Alma Jean Franks had seen Partee Tuberville around the Magnolia A&M campus, but she didn't meet him until he picked her up for their first date.
"I knew who he was and that he played basketball at A&M, but I didn't know him. When he asked me out, I just thought I'd go," she says.
The first time I remember noticing my future spouse:
He says: “I thought she was a pretty girl.”
She says: “I thought he looked nice.”
On our wedding day I wore:
He says: “A suit I already owned.”
She says: “A pale blue below-the-knees dress that I bought in Texarkana.”
My advice for a lasting marriage:
He says: “Respect one another’s feelings.”
She says: “Take care of your husband and take care of your children. Put them first.”
Partee noticed Alma Jean on the campus of what is now Southern Arkansas University when he returned to college in 1945 after serving in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He thought she was really pretty, so when he found out she was teaching typing classes at the high school in his hometown, Emerson, he decided to call and ask her out.
"Emerson was a really small place and everybody knew everybody there," he says, "so I knew she was there."
Partee was 21; Alma Jean 19. He had moved back home and gotten a job keeping the books for a sawmill after college.
He called Alma Jean out of the blue in 1947 to ask her for a date. When she agreed to go out with him, Partee picked her up at the room she was renting.
"They were so kind to me," Alma Jean says of the family who rented her a room. "They treated me like I was their own daughter.
"It was wintertime when we went on our first date and we drove to Magnolia to the movies."
Movies were the norm for Alma Jean and Partee's weekly dates after that, sometimes at the theater in Haynesville, La., sometimes at the one in Magnolia. These outings were often followed by trips to Old Man's Place, a popular hamburger joint just off the town square in Magnolia. They went to basketball games, too.
After a movie date more than a year later, Partee proposed.
"I wasn't sure what her reaction would be, if she would accept," Partee says. "She told me that she wouldn't tell me until she talked to her parents."
Partee had to wait several days for Alma Jean to make the trip home to the Macedonia community, 6 miles from Magnolia, for a face-to-face conversation with her folks. Her family only had one car, so she had to wait to get a ride from a friend who was going that direction the next weekend.
She had worn an engagement ring for about two months when they decided to elope. Alma Jean didn't want to trouble her mother with wedding plans and neither of them wanted a big to-do, anyway.
Partee had a friend from the service who lived in Marshall, Texas, and they decided to exchange their vows during a visit there on Aug. 16, 1948, a Monday.
After their wedding, Partee took Alma Jean to her parents' home in Macedonia, then went to his home in Emerson. No one knew they were married. They wanted to wait until the weekly gathering of Alma Jean's family for Sunday dinner to make the announcement.
They were all sitting around the dinner table and Alma Jean surprised everyone by proclaiming, "We're married!"
Family legend has it that Alma Jean's little brother, Buddy, was the relative most elated by the news because he was as excited for Partee's Chevrolet coupe to be a part of the family as he was for Partee to be.
The newlyweds moved to Magnolia. Partee was hired by First National Bank, where he worked for the next 45 years, rising to executive vice president and secretary of the board. Alma Jean got a job with the Columbia County clerk's office, and then with the Columbia County judge -- she served as acting county judge for a few weeks -- before she took a position as receptionist for the athletic director at Magnolia High School. She retired two weeks before her 80th birthday.
Alma Jean and Partee have two children -- Angela Brasher of Fayetteville and Paul Tuberville of Germantown, Tenn. They have five grandchildren.
They moved from Magnolia to Fayetteville last year to be closer to their daughter.
Partee was a B-24 bombardier instructor during the war and when he returned home, he got a pilot's license. Not long after the couple were married, he borrowed a plane from the man who owned the airport in Magnolia and took Alma Jean for a flight. Her family stood outside and watched the skies as they zoomed over their Macedonia home on their way back to the airstrip.
Alma Jean thinks she was more anxious during that short flight than she was when she stood in that church in Marshall and exchanged the marriage vows that would last a lifetime.
"I wasn't nervous on my wedding day because we were old enough and knew what we were doing," she says. "We felt like we were prepared for life because we both had such good parents, good teachers."
If you have an interesting how-we-met story or if you know someone who does, please call (501) 425-7228 or email:
kdishongh@sbcglobal.net
High Profile on 01/08/2017