RIGHT TIME RIGHT PLACE: Arkansas couple marries 50 years after they were first engaged

Dorothy and Richard Crane celebrated their first wedding anniversary yesterday by having dinner with their family. “I can’t think of any better gift to give myself than having everybody together for our anniversary,” says Dorothy.
Dorothy and Richard Crane celebrated their first wedding anniversary yesterday by having dinner with their family. “I can’t think of any better gift to give myself than having everybody together for our anniversary,” says Dorothy.

Dorothy Brown broke up with Richard Crane when she was 17 years old, but she never stopped thinking about him. She married him 50 years later.

Dorothy's brother Alfred met Richard in 1965 at the Navy enrollment center in Little Rock. He told Richard about Dorothy, and Richard started writing to her.

The first time I saw my future spouse:

She says: “He was standing against the closet door in my bedroom.”

He says: “I was really impressed with her. I thought she was really pretty.”

On our wedding day:

She says: “That was the happiest day of my life and it was just so long coming it was just unbelievable.”

He says: “I was tickled to death.”

My advice for a happy marriage is:

She says: “Just stay in church and it will keep you close and when you have a little disagreement you can settle it so easy if you’ve got God in your life.”

He says: “Stay close and work things out. Stay there with God and it will take care of everything.”

They continued exchanging letters when Alfred and Richard flew to Great Lakes, Ill., for boot camp, and when boot camp was over, Richard made a beeline for England, Ark., to meet Dorothy face to face.

"He was standing against the door and we were all in my bedroom -- my brother and my mom and dad. I guess I was there in the bedroom when he got there and they just all came in there," Dorothy says of the first time she saw him. "My back was to him and when I turned around and I just thought, 'Wow. This is who I want to marry.'"

Her mother gave them permission to go out.

"We got in his car and we went to Spradlin's Dairy Queen in England and we just sat there for hours and drank Cokes, until we thought we were going to burst if we didn't quit drinking all those Cokes," says Dorothy, then 16.

He proposed to her the next time he was home on leave, about eight months after they started corresponding.

She had dinner with his family in Rose Bud, and he took her out to look at the 80 acres of property they owned there.

"We climbed a mountain and looked all around -- it's just beautiful wooded property -- and he said, 'Would you ever want to live here one day?' And I said, 'Oh, yeah, it's just beautiful up here,'" she says. "His aunt fixed dinner and we picked peaches off her tree and she made a peach cobbler -- it was the best I've ever had. I just loved it and love his family."

Unbeknownst to Dorothy, Richard was making payments to buy that land for them to live on when he got out of the Navy. He sent her an engagement ring from Japan, where he was stationed.

Her brother was at home when the ring arrived in the mail and he delivered it to her at school.

"I was the happiest little girl that day," she says. "My teacher told me, 'You may as well go home. I'm not going to get any work out of you today.'"

Her mother wasn't happy, though, that she was sitting at home alone while he was away and encouraged her to go out with her friends. Eventually, Dorothy began to think her mother was right and she broke up with Richard.

"It broke both of our hearts," she says. "I was just young and stupid, I guess. But all those years I never forgot him."

They both went on to marry other people and raise families, and neither knew much of what was happening with the other.

Dorothy had been a widow for 13 years when Richard, who was divorced, showed up at her front door on Feb. 25, 2017.

Richard wasn't sure she was still in England, and he didn't know what her life looked like.

"I've loved her all these years and I just wasn't thinking about all that stuff," he says.

He went to the post office in England and asked if anyone knew where he might find Alfred. When he found Alfred, he asked about Dorothy -- and Alfred gave him directions to her house.

"I had just told my daughter that I guessed I probably wouldn't ever get married again unless a certain guy came along, and I told her about him," says Dorothy. "Two weeks later, a knock on the door -- it was Richard."

She welcomed him in and they talked for hours. Before he left that day, they had decided to marry as soon as they could.

Dorothy was 68 and Richard was 72 when they exchanged their vows on April 28, 2017, in the Lonoke County Courthouse. A Cabot Baptist church preacher who happened to be there with his family when they bought their marriage license officiated.

"Everybody that was in the courthouse that day at the license center just gathered around us and we had a good ceremony, but the preacher forgot to say, 'You may kiss the bride.' It dawned on us after it was all over that, 'Hey, I need a kiss,'" she says. "The girl at the courthouse took our picture so we have a picture of us on the day of our wedding."

Richard has two children -- Richard Earl Crane of Rose Bud and Melissa Vernor of Sheridan. He has two grandchildren. Dorothy's daughter, Patti Palmer, lives in England. She has one granddaughter, Brianna Smith. She also raised two stepchildren and has five step-grandchildren and eight step-great-grandchildren.

They went to Crosby, Minn., for a honeymoon, visiting family and driving through Amish country.

"We love to just get in the truck and drive around and see things," says Dorothy. "We've got a garden planted. We garden and we like to travel. We have a beautiful life together."

If you have an interesting how-we-met story or if you know someone who does, please call (501) 425-7228 or email:

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photo

Special to the Democrat-Gazette

Dorothy Brown and Richard Crane were engaged as teenagers, but they broke up and went on to live separate lives – until Richard showed up at Dorothy’s door 50 years later. They were married on April 28, 2017. “I don’t think wild horses could have held us back that day,” Dorothy said of the day they exchanged their vows. “And they still won’t,” Richard adds. =

High Profile on 04/29/2018

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