I've had a number questions about my wife Vertis, so I'm going to try and tell you why she's my Woman of the Year; this year and every year.
Vertis was the first child of John and Marjorie Burton, born in Dr. Kennedy's Clinic on Main Street in downtown Smackover. She spent her early years in Oklahoma City, and was 13 when they moved back to Arkansas.
She was 15 when she accompanied a friend to the Smackover public swimming pool where the friend had arranged to meet a possible new boyfriend, who happened to be a good friend of mine. I went along to meet the friend of the friend, and was having reservations after finding out she was a preacher's kid. It took a coin flip to get me to the swimming pool.
When we walked out of the dressing area I saw two girls in the shallow end of the pool, and it crossed my mind, I hope the preacher's kid is the blonde ... she sure doesn't look 15.
Vertis was the blonde, and just lacked a week before turning 16.
After an introduction, my friend and Vertis' friend went to the other side of the pool and left Vertis and I sitting there. We were strangers one minute, and five minutes later, we were chatting it up as if we were old friends. We talked until the pool closed.
I didn't see Vertis again for a couple of weeks, when on a Friday night my friend and I stopped by the Dairyette, the current teen gathering place, and a carload of Smackover girls pulled up. I spotted Vertis and minutes later we were in the back seat of my friend's car cruising along North West Avenue.
I asked Vertis for a date, and from that minute on we were with each other at every opportunity until I went back to college.
That semester we wrote each other every day. In the 1960s, long-distance calls were too expensive. I've lost count of the times I hitchhiked the six hours to south Arkansas to see her.
That spring Vertis took a bus to Fayetteville to attend the 1960s spring fling. She stayed with a friend in the girls' freshman dorm and we danced to the music of Chuck Berry in the old Barnhill Fieldhouse. My college friends were shocked because I had an unofficial Razorback beauty as a date; a drop-dead good-looking blue-eyed blonde.
That summer, all we could talk about was when we were going to get married. We finally decided that since I was going to be in graduate school working on my master's degree and Vertis would graduate from Smackover High School early and enter the university as a freshman, we needed a nest egg, so I would continue working at the refinery until mid-January, the college semester break. We had five days to honeymoon, and we picked New Orleans.
The semester started off fine, but even though I had a part-time job, we ran out of money as the semester ended. I struggled to find a summer job, and finally did. It was working offshore in the Gulf as a roustabout. Vertis stayed with my mother, and we saved every penny.
We knew Vertis couldn't stay in school, and as soon as we got back to college, she went to work in a downtown department store. When she found out the Baldwin Organ Factory paid 35 cents more an hour, she jumped at the job. She started doing the worst work in the factory: spray-painting organ consoles.
She knew how to work, and soon she was promoted to the assembly line, soldering electronic keyboards. In a few weeks she was meeting her quota early.
With student loans and grocery coupons, we made it through the year, and I managed to find a job with Exxon as a production geologist on the King Ranch in Kingsville, Texas. As we drove south to Kingsville, Vertis teared up. We had left a beautiful Arkansas spring, and eight hours later we were driving through mesquite. Quite a shock to a couple of newlyweds.
I worked in south Texas for two years, and then, to pay off college debts, I transferred to Benghazi, Libya. Kingsville was a piece of heaven compared to Benghazi. I flew over before Vertis did to acquire housing. Then at 19, Vertis took her first flight--from El Dorado to Benghazi via Rome.
She was a real trooper while we were living in Libya. I was in the desert for two weeks, then back in the Benghazi office for a week. While I was in the desert Vertis couldn't leave the house at night, and to make things worse, the town had rolling blackouts because the city had grown and couldn't keep up with the electrical demand.
She spent many evenings chipping off ugly green paint from our fireplace just to kill time. She still remembers one night when she tuned in the BBC on her battery-powered shortwave radio. Sitting by herself in the dark, she listened to the funeral of JFK.
We made it through those two years, and then transferred to Corpus Christi, Texas.
Two years later, I quit one of the best jobs a young geologist could have to work for a small independent oil company, and a year later, after we adopted two babies, I quit the small oil company to become an independent geologist.
We had less than $15,000 in savings when I quit, and when I spent $4,500 to buy oil leases, which I hoped to sell, Vertis never complained. She was always supportive and never questioned what might seem to be my erratic moves, which, if they weren't successful, could have put our young family in serious financial difficulties. She was always willing to hear everything I was doing or proposing to do. When we had success, we celebrated together, and when we failed, we grieved together.
Vertis has a heart of gold, and the very idea she would just walk by a Salvation Army kettle without dropping something in doesn't cross her mind. She has the voice of an angel, singing solos in church at age 5, and joined the adult choir at 13.
Behind that beautiful face and figure is a smart, savvy woman, who has been the driving force behind downtown El Dorado's renaissance. For years El Dorado didn't have zoning, and when we started our downtown redevelopment, Vertis would go out recruiting to the mall or Hillsboro or North West Avenue, sit down with someone she believed would be an asset to downtown, and make them a deal they couldn't refuse. The great group of businesses we have in our downtown wouldn't be there, if it weren't for Vertis.
I'm a very, very lucky man.
Email Richard Mason at richard@gibraltarenergy.com.