Emil Turner was angling simply for a way to eat one less meal alone. Patti Rice turned out to be his fishing partner for life.
Emil, who had been widowed after more than 40 years of marriage, went to a fly fishing club meeting in 2016. He liked fishing, but was really there to pass the time and appease his worried family. The speaker that day talked about fly fishing in Kentucky.
Emil and his late wife lived in Bowling Green, Ky., as newlyweds, and hearing about it inspired him to take a fishing trip there.
When he reached Bowling Green, he took a nostalgic drive past their old apartment and the church he had led. He wasn’t familiar, however, with Scottsville, Ky., where he went to fish.
He remembered that Patti had lived there, and he sent her a Facebook message asking for restaurant recommendations.
In 1979, Patti was in charge of vacation Bible school at the church in Bowling Green.
“He questioned whether the literature I had chosen was right and he wanted me to check into other materials we were using,” she says. “I did what he asked and I created a chart that compared the different things that I investigated.” She had taken pizza to the Turners’ house when she went to share her research. Emil had accepted her recommendations.
“I led the Bible school, and that was really the last time that we had talked,” Patti says.
Emil and his wife moved to New Orleans after that and then eventually to Arkansas where he became executive director of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. He retired from that position in 2012.
Patti had taught art in Kentucky for a while before moving to Seattle for 21 years. She had, in fact, returned to Kentucky just a year before she heard from Emil, wanting to be near family after she retired.
“I never expected to hear from him,” says Patti, who saw his note and sent a couple of suggestions.
Emil, in turn, was surprised to see a quick response from her. Faced with another quiet, lonely dinner, he invited her to join him.
She accepted.
Over dinner, he apologized for questioning her judgment 40 years earlier.
“I was just being a jerk about it because she was an expert and I was a novice and I was trying to act like I was the expert,” Emil says.
Looking back, Patti is grateful for his faux pas.
“If he didn’t care how it was done and I just did it the way I wanted to do it, we would really have had no interaction, and I don’t even know if I would have remembered him,” she says. “It was that interaction that made us remember each other.” They talked for two hours, about his children and about her father’s death, her time in Seattle and more. As they left the restaurant, he asked if he could call her sometime.
“I was a 62-year-old woman who had never been married and when a man, over his shoulder, says, ‘Would it be OK if I called you sometime?’ Well … sure, because I’m knowing he’s never calling me,” Patti says. “It wasn’t a big deal.” He did call. They talked a few times and then went hiking at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. He invited her to Little Rock to climb Pinnacle Mountain. Then there was a fishing trip to the Little Red River.
“We just began to make more and more trips back and forth,” he says. “I prayed about it. I said, ‘Lord, I’m not asking to get married. What I want is someone who can do things with me — who can take trips with me, who can fish with me.’” Emil wrote a series of questions on a legal pad to help him decide if Patti was that someone.
“He asked me, ‘Do you have any questions you want me to answer?’ I said, ‘I just have one question. Do you put sugar in your cornbread?’” Patti says. “He gave the right answer. He said, ‘If you put sugar in it we call it cake.’” Patti was still a step behind.
“I had assumed there would come a time when he would be ready to look for a wife,” she says. “I was thinking that as he’s going through this process it’ll be good for him to have a non-biased friend who will help him sort it out.” But Emil said he guessed he hadn’t actually asked her the most important question.
“He said, ‘Will you marry me?’ I didn’t even hesitate,” she says. “We had such a comfortable friendship. I thought, ‘Yeah, I could make this a permanent friendship.” They were married on Nov. 3, 2017, in the church where they met.
Patti and Emil enjoy fishing and hiking together still, calculating that in a recent 10-day period they hiked about 85 miles.
“We stay active and move around a lot,” he says.
Patti makes sure they don’t waste time.
“One of the things that we’re aware of is where we are in our lifespan,” she says. “We have made priorities of the things that are important.”
The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “He would sometimes preach on Sundays and I liked to hear him preach because I thought he was interesting.”
He says: “I thought she was an interesting person. She’s an artist but she can also think more traditionally. I thought if I were putting together a staff of people I would want someone with her skill set.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “It was raining and kind of chilly. I wore a dress that was knee-length with short sleeves and it was kind of cold.”
He says: “I learned a new word. She wore a fascinator and I had never seen one and I guess I would have just called it a short veil.”
My advice for a long happy marriage:
She says: “I think one of the secrets is laugh a lot.”
He says: “The workload of a marriage is not her work or my work, it’s our work. It’s our work, our life, our hobby, our activities … it’s the common mission.”
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Emil Turner wasn’t looking for a spouse when he invited Patti Rice to dinner. “When you’ve had a good marriage — and I had a good one for nearly 42 years — it’s not difficult to think about being married again,” he says. (Special to the Democrat-Gazette)