LITTLE ROCK — Peggy Joyce Harrell and her husband took to the sky and sea together as pilots and scuba divers.
“She was outgoing, [always had] a big smile,” Searcy W. Harrell Jr. said. “On all the trips we made, she met new people. She was the one they liked and I just got to tag along.”
Harrell died Sunday at her Camden home from Alzheimer’s disease.
She was 73.
Harrell spent 25 years as a legal secretary, where she met Searcy Harrell, who is now the circuit judge of the Fourth Division of the 13th Judicial District. The couple married in 1976.
In her 50s, Harrell decided to take college courses at Southern Arkansas University Tech for about two years.
“She got so serious about those courses it was interfering with our travel plans,” Searcy Harrell said. “I kind of talked her into quitting.”
Despite leaving college, Harrell’s got an education through travel.
“I got interested in flying in 1988,” her husband said. “She started to take some lessons just for the purpose of knowing how to handle the plane if there was a problem. Then she got more interested and went ahead and got her license.”
In 1990, she began piloting the couple’s airplane, a Cherokee Six. She enjoyed getting from “point A to point B faster,” from visiting her daughter in Texas to going on a vacation in Florida, Searcy Harrell said.
After the couple purchased a twin engine airplane about two to three years later, she was her husband’s co-pilot.
“She loved to fly,” Searcy Harrell said. “She could read the charts and understand the controllers and program the GPS and communicate to air traffic control.”
In 1992, she became a certified scuba diver and in 14 years, made about 150 deep water dives.
“The beauty of the reefs and the fish, that’s what she enjoyed,” her husband said, adding that her favorite place to dive was Grand Cayman. “The water is gorgeous, the weather is great, the visibility is good. She liked the atmosphere of the Caymans.”
The couple often left the plane and scuba gear at home to visit a variety of places around the world, from Egypt to Scotland. While on a cruise to the Greek Isles, Searcy Harrell said he thought it would be fun for the couple to ride down a mountain back to the ship on donkeys instead of using a lift.
“She was still mad at me about that until she died,” her husband said. “It ascended a couple hundred feet on the side of the mountain, you zig-zag back and forth. It was pretty funny ... she said ‘That ass made me ride that ass down the mountain.’”
After Harrell was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2006, the couple still traveled, but to the same resort in Cozumel, Mexico. Their last trip was July 4.
“We’d go to the same place because she knew her way around there and they knew her,” Searcy Harrell said. “The people that worked at that resort always called her by name.”
Despite her disease, Harrell still loved to laugh.
“If other people were laughing, she was laughing even if she didn’t understand the joke,” her husband said.
While her memory faded, Harrell still enjoyed spending time with her family and never forgot her husband, said Becky Gilbert, trial court assistant for Judge Harrell.
“She might not know someone else, but she always knew him,” Gilbert said. “When he’d walk in the room, she’d just light up because he was there.”
Arkansas, Pages 10 on 09/25/2012