RIGHT TIME RIGHT PLACE

He kept buying gas but she knew his tank was full

Jimmie and Vera Scott
Jimmie and Vera Scott

It was all fun and games when Jimmie Scott and Vera Pate first met outside his daddy's grocery store as kids. But later, when he decided she was the girl for him, he knew he had to get serious.

Vera's family lived in Buckville and then in Pearcy, but when she was 5 years old she spent time with her older sister in Mountain Pine. Her sister lived near the grocery store, and there were a bunch of other kids who lived nearby, including Jimmie.

The first time I saw my spouse:

She says: “He was just a little boy playing like the rest of us.”

He says: “We just played. Later, when we were older, I thought she was the lady I needed.”

On our wedding day:

She says: “I made my own cake and took it to my mother’s house. We both went up there together.”

He says: “She wore a light blue dress to our wedding. I thought she was the best woman I’d ever met.”

My advice for a long happy marriage is:

She says: “Go to church and be a good person.”

He says: “Stay in touch with the Lord and really love one another, even in hard times. It’s not easy.”

"All of us were about 5 years old and we stayed down there with [my sister] about all summer and we would play ball or hide and seek or whatever we could think of," she says.

Vera and Jimmie saw each other a few times over the next several years but they didn't live in the same town so their sightings were few and far between.

They were in their early 20s when he discovered she worked in her sister's grocery store on Arkansas 7 just outside Hot Springs. He became a frequent customer.

"I would stop and gas my truck up and I really didn't need gas," he says. "I was just stopping to see her."

He's pretty sure she knew he was coming in to see her.

"She knew something was up," he says.

He had to work up the nerve to ask her for a date, and when he did she turned him down flat.

"She wouldn't go out with me until I got my life straightened out," he says.

He was sowing his wild oats back then, according to Vera, and it took him a while to settle down.

"I had two of the best parents that ever were. I was brought up exactly like you were supposed to be, so it didn't have anything to do with that," he says. "I thought she was a nice lady and I'd been brought up that way and I thought she was the kind of girl I needed to go with."

He had gone to church when he was growing up, but had gotten out of the habit when he reached adulthood. Motivated by the desire to spend time with Vera, he decided to quit drinking and start worshipping again.

"It took me a while to get my life straightened out but she knew what was going on," he says. "She could tell by the way I acted."

When he asked her out again, she said yes.

Their first date is a long-lost memory but Vera vividly recalls when she was working at the hospital in Hot Springs and heard that the ambulance was bringing in someone hurt in an accident. The nurse she was working with was afraid it might be her son and was so distraught she fainted, but when the ambulance arrived Vera was the one who was upset because it was Jimmie on the stretcher. He had been at a stoplight on his way home from work when someone hit his brand new truck from behind.

He was battered but had no serious injuries. Vera was considering nursing school at the time, and that came in helpful as she nursed him back to health.

"I didn't end up going," Vera says. "My daughter did that for me later. She works in pediatrics with the little babies."

Shortly after his accident during a visit to her parents' house, Jimmie asked Vera to marry him. He found her mother in the kitchen and asked for her blessing, and then went outside to look for her father so he could ask him for her hand as well.

They were married in that house on Feb. 5, 1965.

They moved to Hot Springs, where Vera was living while working at the hospital. They later moved to Mountain Pine to live near his family and then eventually back to Buckville.

Jimmie didn't just change his ways before he married Vera, he changed his goal in life. In 1965, he became a preacher. He worked other jobs over the years to pay the bills while preaching, but he retired from those in 2000. He still has a church, Valley Home Missionary Baptist Church in Hollis.

Even after the big anniversary celebration their children hosted for them this year, he has a hard time believing he and Vera have been married 50 years.

"It doesn't seem possible. It went by so fast," he says. "But we've had a good 50 years."

The Scotts have two children -- Lisa Sharp of Mountain Pine and Jimmy Dale Scott of Buckville. They have three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, one of whom is almost the same age they were when they met.

"I do just about everything she wants me to do," he says of his great-granddaughter. "We play hide and seek, we play ball, just whatever, like when we were kids."

If you have an interesting how-we-met story or if you know someone who does, please call (501) 378-3496 or email:

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High Profile on 04/26/2015

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