RIGHT TIME RIGHT PLACE

Suitor finally got her to go on a date by hanging up on her

Paula and Dick Pickens on their wedding day, Aug. 28, 1965
Paula and Dick Pickens on their wedding day, Aug. 28, 1965

Dick Pickens first saw Paula Johnson under the old oak tree on the campus of Arkansas A&M College (now University of Arkansas at Monticello) and spent all of football season hoping she would go out with him. He was a basketball player, she was a cheerleader, and it was a pep rally that started it all.

photo

Paula Johnson took one look at Dick Pickens across the Arkansas A&M Student Union and thought, “No, I’m not interested. He just looks too old.” Pickens’ college years had been interrupted by the Army, and “he didn’t have the flat-bellied freshman look.”

Dick was at the rally with a teammate, and he told that guy he really wanted a date with Paula. His teammate happened to be dating Paula’s roommate and said he would intercede. His girlfriend talked to Paula.

“I said, ‘Well, I don’t know him. I haven’t seen him,’” Paula says. “So [her roommate’s] boyfriend said, ‘Well, he’s always in the Student Union right after class and if you go in there you’ll see him,’ and he kind of described him.”

Paula went to the Student Union and asked someone who worked at the bookstore there who he was.

“I was curious,” she says. “They knew him and showed me where he was and I looked at him. I looked at him and I just thought, ‘No, I’m not interested. He just looks too old.”’

He was 25, just three years older than she, but his college education had been interrupted by a three-year stint in the Army.

“I thought he was older than he was,” she says. “He looked more settled. He didn’t have the flat-bellied freshman look.”

Paula’s verdict made its way back to Dick, but Dick didn’t give up.

“I’m a persistent person,” he says. “I’m a competitor. I knew if I could ever get her to have a date we might hit it off.”

The cheerleaders had to find their own transportation to away games then, and so he offered to drive them. After the game, as was the custom, they stopped for something to eat.

“I got to know him. He was just so funny. I laughed a lot around him, and I knew he had a great personality, but I just wasn’t interested in a relationship with him — or I didn’t think I was,” she says.

The last football game of the season was at Henderson State Teachers College (now Henderson State University) in Arkadelphia, and Paula “started visiting with another young man from Monticello.” Instead of riding back with Dick and the girls, she went with that boy. Oh, that almost did Dick in, but he vowed to give it one more chance.

He called Paula at the start of basketball season to ask if she was going to cheer at the intersquad game. She was, and he said he would come get her. “Then he hung up. He didn’t wait for me to say ‘Bye’ and he didn’t say ‘Bye,’” she says.

Paula didn’t call back or make other arrangements. Just like Dick, she just let it be — fully expecting him to pick her up.

And he did.

When the game ended they went to get something to eat, just the two of them. It reminded her how amusing he was, but she discovered something else.

“We realized we knew a lot of people in common. He had graduated the year that my brother had graduated from high school, and they had even played basketball against each other,” says Paula, who grew up in Monticello. (Dick’s hometown was Jonesboro.)

“It was that connection — the fact that he knew so many of the boys that my brother had grown up knowing and playing with us in the yard and all that. I felt like he was a lot like my brother,” she says. “I was close to my brother and I wanted someone that would be like him.”

Neither Paula nor Dick dated anyone else after that. Dick had two years of school left when he and Paula went on their first date in November 1964.

In April, as she prepared to graduate in May, she told Dick she was thinking of seeking a teaching job in Austin, Texas, where her brother lived. She didn’t have a reason to stay in Monticello, after all.

“He said ‘Well, if I gave you a reason to stay would you stay?’ And I said, ‘What would that be?’ And he said, ‘If I asked you to marry me would you stay?’ That’s how that happened,” Paula says.

Dick married Paula in First Methodist Church of Monticello on Aug. 28, 1965, almost a year after he first saw her.

She taught in Jonesboro while he finished college and the next year they moved to El Dorado, where he went to work for Arkansas Power and Light Co. (now Entergy Arkansas). She found teaching positions wherever their job took them — Blytheville, then Kennett, Mo., Blytheville again and, finally, Walnut Ridge, where they both retired.

They moved to Jonesboro in 1997.

The couple have three children, Karen Pickens Jones, Paul Pickens and John Pickens, all of Jonesboro. They have six grandchildren.

Paula still enjoys Dick’s sense of humor. “Sometimes we’ll be somewhere and he’ll say something and I’ll get tickled, and no one else is laughing. I still think he’s funny. That was one of the things that drew me to him when we started dating. That’s what glued us together.”

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

[email protected]

Upcoming Events