RIGHT TIME RIGHT PLACE

She drew a line in the sand: Her or her neighbor

“One of the things Wayne does almost every day is that he tells me how pretty I am or that he loves me more every day,” Sarah Shearon says. “I’m very lucky.”
“One of the things Wayne does almost every day is that he tells me how pretty I am or that he loves me more every day,” Sarah Shearon says. “I’m very lucky.”

Sarah Orme and her best friend, Carol, had just moved to Tennessee from Kentucky in 1976. They didn't really know anyone and were passing the time playing jacks in their Nashville apartment one evening when, who should come rap-rap-rapping at their door?

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Wayne and Sarah Shearon on their wedding day, Feb. 25, 1978

Love, evermore?

The first time I saw my spouse:

She says: “I was amazed by his apartment because it was as clean as it could be. There was nothing out of order. He is a real neat freak.”

He says: “It was wintertime and she had on an old pea coat and old jeans. I kind of thought she looked like an orphan, like she didn’t have anything. But she also was beautiful. I liked the way she smiled.”

On our wedding day:

She says: “I was so excited. My hair was in curlers forever. All of my family was there and his family and our really close friends.”

He says: “I was nervous and someone told me to take a Xanax. I took a Xanax about 30 minutes before we got married but it didn’t hit me until we were on our way to our honeymoon in Amelia Island, Fla. We got to Chattanooga and we had to stop and spend the night in a hotel and I was out cold on our wedding night.”

My advice for a long happy marriage is:

She says: “Put God first. And love and respect each other.”

He says: “You have to have respect and love. You definitely have to have that. I see so many marriages that, especially husbands, don’t have respect for their wives and walk in front of them and things like that. We tell each other we love each other every night.”

No, it was just their neighbor, Peggy. She wanted to introduce them to the president of their apartment complex's social committee, who happened to be her boyfriend. They threw on coats and followed her to the next building to do some rap-rap-rapping themselves.

Wayne Shearon opened the door and welcomed them inside, and later, into the social committee.

"I considered her at first to be kind of like my little sister," Wayne says of Sarah, who was 22, about 10 years his junior. "She was dating other people and I was dating other people and we used to hang around at the pool in the summertime, and we would tell each other about our dates. She would talk to me about advice and all that."

A year or so later, the committee went on a weekend retreat to Center Hill Lake in eastern Tennessee. Wayne drove a carload of four or five people, and Sarah was one of them. Throughout the weekend, Wayne and Sarah spent more time talking to and about each other than about the other people they had been dating.

"I think ... it just clicked then, probably because we were away," Wayne says. "I think that's when we decided that we kind of liked each other."

When they got back home, he invited Sarah to dinner.

"We tease about it because he said, 'We're going to go to dinner, if you want to go,'" she says. "And I got off the phone and I didn't even know whether to go or not. I was like, 'Well, does he want me to go? Or is this just as a friend?'"

Wayne picked her up and drove her to the steak restaurant, where they met his brother and sister-in-law, the first indication this was probably a date. The way they gazed at each other, she says, was another pretty good indication of why they were there. And when he held her hand at the table, she decided there was no question -- this was a date.

They saw each other casually for a little while, and Wayne continued casually dating Peggy, too, which was not without a few awkward moments.

"The problem I had is that since Peggy and Sarah lived across the hall from each other, when I would take Peggy home or when I would take Sarah home, I had to do it real quick. I lived in the next apartment building. They knew I was dating both of them but they didn't know when I was dating them."

Sarah gave him an ultimatum, he says.

"She said, 'You either choose Peggy or me. If you choose Peggy, I'm gone,'" Wayne says. "I didn't think about it or anything, I said I would quit dating Peggy and the rest was history."

The retreat was in August, and in October, Wayne went with Sarah to Stanton, Ky., to meet her family.

Her dad was a basketball coach, her mother a nurse, and she had a brother and two sisters.

"Her family was an all-American family, like some of the old sitcoms we used to see, like Bringing Up Father, just really a close-knit family," he says. "I was ready to propose and she was ready to accept even before that. Going to meet her family sealed the deal."

They were married on Feb. 25, 1978, at Carol's parents' home in Gallatin, Tenn.

They honeymooned in Amelia Island, Fla.

The Shearons moved to Jackson, Miss., a year after they married, and then back to Nashville, then to Atlanta. They have lived in Maumelle since 1994.

Wayne is an insurance consultant and instructor for Independent Insurance Agents of Arkansas. He and Sarah have two sons, Heath Shearon of Maumelle and Chase Shearon of Little Rock, and two grandchildren.

"One of the things Wayne does almost every day is that he tells me how pretty I am or that he loves me more every day," she says. "I'm very lucky."

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 08/30/2015

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