It might have been Friday the 13th, but luck was with Jackie Tedford when he rolled off the Joyland skating rink floor in Cabot in March 1964. The announcer had just called for a girls' choice couples' skate. Lauretta Evans, a high school junior, was on the lookout, though not for Jackie.
"I swear I cannot remember who, but I had my mind set on asking someone else to skate with me. I couldn't get to them, and as Jackie came off the floor he was just there and I asked him to skate just so I would have a partner," Lauretta says.
The first time I saw my spouse:
She says: “He was just someone to ask to skate. There were no bells, no whistles, no nothing.”
He says: “She was very bashful.”
My biggest memory from our wedding day is:
She says: “I was really nervous.”
He says: “She wouldn’t let me kiss her.”
My advice for a long happy marriage is:
He says: “Be faithful, to the wedding vows and everything. Be loving and forgiving.”
She says: “I think trust has a lot to do with it. I have never had to worry about what he was doing. I think having God at the center of your life makes a big difference.”
Jackie had joined the Air Force after high school and was stationed at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, where he completed Titan II Missile Maintenance training.
"I, along with my fellow graduates, was scheduled to go to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California," Jackie says. "Instead, I was the only one who was sent to the Little Rock AFB to help maintain the Titan II Missiles in Arkansas."
He didn't have a car and was only at the skating rink because he had friends from the base who wanted to go.
So Jackie and Lauretta skated a few times that night and then parted ways. Lauretta's parents rarely let her go to the skating rink more than once a week, but she was determined to return the next day in hopes of seeing Jackie again.
"I threw such a fit my mother let me go," she says.
She saw him inside and sat in a chair behind him, hoping he would see her when he stood up. He did, and he wanted to know if she was going to skate.
"I had my socks in my purse and I wore a nice dress," Lauretta says.
She hurried over to the counter to rent some skates and soon caught up with Jackie, who skated forward as well as she did, but skated backward infinitely better, making it possible for them to hold hands and skate like they were dancing together.
Jackie says his friends bet him he couldn't get a date with Lauretta. He was interested in her, and he liked the challenge, so he asked her to go out with him the following Sunday.
"I hardly ever missed church, but I went with him to the drag races in Carlisle that next week," she says.
Jackie didn't win any cash from his friends.
"I just got her," he says.
They were at a drive-in movie a couple of months later when he declared, simply, "Someday I'm going to marry you."
"It was a statement instead of a question," she says.
Jackie still didn't have a car and they were dependent upon friends with cars to get them together. But they could talk on the phone occasionally and they wrote plenty of letters. So Jackie followed up his marriage declaration with one written in code.
"Instead of putting on the back of the envelope 'SWAK' -- 'Sealed With A Kiss' -- like a lot of people did, I put the numbers '4352,' which means 'Will you marry me?' because of the number of letters in those words."
Miraculously, Lauretta knew just what he meant.
"It took me just a little while to figure it out but not very long, because of the events that had transpired, and when he told me he was going to marry me I knew what it meant," she says. "I sent him a letter back with a big three on the back for 'yes.'"
Right after Lauretta's high school graduation, they learned that Jackie would have a day off while his barracks moved, and they hurriedly made arrangements to be wed at 10 a.m. that day, June 2, 1965, at the pastor's house.
They had already rented an apartment, and that's where they got dressed for their wedding so no one would know their plans. Jackie donned his dress blues in the bedroom while Lauretta locked herself in the bathroom and put on the white lace two-piece outfit that she had ordered for the occasion.
"I wouldn't let him kiss me in the pastor's house after the wedding was over," she says. "The pastor didn't say we could kiss. He didn't say anything. He just went to the kitchen to sign the license, and I just went over to the couch and sat down."
The Tedfords have two children, Wayne Tedford of Old Austin (incorporated into the town of Ward) and Jacqueline Giambalbo of Cabot. They also have three grandchildren and six great-grandchildren with another on the way.
Lauretta is retired from Regions Bank. Jackie is retired from Western Electric.
They renewed their vows last month in a ceremony officiated by their friend, Lulu Roman, best known for her role on Hee Haw.
"Oh, there were times, like in most marriages, that I didn't think that we were going to make it, but God had a plan. God has truly blessed my life," Lauretta says. "I don't know what in the world I would do without him."
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High Profile on 06/21/2015