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He worked for fried chicken, got the cook too

Mike and Donna Hammond
Mike and Donna Hammond

Mike Hammond was there to dig a ditch and Donna Eggman was there to help fry some chicken. She thought he was cute, but he had a girlfriend. Then the girlfriend was a no-show for the county fair, and the blue-ribbon chase was on.

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Mike and Donna Hammond

Mike, a junior at Arkansas State Teachers College (now the University of Central Arkansas) in his hometown of Conway, was working for a survey crew in the Plumas National Forest in northern California during the summer of 1961. His regular job duties included surveying for logging roads and fighting forest fires, but his crew chief asked for volunteers to dig a ditch one weekend so he could install a water line at his cabin in the Bucks Lake Wilderness, where the only water source at the time was a mountain spring.

The crew chief offered a fried chicken dinner in exchange for the labor and Mike stepped up, not knowing that the real -- albeit unintentional -- reward for his efforts would be meeting Donna, a local girl whose sister was dating the crew chief. Donna and her family were there to help in the kitchen.

A few weeks after the ditch was dug, Mike and his crew were on standby to fight a fire.

The gang -- including Donna and her sister and their much younger brother and sister, whom they were caring for at the time -- spent a few days at the crew chief's family's home in Spring Gardens in hopes of making it to the Plumas County Fair when the fire danger abated.

"We just got to know each other just visiting out on the lawn and stuff, but when they were finally released where we could go to the fair on Saturday night, he told us he had a date and that was fine," Donna says.

Mike was supposed to take the girl he had been seeing to the fair, but she didn't show up, possibly because she was upset that he canceled their date the night before when he was still under orders to stay put. Donna was supposed to go with another guy from the crew.

"He just found us and said she didn't come. We were going to this logging championship thing at the county fair and we ended up spending the rest of the evening together," Donna says. "His buddy just kind of stepped aside. We were just friends, and it was just a matter of kind of pairing up."

For Donna and Mike, the fair outing was a turning point in their friendship.

Mike was to return to Arkansas for school the following week, so he and Donna spent as much time together as they could before his departure. After he left, they wrote letters and talked on the phone when they could.

"It cost a lot to make long-distance phone calls back then, but I paid my phone bill -- my parents' -- with my baby-sitting money," she says. "We communicated the whole year and he came back the second year and by the end of the second year we were going steady."

Mike's brother was a professional forester in another part of California and when he went home to Arkansas for Christmas, Donna went with him.

Mike gave her his fraternity pin over the holidays.

"I really wasn't expecting it, and I don't think he was really expecting to do it either, but he proposed at his folks' house," she says.

Donna graduated from high school the following June, and by then Mike had graduated and moved to California.

"He was out there in time to go to my senior ball," she says. "And our school did a senior dinner dance the week before graduation and he surprised me with my ring then. We were already pinned and engaged by then."

They exchanged their vows a year to the day of her high school graduation, June 13, 1964, at First Baptist Church in Castro Valley, Calif., where Donna grew up.

They spent a month in Arkansas before moving to Austin, where Mike studied mathematics at the University of Texas under a National Science Foundation grant. At the end of that academic year, they moved to Hot Springs so Mike could teach history at Hot Springs High School. Five years later, they moved again, this time to Beebe, where Mike spent 43 years teaching history at Arkansas State University.

Donna got an associate degree from ASU and a bachelor's from UCA in Conway. She taught kindergarten for 23 years and served as program director of the afterschool program in the Beebe School District for 15 years.

The Hammonds have four children -- Dr. Kevin Hammond of Cape Girardeau, Mo.; Kara Baumgartner of Maumelle; Kristi Doyle of Marion, Ark.; and Melanie Hammond of Little Rock. They also have seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

"We didn't have a really big house when our kids were growing up. Our kitchen was pretty small, but our table was always full, with our family and their friends. Some of their friends used to say ours was a TV family because we had such interaction around the dinner table. They got a big kick out of it because we had a lot of fun," Donna says. "We still do."

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 03/01/2015

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