Gladys Scruggs caught Boyd Reed's eye when she was the new girl in town, but he paid even more attention to her after she'd been around for a while.
Gladys' father died when she was young, and when she was 11 her mother remarried and moved the family to Ward. Gladys was in seventh grade at her new school; Boyd was 15 and a freshman.
The first time I saw my spouse:
She says: “It probably was at church when I was 11. He was mischievous, blond-headed, small as a boy. His mother said he never got in trouble but I would say he was a joker. He never did anything serious, though.”
He says: “She was a really cute girl.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “I had a new dress because it was around Easter time but I walked out the door, just like I was. I walked to the corner with him, got into the car with his friends and drove to the Methodist parsonage in Cabot.”
He says: “I said, ‘I have someone to drive us, a couple of married friends, so do you want to come along and go?’”
Gladys says a social life in the 1930s was school and church, and she saw him there regularly, but because her best friend lived right across the street from him she saw him at his home, too.
"Boyd lived three blocks on one side of the railroad tracks and I lived three blocks on the opposite side," she says. "The Reeds had a tennis court in their yard and they played tennis together a lot and I had been going over to her house."
Boyd brought Gladys a small Christmas gift -- a photograph album -- when she was 14, something she notes he hadn't done for most of the other people they knew.
"No young people had a car and Boyd was the only young person allowed to use the family car," she says. "He always carried as many people as could fit in the car going to the theater in Beebe. Movies in Beebe were 15 cents a person."
When Gladys was 15, he asked if she would go with him to Little Rock, 30 minutes away, and alone, to see a movie in a theater there.
"My mother said, 'I don't think so,'" Gladys remembers. "But I went anyway."
Boyd picked her up at 3 p.m. and she was home by dark. Her mother didn't say anything about her disobedience when she returned, thanks to her stepfather's intervention on her behalf.
He would do that again -- intervene on Gladys' behalf -- a couple of years later.
In 1937, Boyd graduated from high school and went to college in Nashville, Tenn. Gladys was quite literally a distant memory for a time. His father died while he was away so he dropped out and moved to Little Rock to care for his mother. He and Gladys didn't see each other much during that time, but they exchanged a few letters and their paths crossed on occasion when he was in Ward.
But as Gladys neared high school graduation in 1939, Boyd's visits to Ward became more frequent. He even started riding the bus to church there every Sunday, and he usually stayed for dinner with Gladys and her family.
One afternoon in March 1939, Boyd broached the topic of marriage. Gladys' family had no phone, but he sent a cryptic message to her through a friend: "How about next Sunday?"
Gladys knew what he meant.
"I knew he was coming out to get married but my mother said she was going over to my grandmother's and did I want to go with them," she says of that Sunday, March 19, 1939. "I usually didn't go with them, but I said, 'Yes, I believe I will.' I didn't know if he would wait on me, and I didn't do it on purpose. I don't know why I did it. But he was there when I got back, and he came in and said that he had a friend to take us there and someone to witness for us."
They left at 3 p.m. and were married soon after by a Methodist pastor in Cabot. Gladys was 17 and Boyd was 19.
There wasn't a honeymoon, and there wasn't a new apartment right away because they had decided to keep their union a secret for the time being.
Boyd took his new wife back home after the ceremony and then drove back to Little Rock so he could go to work the next day.
"My stepfather found out," Gladys says. "The preacher who married us, the graduating class called on him to preach the baccalaureate sermon. I felt like he was looking a hole through me. I came out of the driveway one day going to the post office. I saw him and my stepfather standing there talking to each other and [the preacher] had said to my stepfather, 'Who is that girl?'" and before her stepfather answered, he added, "'I married her not long ago.'"
Gladys' stepfather broke the news to her mother, and again calmed her before she could launch into Gladys.
"He said, 'No, give them time. They'll have to tell it pretty soon,'" Gladys says. "It was the second week in May before we moved in together."
Boyd worked for the Missouri Pacific and Union Pacific railroads until his retirement in 1979. Gladys worked in various positions over the years, but was primarily a stay-at-home mother to their children, Eddie Reed of Highland and Linda Wright of Shelby, N.C. They also have six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
Gladys and Boyd lived in central Arkansas for most of their married life but moved a few years ago to Mountain Home.
After 77 years, they are asked often for marriage advice.
"Someone asked me that not long ago," Gladys says. "I told her to pray for a long life and don't get a divorce. I never thought about leaving."
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High Profile on 04/03/2016