Daniel Littlefield generally appreciated his students' quest for knowledge. One had a question with far-reaching implications.
That one, a girl named Carla, stopped at the door on the way in for class one day in the fall of 1972.
The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “I thought he was nice-looking. He had a mustache and shoulder-length hair. I liked what he looked like.”
He says: “I was surprised how short she was. She’s about 5-foot-2.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “I just hoped that the roads weren’t too slick between here and Benton. He used to write a little column for the Benton paper. He knew the judge but the judge wasn’t in. I was beginning to get a little antsy.”
He says: “The guy who married us was a photographer, and he stood us up like he was going to take a picture, and that’s when he married us. But he didn’t take a picture.”
My advice for a lasting marriage:
She says: “You not only have to love somebody, you have to like them. You’re going to have arguments and disappointments, of course, that’s the way life is. But you just don’t get mad over little things and think you have to have your way all the time.”
He says: “Don’t argue about money.”
"Everybody else was already there," says Dan, then an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. "She said, 'Mr. Littlefield, do you like girls?'"
He knew the answer, but he wasn't sure of her intent, so he pondered his response while the whole class looked on.
"Finally I said, 'Well, I like some girls. Why?'"
As it turned out, Carla wanted to set him up with her high school French teacher.
The French teacher, Mary Ann Wood, was dubious. She had initially refused to let Carla give Dan her number.
"For one thing, I was not in the habit of just passing my phone number around to weird people I didn't know," says Mary Ann. Without having seen Dan, "I couldn't judge who he really was. She came back a second time, begging and pleading, and finally I said OK, thinking no man in his right sense was going to call someone he's never even seen before. But he did."
It took being put on the spot a second time, though, for Dan to make a move.
"Some time later, this girl hit the door to my class again, and the first thing she said to me was, 'I thought you told me you liked girls?'" he says. "I thought, 'Well, OK, I better call her.'"
Dan asked Mary Ann (whom he calls Mary) if she would mind if he picked her up in his pickup with a camper on the back. He held her hand on the way down the stairs from her second-floor apartment and they went for pizza and beer.
"He was very easy to talk to because both of us knew people at the university and also we agreed on politics," she says.
After dinner, they went to hear some music.
"I knew that there was something up when we were sitting there and she reached over and grabbed my beer and drank her share of it," says Dan.
She doesn't know why she did that but guesses that it was an indication of how comfortable he made her feel.
"I'd never done anything like that," she says.
That was in October 1972. By December they were engaged.
"I think the way it was said was, 'Well, we might as well get married.' You know, like we didn't have anything else to do," says Dan.
In fact, they had many things to do.
On Jan. 11, 1973, snow was melting on the roads in central Arkansas but there was enough to keep schools closed, so Mary Ann had a day off work. Dan, at UALR, was helping with student registration.
"We had these banks of cards that students would come by and pick up and they would run those cards through one of those computers to enroll," says Dan.
He asked the head of the English department if he could take an extra hour for lunch.
"Of course she was kind of concerned about that because we needed all hands on deck, and she said, 'Well, why? What do you need off for?' And I said, 'Well, I want to go get married,"' he says.
They drove to Benton, where the marriage process was more streamlined than in Pulaski County, and exchanged their wedding vows.
Afterward, Dan took Mary Ann to her apartment so she could begin packing, then he went back to his spot at the registration table.
"I felt so strange and alone. I thought, 'Is this how marriage is? You just get married and then you go on back to work?'" says Mary Ann. "About that time the doorbell rang, and it was the florist bringing me a dozen red roses."
Dan has sent her roses on their anniversary every year since, with one exception, when the florist couldn't deliver until the next day because the roads were icy.
They spent a year in Baltimore early in their marriage so Dan could do post-doctoral research under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. They returned to Arkansas but later moved temporarily to Tuscaloosa, Ala., this time for Mary Ann to study to be a librarian. She retired from the Arkansas State Library in 1999.
Dan is director of the Sequoyah Research Center at UALR.
They lost track of Carla years ago. They aren't even sure why Carla was so certain they would be a match. Dan knows what he would say if he saw her again.
"I would say, 'Thank you.' I would probably give her a hug, too," he says.
He might point out that he does like girls.
"At least I've liked this one for 40 years or so," he says. "I have no complaints."
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High Profile on 12/04/2016