Joyce Toliver and her mother stepped into the grocery store in Gravel Ridge one afternoon more than 60 years ago and passed Dale Moody. He was soiled and oily. To Joyce's mind, this was just exactly how fondness doesn't begin.
"I was working on an old car," Dale says. "I was all greasy. She came outside and asked me if I knew where [her friend] Janice was working."
The first time I saw my spouse:
He says: “I just thought she was a dream girl. I didn’t find anything prettier than her.”
She says: “He was under a car. I thought, ‘I would hate for him to be my husband.’”
My advice for a long marriage:
He says: “We’ve just always been best friends. I never did have it in my mind to ever divorce or anything like that. I don’t guess it ever crossed my mind or hers.”
She says: “Have respect for each other.”
On our wedding day:
He says: “We had a hard time finding a preacher or a justice of the peace on our wedding day. I wore a suit for our wedding.”
She says: “I wore a suit that I already had. I didn’t buy a new one. I was excited. I was so young and dumb I didn’t think about our future and how young we were. I was just always really comfortable with him.”
Joyce's father worked on the railroad with Janice's father. Joyce's father's work had brought their family to North Little Rock a few months earlier, and Janice's family moved to Gravel Ridge around the same time. Janice had said there was someone she wanted Joyce to meet, but she wasn't fast enough to make the introduction. It was Dale.
He had gotten to know Janice because they spent a good bit of time in and around the store.
"Janice was a sweet girl," Dale says. "She was more of a sister to me than anything else."
He pointed Joyce down the street to the home where Janice was baby-sitting three little boys, then watched her walk down the road.
"She was wearing a poodle skirt that day," he says. "She was about 4-foot-9 and weighed about 90 pounds. She was little bitty."
He got her phone number from Janice. By the time he called, Joyce knew he was the fellow her friend wanted her to meet, but she hadn't connected his name with the greasy face she'd seen at the store. It is not overstating to say that this detail may be the lynchpin of a 50-year marriage.
"When I saw him out there, I thought, 'Oh, I would hate to be married to that thing,'" she says.
Their phone conversation was brief.
"I think he just wanted to be sure I would be at his church that weekend," she says.
She went to church with Janice that Sunday, and after the service, they watched him play baseball.
He took her home after the game.
"That was one way to find out where she lived so I could go back again," he says. "I didn't see her again until the next night."
They sat together on the glider on her front porch then, talking about life and the world.
"He had to leave by 10 o'clock," Joyce says. Her father worked the night shift and insisted that Dale be gone before he left for work.
Most of their dates took place on that glider, but there were occasional trips to the drive-in movie or to a drive-in restaurant, too.
"We didn't have money enough to do a great deal. When we would go out we would just get a hamburger and a Coke," she says.
And then there was Dale saying, "When do you want to get married?"
"By then, I thought he was a great fellow," Joyce says. "We had become close friends during that time that we spent together."
Joyce went to visit her brother and sister in Texas, and Dale missed her fiercely while she was gone.
"She didn't think I had their number but I fooled around and found their number and I called her while she was out there visiting them," he says. "In the meantime I went and got my brother and we went to the jewelry store and picked out a set of rings."
He picked up her family at the train station when they returned, and after he took them home, he gave Joyce the ring.
"Her mother and dad usually made her be home by 10 o'clock but they came in late on the train and they let us stay out later than 10 o'clock that night," he says.
Joyce was 17 and Dale was 18 when they set out on Saturday, Jan. 16, 1956, to find someone to marry them. They saw Dale's friend walking by the side of the road and picked him up in hopes he could help them find a preacher. They stopped at the Church of Christ in Sylvan Hills and Dale's friend went to the door of what they thought was the church parsonage.
"It wasn't, but the lady there said she could get the preacher there in just a few minutes," Dale says.
They exchanged their vows in the church foyer.
Dale and Joyce live in Vilonia. They have three sons: Ted Moody of Austin, Billy Moody of Conway and Robert Moody of San Antonio. They have six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
They are still friends with Janice. And years of love have deepened their own friendship.
"He's still my best friend," Joyce says. "We always got along. Time has gone so quickly. I look back on it with pleasure and I look forward to what years we have left with pleasure."
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High Profile on 01/24/2016