Larry Kelley's desire for a date with Pat Simmons far outweighed his fear that he might get a punch in the nose from his friend if he asked her out.
"I thought I had found a diamond," Larry says.
Larry had been friends with Mike since they were little. Their fathers worked together, Mike's mother had been the den leader for their Cub Scouts, and they were high school classmates in Walnut Grove, Mo.
"We were together constantly in the summertime," Larry says.
So, in 1963, when Mike started dating Pat, who lived about nine miles away in Ash Grove, Mo., it was only natural that he would bring Larry along when he went to her house.
"We would all just sit in her yard and talk, and I would wrestle with her brothers," Larry says.
All the while, though, Larry wanted to go out with Pat himself.
She was a cheerleader and Larry had seen her on the basketball court during a game sometime before that.
"I didn't have any idea who his girlfriend was and when I saw her it came as a surprise to me because I had seen her and thought she was so pretty," he says.
He went back to her house without Mike one day and asked Pat for a date. Pat was only 14 then. Larry was 16, and he drove as they went riding around town on their first date.
He had given Mike a heads-up.
"Mike and I were friends but I didn't want to have him beat me up. I didn't know if he would," he says. "I probably didn't stick around very long after I told him."
When Larry graduated from high school, he enlisted in the Navy rather than waiting to be called up.
"I think my words to her when I left were, 'Well, these are my four years. I'll see you later.' Something to that effect. I knew I was going to be gone and I didn't want to tie her down in case she didn't want to wait for me," Larry says.
Pat was sad to see him go, but she was still in high school.
"I dated a lot, and I graduated and got a job at the telephone company up in Springfield, Mo., and moved to the big city," she says.
They wrote letters and Larry visited her when he was home or on leave.
"I went over there one time and knocked on the door and her mother opened it and said, 'I'm sorry, we don't allow sailors in here.' And I turned around to leave and she stopped me and said, 'I'm only kidding,'" he says.
Her parents liked him and had known his family for years.
"There are a lot of similarities between our families," Larry says. "Our grandmothers were both named Edith Marie. One went by Edith, the other went by Marie. My mother's name was Lorraine, her mother's middle name was Lorene. I have a sister Pat and I married a Pat; I have a sister Barb and Pat has a sister Barb."
Larry got out of the Navy in April 1969, and made his way to Pat in short order.
Pat was living in a Springfield apartment with two friends then, and while they hadn't been all that serious before then, by June they were making nuptial plans.
They were married on June 21, 1969, in a Baptist preacher's house.
"It was a small wedding because I wasn't working at the time we got married. I was going to work on Monday," says Larry, who had been doing odd jobs for his brother at a gas station until then. He found jobs at two grocery stores and a gas station and then at R.T. French Co. "I got to thinking I could go back in the Navy and retire in 16 years or I could keep working at R.T. French and retire in 35 years or so."
He and Pat mulled it over for a couple of weeks before he joined.
"Pat said, 'Well, that's great. I'd like to see the world,'" he says.
They were stationed in Tennessee, Texas and Maine. While in Maine, Larry was assigned to a patrol squadron that spent six months in the winter in Rota, Spain. After all of that, he went on recruiting duty in Mountain Home and Pat stayed there when he went back on board a ship.
"So I saw the world and she saw exotic places like Millington, Tenn.; Corpus Christi, Texas; Brunswick, Maine; and Mountain Home, Ark.," he says.
The Kelleys, still of Mountain Home, have two daughters -- Cyndi Lindenmeyer of Mountain Home and Christa Leavitt of O'Fallon, Mo. They also have six grandchildren.
"It's been good though," she says. "Even though I didn't get to see that many places, it was a good decision for him to go back in."
Larry thinks Mike made a good decision in not punching him in the nose.
"We were still friends after that," Larry says, "and even after Pat and I married."
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High Profile on 09/25/2016