Rhonda Colbert's crush on Randy Evans went back as far as she could remember, but when he tried to chase her down, she fled.
"I finally caught her, and I've never let go," says Randy, 27 years after the day they wed.
On our wedding day:
She says: “It was a dream come true. It had been my dream since I was little to marry him. I always liked him, and I just felt like that was the way it was supposed to be.”
He says: “We went to Ralph and Kacoo’s for dinner. On the way home, I wanted to find a ferry that crossed a lake — it was on the map — but I got everyone lost for two or three hours.”
My advice for a lasting marriage:
She says: “It’s a lot of work. You have to put the other person first.”
He says: “If you’ll follow our creator’s instructions your marriage will be about as positive as it can go. About 90 percent of that is on the man and if he leads his family that way it can’t help but be good.”
Rhonda and Randy lived just a few houses apart in the same Little Rock neighborhood when he was 4 and she was 2.
"Me and my girlfriends usually watched him from afar," she says. "He was never interested in us."
Rhonda's best friend was Randy's next-door neighbor, and she and Rhonda gathered at her house for prime viewing opportunities. Later, they saw each other when visiting their respective grandmothers, who lived on the same street.
They had another encounter in junior high, although it proved unfruitful. Randy tried to talk to Rhonda in high school, when she was a sophomore and he was a senior, and they found themselves briefly in the same classroom. But her nerves took control and their conversation went nowhere.
"I was off-the-chain, I was kind of acting a fool," he says. "I picked my desk up and carried it over there next to her. I was trying to impress her and make her pay attention to me, but she was really embarrassed or whatever and didn't respond the way I thought she ought to."
They didn't see each other much in the three to four years that followed.
"I would see her passing in her little hot rod Camaro," he says. "I tried to chase her down on more than one occasion but she wouldn't stop." One time he flashed his lights to get her attention. She ignored him and kept going.
The thing to do if you were young in southwest Little Rock in 1988 was to cruise Geyer Springs Road, and that's just what Rhonda, at 21, was doing when Randy, then 23, spotted her in a Kroger parking lot.
They started talking -- this time she talked back -- and Randy asked if she would like to ride around with him. Of course she would, she told him, and they drove and talked for hours. Rhonda was living with her parents then, and she was out so late that her mother was frantic with worry by the time she got home.
When her mother found out who she had been with, all was forgiven.
"They knew him, and they really liked him," Rhonda says.
A week later, he called to ask if they could get together again. She had been waiting for him to call, and her mother had been hoping he would, as well. When the phone rang, Rhonda was out on date with another guy, and her mother kept him chatting for about half an hour as she waited for Rhonda to get home.
One of Rhonda and Randy's earliest outings was to Petit Jean Mountain State Park. They took steaks for cooking out and relaxed and talked. Over the next two years, they saw movies, had dinners, went to Wild River Country and spent time with each others' families.
After all that, they decided the time was right for getting married.
They exchanged their vows on March 10, 1990, in a ceremony officiated by a justice of the peace in New Orleans.
"We got up on stage and sang at the Cat's Meow and did 'Your Mama Don't Dance and Your Daddy Don't Rock and Roll' on that trip," Randy says. "There were a bunch of other people, but I remember that was fun, and we would do that again if we were back down there today."
Randy and Rhonda live in Tull and they have two children -- Trustin, 20, and Briley, 15.
Randy is glad he and Rhonda got together when the time was right.
"I was not interested in a spouse when we were kids, of course. But to me it was pretty much a God thing," Randy says. "We kept coming into contact but it just took a while for us to get together."
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High Profile on 04/23/2017