Olen Wilson doesn't remember a time when he didn't know Elma Fletcher. They married 70 years ago this month, but they have been acquainted for most of their lives.
"I can remember her from when I was 5 or 6 years old, maybe even younger than that," Olen says.
The first time I remember noticing my future spouse:
He says: “I don’t really know when the first time was. I’ve just always known her.”
She says: “I thought he was nice. He was a good student.”
On our wedding day:
He says: “We didn’t make it a big thing. We just wanted everything to be calm and plain. We got married in Mountain View and we spent the first night together there in Mountain View in a little hotel and from then on it was just the two of us, of course.”
She says: “I wore what I had. I wore a dress. We didn’t tell anyone that we were going to get married.”
My advice for a lasting marriage:
He says: “There’s really no secret, it’s just treating one another like you’d like to be treated.”
She says: “Be good to each other and try to be happy.”
Olen is about three years older than Elma, but from the time she was in first grade until he was in eighth, they went to class in the same one-room schoolhouse in Onia (Stone County). Olen started ninth grade after that at a separate high school -- Big Flat High School -- and Elma continued on at Onia until she finished eighth grade. They saw each other around town after that. It was hard not to see everyone in that small, rural community.
After graduation, Olen was drafted into the Army. When he returned home, he got a teaching certificate and taught in the one-room school he and Elma had once attended. Even though Elma was gone by then, her younger sister was still there. That turned out to be a handy thing for Olen.
He had had his eye on Elma, who had grown up a bit while he was away.
"She was a beautiful girl," he says of Elma. "She just had characteristics ... that matched what I wanted better than any of the other girls that I dated. She seemed like the type of girl I was looking for to spend the rest of my life with. She was just everything I was looking for."
He had asked to walk her home from church a couple of times, but it was through letters he sent through her sister that he let Elma know he wanted to date her.
"People just didn't visit then like they do nowadays," he says. "They go by cars now and they didn't do that back then. Back then it was horseback and walking everywhere."
The distance was enough to discourage him from making the trek to her house without knowing if he would be welcome. Elma was the second oldest of nine children, and her parents depended on her to help with the younger siblings. Her father was busy in the fields while her mother canned and cooked and cleaned and did a myriad of other things that had to be done to care for the family. Olen knew roughly how this worked because he was one of seven children.
But it was easy enough for Olen to send a note home with Elma's sister, and Elma could send one back to him the same way.
Their first date, arranged through those letters, was to the Sunday morning service at Onia Missionary Baptist Church, Elma says.
"We just did whatever was going on in the community, which wasn't much," says Elma of their subsequent dates.
They had been seeing each other for almost a year when he proposed to her, right after his grandmother's funeral.
"I didn't plan it that way. There was no plan in place," Olen says. "I was walking her home from the funeral, and I just didn't hesitate to ask her, and she didn't hesitate to say yes. We knew each other our whole lives so we didn't have anything to think about."
They eloped on Jan. 31, 1947, to Mountain View, and were married by a preacher Olen had met during a revival. Elma's mother cried when they told her they had married. "My dad was out working," Elma says. "He didn't really say much when we told him."
They lived in Onia as newlyweds and Olen worked for a farmer for a while, but they soon moved to Conway so Olen could go to Arkansas State Teachers College, the closest four-year college to Onia, and work toward a teaching degree so he could teach high school agriculture classes.
ASTC, now the University of Central Arkansas, stopped offering the agriculture education degree when Olen was two years into his degree. He and Elma packed up and moved to Fayetteville so he could complete the last two years at the University of Arkansas.
"It was an adventure to me because I never had done anything," Olen says.
With his degree in hand, Olen found a teaching position in Batesville and stayed there for a few years before being offered a job in Timbo, not far from Onia. He retired as an agriculture teacher from the high school in Timbo in 1984 and continued raising cattle and harvesting hay for many years after that.
Olen and Elma have three children: Jerry Wilson of Mountain View; Joanie Cromwell of Gulfport, Miss.; and Janice Eunson of Timbo. They also have four grandchildren.
Elma went to work as a nurse's aid in a hospital and in a nursing home when her youngest child started school. She is also retired. They built the house they live in now in Timbo in 1959.
"We've been married 69 years and if we make it until Jan. 31 it'll be 70 years," Olen says. "I admired her -- everything about her -- then, and I still do."
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High Profile on 01/01/2017