Earnestine Young had long believed that any man in a nightclub would be the wrong man for her.
Until she met Ronald Foster.
The first time I saw my future spouse
He says: “I liked her then, but when I told her I was from Chicago, that was the end of that.”
She says: “I was turned off because he said he was from Chicago.”
On our wedding day:
He says: “I was kind of nervous, just a little bit.”
She says: “I was a little nervous, but I dealt with it pretty well because I knew I was going to have a good husband.”
My advice for a lasting marriage:
He says: “Put God first. Always work together, and take care of each other.”
She says: “Put God first. Be faithful to each other. Be able to communicate. Trust and be honest with each other. Keep other people out of your business. Don’t go to bed mad. Don’t fight around your kids, and keep peace around your home.”
Earnestine's sister and brother-in-law were visiting her family in Little Rock over Thanksgiving 1984 and asked her to go out with them for the evening.
"I said I didn't want to go out," says Earnestine, then 21. "I didn't want to go out because there was nothing for me in clubs. Men in clubs are no good."
Her sister, though, was relentless. She wheedled and insisted this is what she wanted to do for the evening while she was in Little Rock. She wanted Earnestine to go, too.
Earnestine gave in. They sat around a table together for a while, chatting and enjoying the scene. When Earnestine's sister and brother-in-law got up to dance, Ronald sidled up and took a seat.
"I told him I was holding those seats, and when they came back he was going to have to get up," she says. Ronald, who was 34, didn't mind, as long as she danced with him after he stood -- and she did, several times.
At the end of the evening, Ronald walked Earnestine to her sister's car. He asked for her phone number, but she demurred. He could give her his, she offered.
On the way home, Earnestine's sister asked her if she planned to call him. "I said, 'Yes, I'm going to call him. You've already got your husband, and now I'm going to get me one,'" Earnestine quipped.
But when she called, she discovered he had given her the wrong number, reaffirming everything she believed about men in nightclubs. "I said, 'He lied to me. I knew I shouldn't have gone out,'" she says.
She stewed about this for a while. She remembered that she had actually met Ronald a year earlier, also in a nightclub. They had talked just long enough for him to tell her he had been in Chicago.
"I just ran away when he told me that," she says. "I didn't want to fall in love with him and then have him leave to go back to somewhere else."
Ronald was from Little Rock but had lived in Chicago for seven years. He had thought that fact might impress her -- not scare her away.
She knew most people would just throw away the piece of paper with the wrong number scrawled on it, but she decided to try again. Instead of a "4" at the end, she dialed a "5."
"I don't know why I did this," she says. But, miraculously, Ronald answered.
"I didn't mean to give her the wrong number. I didn't know I had made a mistake writing the number down," Ronald swears.
He asked her if she wanted to do something that day. Earnestine, who wasn't about to let a man she barely knew come to her house, suggested they go to a park. They met there, but Ronald arrived hungry and suggested they go grab a burger. They each drove their own cars to the restaurant, but after they sat and talked a bit, she invited him to her apartment.
"I was nervous," she says. "I didn't let men come to my place, and I was looking around to see if there was anything he could steal and hoping he didn't hurt me. He seemed nice, and I knew he had two jobs and I liked that, but I was still kind of nervous."
After a while, he asked if she wanted to go bowling. When he brought her home, she thanked him for a nice evening and told him that it was late and that he needed to go home.
The next day, she invited him for dinner. She made greens, macaroni and cheese, candied yams, cornbread and barbecued chicken.
A year later, while they were eating dinner with her family at her sister's house, he dropped to one knee and proposed to Earnestine, after first asking her mother's permission. She said yes. They exchanged vows on May 17, 1986.
The couple have two children -- Ronald Foster Jr., 12, and Jennifer Foster, 26. They also have one granddaughter, Leilani, 3.
Earnestine and Ronald didn't go back to any nightclubs after their first date.
"We were done with that," Earnestine says. "We had both found what we were looking for. But to all those people who think you can't find a good man in one of those places, I used to think that, too, but I say this proves you can. I found a really good man."
If you have an interesting how-we-met story or if you know someone who does, please call (501) 425-7228 or email
High Profile on 09/24/2017