Daniell Davis was trying to fix Joe Homan up with one of her friends, but as it turned out his friend was the real matchmaker -- he set Daniell up with Joe.
Daniell was just 17 when she was hired as Christmas help by the Toys "R" Us in North Little Rock in November 1990.
The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “He had long hair with an earring and he wore a rock T-shirt and the Levi’s — skin tight, rolled up at the ankle — with high tops. I thought jiminy Christmas — I really thought, ‘That guy is trouble.’”
He says: “I thought she was an angel from heaven. That’s why I bugged Rob to find out about her.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “Right before we got married he was at McDonald’s getting something to eat with his brother.”
He says: “She was walking down the aisle and she was grinning from ear to ear but she was so nervous she almost shook the bouquet loose of all its flowers.”
My advice for a long happy marriage is:
She says: “Never go to bed without saying I love you because the next day is never a guarantee. That’s what we do every night.”
He says: “Communicate.”
"It was my very first job," Daniell says. She was then a senior at North Little Rock High School.
A girl she met on the job told her about another co-worker she really wanted to go out with, and Daniell did her best to get them together.
Daniell pumped one guy they worked with for information about the one her friend was interested in; the guy she questioned was Rob, Joe's best friend -- and Joe was the object of her interest.
Joe, in the meantime, had his eyes on Daniell.
He and Daniell didn't always work at the same time, nor did they work in the same part of the store. She worked at the register and Joe worked on the sales floor.
"Our schedules were just kind of haphazard," says Joe, who was 18. "Sometimes I would be clocking out when she would be clocking in."
Joe had, in fact, chatted with the girl Daniell was trying to set him up with. He wasn't interested in that girl, but Daniell's attempts at talking with him about her piqued his interest in Daniell.
"Sometimes there were four, five, six of us just hanging out in the break room chitchatting. I got to see her from the viewpoint of how she was with other people and she was just very genuine," he says.
It also didn't hurt that he thought she was beautiful.
"I've always had a fascination with long hair and she had long blond hair. It seemed like every time I saw her she had it pulled back," he remembers. "There was just one day that she had run up the stairs and she had her hair down ... that was when I started bugging Rob to find out about her."
Rob took his request a step further.
"There were a few times after work that we would get done with our shift and we would just run up to McDonald's, the three of us, and hang out and talk," Joe says. "Rob was the one who had first suggested that we all go hang out at McDonald's so I think it was kind of him who brought us together."
Daniell abandoned her matchmaking efforts after she and Joe started getting to know each other.
"I don't even know what happened to that girl," she says.
Daniell and Joe went on their first date Dec. 17, 1990.
She left Toys "R" Us in late January when her seasonal job ended and started working as a nanny. Joe continued working there for a few months, just in time to take Daniell to the prom.
He asked her to his prom at North Pulaski High School and she asked him to hers at North Little Rock High School.
Both enrolled at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and continued living at home with their parents after high school graduation.
They had started talking about marriage within a few months of their first date, but they wanted to go to college before they made such a big life commitment. They spent time seeing movies and eating dinner together, strolling through the Memphis Zoo and the streets of Eureka Springs, floating the Buffalo River and playing games with Joe's family before they were ready to settle down.
They exchanged their vows on Oct. 3, 1998, in the Capital Hotel. They honeymooned at Disney World.
Joe is a teacher and coach at Pulaski Heights Middle School in Little Rock; Daniell is a teacher at Pike View Early Childhood in North Little Rock. They have two sons -- Jackson, 16, and Charles, 12.
When Daniell and Joe heard Toys "R" Us would be closing, they decided to make a nostalgic trip back down its aisles.
"I was hoping that there might be an investor that could come along and let them redo their bankruptcy and fix everything," Joe says.
Joe and Daniell's youngest son snapped a picture of them standing together among the sales signs.
"Yeah, it was sad," Daniell says.
The store was remodeled years ago, and walls and shelves were moved in that process. But Joe still remembers the exact spot where he stood when he realized Daniell was his soul mate.
"One night we were both closing up," he says. "We were doing what's called re-shop, and it's where we go through each aisle and we find items that don't belong that people have put in the wrong place and we put it where it belongs on the shelf. Everybody basically participates in that. She was on aisle 4B, straightening up some roller skates and I came through with some and as I came around the corner she stood up and there was a glow -- literally a glow -- around her and at that point in time I knew she was the one for me."
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High Profile on 07/15/2018