Velmarie "Val" Parker had heard countless times that she needed to meet Leland Callaway. Leland had heard the same from their mutual friends.
"But when we first met there were no sparks flying at all. He went his way and I went mine," Val says.
The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “He is so handsome. He had dark black wavy hair — and a lot of it. He was just a handsome man. I thought I would never have that handsome a person as a husband. He was very, very handsome and he was very outgoing, somebody you could just fall in love with immediately — but it wasn’t the time.”
He says: “She was very cute, she was fun and she was outgoing. She was really a pleasant person.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “I was amazed at the number of people who came because this wasn’t where I grew up. This was the church that I attended and so many people from where I worked were there. I was amazed by the number of people who came to my wedding.”
He says: “She wanted it to rain — and it rained everywhere we went.”
My advice for a long happy marriage is:
She says: “Let Jesus be the center of your relationship. Don’t hold grudges. Be forgiving and don’t take things personally — realize that there are times in your life that you don’t feel as well as others and you might say things you wouldn’t say otherwise. And just always try to put the other person first.”
He says: “Both of you be Christians, that was one of the main things for both of us.”
Val had moved from near Glenwood, where she grew up, to Little Rock to go to nursing school just about the time Leland had left Little Rock for Jacksonville College in Jacksonville, Texas.
They both went to Temple Baptist Church -- first Leland, and then Val -- and they had the same group of friends there.
"But, of course, we did not know each other," Val says. "Our friends would all say, 'Oh, you've got to meet Leland,' and then they would say to him, 'Oh, you've got to meet Val.'"
When Leland returned to Little Rock for a visit and saw his friends at church on a Sunday morning in 1957, they made sure to introduce him to Val.
"We just met in the foyer of the church and everybody was there, people coming in and going," Val says. "He had been to church there and everybody loved him and was talking to him. We said hello and then we just sort of went our different ways."
Leland left to go back to Jacksonville right after the morning worship service, with no more than that brief introduction to Val before he left.
But when he was back in town a year or so later they met again.
Leland went to the Wednesday night service at church and afterward he joined his friends for bowling. His friends were also Val's friends, of course, and she went, too.
"She was a good bowler. She was a real good bowler," Leland says. "I watched her bowl and thought I sure would like to date her. She sure is cute. I called her the next day and asked her out."
They went to a service at another Baptist church led by a friend and former roommate of Leland's and afterward they went to his friend's house.
"We just laughed and had a good time talking," Leland says. "When we left and I took her home, to the dorm where she was staying, I told her, 'I'm going to marry you.'"
Val's response was probably not the one he had hoped for.
"I said, 'You're just like what I thought you were. A ladies' man,'" she says.
Leland went back to Jacksonville, and he began writing to Val.
"We had a dating relationship that way. He wrote a letter to me every day," says Val, who wrote to him most days, too. "We dated through the mail. He is a natural writer. I can't think of that much to say. I don't have that much to say. But he would write two pages every time and it was all very interesting."
He came back to Little Rock to see her when he could, and she visited him in Texas a couple of times as well.
"From that first time I said I was going to marry her I started working toward that end," Leland says. "She was everything I had been looking for, both physically and spiritually. I was a ministerial student at that time and she was just fit in every way for that."
They eventually started discussing marriage and made the mutual decision to exchange their vows.
"I was 24 so I was over the age of the average dating person and I was very interested in my work but I was also ready to have a husband and a family, so it was the right time," Val says. Leland is 4 1/2 years older than she.
They were wed on June 5, 1959, in Temple Baptist Church, where they had met.
It was a rainy day -- just what Val had prayed for -- and the rain followed them all the way to Gulfport, Miss., where they honeymooned on the beachfront, then back to Little Rock to pick up Val's belongings and then to Jacksonville, where they moved into their first apartment together as newlyweds.
"It rained, but it was romantic," she insists. "I love rainy weather. It's one of my favorite things."
Val got a job as a nurse in the Jacksonville hospital and Leland continued his work at the college there, along with his ministerial studies. They moved from Jacksonville to Magnolia, where they live today, but there were a few other moves along the way. From Magnolia they moved to Lubbock, Texas, where Leland got a doctorate in business, then back to Magnolia.
"In 1990 he decided to quit teaching and just pastor so we moved to College View Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas, and after about 10 years we decided to move back to Magnolia and we've been here ever since," Val says.
The Callaways raised four children-- Kelli Harwell, Khalin Callaway and Kyle Callaway, all of Magnolia, and Kevin Callaway, who died about five years ago. They also have six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
"The Lord has blessed us in so many ways," Val says.
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High Profile on 11/18/2018