RIGHT TIME RIGHT PLACE

Growing up together was impetus for married life

Keith Jones and Leta Strother spent their childhoods roaming their North Little Rock neighborhoods together, stopping to visit friends or play a hand of cards along the way.

They were introduced before they even started school and spent countless hours together as their parents socialized in each other's homes.

The first time I saw my future spouse:

She says: “He was curly haired and cute. He doesn’t have any hair now.”

He says: “She was cute with thick glasses.”

On our wedding day:

She says: “He had on a blue plaid suit, kind of subtle, with blue and gray two-toned shoes.”

He says: “She had a traditional wedding dress for the wedding but when we left — you know, it was the 1970s — and she had on a dress that was really just a long T-shirt. It was a pale pink minidress.”

My advice for a long happy marriage is:

She says: “The important things are the little things, like the time he left a Butterfinger candy bar in the car for me. There are always hard times, but just knowing that there are the good little times, too, is important.”

He says: “Let her go first. Learn their differences. It took me a long time to learn that we’re different in the way we react and approach things. And there should be a lot of forgiveness.”

"When our families would get together, he and I would fight. He would kick me and I would scratch him, because we were 6-year-olds. But we don't do that too much anymore," Leta jokes. "We've settled down a little bit."

Their individual first grade school pictures from Levy Elementary were printed side by side, and they were photographed standing next to each other with the elementary choir around that same time.

Keith recalls Leta asking him, while they were in elementary school, if he knew how to play 52 pickup.

"I didn't know what 52 pickup was so she threw a deck of cards at me," he quips.

Leta's family moved to Memphis when they were in 10th grade.

"We always knew where each other was during that time because our parents were friends and always stayed in touch," Keith says.

"And he probably secretly had a crush on me all these years," Leta says.

("That's true," he says.)

After high school, Keith went to college in St. Louis, and occasionally stopped by to see her family in Memphis on his way home or back. When he graduated from college, he got a job as a transportation engineer with Metroplan and moved back to North Little Rock. On Christmas Eve in 1972, he stopped by to visit Leta, whose parents had moved back to North Little Rock by then.

"I was out shopping for Christmas and when I found out he had come by my mom and dad's house I thought, 'I think I need to go say hi.' So I got all dolled up and I went over there," Leta says. "I thought, 'By golly, I want to go see and he'll be fun to hang out with anyway because he's really a funny guy.'"

Keith's family had guests when she arrived, and she stayed and visited with Keith and some of their friends.

"So that's what started it, and then when he said, 'Let's go do something else,' I thought, hmmm ... OK," she says.

She momentarily hoped they could go out for New Year's Eve, but Keith already had a date for that night so they arranged to go out shortly after that. Keith made her dinner so he could show off his new bachelor pad in a singles apartment complex in Little Rock and they saw a movie.

"Five weeks after that we got engaged and six weeks after that we got married," Leta says.

Leta was teaching high school English in Morrilton then, so Keith visited her one day each week and she returned home to North Little Rock on weekends.

"One night when he came to Morrilton, I was going to cook for him and I bought a box of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and he had to cook it. I didn't know quite how," Leta says.

It was Valentine's Day when one of them proposed -- the debate about who that was has carried on through the years.

"I think she proposed to me but she says I proposed to her," Keith says. "Why we moved along so fast, well, we knew each other so long that the background checks had already been done."

They exchanged their vows on March 23, 1973, in Leta's parents' home in North Little Rock's Lakewood neighborhood.

"It was very small," she says, "because I decided that I didn't need a big church wedding. My brother-in-law, who was a Baptist minister, did the ceremony and so it was mainly just family and a couple of friends. And then we were going to go to Hot Springs for our honeymoon, for the races because it was in March."

They ended up spending their wedding night in a Little Rock hotel, because they couldn't get a reservation in Hot Springs. They took a delayed honeymoon to Estes Park, Colo., that summer.

They got an apartment in northwest North Little Rock to make it easier for Leta to commute to Morrilton and complete her contract.

Leta has worked, over the years, as a director of preschools and day cares, including 18 years at Westover Presbyterian's preschool. In 1987, Keith started Central Arkansas Transit Authority and River Rail Streetcar. Now a consultant with various cities on streetcar systems, he is currently serving as general manager of RATP Development USA in Washington.

Leta and Keith have three daughters -- Holly Jones of Fort Worth and Kristin Hartman and Margo Duvall, both of Little Rock. They also have three grandchildren.

They have built many family memories over the years, adding to those they made before they even started dating.

"His dad had a home movie camera and you wouldn't believe how many of those home movies we're in together -- things at church, birthday parties, things like that," Leta says. "It's so funny to see how, that long ago, we were in family home movies together."

If you have an interesting how-we-met story or if you know someone who does, please call (501) 425-7228 or email:

[email protected]

photo

Special to the Democrat-Gazette

Keith Jones and Leta Strother were married on March 23, 1973. They were engaged within five weeks of their first date, but by then they had known each other almost their whole lives. “Keith, I knew, was a good man, a very, very intelligent man. I knew he would be a good husband and dad and he was and still is,” she says. “He’s a real rock for this family, very steady and has good ideas and good thoughts about things.”

photo

Special to the Democrat-Gazette

Keith and Leta Jones recently celebrated their 46th anniversary. They met in preschool because their parents were friends. “We arrived at the same idea independently that we were both interested in being more than friends at long last,” he says.

High Profile on 04/07/2019

Upcoming Events