C.T. Upshaw was pole vaulting over a neighbor's fence, using a stick he and a friend found in the yard, when Harriette Jackson called him for the first time. He had already fallen for her.
Harriette was not quite 13 years old when she first saw C.T., whose name she didn't know.
The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “I knew I would marry him.”
He says: “I liked her right away. I thought she was real cute, she was nice, she was fun to talk to. And I wanted to sit by her in the movie.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “I was so scared.”
He says: “I was scared, too, but it has worked out.”
My advice for a long happy marriage:
She says: “Don’t assume that your partner knows what’s troubling you. Ask. We’re not mind readers.”
He says: “Just find the right girl and hang right in there.”
She was standing in line with her cousin and his girlfriend -- her friend -- at the Center Theater in Little Rock in the winter of 1956, waiting to see the movie Giant. C.T. strode up in his big fur coat, claiming a place in line next to her cousin, who he recognized from school.
"We were really close to the box office," she says. "The theater was packed and when we got in, my cousin sat me at the far left so his girlfriend had to sit next to C.T., and so as soon as the movie got started, C.T. got up and tried to go find another seat because he didn't want to sit by her."
"I wanted to sit by you," C.T. reminds her.
After C.T. got up, Harriette asked to swap seats with her friend, much to her cousin's chagrin. C.T., in the meantime, determined no other seats were available and returned to his original spot.
"There I was," Harriette says. "We started battling with our arms over who was going to get the armrest. And finally, he just took my hand in his and that seemed to settle that argument."
After the movie, the whole group went downstairs and got in a cab to go home.
"Each one was giving the address for where they wanted to go and I heard him say he wanted to go to Rice Street -- but I didn't know his name," Harriette says.
C.T. leaned over and gave Harriette a kiss during the cab ride, but after she got out at her stop the cab pulled away with her still-unidentified crush.
"I told my girlfriend's mother because I was spending the night, 'Tonight I met the boy I'm gonna marry,' and she just kind of smiled and went, 'Uh huh,'" Harriette says. "I had no doubt in my mind at all that this was going to be him."
C.T. tried to get Harriette's name and number from her cousin, to no avail.
"He didn't like me much," C.T. explains.
Harriette found the directory for West Side Junior High, where she had heard her dreamboat say he went to school, and called every boy who lived on Rice Street, asking each one if he had seen Giant the night before.
"Girls didn't call boys," she says. "That was not the norm, but that didn't matter to me. I was going to find out who that person was."
The name Upshaw was ninth or 10th on her list, and C.T.'s mother answered the phone at their residence.
"She said, 'Well, he's outside playing,'" Harriette says, who followed with an inquiry about whether she might speak with him. "She put the phone down, and I could hear her holler at him to come to the phone."
After they talked, C.T. got a friend to drive him to her house, and they whiled away the next couple of hours on her front porch, holding hands and talking.
Harriette talked her mother into letting her transfer from Mount St. Mary Academy to West Side Junior High to be with C.T.
"This was my man and I was not gonna let him go," Harriette quips.
Neither had a car, so they took the bus when they went out, and that was only after C.T. had walked to her house to meet her.
"We were just kids, so we just did whatever there was to be done," she says.
They were married on Oct. 17, 1959, in a church in Benton.
"There was a Boy Scout troop raking leaves at the courthouse across the street," Harriette remembers, "and when we came out, they started singing 'Here Comes the Bride.' That was sweet."
Harriette and C.T. have two children -- Paris Upshaw Henry of Franklin, Tenn., and Ted Upshaw of Little Rock. They also have two grandchildren -- Jack Henry of Franklin, and Jill Upshaw of Little Rock.
When she was 9 or 10 years old, Harriette did an experiment with a slightly older neighbor girl.
"This was kind of a silly thing, but my girlfriend told me if you hang out a napkin at this certain time, the dew will form the initial of the person you're going to marry and so both of us did," she says. "I couldn't figure out what kind of person would have a name starting with a 'U.'"
Now, of course, she knows perfectly well what kind of person has a name starting with a "U."
"We've had some hard times. He had open-heart surgery a few years back and we made it through that and I had cancer and we made it through there," she says. "I think the Lord has blessed us with time together. I pray as he will continue to do so because this man just makes my life go."
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High Profile on 10/13/2019