He was on her toes first; proposing, he was on his
To get ahead in this world, and occasionally to get wed in this world, you have to step on some toes. Consider the case of Clinton “Buddy” Sellers and Evelena Betts.
Newly stateside on a 60-day furlough in April 1947, the Army soldier decided it was high time for him to settle down. He went home to Providence, near Judsonia, where he stopped to talk with a woman he had known before he left. “She was sitting under a shade tree. I said, ‘I can’t find a decent girl to marry,’ and she told me she knew someone — Evelena.”
Clinton knew of Evelena Betts, having grown up in the same community with her; he had been just two years ahead of her in school and in the same grade as one of her brothers.
He was surprised to hear that Evelena hadn’t married already. He didn’t know her well, although he did have fleeting memories of her from their youth.
“When I was just a little girl, he stepped on my toe,” Evelena says. “He said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry I stepped on your toe.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s OK. I walk on them, too.’”
They went on a double date sometime later — not together-together; he went with the other girl — and that was the extent of their involvement. Clinton hadn’t given her much thought over the years, nor did she give much to him.
“He went his way and I went mine,” Evelena says.
On the day Cl i n ton stopped to talk to his friend, who happened to be Evelena’s cousin, he asked her where Evelena was, and just like that, Evelena’s cousin, the cousin’s brother and Clinton hopped in the car and tore off to find him his intended.
“I knew her family and I knew them as good Christian people, and that appealed to me,” he says. “And, oh, she was pretty.”
Evelena was staying then in Judsonia with her brother. Her sister-in-law was to have a baby soon and she needed Evelena’s help around the house.
“I was walking downtown, and they came along in his car,” Elevena says, who had just graduated from high school in Providence. “He wanted to know if I wanted a ride, and I told them, no, I would just walk.’ He said, ‘Oh, come on, get in.’ So I finally got in.”
Clinton drove her the short distance to her brother’s house. When he dropped her off, Clinton asked if he could come back to see her there another day, and happily, she said yes.
They dated while he was on leave, seeing countless movies at the theater in Searcy. Before Clinton left to go back to his Army base in Somerset, Ky., he asked Evelena to marry him.
Now, some of her girlfriends had been proposed to by servicemen who popped the question without fully committing to the engagement themselves.
She said, “‘Well, maybe if I knew you meant it … ,’ and he said, ‘Well, I do mean it.’ So we decided to get married.”
Clinton served for two more months, during which time they wrote to each other almost every day, building on the courtship that was so brief until then.
He was discharged on July 3, 1947, and they were married almost two weeks later.
Clinton’s voice quivers as he describes his first glimpse of Evelena on their wedding day.
“She had on a beautiful little dress, and she walked out to meet me at my car,” he says. “She was just so beautiful.”
Clinton was 21 and Evelena was almost 19 when he picked her up in his 1940 Ford and drove to the home of a justice of the peace.
“He married us while we were sitting in the car,” Elevena says. “And we’ve been married going on 67 years, so it doesn’t take a big wedding to keep people together.”
Three days after the nuptials, the newlyweds left for Michigan because, Clinton says, jobs were hard to come by then in Arkansas.
“I had never been away from home,” Elevena says. “We were so bashful. That first night after we were married, I thought, ‘Oh, my. I don’t know him.’ But we grew up together and made a good life.”
They stayed in Michigan for 13 years and then bought a dairy farm and settled down in Beebe.
They have two daughters — Barbara Baum and Sharon Phillips, both of Beebe. They also have three granddaughters and four great-granddaughters.
Clinton sings “You Are My Sunshine” to Evelena every day — sometimes more than once a day.
She’ll never know just how much he loves her, he croons. She says that’s what keeps her going.