Tragedy brought them together. It was happy times after that.
Gail Gordon laid claim to Kenneth Eason the first time she saw him, but she didn’t mind that he just wanted to be her buddy. After tragedy struck, though, their friendship helped them heal and brought them closer together.
Gail and her two best friends ogled Kenneth and his brothers — one a year older and one a year younger — as the boys registered at Joe T. Robinson High School during the school year in 1964.
Several girls took notice. “We said, ‘Three new boys!’ I said, ‘I want the middle one,’” Gail says. It didn’t work out that way. Kenneth and one of Gail’s best friends, Judy, started dating their senior year. They all hung out together, going back and forth to football games in Kenneth’s Pontiac convertible.
After high school, Judy left for what is now Arkansas Tech University in Russellville, and Kenneth worked for Judy’s father and tried to finish one last credit to officially graduate.
Judy asked Gail, then a senior, to help Kenneth get that credit.
“I said I would do it under one condition — if he’d be my chauffeur,” Gail says. He took her to games, and sometimes he would take her home. “There wasn’t anything romantic between us at all. We were just big buddies.”
Gail joined Judy at Tech after she graduated from high school in 1965. Kenneth was drafted into the Army.
“And then in December, the whole world fell apart for us,” Gail says. There was a wreck on Mount Nebo and five college students from Tech were killed — Judy was one of them. “I was supposed to have been with them, but I was late getting to the place where I was supposed to meet them, and they went off without me to teach me a lesson about being late.”
Gail and Kenneth saw each other at the funeral, but their shared loss made it hard for them to interact. For the next year, they did not even talk. Both stayed close to Judy’s parents, who had lost their only child.
“We did everything we could to try to ease things for them,” Gail says.
One evening around Christmas in 1966, Gail and Kenneth stopped by to visit Judy’s parents at the same time. They started talking, and Kenneth asked Gail if she could take him to get his driver’s license renewed. He could get his father’s car in the evenings, but didn’t have access to one during the day.
She said yes, of course. The older man in the booth who helped Kenneth with his license renewal asked if Gail was his wife or sister or girlfriend, none of which she was.
“He said, ‘Well, she’s a good-looking little girl. You better take her down the hall and get you a marriage license and marry her,’” Kenneth says.
Kenneth and Gail just laughed. That night they watched a movie at her house, and he asked about her plans for the next day. She didn’t have plans, so he came up with one.
“He said, ‘I guess we could go get married. That’s what the guy told us to do,’” she says.
She thought he was joking and shot back that she would believe him if the next morning he came to her house and proclaimed his intention to her parents.
He did.
Their betrothal might have happened on a whim, but their longtime friendship made it logical to them.
“I really couldn’t imagine anyone I would rather spend time with for the rest of my life,” she said.
They intended to marry right away, but they couldn’t get the required blood tests done before Kenneth had to be back on base after his holiday leave.
“I got my engagement ring through the mailbox,” she says. He had bought it when he got back to Fort Bragg, N.C., and mailed it to her.
They were married March 30, 1967, during the first threeday leave he got after that. Judy’s parents were their honor attendants. They left immediately for Fort Bragg, where they lived until his service was up, and then they returned to central Arkansas.
The Easons have four children — Judy Forrest of Roland, named after the young woman who meant so much to both of them; Christy Eason and Wayne Eason, both also of Roland; and Chuck Eason of Albany, Ky. They also have seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Gail struggled with guilt over the years. “Why was I alive and my friends weren’t? It was also that I was going to end up with him even though I never intended for that to happen,” she says.
But they’ve had much to celebrate after all these years.
“We still love each other,” Kenneth says. “We argue sometimes, but it’s give and take. We’ve been giving and taking for years.”