Airman, lass met in pub; he proposed that night
Jean Barrie was standing near the pub’s fireplace in Kettering, England, in February 1957, her green coat buttoned up to the neck, when Jim Colvin first approached.
She was surprised to hear him ask if she would be at the dance that night but quickly regained her senses and told him she would. The dance, a regular event held at a private club called The Town Band, was open to the public and popular with the military men who, like Jim, took the bus to Kettering when they got weekend leave.
“I told her to save me a dance,” says Jim, who was serving in the Air Force in nearby Alconbury. “She was just so pretty. She was the best-looking young girl I ever saw.”
That was around noon, and by evening, as the dance started, he was watching for her to arrive. He saw her as she walked through the door, just over 5 feet tall with brown wavy hair, and still in the green coat.
“We danced most of the night,” he says.
Jim and his friends and Jean with hers sat around a big table when they weren’t on the dance floor. “I took up most of her time,” Jim says. “I proposed right then. Immediately. And she told me I was crazy.”
She did, she admits. She thought he was joking.
“I think I said, ‘Oh, sure.’ I thought it was funny,” Jean says.
But he was tall and darkhaired, and she found him very handsome, so she appreciated his sense of humor and looked forward to seeing him again.
He came back to see her the next weekend. And the
week after that he came again, that time bringing with him some papers they would need to have filled out so they could marry and so she could return with him to the United States when his service time was up.
“I thought, ‘Oh, Lord.’ This was really fast. It really was crazy,” she says.
By then, though, she was in love and realized this was serious.
They continued dating, with Jim taking a bus or catching a ride with a friend to Kettering every chance he got to see Jean, who worked during the week at the meat counter in Sainsbury’s grocery store.
“We went dancing, and we went to the movies, and we were with friends,” she says. “We had a good time. It was always nice. We ate fish and chips a lot. We still eat that. I make fish and chips.”
Jean had just moved to Kettering from Forth, Scotland, a few months before she met Jim so that her father, a coal miner, could find a new line of work. He was working as a bus conductor in England. The family struggled with the fact that Jean had found love with someone from so far away.
“I think they felt like they would never see me again,” she says. “It was happy, but it was sad, too.”
Jim and Jean were both 21 when they married on June 29, 1957, with about 70 friends and family members looking on.
Their honeymoon was spent fixing up the flat they rented in a centuries-old stone house in the village of Finedon.
In December, Jim’s time in the military was up, and he left a week ahead of Jean to return to the United States. After a flight filled with mishaps, she eventually made her way to Dallas. She was eager to be reunited with her husband when she landed, but she found herself alone in the airport.
“There was no Jim. There was nobody,” she says. “It turned out that his mother and father had been at the airport all day, and they didn’t know what had happened to my plane. When I got there I didn’t know what to do. I was just in shock in a way.”
A man in the airport helped her use the telephone to call Jim’s parents, but an appreciative Jean was still quite shaken.
“That was my experience, and I wanted to get back on the plane and go back home,” she says.
Her Scottish accent was thick and his parents had trouble understanding some of what she said, but they were welcoming, and she stayed with them until Jim made it to Dallas a week or so later. He had been stuck in the Azores for a time and then delayed in New Jersey on his way home.
In 1962, they moved to El Dorado, where Jim worked as a traffic manager for Prescolite for 35 years. Jean retired about four years ago as a private sitter for elderly people. The couple have one son, Paul Colvin of Hot Springs, and three grandchildren.
Jim has assured Jean over the years that his proposal on the night they met was made in all seriousness, and she believes him, for the most part.
“I’ve always told him it was a joke that backfired,” she says.