Dad said to find friends, but she found a husband
Donna Herring’s father was tired of seeing her mope around so he sent her out to find her friends. She found Mark Eades, sitting in his white 1973 Dodge Charger.
“He was my knight in white shining armor,” says Donna.
It was Jan. 13, 1978. Donna had broken up with her boyfriend just before she moved back to her hometown, Magnolia, during Christmas break following a semester at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.
“I was moping around and my daddy said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I said I was just lonesome,” she says. “He said, ‘Well, why don’t you go find your friends.’ My daddy would never tell me to go out. He just wouldn’t. He always wanted me to stay home. The first person I saw that I knew was Mark.”
Donna had met Mark a few years earlier while she was working in the concession stand at the Rocket Drive-In. He ordered popcorn and a Coke and when he left, Donna stopped the guy he was with — a friend of her older sister’s — to ask who he was.
“He had a full beard and I liked his beard then,” she says
The friend told Mark, then 19, about Donna when they got back to his car, and Mark had called her a couple of days later to ask her for a date.
She was 16 when they met, and Mark thought she looked even younger.
“In a lot of ways she was more mature than her age,” he says. “But that’s a pretty big age gap during that period and in that age group. Three years doesn’t mean anything even in your 20s but in your teens that really makes a difference.”
They went out a few times, but when Mark and his onagain, off-again girlfriend got back together he and Donna went their separate ways.
On this night, though, when she was 18 and he was 21, they started talking again. The favorite pastime in those days was driving up and down the main drag in town, and that’s just what they were doing when she spotted him.
“I turned around and went back and talked to him,” she says.
Mark remembers her driving by in her 1974 two-door Chevrolet Nova.
“I recognized her right off, of course, even though it had been awhile since I’d seen her,” he says. “We just clicked.”
Donna was going to school at Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia and Mark was working for a contractor at Dow Chemical Co.
They liked to see movies at the drive-in and hang out together with their friends when they were dating but mostly they enjoyed riding around just to see what they could see, either on the main drag of town or on the back roads out in the county.
They were riding around one night in February 1979 when Mark turned to look at Donna and said, “So, you want to get married?”
“He didn’t even stop the car,” says Donna. “I said, ‘Yeah, when do you want to do that?’ He said, ‘As soon as possible.’”
Mark says he hadn’t really planned that out.
“Obviously I had been thinking about it,” he says, “but as far as planning exactly when or how I was going to pop the question, I don’t think so. That would be giving me too much credit.”
They were married on March 10, 1979, in the chapel at Central Baptist Church in Magnolia.
“We planned that wedding in about a month and I had the flu one of those weeks when we were planning it,” says Donna. “My uncle married us — my mother’s brother-in-law was a preacher.”
It was a small ceremony — they each had one attendant, and most of their family members were there. Mark is the youngest of seven and one of his brothers was serving in the military in Alaska and couldn’t make the trip for the ceremony.
They took a short honeymoon to Shreveport.
“We were just two broke kids when we got married,” says Donna. “We stayed the first night in the absolute trashiest hotel in Shreveport, but we didn’t know it because it was dark when we got there. We stayed somewhere else the next night.”
Mark and Donna, who still call Magnolia home, have two children — Candice Eades of Magnolia and Cameron Eades of El Dorado.
“My daddy didn’t like Mark then because of his beard, but he loved him after we got married and Dow made Mark shave his beard and it made my daddy so happy,” says Donna. “He later told me marrying Mark was the best thing I ever did. But he just was not on for that full beard deal. He wouldn’t even look at the wedding pictures.”
Mark and Donna are opposites in most ways, but they find that they’ve become more similar over the years.
“He’s real shy and I’ve never met a stranger,” says Donna.
“Over the years, a little bit of him has rubbed off on me and I’ve rubbed off on him, too.”