She couldn’t ignore the quiet boy next door
Beckie Whipple fell for the guy next door. The guy, Patrick Smith, thought she was head over heels for his roommate.
Beckie was a recent graduate of Little Rock Central High in 1968, and she lived with her family next to the school. Patrick and his roommate rented an apartment across the street.
“They had a tendency to have some parties,” Beckie says. “I would kind of go over there. I’m not much of a party girl so I wouldn’t stay long, but I would go and I would wonder if Patrick was ever going to notice me.”
He parked on the street when he got home from work in the evenings, sometimes the side closest to Beckie’s house.
“He had these huge dark eyes,” she says. “I would sit on my front porch and just watch him go into his apartment, his side of the house over there. I was just too shy to ever say anything.”
This went on for about six months.
One evening, Patrick wandered over to Beckie’s house looking for his roommate.
“I thought they were going out together,” Patrick says.
Beckie didn’t know that, and she responded simply that his roommate had no business over there.
Patrick looked elsewhere for his roommate and when he had no luck finding him he returned to Beckie’s front porch.
“He said, ‘Well, I can’t find Mickey. Would you mind going out to supper with me? I don’t want to eat by myself,’” she says.
Beckie, thrilled with this turn of events, uttered a cool agreement and off they went.
They hadn’t gotten far, though, when the hose to the water pump in Patrick’s car sprang a leak and they were stranded on the side of the road. They called Beckie’s father, who picked up parts for the car and rescued them.
Beckie and Patrick ended up eating at a little dairy bar in the area where the car broke down.
After that, Patrick often sat with Beckie on the front porch where she had watched him for so long.
“We became friends,” Patrick says. “And then we really started going out.”
There were dinners and movies on occasion. More often, their time together was more low-key: they played pinochle, often with Beckie’s father, or they played chess.
Patrick also invited her to go with him when he got groceries.
“We got comfortable with each other and all that good stuff,” she says.
Beckie frequently did babysitting to make spending money. Patrick picked Beckie up from the home of a client in southwest Little Rock one afternoon, after they had been dating for a year and a half, and on the way back to her house he pulled over on a side road and stopped.
“There was some heat lightning in the sky and he stopped to watch the heat lightning in the sky, in the east — or so he said,” she says. “Then he said, ‘I have something to ask you.’”
Beckie was surprised when he asked if she would marry him.
“I was somewhat shocked, actually,” she says. “I said, ‘Well, I’ll have to think.’ I’m one of these people who just kind of live day-by-day. I didn’t sit around anticipating who I was going to marry.”
She had, however, dreamed of getting married — the wedding part, not necessarily the groom part — since she was a little girl.
“I had, ever since I was a little girl, wanted a wedding dress,” she says. “I didn’t care so much whether I had a husband.”
When Beckie was small, her mother had left her with the ladies who worked in Blass Department Store on occasion while she shopped. Beckie would play among the store’s wedding dresses until she got tired and lay down to fall asleep.
She and Patrick were engaged for a year and a half.
“And then I got mad,” Beckie says. “I just decided this was going on too long and if we were going to get married we better do it.”
In July 1970, Beckie marked some potential wedding dates on a calendar and presented them to Patrick.
“I went over to his house and I said, ‘OK, if we’re going to get married, pick one of these dates. I’m tired of waiting.’ He picked the very last one,” she says.
He was being strategic, he explains.
“I thought we needed time to plan the wedding and time to tell my parents and that sort of thing,” says Patrick, whose parents lived in Louisiana.
They were married on Oct. 5, 1971, at St. Edward Catholic Church in Little Rock.
Patrick and Beckie still live in Little Rock. They haven’t played pinochle or chess in years, but they have spent hours fishing and doing other outdoor activities together throughout their marriage.
“We enjoy our family. We watch a lot of movies and TV and we do a lot of cooking,” Beckie says.
She and Patrick have one son, Christopher, who lives in Little Rock. They also have two grandchildren.
They have long enjoyed doing the things they might do alone more by doing them together — like grocery shopping.
“We still do that together,” Beckie says.