Motorcycle ride seals the deal for outdoorsy pair
Brenda Riddle was freewheeling when she caught the attention of Allen Hill, who caught her attention with his two-wheeler.
Brenda had created a profile on Yahoo Personals in 2005.
“I was in college and I was bored one night when I was studying,” Brenda says. “I got online and I filled out this long survey.”
She was procrastinating, she says, more than she was looking for a date.
“I didn’t really even think anybody would answer,” says Brenda, who lived in Vilonia.
Allen, who lived in Cabot, was ready to give up on Yahoo Personals, having concluded it wasn’t the place to find lasting love. But he saw Brenda’s new profile and sent her a message.
They talked for a bit, he asked her for a date and she accepted.
“He had a picture of himself with a motorcycle in the background,” Brenda says. “I hadn’t been on a motorcycle ride in years and I wanted to go on a motorcycle ride. That’s the honest truth.”
He picked her up on his motorcycle and they went to Starlite Diner in North Little Rock.
“We ordered banana splits,” she says. “Then these bikers came in and a big, huge guy — probably 6-foot-4 and 320 pounds — came over to our table and said, ‘Boy, those look good.’ I just slid the banana split over to him. ‘I said, you can have the whole thing.’”
Despite her initial alarm — and Allen’s — the bikers turned out to be friendly and they all had a laugh.
They made plans to go out again, but Allen was helping a friend with something and picked her up late for their second date.
As they drove around looking for a restaurant that was open late, she wondered off-hand, aloud, if he could be a serial killer.
“He said, ‘Well, would I tell you if I was?’” she says.
There were some silly jokes about how he did eat corn flakes and Cheerios and then she told him she could have him checked out to be sure.
Allen retorted that he could have her checked out as well.
“I said, ‘No, seriously. I could have you checked out. My sister-in-law works for the FBI.’ And he said, ‘No way. Mine does, too,’” Brenda says.
Right then, Allen called to ask his sister-in-law if she knew Brenda’s sister-in-law. Their sisters-in-law, they discovered, worked together, in the same office.
“That’s how he found out I was from a decent family and that’s how I found out he was from a decent family,” she says. “Because when you work for the FBI each family has to be checked out.”
They were already headed for a third date, Allen says, but that might have sealed the deal.
“I was already smitten,” he says.
He proposed as they watched a movie, about seven months after they met.
“He got down on his knee, and I thought he was going to cry,” she says.
Brenda said yes, but she said the wedding would have to wait a few months while she finished radiology school. She had one other stipulation.
“Whenever I asked Brenda if she would marry me — because we had both been married before — she said, ‘Well, you need to ask Brittany if that’s OK with her,’” he says. Brenda’s daughter, Brittany, was about 16 then. “That scared me more than asking her to marry me.”
He had the engagement ring when he asked Brittany.
“I showed her and she said, ‘That’s beautiful. She will love that.’ I was so relieved,” he says.
Allen and Brenda celebrated Christmas together that year, and a couple of days after, on Dec. 27, 2005, they went for a drive, just to pass the time.
“We were driving around, and we decided if we were going to get married we might as well just do it now,” she says.
They checked to see if Brenda’s friend’s brotherin-law, a minister, could do the ceremony, but he wasn’t available. They struck out with several other possible officiants that night as well.
“We couldn’t find anybody to marry us,” Allen says. “But we were driving through Cabot and I saw Stubby Stumbaugh, who was the mayor of Cabot.”
Allen knew Stumbaugh through motorcycle riding and he pulled over to request that he do the honors. Stumbaugh was headed into a beauty salon, but he said he would be willing to marry them if they were willing to wait.
“He married us in the beauty shop, in front of their Christmas tree,” Brenda says.
Their anniversary is two days after Christmas and five days before Brenda’s birthday.
“We have an understanding when it comes to birthdays and anniversaries,” Brenda says. “We get stuff that we both need or that we can both use.”
One year, unbeknownst to the other, each got a heavy duty extension cord as a gift for the other, a practical present to use for the camping trips they enjoy.
“We like go camping and we like to go deer hunting and we like to fish. We like to go to concerts,” Brenda says. “We also like to play tricks on each other. We just have fun doing things together.”
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