Widow, widower connect through school alumnus
Susan Keck and Leslie Anderson and the friend who introduced them were all alumni of the same school.
“We all went to the Arkansas School for the Blind, just at different times,” says Susan, who lived in Fayetteville then.
Susan graduated in 1981 and Leslie, who lived in Little Rock, graduated in 1968.
They talked on the phone for a while, just getting to know each other.
“Initially it was, to me, like a brother and sister thing,” she says. “He was going through a hard time and he needed some encouragement, so we talked a lot.”
Both Susan and Leslie had been widowed, and they welcomed the companionship.
“We were encouraging each other because I had lost my first husband and I was still going through that and he knew how it was to lose somebody,” she says. “I really wasn’t looking for anybody, to be honest with you.”
Leslie was fascinated to learn that Susan had flown from Little Rock to Fayetteville each Friday evening after she enrolled at the Arkansas School for the Blind at age 9, so she could spend weekends at home with her family. On Monday mornings, she flew from Fayetteville back to Little Rock.
“I had never known anyone who did that,” he says. “She was the only person I ever knew that rode an airplane to school on Monday morning.”
He was also impressed that she was in a rigorous Bible study program
“We had learned the state capitals in the fifth grade and she didn’t remember all of them but we started playing this game where we would ask each other, either the state or the capital,” he says.
They wrote the names out in Braille so she could practice, Susan says. “We carried on a long-distance relationship and with both of us being either legally or totally blind, neither of us drive,” says Leslie, who was running a snack stand, selling chips, sandwiches and candy in government buildings in Little Rock when he met Susan.
They took buses back and forth between Fayetteville and Little Rock to see each other.
“He would come all the way to Fayetteville to pick me up because he said, ‘I don’t want you to ride on buses by yourself,” Susan says. “It was really sweet.”
Their first date was to a convention for alumni of the Arkansas School for the Blind.
“And the first restaurant we went to was Dixie Café, his favorite,” she says.
Leslie proposed during a weekend visit to Fayetteville in 2005.
They went out for a nice meal. It was a cold day, she remembers, and when they got back to her house he sang her a song — “Walk Through This World With Me,” by George Jones.
“He was singing, and I said, ‘Yes, I’ll marry you!’” she says.
“She said yes right away,” he says. “She didn’t make me wait or anything.”
They exchanged their vows on June 25, 2005, at Northeast Baptist Church in Fayetteville.
“I had told him I would plan the wedding if he would plan the honeymoon. I wanted a simple wedding and a good honeymoon, and he took over and did that,” she says.
A friend dropped them off at the airport the following Monday and they flew to Honolulu.
“I wasn’t going to book that trip on my own, though, so we did do that together,” he says. “But no one on Earth knew where we were going except us.”
In Honolulu, they went to a luau, visited the Arizona Memorial, toured the island and took a sunset dinner cruise.
“We got to do our first dance together out on the beach,” Susan says. “We had a really nice time and we weren’t really ready to come back to Arkansas.”
Susan helped Leslie with his snack bar at the state Capitol for almost five years after they married, before he retired.
“I wouldn’t go every day but I did go and help him out,” she says.
They have traveled since settling together in Little Rock, too, including a trip to Wisconsin to visit Leslie’s relatives. They went to a cheese factory and saw the grave of baseball player Andy Pafko, with whom his mother went to school.
They went together annually to the National Church Conference of the Blind.
For their 10th anniversary they went to Niagara Falls, N.Y., and crossed into Canada with a tour group to visit the falls.
“She loves waterfalls,” Leslie says. “We had our home paid off in that 8½ years and then we saved our money and went to Niagara Falls.”
Leslie and Susan like to play cards and listen to audiobooks together. He makes her laugh, she says, which is important in a relationship.
“Every day Leslie and I do daily devotionals,” Susan says. “Leslie prays, then I read a devotional from Our Daily Bread. It is in braille. Also, on the phone we listen to Daily Word, then I go in my prayer room and have a private prayer time, and read a Scripture. This is the reason our marriage is long lasting, because we are in God’s word everyday.”