Universe cooperates, stars align for two to meet, marry
Warren McElroy saw a girl sitting on a park bench one summer day in 1952 and announced, “I’m going to marry that girl.” As the new Bud Light campaign suggests, it’s only weird if it doesn’t work.
To be clear, it was not the first time he’d laid eyes on her. He had seen her a few years earlier, crying in the school bookstore where she worked. He hadn’t talked to her then, but she had crossed his mind many times since. A crying girl in the school bookstore is a memorable sight.
He hadn’t talked to her on the park bench before declaring “I’m going to marry that girl” either. But, perhaps realizing he wasn’t elevating his plans from the conceptual to the practical, he gathered his nerve and went back to the park to find her.
The girl, Bobbie Lee Custer, wasn’t there when he arrived, but her friend was. When Bobbie got off the bus after a shopping trip with her mother, her friend was waiting.
“She told me a boy had been here on his motorcycle to see me and that he was going to ask me for a date,” says Bobbie, who lived across the street from the Junior Deputy Park in central Little Rock. “And she said, ‘ Wouldn’t it be funny if you married that guy?’”
If the universe had failed to cooperate before, now the stars were aligning.
Warren was shy, by all accounts, and had not dated anyone before.
He had found out that the day he saw her in the bookstore, she and the other girls were upset because another girl from their school had committed suicide, which explained why she hadn’t noticed him.
“The night that he came to my house was the first time that I had ever laid eyes on him that I knew of,” she says.
Warren had asked Bobbie’s friend where Bobbie lived, and he drove his motorcycle past her house later that day. That time, she was outside, and they chatted for a while.
They hit it off instantly, and didn’t much mind that they didn’t have money to go on many real dates.
“For a long time we just sat on my front porch and talked,” Bobbie says.
Bobbie’s parents wouldn’t let her ride on his motorcycle, so when they decided to go to a movie downtown, he borrowed his mother’s car. He found that driving on four wheels felt a bit different after all that driving on two.
“I was scared to death to ride with him because he couldn’t make left turns very well,” she says. “He got better real quick though.”
They played miniature golf a few times while they were dating, and went to some services at her church. Mostly, they watched snowy television in the living room at her family’s home after Warren finished his shift delivering prescriptions for the local pharmacy.
“He didn’t get off until 9 o’clock so my mother would make me take a nap after school, and then he would come over and stay for a couple of hours before going home,” Bobbie remembers.
He proposed at the drivein movie theater. She accepted, and then they picked out a ring.
“I was at my work at the front desk, and he came in with about five of his best buddies and had the ring folded up in a dollar bill and he threw it over the counter and then he walked out without a word. He was so romantic back then,” she laughs.
“I thought she would remember something that way,” he jokes.
They were 17 when they married on Nov. 6, 1953, at Temple Baptist Church in Little Rock.
Their ceremony was a short-and-sweet 8 minutes bev cause the minister had to hurry home to help deliver a calf.
They spent their honeymoon at the Rose Motel on what is now Interstate 30.
“He still has the receipt for the night and it was $8.25,” Bobbie says. “It was a nice area and a beautiful hotel back then, but the hotel’s been torn down now.”
Bobbie’s family and several of their friends were skeptical of the staying power of their relationship. Some went so far as to declare it wouldn’t last more than three months, mostly because they perceived that guys who rode motorcycles were reckless and unlikely to commit.
“He could be a little wild,” Bobbie quips of her still-reserved husband. “It didn’t take everyone very long to understand that we were made for each other.”
He raced motorcycles, even for a little while after they had their first child.
They have two sons, Lawrence McElroy and Ron McElroy, both of Little Rock. They also have six grandchildren.
He has become more romantic as the years have passed, Bobbie says. For their 50th anniversary he took her on an Alaskan cruise. And then he gave her a ring over dinner at Murry’s Dinner Playhouse, just as the master of ceremonies announced their anniversary.
“We’ve had a wonderful life,” he says. “We really have.” If you have an interesting howwe-met story or know someone who does, please call (501) 3783496 or email: cjenkins@arkansasonline.com