A decision and a drive-by set wheels in motion
Dana Waters vowed all through high school that she would go to college instead of doing secretarial work as her sisters did. On graduation day in 1961, though, she changed her mind. That decision led to vows of a whole different kind.
Dana had insisted for years that she would go to Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, La.
“After graduation, right at the last minute, I told my mother that I had changed my mind, that I wanted to go to business school in Shreveport like my sisters had done,” she says.
There she became friends with a girl from Emerson. Eight or nine months later she was offered a job in a nearby town and moved there to work and lost touch with her friend.
She found a roommate and moved into an apartment near the office where she worked, but several months later that roommate decided to move home to Hamburg.
“I was going to have to give up the apartment because I couldn’t afford it by myself. I was driving down the street in Shreveport and I happened to see this friend from Emerson in a car. I looked her up in the phone book and I called her and it turned out she needed a roommate,” she says. “So we started rooming together, and the first weekend that I went home with her to meet her folks I met Larry.”
Larry Thornton was sitting on the sofa with another girl when Dana walked into the house. His position, physically and metaphorically, wasn’t conducive to any real conversation.
That would all change soon enough.
Weeks went by and Larry and the girl he had been with broke up. He told his friend, who was dating Dana’s roommate, that he would like to go out with Dana. That set the wheels in motion.
The roommate’s boyfriend gave Larry a ride the next time he went to Shreveport for a visit and the four went on a double date.
“We went to the Louisiana State Fair and to some car races,” Dana says. “The races were on a dirt track and we had seats really close to the track. I came out of there with red clay all in my hair.”
That was the first of many car races they watched together, driving on occasion to Marshall, Texas, where Dana’s brother-in-law raced his own car.
Driving was an integral part of their courtship. Larry drove from his house to Ida, La., every Saturday to take Dana out for a hamburger or to see a movie or a race or whatever they deemed most entertaining at the time. Then he drove back home at the end of the evening.
“Then after church on Sunday he would come back over there,” she says.
It was at the end of one of those dates, as they leaned against his car and said goodbye, that he queried: “When are you going to marry me?”
“He didn’t say, ‘Will you marry me?’ He said, ‘When,’” Dana says. “I said, ‘Christmas?’ and he said, ‘Oh, that’s not very far off.’ I thought, ‘OK, he’s getting cold feet.’ So I said, ‘What about Valentine’s Day?’ That happened to fall on a Friday that year.”
They exchanged their vows on Feb. 14, 1964, in her parents’ home, just as Dana’s older sisters had done before them and her niece would do after them.
“After we had arrived at the motel for our first night, Larry excused himself to go out to the car. All I could think about was the story told about my best friend’s aunt whose brand-new husband left the room on the first night … and never returned,” Dana says. “I’m happy to say that Larry returned carrying a beautiful, white, heart-shaped box of Valentine candy with a bride doll on top.”
The Thorntons have two daughters, Cheryl Sanders of Taylor and Holly Archer of Minden, La. They have seven grandchildren.
Larry retired from Sapa Extrusions. Dana is assistant director at the Columbia County Library in Magnolia.
He says it doesn’t feel like they’ve been married 51 years.
“I guess it’s gone by pretty fast,” he says.
As for Dana, she believes they’ve been right where they should have been all along.
“I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe that things happen because of the decisions that you make. They put you on a path that’s dependent on the decisions that you make. I feel like God put me on that path because I was supposed to meet him and I would marry him and I would have the children that I have,” she says. “I just think it was all because of one decision that I changed.”