Beliefs put pair in shallow pool, but water was fine
Religion brought Amie Marshall and David Townley together, and their simple traditions of Chinese food and movies helped them weather the test of time.
Amie was 15 in 1992 when she moved to Little Rock from Corpus Christie, Texas, and her one fellow Jewish teammate on the Dolphins Swim Team at the Little Rock Racquet Club invited her to a youth event at Temple B’nai Israel.
Her teammate had already told his cousin, David Townley, about her by then.
“He kind of said, ‘She’s here, she’s Jewish and she’s not related to you.’ If you were Jewish and living in Little Rock we were probably in the same family,” David jokes.
They were introduced before the Sabbath service that evening.
“We talked for the 30 minutes or an hour before the service and then met back up right after the service to keep talking for another couple of hours,” David says. He was 16. Amie accepted his invitation to go to the mall and to Bennigan’s a few days later.
“He grew up here so we just drove around. We were just hanging out. I kind of thought he was cute, and he maybe thought I was cute, but we were just hanging out at that point, I think,” she says.
Amie asked David to help her with math, one of his stronger subjects, and he was happy to oblige, although he thought it was all a guise.
“I did need the help,” Amie insists, “but I did specifically want him to help me. It wasn’t like I was asking any random person. I knew he was smart and I wanted him to be my tutor. There might have been kissing involved but we really did work on math.”
They soon became an item, going to Catholic High School for Boys football games, movies and other typical teenage things.
Amie was a student at Mount St. Mary Academy and David went to Catholic High. When Monsignor Lawrence Frederick began teaching at both schools, Amie sometimes asked the priest to relay messages to her beloved.
“I would say, ‘Father Fred, will you say ‘hi’ to David for me?’ or ‘Will you remind him to pick me up after school?’” Amie says.
And then, six months after it started, everything screeched to a halt; they broke up.
They didn’t talk for about a year, finally exchanging casual greetings at a youth group event at the end of David’s senior year, which was Amie’s junior year. David graduated from high school and went to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.
He and Amie exchanged occasional emails, and when he came home for winter break, they started a tradition — lunch at Fu Lin’s followed by a movie on Christmas Day.
“We always did that because what else would two Jewish kids do?” says Amie, who went to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville after high school.
They dated other people during that time, sometimes seriously.
“We weren’t single at the same time for three years,” David says. “But this girl was still someone I knew I would consider marrying.”
In the fourth year — David was a senior at the Naval Academy then — both were unattached, and they decided to see what might happen if they got back together.
He invited her to a Valentine’s Day dance at the Naval Academy, but after her flight and hotel room were reserved, the date of the dance changed. He took her instead to a play at the academy and to the landmark Treaty of Paris restaurant in Annapolis.
That summer, David visited Amie in Fayetteville, where she was working and going to summer school.
He packed a picnic lunch and took her to Wilson Park, where he promptly asked if she was thirsty. She wasn’t.
“And then he said, ‘Well, I’m thirsty.’ And I was like, ‘Well, OK, grab a drink,’” she says. “He was like, ‘Would you just grab me a drink out of the cooler?’ I opened it and I was like, ‘Why is there a shirt in the top of this cooler?’”
The shirt was wrapped around two long-stemmed, silver champagne flutes, and as she studied the engraving on each one — that day’s date, June 20, 1998 — David pulled out an engagement ring and proposed.
They were married on June 26, 1999, in Temple B’nai Israel.
If you’re keeping track, they got engaged six months after they got back together, and six years after they met.
“Six is my lucky number,” Amie says.
At 6 a.m. on their first day as a married couple, they started a 12-hour drive to Kingsville, Texas, where David was to start a new phase of flight training.
They moved six times in their first two years of marriage as David progressed through flight school.
The Townleys moved back to Little Rock eight years ago. They have three children: Madolyn, 10; Sadie, 8; and Cohen, 6.
While it took a bit for them to be totally sure, they say they had an inkling of how things would go from the beginning.
“I thought, ‘Wow, this girl is pretty special,’” says David of the day they were introduced. “I kind of knew it right from then and that was the first time that I had met her.”
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