She got carried away, eventually to the altar.
There’s sweeping a lady off her feet, and then there’s throwing her over your shoulder and hauling her away. For Gates Booth and Diane Dean, the two were one and the same.
Gates admired Diane as she strolled by the window of the cafeteria where he sat on the first day of her freshman year at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia in 1971.
He left the cafeteria, got in his little green Volkswagen Beetle and drove to the other side of campus, where he spotted her on the front lawn.
“She was playing Frisbee football with a bunch of other students, and I don’t know if she had fallen down or what but some guy was over there picking on her, throwing grass in her face,” he says.
Diane was, indeed, in distress.
“This one guy got a little too carried away with playing,” she remembers. “I ended up on the ground. [I] kind of did a face plant.”
Gates pulled over and jumped out of his car.
“I ran over and picked her up and literally threw her over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes and took her back to my car and put her in the front seat and we went to the Sonic and got a drink,” Gates says.
Diane hadn’t seen Gates coming. She had the sense of being lifted into the air by an unseen force, and in that moment that was just fine with her.
“There he was, and I didn’t have time to even think. It was like, ‘Oh, he’s my hero!’” she says.
Diane had made quite an impression on him the first time he saw her, but the first look she had gotten of him was from the front seat of his car.
“I thought he was pretty cute,” she says.
He got her number before he took her back to her dorm that night, and the following Sunday they went together to the Sunday evening service at First Baptist Church in Arkadelphia.
Dates after that included dances sponsored by Gates’ fraternity, Rho Sigma.
“We were both broke, and sometimes we would just get in the car and drive and talk,” Gates says.
They dated throughout that school year — his senior year — but broke up sometime after he graduated.
Gates moved to Little Rock and found a job, and he didn’t know what had happened to Diane until she called to let him know she had left college and moved to North Little Rock. She was living with an old college roommate in the roommate’s grandmother’s house and working in the newly opened McCain Mall, she told Gates. He was going on a date with someone else the evening she called.
“I actually took my date home early that night so I could go see her,” Gates says. “And then we started dating again, and we’ve been together ever since.”
Gates proposed to Diane not too long after that. They exchanged their vows on Nov. 21, 1973, at First United Methodist Church in Conway, Diane’s hometown. Their first home was in Pine Bluff, where Gates grew up and where he got a job working for Reid Vining Jewelers. They moved from Pine Bluff to Conway in 1978.
The couple have six children and seven grandchildren. Gates retired from his landscape contractor company, Landscape Services, in 2012.
Their family ate dinner together almost every night when their kids were growing up, sitting at a long table and sharing stories. One of the most popular was the one about how their dad threw their mom over his shoulder the first time they met. He’s thankful none of the children asked him to demonstrate that move.
“We’ve been back to the campus,” he says, ‘but we haven’t re-enacted anything.”
They have both, at times during their marriage, been each other’s heroes, though.
Within a year of their wedding, Gates’ mother died and Diane’s left foot was amputated because of a condition she had battled since birth.
“I was depressed, and I lost a lot of weight, but he really pushed me to get out there and walk and to just get better,” she says.
When he had a stroke in 2012, she resolved to do the same for him. It was quite an adjustment for them both when his health required that he stop working 12- to 14-hour days.
“Suddenly we were together 24 hours a day,” he says. “We enjoy each other’s company, though.”