Love was in the airwaves for fan of disc jockey
Rebecca Roberts was captivated by Robert Davis’ voice when she heard it over the airwaves in early 2000. She worked her magic, and he soon fell in love.
Robert was a disc jockey for the radio station KQARFM, Q100, located in the Argenta area of North Little Rock. Rebecca was 17 and a student at Cabot High School. She started calling Q100 to enter contests, not so much because she wanted to win but because she wanted to hear him talk.
“I was just always a random caller,” she says. “I didn’t let on that I was the same person every time. I was just kind of being coy about it, really.” He knew.
“You get to know the frequent callers, most definitely, so once she had called two or three times I was recognizing her as Rebecca,” Robert says. “Through those conversations I came to find out that she had actually been listening to me since I was interning and that her mom also listened to the show.”
Without knowing her, he thought she might be a stalker.
Robert almost always answered Rebecca’s calls off the air, which gave them a chance to talk briefly before he had to go back to the microphone. He learned that she was a magician at a Cabot pizzeria, and he coaxed her into giving up one of her secrets. By then he was intrigued — he wanted to know what she looked like.
“I made her basically sell out one of her magic tricks to win a prize and to spin it for the radio, and at some point she was going to have to come up to the station to pick up the prize,” he says.
The prize was movie tickets, and she was supposed to see him at the theater before the show in October 2000, but a car wreck knocked that off her agenda.
He had given her the hotline number by then, a direct route to the disc jockeys’ booth. She dialed it a day or two later to let him know what happened.
She knew what he looked like — she had gone with her mother to some of his public appearances — but she didn’t approach him there. Soon after the missed encounter at the movies, Rebecca’s friend insisted they drive to the Q100 studio so Rebecca could finally meet Robert face to face.
They pulled up in front of the studio and peered in the window at Robert and another disc jockey. They were buzzed in, and they hung out in the studio with Robert for a couple of hours.
“At some point before they left, she asked if I would come to see her at the pizza place where she worked,” he says. “I was like, ‘Hey, I’m broke.’ I wasn’t going to just go on a whim.”
Rebecca handed him $20 for gas, though, and he ultimately decided it was worth the risk.
He watched her perform magic for a few tables of customers.
“I think that’s honestly when I fell in love with her, when she sat down, and I got to have dinner with her and have that first date with her,” he says.
A couple of weeks later he picked her up to go ice skating in downtown Little Rock
“When she opened the front door, something just struck me — it’s like when you just know it. I thought immediately, ‘I’m going to marry this woman,’” he says. They dated for five years. “He asked me to marry him — on a piece of paper, on a window, on something — every single day,” Rebecca says. “But we were so young. I wanted to be at least 21. I wanted to drink at my wedding.”
The official proposal came unexpectedly, a month or so after he bought her a ring. Robert was at home sick that day, and he watched Rebecca vacuuming.
“She was there taking care of me. It just felt like the right time,” he says.
They were married on May 13, 2005, in a room above the River Market. The couple now have a 7-year-old son, Robert Davis III. Robert is no longer in radio; he and Rebecca now work together at their own company, Arkansas Aerials.
“He teases that I stalked him and that the number one rule in radio is ‘don’t date listeners,’” Rebecca says.
But, she says, after they met, “We did everything
together. We were just best friends. We are best friends.”
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