Couple weren’t really kissin’ cousins after all
Lynda Bussey loved her family, and she really liked George Pickler, but she was ecstatic when she found out he was not her family.
Lynda grew up in Bradley, where there wasn’t a whole lot to do, and one afternoon in 1965 she went with a friend to Springhill, La., a bigger little town not far away where there was a drive-in, a bowling alley and a movie theater, among other things, for some fun.
Her friend stopped at Piggly Wiggly and they ran into George, who grew up in Taylor.
Lynda was a senior in high school then. Her friend was a student at Southern State College (now Southern Arkansas University) in Magnolia, and she was dating George’s roommate. She introduced Lynda to George, but he said no introduction was necessary — he already knew her.
“I said, ‘Oh, really?’” Lynda says. “And he said, ‘Well, yeah, we’re cousins.’”
Their grandmothers had been neighbors in Bussey, it turns out, and they both visited their grandparents on Sundays.
“All of us kids would go to the crawdad hole and we would put bacon on strings and all that,” Lynda says.
She didn’t remember George from the crawdad hole — the pond near their grandparents’ homes — but he remembered her.
“She was a little redheaded girl with pigtails,” George says. “That’s the first time I remember seeing her.” George is four years older than Lynda, and he was about 10 then. He was old enough that he remembered and recognized her when he saw her out and about over the years.
Lynda and George were together a great deal over the next several months as they were out and about with their friends who were dating. Lynda even made extra offers to run to Piggly Wiggly for her parents so she could say hello to George while he worked.
“We would just be at different places together, and he was always so nice,” she says. “I really liked him. I really liked my cousin.”
One night, Lynda and George tagged along with their friends to a nightclub, and in the middle of a dance, George made a remark that would change their course.
“He looked at me and he said, ‘Lynda, I believe if you weren’t my cousin I would marry you,’” she says. Lynda went home and asked her father how, exactly, she and George were related.
“I found out we weren’t a bit of kin,” she says. “I thought we probably were cousins because my dad had nine brothers and sisters and my mother had 11. I had dozens of cousins and some of my cousins had kids.”
Her father found the question funny.
“My dad was quite amused that George thought we were cousins but was happy to set me straight,” she says. “He had known George’s parents all his life and knew them to be good people.”
She went to Piggly Wiggly the very next day to tell George the news.
“When I told him that we weren’t cousins, he turned white as a sheet, but he didn’t turn away,” she says. “He called that night, and our first date was the next night he didn’t have to work.”
They dated about two years, part of that long-distance as she finished high school and started classes at Southern State. He graduated from Southern State and moved to Shreveport and then New Orleans to work for International Harvester Truck Division.
He was back in Arkansas for a visit on March 6, 1967.
“We were sitting in the car, and he said something about how this is how it would be when we got married. And then he said, ‘Do you realize I just asked you to marry me?’” Lynda says. “I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Yeah. Will you?’”
They exchanged vows five months later, on Aug. 6, in Bradley Methodist Church and raised two sons — Brad, who lives in Pine Bluff, and Grant, who was killed in a car accident in 2003. They have one grandson.
Lynda had completed two years at Southern State before they married and she continued
college coursework while they lived in Baton Rouge and then Laurel, Miss., graduating from the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg with a bachelor of science degree in fashion merchandising with a minor in marketing. She’s a Realtor with Century 21 in Pine Bluff.
George bought an International Harvester dealership in Pine Bluff a few years after they were wed and is now semi-retired.
“He is a man of his word,” she says. “He said he would marry me if we weren’t cousins — and he did.”