Housesitting stint leads to love for co-workers

Peggy Edwards told John Todd what to do — and he did it.

Peggy, a dispatcher for Southwestern Bell in 1980, was having surgery and needed someone to take care of her Blue Heeler and her four cats while she recuperated. But she balked when a friend who was a technician called her to suggest that she let John, who was also a technician, housesit for her.

“I said, ‘I don’t know. He’s kind of rude on the phone,’” she says. “He would call in and he was always kind of pompous. I didn’t really care for him.”

She had talked with John numerous times but had never seen him.

“I thought, ‘Well, he at least better be good-looking because he’s not very nice on the phone,’” she says. “Well, I’ll be darned. When I met him, he was cute.”

John lived in Beebe and he wasn’t looking forward to commuting to work in southwest Little Rock during the winter. This housesitting arrangement was ideal for him.

“The first time I met her face-to-face was at her apartment,” he says. “She showed me around her apartment and introduced me to her animals.”

They didn’t talk much while he was staying in her apartment and she was recuperating from surgery at her sister’s house.

“I would ask how the animals were occasionally,” she says. “And I found out he was watering a silk plant for a few weeks.”

Peggy got better and John moved back to Beebe. They saw each other at a union meeting, but that was the extent of their interaction.

Then she moved into a two-bedroom house.

“When the weather got bad I called him and said, ‘Do you want to just come back here and stay as roommates?’” she says. “I knew that was a long drive because my grandmother lived in Beebe. Where I had moved was really close to his work.”

Not long after John moved in, he had a bad motorcycle wreck on his way home from work. His helmet, Peggy says, likely saved his life but he got three sprained limbs and a broken collarbone.

Peggy met John’s mother for the first time at the hospital where he was being treated.

When he was released from the hospital he returned to the house they shared, but they soon realized he would need full-time care so his mother picked him up and took him back to her house so he could heal.

“I guess it was while he was gone that I realized how much I missed him,” she says.

Although their relationship had been platonic before that, Peggy hadn’t dated anyone else since John moved in.

“A guy came over to take me out and John came up behind me and put his arm around my shoulder and my friend said,

‘Well, I think I better go,’” she says.

“I was being protective,” he says. “But I don’t think either one of us were looking for anything permanent. We were young and single and we worked all the time. A 40-hour week was a rarity.”

As their relationship evolved, Peggy took John to

Velvet Ridge to meet her father.

“Her dad lived out on probably 100 acres [with] 100 head of cows. Behind his house was a creek and I came and I brought some fishing gear and I brought some artificial lures,” John says.

Peggy’s father scoffed at the lures and predicted John wouldn’t even get a bite with those.

“I came back in with a stringer full of fish. Her daddy’s dog liked me — left the house and went with me to the creek and got in the boat with me and we fished,” he says. “It seemed like that kind of changed his attitude about me and about artificial lures.”

Neither of them had moved as their relationship progressed and their families pressured them to marry.

“I remember I was working on what is now known as Martin Luther King Drive,” he says. “I was working in that area and I was working on a pay phone and to test it I called dispatch. I called her private number. We both had a weekend off and it was the next weekend.”

He asked her if she wanted to get married the next weekend. She said yes. He suggested they get married by a county judge, but by the end of the week her mother and sister had planned a full wedding.

They exchanged their vows on Oct. 30, 1981, in the dining room of the restaurant Peggy’s mother owned in Conway.

The Todds live in Maumelle. Peggy works part time now for the Ronald McDonald House and she volunteers with that organization as well as with several pet rescue groups. John serves on the planning commission and with their property owner’s association and he just came off the Rock Region Metro board. They both retired from the phone company.

Peggy calls John by his last name — that is how dispatchers referred to technicians, after all. Their early work relationship carries over in other ways, as well.

“He says, ‘My wife tells me all day what to do and I have to do it,’” she laughs.

Special to the Democrat-Gazette John Todd housesat for Peggy Edwards in 1980, and her dog fell in love. She soon followed suit. “My dog would sit next to him and lean her head on his shoulder like they were car dating. She was just mooneyed over him. I mean, what are you going to do when your dog loves him? You’ve got to keep him.”

Special to the Democrat-Gazette Peggy Edwards and John Todd were married on Oct. 30, 1981. “When all of my family and all of her family showed up for the wedding, we found out there were a lot of common friendships between the families from White County,” he says. Their grandmothers had known each other as girls and her father had known his uncle when they were growing up.