He met his dream girl years before — in a dream
Terry Baldwin married the woman of his dreams.
That is to say, he dreamed about Stefania Overton, then he met her … and then he married her.
Terry vividly recalls a dream he had 10 years before he was introduced to Stefania by his cousin Lee and Stefania’s cousin, Charlotte.
“In this dream, I was lost,” Terry says. “I lived in Little Rock and I needed to find my way back to Little Rock. I was driving down the road and I saw people on a front porch of a house, a white boarded, country house that you see so many of out in the country.”
He saw an older man and woman sitting in a porch swing and a boy in an Army uniform sitting next to a pretty young girl with dark hair, a younger child playing with something not far away. The older man stood to give him directions, and as Terry turned to leave he stopped and made a comment to the Army man.
“I had noticed sitting next to that Army guy there, his girlfriend. In those days you certainly wouldn’t want to say to him, ‘Boy, you’ve sure got a pretty girlfriend.’ He would have said, ‘That’s none of your business about my girlfriend,” he says. “But I felt safe because I was walking toward my vehicle so I just said to him, ‘Hey, that sure is a pretty girlfriend you’ve got.’ And he said, ‘This ain’t my girlfriend, this is my sister.’”
Terry laughed and said if that was the case, she could just come with him.
“He said, ‘No, you can’t because the time is not ready yet,’” Terry says.
When Terry and his cousin drove up to Stefania’s house in Sardis with her cousin Charlotte, he noticed it was the same white clapboard house from his dream.
Her grandmother apologized to her visitors, explaining that they had been working in the garden that day and needed to get cleaned up. But Stefania, a pretty dark-haired girl like the one he had seen in his dream — who also had one brother in the Army and one brother younger than she — welcomed them in, pulled out her record player and put on “Talk Talk” by the Music Machine.
“I just liked it,” she says. “But it’s fitting for him because he’s a talker.”
Stefania’s mother had died when Stefania was young, and her grandparents raised her.
“She was well-guarded by her grandmother. Her daughter had died at 24 years old and left three children, so she raised these three children and she was not going to let anything happen,” Terry says.
Terry visited Stefania at her grandparents’ house as often as he could.
“Back in those days, driving from Little Rock to Sardis was a big deal,” he says.
When they met, Stefania was a junior at Bauxite High School; Terry was a freshman at then-Little Rock University (now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock).
When her grandparents were finally willing to let her go out with him, he took her to the Dairy Bar in Bryant.
“I was so shy I didn’t even want him to buy me any food. I didn’t want to eat in front of him. But we did stuff like that,” she says. “And he would come around whenever I would be baby-sitting my aunt’s kids.”
He occasionally came over while she was baby-sitting and asked her to come with him to the Dairy Bar again. She told him if he took her he would have to take the kids in her charge, too.
“He was going to college barely getting by,” she says. “He said, ‘You never want to eat when it’s just you and me but you want to eat when you’ve got the four kids.’ But he took all of us and he bought them all what they wanted.”
They had dated less than a year when he arrived at her grandparents’ house with a surprise.
“We had talked about getting married, but he just came down one day and had something behind his hand — and there was an engagement ring,” she says.
They were married on Jan. 10, 1969, in a little country church.
The newlyweds took a quick honeymoon to Hot Springs.
Terry stopped at the new Majestic Lanai Towers and went inside to find out how much a room would be for the night. It was priced at $90, but the desk clerk let him have it for half that because he had just gotten married.
Stefania was a senior in high school then and Terry
was still in college. They both had to be back in classes that following Monday morning.
The Baldwins, who live in Alexander, have two children — Shawn Baldwin of Bryant and Melissa Watson of Benton.
“I know I picked the right girl because God sent me a photograph of her in a dream,” Terry says. “I knew that way before I ever met this girl. It’s all about God’s timing in your life.” If you have an interesting howwe-met story or if you know someone who does, please call (501) 425-7228 or email: kimdishongh@gmail.com