They clicked when she answered his distress call
Kathleen Mowery answered a distress call — or, rather, text — from Michael McMurray in 2016 and she’s been by his side pretty much ever since.
Kathleen met Michael when she was at Hendrix College in Conway two years earlier to visit her boyfriend, who was participating in Shirttails, a competition between residence halls. She couldn’t find her boyfriend, though, and was hanging out with friends.
“Her friend from high school was my best friend, and he was hanging out with me that day,” says Michael, who was two years ahead of her in college and who was also dating someone else.
Kathleen was a freshman at the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville but she made frequent visits to Hendrix.
“We became very vague acquaintances,” she says. “He was always so nice, and he always gave me free wristbands to get into events.”
She transferred to Hendrix the next year. Michael asked her once to hang out, but she declined.
“I would be like absolutely not, because he was such a social person, kind of like a party guy in college. He was very much going to all the events and hanging out with all the people and that was not me,” Kathleen says.
Michael graduated in 2016, and that summer he was directing an Ozark Mission Project camp, which pulled together high school and college students from various areas and assigned them to building or repair projects in whatever community they were serving.
“I had somebody who was going to volunteer for me drop out and I was desperately looking for somebody to pitch in, and it was a like a week and a half or two weeks before the camp,” Michael says. “I was texting literally everyone I know asking if they would help.”
Kathleen responded with a yes.
“It was like, 11 o’clock at night,” she says. “You only text someone at 11 o’clock at night if you’re desperate. I used to do Camp Aldersgate every summer but I was taking a break from that so he got me at the right time.”
Kathleen served as the program coordinator at the camp in Marianna.
“I was running around delivering Popsicles and we just had really good chemistry from the get-go,” Kathleen says.
The other campers looked for ways to put Michael and Kathleen together.
“They just wanted to try and make a spark happen,” Kathleen says. “We had a horror movie night and he and I sat next to each other, hands adjacent. It’s so funny to think about.”
Toward the end of the week, Michael asked Kathleen for a date as she rode with him to lock a gate. She, again, said yes.
At the time they were supposed to go out, though, a friend of Kathleen’s friend — a Walton scholar from a Central American country — was stranded at the airport.
“I canceled on Michael at the last minute — I think he was on his way over at the time — and he thought I was just canceling and had madeup some random excuse,” she says. “We ended up going out the next night and we had a really good time.”
Dinner was a tad awkward as they found their footing.
“Then we went bowling and I was super competitive and we had a lot of fun, and then we went to a park because we just wanted to keep hanging out,” she says.
Kathleen was a junior at Hendrix then, and Michael was working for Ozark Mission Project. A year and a half later, Kathleen started sending Michael ideas for engagement rings.
Michael’s grandmother gave him his grandfather’s diamond tie pin, and Kathleen’s mother and great-grandmother gave her a few pieces of jewelry, and they had those put together to create a ring during Kathleen’s senior year at Hendrix.
She was still surprised when he proposed after brunch in April 2018. They had stopped by Michael’s old house, the first place he told her he loved her, under the pretense of picking up his former roommate, who still lived there.
“She was picking flowers in his front yard to give to my friend and I knelt down and had a ring,” he says.
That fall, Kathleen left for a nine-month teaching assistant program in France. They had weekly long-distance “dates,” talking and playing online games or streaming shows to watch together.
They were married on Jan. 18, 2020, at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Little Rock. There was a reception at the Clinton Presidential Center.
Kathleen worked on a master’s degree and Michael worked in marketing and they intended to take a honeymoon during her spring break, but the pandemic delayed their plans. Last summer they went to Catalina Island in California.
Michael is the director of communications at Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church, and he volunteers at Ozark Mission Project. Kathleen is a French teacher at Virtual Arkansas. She spends summers nannying and tutoring.
“It was just unexpected. I was dating somebody else and I would not have expected to meet the woman I would marry at Shirttails in 2013,” says Michael of their marriage. “I am glad that we met. And I’m glad I gave her free wristbands.”