His boisterous personality finally won her over
Edgar Montgomery flirted with Darlene Duncan throughout eighth and ninth grades. He waited until she was getting on the bus to go home for summer break to make his move.
Darlene had always gone to school in DeWitt. Edgar’s family lived outside the town, so he had gone to school in Arkansas County.
“When integration took place, he had to come from his school to DeWitt for middle school,” says Darlene of first meeting her future husband in 1966. “We hadn’t been on each other’s radar at all before that. That’s when we met.”
Darlene was not an instant fan of his Edgar’s boisterous personality.
“By the time we got to ninth grade he had kind of set his eye to kind of bother me and agitate me, like middle school boys do,” says Darlene, who still wanted to talk with him at lunchtime.
Edgar made various attempts to bring attention to Darlene. He even once said, loud enough for her to hear, that he was going to marry her one day.
“He would say, ‘See that pretty girl over there with the big legs? I’m gonna marry her,’” she says.
This went on throughout middle school. On the last day of ninth grade, as she boarded a bus to go home on the last day before summer break, Edgar made his move.
“He said, ‘I’m going to come see you this summer,’” she says.
His announcement made her anxious. Darlene’s mother was strict and Darlene knew that having a male visitor would be frowned upon. Some of her classmates warned Edgar about her mother, as well, but he was undaunted.
He was working that summer with a cotton implement company. When he got off one Saturday evening he went home to shower and then headed to DeWitt, where he knocked on the Duncan family’s door and asked to see Darlene.
Darlene’s nephew was visiting and he answered the door and called out that someone was there to see her. “I panicked,” Darlene says. Edgar, however, was calm. “I don’t recollect being that nervous,” he says. “We were kids and we went to school together and we had been talking at school, so it was just a matter of coming to the house and getting past the parents.”
He turned on the charm and confidently crossed that hurdle.
“He kept coming over,” she says. “He would get off work and get his bath and he would come in smelling good,” she says. “He was always happy. It got to where he would call and I would know he was coming.”
He sometimes brought a portable record player and they would sit outside and listen to 45 RPM records.
“We were on the edges of integration so there were not a lot of places that we could just go and sit and eat, like a burger or whatever,” Darlene says. “So he would come to DeWitt and stop on the way at one of the restaurants and get burgers and fries and we would sit with his little record player.”
When darkness fell they would move to the porch, until Darlene’s father let her know it was time to come inside.
“That would be his cue that he would have to leave,” Darlene says.
She invited him over one Sunday and she made barbecued chicken, potato salad and baked beans and served strawberry shortcake for dessert. They got permission from her family after that to repeat that meal on a picnic later that summer.
When school started, Edgar went back to playing football and Darlene cheered him on from her place in the pep club.
They graduated from high school in 1971. Edgar went to Southern State College (now Southern Arkansas University) at Magnolia on a football scholarship. Darlene had an academic scholarship to Henderson State University in Arkadelphia.
“That didn’t last very long,” says Darlene, who transferred to Southern State to be with him.
They were married on June 22, 1973, on Darlene’s family’s back lawn in DeWitt.
“My mom was a big fan of flowers and she had a beautiful flower garden,” Darlene says.
Tunes from the “Wedding March” streamed from Edgar’s record player as she made her way down the aisle with her father.
After a quick honeymoon trip to Hot Springs, Darlene and Edgar moved into student housing at Southern State. They finished their undergraduate degrees in 1975 and both started teaching in the Barton School District as well as working toward Master’s degrees.
“We were teaching school in the day and going to Arkansas State University in Jonesboro at night, taking classes,” Darlene says.
In 1977, they returned to Magnolia so Edgar could teach and coach and she could teach. They were promoted to administrative positions in Magnolia. They later worked in the Waldo and Dumas school districts. Both are retired.
The Montgomerys have three children — Monte Montgomery of Elk Grove, Calif.; Monica Montgomery of Little Rock; and Mondrae Montgomery of San Diego — and three grandchildren.
“We’ve had a good life together ...,” Darlene says. “We’ve had ups and downs with careers, jobs, that sort of thing, but we endured.”
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