Pretended to like basketball for him; then loved it
Wayne Perrin was perched in the center of a courtyard at El Dorado High School when he first saw Linda Tullis go to her locker for books. He had to perch there again so she could get a look at him before he scored an introduction.
It was 1968, and Wayne was a junior. Linda Tullis, a sophomore, was walking toward the lockers with someone he knew.
“She was with a good friend of mine’s sister,” he says. “I thought, ‘Aha, here’s a connection,’ because I remember thinking how gorgeous she was and that I had to figure out a way to meet her.”
Linda, he says, was wearing a blue dress that she had made in home economics class. She might not have thought she had extraordinary skills as a seamstress, but he thought she looked gorgeous in that garment.
Wayne was close to his friend as well as to his friend’s family.
“My mom passed away when I was 10 and they kind of adopted me,” he says. “They lived about three or four houses down and I went to church with them on Sundays and all that.”
He mentioned to his friend’s sister, Jane, that night that he was hoping to meet Linda. Jane told him she would introduce them, but that Linda had to give her OK first.
“Jane said, ‘Well, be sitting there, where y’all usually are, when we walk by tomorrow, and I’ll let her see you,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh, great. Well, hopefully I’ll be deemed worthy.’”
He sat in the appointed location and Linda walked by and glanced at him, and she gave the approval Jane needed to make the promised introduction.
Wayne asked Linda to go to a basketball game.
“He didn’t know — although a lot of other people did — that I did not like basketball,” says Linda, who set aside her feelings about the sport and said yes immediately.
Wayne says he suspected she did not like basketball, but he knew his friends would be there and wanted to show her off.
“Part of the way through — it probably wasn’t even a quarter over — I leaned over and said, ‘I know you don’t like basketball. Do you want to leave?’ I think we went to the Tastee Freez and got burgers.”
Later dates included movies, playing putt-putt golf and watching more sporting events. Linda says she eventually grew to love basketball.
Wayne and Linda dated throughout high school, but after they graduated, a year apart, they went to separate colleges.
“My parents wanted us to date other people, which was very wise,” Linda says.
She went to State College of Arkansas (now the University of Central Arkansas) in Conway, and he went to Southern State College (now Southern Arkansas University) in Magnolia. They did date other people, but they didn’t stop talking to — or thinking about — each other.
“After about two years, we were still seeing each other and writing letters, so right after my sophomore year at [SCA] I transferred down to [Southern State College],” she says.
That was in 1972. Wayne proposed marriage in the spring of 1973, in the parking lot in front of the ice house in Magnolia, after they stopped to get ice for a day at the lake with Linda’s family.
“We got married that next summer, but you’ve got to understand that we had known each other for five years at that point,” she says.
He had given her a promise ring a year or two earlier. He had been planning his proposal for a couple of weeks before he popped the question.
“It was definitely a surprise, because I didn’t expect it there,” she says.
Linda and Wayne were married on May 25, 1973, in a Methodist church in El Dorado.
“It was just a small wedding there in El Dorado,” she says.
“Looking back on it, it was just perfect. We got married and both worked and finished school, and that was a real accomplishment.”
Linda’s major was secondary business education and Wayne’s major was business management.
They lived in El Dorado for about a year before Wayne took a new job in Little Rock.
The Perrins have two sons — Court and Cody — and three grandchildren.
Each of their sons has a wife named Lindsey.
“And they’re not the same one,” Linda clarifies.
Their sons live close by with their families.
“They are my neighbors,” Linda says. “One lives behind me — our backyards back up to each other — and the other lives on the next street over. We didn’t even know the houses were for sale and the next thing we knew they bought them. I feel very blessed.”
The Perrins attend Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock and they say church has been a big part of their marriage.
“It’s just part of our life,” she says. “We all want to be loved and I feel like we’ve done that for each other. We both had very difficult childhoods and I think we both just needed and wanted to feel like we were loved, and I think God has given us the ability to do that even on the days when we may not feel so lovable.”
If you have an interesting howwe-met story or if you know someone who does, please call (501) 425-7228 or email: