October 3, 2012
Today would have been the 59th anniversary of the wedding, and I continue to think of this day as special even though Wanda has been with the Lord for nearly eleven years.
We were married in a simple ceremony in a pastor’s home in Dallas the evening of October 3, 1953. Afterwards, we had dinner at a downtown Dallas restaurant with my mother and stepfather, and then drove northward, stopping for the night at McKinney, Texas, because we drove into a blinding rainstorm accompanying a cold front. We went to church the next morning at the First Baptist Church of McKinney. The lady sitting nearby complimented us on our voices as we sang the hymns.
On Sunday afternoon we drove to Turner Falls, Oklahoma, a beautiful spot for a honeymoon trip.
We had a wonderful time for a couple of days, then drove back to Cleburne, where Wanda was a public school music teacher, and where we lived until shortly after Christmas, when we moved to Lampasas, Texas, where we pastored a mission of the First Baptist Church there, until the summer of 1955, when we moved to Fort Worth and the seminary. In three months, our second child, Dan, was born, joining his older brother, David, who had been born in Burnet when we lived at Lampasas. I was a student at the seminary when Wanda and I married, but dropped out to pastor the church in Lampasas. I had previously been Associate Pastor in Groesbeck and pastor at Oletha. I resigned the Lampasas church to re-enter the seminary, and went to work at General Motors in Arlington to pay the bills.
By the time I graduated from the seminary in 1959, Wanda had resigned from teaching and I had been pastor at Briar, near Azle. We moved to Kosse, where our third child, Debbie, was born in nearby Marlin. In 1961, we moved to Dallas to pastor the Vickery Baptist Church, and in 1963 our daughter, Dianna, was born at Baylor Hospital.
Our next move was to Rockport in 1964, where in 1966 our youngest son, Dwight, was born at Spohn Hospital in Corpus Christi. We never moved again (until I moved, alone, to Houston and the Timbergrove Baptist Church for several years–I have remained busy serving churches in Houston, Refugio, Rockport and Ingleside–after retirement from the Rockport church). All our children graduated from the high school at Rockport and went on to become college graduates. We have nine grandchildren, all of whom have either graduated from college or are college students at the present time.
God has blessed. All this and much more is running around in my head like a colorful carousel as I think about the significance of October 3. Although I have celebrated the day as a widower for a number of years, it’s still special to me.