The beginning

By Roy Ockert Jr.

“Hi, Roy,” she said as she walked past the table where I was seated.

I looked up as she turned her head toward me on her way across the room. I didn’t recognize the dark-haired girl, which doesn’t mean I hadn’t met her, but I’ve never been good at connecting names and faces.

In this case, though, I noticed her slightly, but delightfully bowed legs.

I wish I could tell you that I knew immediately this was the girl I’d marry and spend the rest of my life with, but I didn’t know that until a couple of years later. By then it seemed like a dream.

That first time I saw Pat Montgomery was in a Journalism Building classroom at then-Arkansas State College in Jonesboro. The room served as the “laboratory” for production of the weekly A-State student newspaper, the State College Herald, and it would prove to be an important scene for our love story.

The student newspaper then was almost completely a project of journalism classes. Students in the two semesters of New Writing, which functioned as the introduction to the major program, served as the newspaper’s reporters, and they took assignments from the editors. The editors were usually senior majors taking the two semesters of a New Editing course, which was structured with one class weekly and four hours of “lab” — newspaper production.

At this time, in the fall of 1964, I was a sophomore journalism major, and Pat was a freshman taking her first journalism class. That first chance meeting — at least the one I remember — probably took place on a Monday because most of the reporters’ stories were due that day, and the editors’ first 2-hour lab was Monday afternoon.

I was there as a volunteer editor, helping with the copy editing for our 4-page paper. My fraternity, Lambda Chi Alpha, was heavily involved in student publications, among other things, and I had been convinced that the key to becoming a top editor as a senior was to help out along the way.

I was already getting plenty of journalism experience, working about 30 hours a week as a sports writer for the Jonesboro Evening Sun, and my fraternity brothers had previously talked me into being assistant editor of The Indian yearbook. But this was in the Journalism Department, and it gave me a chance to work closely with my mentor and the founder of the journalism program, L.W. “Tex” Plunkett.

I didn’t know it then, of course, but Tex would eventually be a matchmaker for Pat and me and later the godfather of our second daughter.

However, that wasn’t on the horizon this particular Monday in the fall of 1964, when I first saw the dark-haired girl with the slightly, but delightfully bowed legs.

If I had been more adept socially with the opposite sex, I would have walked over to her that day and said something smooth like, “Do I know you?” Since I wasn’t attached at the time, having been dumped by my girlfriend at Hot Springs at the beginning of the summer, the conversation could have resulted in a social engagement — or so I might have imagined that would happen.

I didn’t, though, and the opportunity passed. She dropped her story in the basket at the front of the room and left. But she had made an impression, and I asked one of the guys at our work table, a fraternity brother, who she was.

“Oh, that’s Pat Montgomery,” he said. “Don’t worry about her. She’s going with someone.”

That guy was an acquaintance, not exactly a friend, but he seemed to be a nice guy. He was a member of one of our rival fraternities, and I wasn’t the sort to push the envelope with another guy’s girl. Besides, at the time I was becoming interested in another freshman who had come to work on the yearbook staff. As it turned out, she and Pat would both pledge the same sorority, Phi Mu, and become good friends.

After that day, whenever I saw Pat, I pretended that we had been formally introduced, or at least that I remembered who she was. But she was taken, and I moved on.

The following fall, though, Pat and I were both unattached, and we started dating. Alas, there were no sparks, and I gave up after a while.

Then in the fall of 1966 Tex paired us as co-editors of The Herald, and for whatever reason the rest was magic — much to his delight (and mine, of course). It still is, almost 60 years later. 

Happy Valentine’s Day to all who found the love of their lives — somewhere, sometime.