Democrat-Gazette online

On Aug. 26, 1965, my granny and Pa Harper heard on the news that young men who were married by that date would be less likely to be drafted into the Vietnam War. As my mother, then 18-year-old Janie Harper, and father, 19-year-old James Ford, had already set their wedding date for September, it was decided they should get married that night instead to help his chances of not dying overseas. So they contacted the minister and hurried to get dressed up and meet at First Baptist Church of Ozark. Daddy's daddy worked at the steam plant. A friend was dispatched to the town square to flag him down on his way home and direct him, in sweaty work clothes, to the church.

The honeymoon was a trip to Fort Smith and a nice hotel that was pointed out to me as a child when it still existed. It was the kind in which the room doors open to the outside, which I occasionally stay in but do not prefer. I want to say that it was the Sands Hotel; something like that. They spent the night there; the next morning at 6 a.m., my mother drove my father to work on the new lock and dam in Ozark.

Soon they would move into "married housing," a one-room apartment on the campus of Arkansas Tech University that was the size of their living room now, as they........

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