Janice Steuart didn’t think Wayne Elkins was her type.
They both grew up in Texarkana — Wayne on the Arkansas side and Janice across the border in Texas. They didn’t meet until they started classes at Texarkana Junior College in 1964.
Wayne was the student director of the school choir, which gave him the air of someone in charge.
He noticed Janice early in the fall semester, but was biding his time in hopes of getting to know her.
He had a paper due on the Brandenburg Concertos for his music history class, and he decided to turn that obligation into an opportunity. He asked Janice to type it.
“I was not a typist at all,” he says. “I could hunt and peck. And I never had a whole lot of self-confidence. I thought maybe if she would help me with this paper we could get to know each other and that would open the door for me and make it easier for me to ask her out.”
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He asked, and she turned him down flat.
Janice thought he was nice-looking — tall and thin with dark hair that had a tiny streak of silver in the front.
“He looked like he was confident and had it together but I thought he might even be a little bit stuck up and all that,” she says. “But later I thought about it, and I realized that probably wasn’t very nice. I had an electric typewriter and he didn’t, so I relented and decided to help him.”
He came to her house after school so she could type.
“It was fairly late when we got started so it was like 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning by the time we were finished,” says Janice, who decided then that Wayne wasn’t stuck up at all.
He asked her out for the next weekend, but she told him she was going to a homecoming football game. He offered to take her.
“He came with a big corsage and took me to the game. I think our side lost,” she says.
Their first date was on Friday, Nov. 13. They have celebrated it on every Friday the 13th since.
“It was bad luck for our team, and I guess a lot of people see it as bad luck, but it was good luck for us,” she says.
The following fall, Wayne realized she was the one he wanted to spend his life with — and that’s when he popped the question.
“I was sitting and talking with her and it was so easy and comfortable,” he says. “She made me feel good, and we laughed together and it just felt right. I didn’t go over there with the intention of asking her that particular day. It was such a good evening and visit that it just kind of came out of my mouth.”
They looked at rings and chose one that the jeweler promised to hold while Wayne saved up the money to buy it. But when they returned, it was gone.
“We were a little bit unhappy with [the jeweler] but he was a really nice old guy and he said, ‘Let me do a little something for you.’ We had the same setting but he pulled out a little bit larger and nicer stone to put in it,” Wayne remembers.
He got Janice a box of chocolates for Christmas and slipped the ring into one of the little paper cups inside.
“I thought it would be a nice surprise, but her employer had given her the same box and her disappointment showed when she opened it,” he says.
That all changed, of course, when she spotted the real present inside.
They were married on July 16, 1966, in County Avenue Baptist Church of Texarkana, although the wedding almost didn’t happen as scheduled.
They had their blood tests done in plenty of time and Wayne’s mother gave written permission for him to marry before the age of 21. But Wayne forgot to pick up the license at the Miller County clerk’s office, remembering only when the preacher asked for it the Friday night before the wedding.
After some pleading from Wayne, the county clerk agreed to open the courthouse so he could get it.
Soon after they married, Wayne accepted a job in music and youth ministry at Antioch Baptist Church in Little Rock. During his almost 20 years there, he completed a master’s degree and became a social worker, first part time and then full time, eventually leaving the ministry to be a psychiatric social worker.
Janice was a teacher in the Pulaski County Special School District for 15 years.
They have one daughter, Shannon Webber, who lives with her husband, David, and their three children in Murphysboro, Ill.
“I still love her,” Wayne says of his bride. “It’s hard to remember a time when we weren’t married. We’ve been together so long. And the other side of that is that time has flown. I look back and it doesn’t seem like there’s any way possible that it’s been 50 years, but it has.”
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