RIGHT TIME RIGHT PLACE : His touch wasn’t feathery, but she didn’t fly the coop
Posted on Sunday, May 11, 2008
BELLA VISTA — Ron and Chris Thurston met over spilled turkey drippings.
It was a slip that brought the two together, along a path toward marriage and, incidentally, a life in turkeys.
She was then Christine Stephens, a Fayetteville High School senior, who one autumn night in 1964 found herself nervously shuffling through her first shift as a banquet server at the University of Arkansas’ Memorial Hall. The event was a dinner for the National Turkey Federation.
She had bought new white Keds to go with her black skirt and white blouse.
He was a chemistry major and a junior from Bella Vista, and he was hunched over a hot oven lifting a pan of steaming turkey when those shoes entered his peripheral vision.
“I looked down at her foot. I was not dating anybody, and obviously that was a girl’s shoe. Bingo !” Ron recalls.
He let the heavy pan tip and poured the drippings on Chris ’ new shoes.
“I don’t remember much beyond that, to tell the truth,” Chris says.
In fact, the two sorted silverware together later in the evening, but they didn’t see each other again until the next event — a banquet for the 1964 Razorback football National Championship team.
In the meantime, Ron confessed to the food services manager, Delores Cunningham, that he fancied Chris, and the older woman wasted no time informing Chris ’ mother, Jewell. It was Cunningham who suggested Ron take Chris to her annual Christmas party in December. It was their first date. They can’t recall if turkey was served.
“I was hesitant, because I hadn’t dated anybody. This was a jump forward to me into a whole new world,” Chris says.
Chris’ father welcomed the match — with a wife and three daughters, he desperately wanted a son — but her mother was disappointed that her eldest daughter was dating a Catholic. At the time, Ron says, that was an interfaith marriage.
They were married Sept. 10, 1966, just months after Ron graduated with a degree in chemistry.
That day, southbound on Arkansas 112 headed to the church, a wild turkey crossed in front of Ron’s car. Wild toms were a rare sight then, he says, but other than that, he thought little of it.
The two moved for a year to Decatur where Ron taught school, but he didn’t like teaching, and he was soon on the phone with professor Grover Harris in the UA’s poultry science department. Harris was working on cryopreservation (the process of cooling and storing ) of turkey sperm. The professor thought Ron’s chemistry background could be helpful.
Ron received his master’s degree at the UA and his doctorate from the University of Missouri at Columbia. His dissertation examined the technique and technology of turkey semen preservation and the anatomy of the female reproductive tract.
Chris typed the document and formatted the illustrations.
Eventually, the couple moved to South Carolina, where Ron continued his research into turkey breeding as a member of the faculty at Clemson University. Chris worked for more than 20 years as a research administrator.
In 1996, three decades after they tied the knot, the National Turkey Federation awarded Ron its highest honor for his body of research.
Chris says she doesn’t have any special affinity toward turkey, although her husband’s work undoubtedly has lowered the price of turkeys.
“When I met him, he was not so involved in poultry. When my heart goes aflutter, it wasn’t for a turkey guy,” she says.
Today, Ron, 63, and Chris, 60, live in Bella Vista, just behind Ron’s childhood home. They have three adult children and four grandchildren. Both retired from Clemson.
“We sort of were a puzzle. I’m terrible with money... she’s good at organization. It just was a match. We improved our lives immensely,” he says. “Here’s the secret: When you get older and you start thinking maybe you could have had someone else; well, we both had a retirement and we developed our lives in such a manner that we can’t afford to [split ].” If you have an intriguing how-we-met story or know someone who does, please e-mail Cyd King at cking@arkansasonline. com
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