Melba Browning & Bill DeShazo
How they met...

A Love
Story

50th
Wedding
Anniversary

  It was "Fiddlers Day," May 28, 1947.  20-year-old Melba Browning had just returned from Arizona.  29-year-old Bill DeShazo was back from a stint in Washington state.  Both had decided to get home in time to join the crowd around the Athens square for the Old Fiddlers Reunion.  Those decisions would change the courses of their lives.

  It's not certain who saw whom first, but Bill clearly recalls spotting Melba through the crowd.  "Oh, she was beautiful," he says, "and I was lookin' a purpose."

  That purpose, it seems found its moment when he spied Melba slipping into a picture booth.  Just before the cameraman snapped his shot, Bill slid his long slender frame quickly through the curtain and sat down next to the girl he'd been eyein'.

  "We hadn't even said howdy or what's your name or anything," laughs Melba.  Her daughter teases her, she says, about the conspicuous placement of her hand on the knee of the audacious stranger -- something Melba explains as a reflex action to keep from falling off the bench.

  After the smoke cleared from the flash, the two exchanged names and headed over to the Ferris wheel.  That went well enough, so they followed up with a little dancing in the streets.  "It rained on us," Bill recalls with a wry smile, "but we didn't  mind too much."

  The daughter of a Henderson County farmer, Melba had watched her girlfriends marry one by one, and she was  determined to hang on to her independence.  A favorite aunt owned a restaurant and hotel in Arizona, and Melba enjoyed living and working there, to the point that she decided it would be a good way to spend her life.

  Bill, a self-described gypsy, had become accustomed to moving around while serving in the Air Corps during WW II and kept the lifestyle after he was discharged.  Before meeting Melba, he held a succession of jobs, including apple picker, taxi driver and pipeline worker.  It was the pipeline work that would keep him busy throughout his life.

  But that evening in 1947, the only traveling Bill wanted was to escort Melba home.  "That night he met my family, and later he said, 'I'm gonna take you home,'" says Melba.  "I said, 'No you're not.  I came with my Mama and Papa and I'm going home with them.'"

  To appease him, Melba told her sudden suitor she lived in Montalba, which was actually down the road a ways from her parents' home.  She never expected to see him again.  "Two weeks later he was at my door," she smiled.

  Finally, after a trip to Arizona for Melba and some serious thinking, the time seemed right.
  Having finally agreed to marry, the matter became simply when and where.  They decided to elope.  A justice of the peace in Waurika, Okla. married the couple on February 8, 1949 -- 50 years ago this month ... on the way to a pipeline job.

  Their marriage would follow the path set by their wedding.  They have shared a passion for wandering, living in or visiting most of the 50 states throughout half a century of togetherness. In addition to laying pipeline, Bill worked on a number of occasions as a Henderson County deputy sheriff -- always  ending when he got the itch to move again.  Melba worked for a good spell as a nurse's aide at the Henderson County Memorial Hospital, but mostly her work consisted of raising their two children, Nancy and Verge.  The year their son was born they "settled down" as motel owners at a "wide spot in the road" in Arizona.  It lasted a year.

  The secret of their marital success?  "I've been minding him for 50 years," says Melba with a laugh. 

   "That is a false statement," counters Bill. "She's very unruly."

  "We don't ever agree on anything," sighs Melba, hardly able to suppress another laugh.  "I guess that's why we're still together.