His blind date was well-dressed and ready to go

Johnny Rogers wasn’t sure Phyllis Powers’ outfit was appropriate for their first date.

He went the door to pick her up and was greeted by a young woman in shorts and a T-shirt.

“She was really not dressed to go out,” recalls Johnny, who had not seen Phyllis before their blind date.

That woman, he was relieved to learn, was a friend of Phyllis’ who had been walking her dog and was there mostly to give Phyllis peace of mind when her blind date arrived to pick her up.

When Phyllis came out, she was dressed and ready to go.

“I don’t remember specifically what she was wearing, but she’s always well-dressed,” he says. “When I saw her I thought, ‘Wow, she looks really good.’”

They had dinner at Red Lobster. “That was the place to go back in the day,” she says.

Their first date was a success. “There was a lot of laughter. It went super well,” he says.

It might not have happened, though, if not for the persistence of a neighbor who lived in Johnny’s apartment complex. That woman worked with Phyllis in a Little Rock financial firm.

“She said, ‘I have this guy that you just have to meet. I think you guys would be perfect,’” Phyllis says.

Phyllis’ co-worker gave Johnny Phyllis’ phone number.

“I’m not sure how long that was going on, that she would ask if I would mind if she set a date up for us,” Johnny says. “At first I just said, ‘Oh, no, I’m busy.’”

He finally agreed to call Phyllis, and in late December 1988 he asked her for a date.

He planned to ask her to dinner again for a second date, but her company had tickets to a University of Arkansas at Little Rock basketball game and she invited him to go.

There was snow on the ground and the streets were icy when he picked her up in the old truck he drove at the time. The drive back afterward was even more treacherous.

“We were coming down Cantrell Hill and it was iced over, so when I got to the bottom I told her, ‘Boy, I’m glad we made that because my brakes on the truck won’t work,’” he says. “I thought, ‘Well, I won’t get a third date because she won’t want to see me again after that.”

Phyllis did, of course, want to see him again. They began to see each other more and more often.

They did the typical things together, like movies and outings with friends, but Phyllis also discovered that Johnny was handy.

She asked him for help when the grill she ordered for her condo deck arrived unassembled. And when a squirrel invaded her living space, entering through a hole in the roof and hunkering down in a furnace closet, Johnny came to her rescue.

“I opened the door and threw a towel over it, and I reached down there to grab it,” Johnny says. “That little rascal jumped three feet in the air and I jumped five feet. He skittered back up that hole and we never saw him again.”

They had been dating for about a year when they broached the topic of marriage.

“She said, ‘You know, we’ve been dating for two years and if we’re not going to get engaged I want to know that.’ And I understood.”

Phyllis wasn’t insisting that they get engaged right then.

“I just needed to know if he was willing to make a commitment,” she says.

Shortly after that, Johnny took Phyllis to Lauray’s in Hot Springs to choose an engagement ring.

They were married on Jan. 26, 1991, in Second Baptist Church in Hot Springs.

Their honeymoon was their first and only ski trip. Vacations these days are more likely to include their lake house in Hot Springs or a warmer destination.

“I haven’t been able to get her to go back,” says Johnny, who owns Mid-Central Plumbing Co. in North Little Rock. Phyllis is the chief financial officer of Arkansas Foundation for Medical Care.

There was a winter storm on Christmas just before they married, and Phyllis was distraught. She had not missed a holiday celebration with her family in Hot Springs before but she did not know how she would make it to their house in that weather in her car, which did not have front wheel drive. Johnny’s mother insisted they take hers.

“It was so memorable and so welcoming for her to do that,” she says. “My parents only lived a couple more years and I never missed a Christmas with my parents. If it weren’t for my soon-to-be-mother-in-law that wouldn’t have happened. It really meant a lot to me.”

Johnny gave Phyllis a new wedding set from Sissy’s Log Cabin a few years ago. The stones from the other set were used to create new jewelry pieces, which she cherishes as representation of their long history together.

She remembers Johnny telling her in one of their earliest phone conversations that his nephew was being born soon.

“Now his nephew has just gotten married,” she says. “It’s funny to remember back to these things.”