Tom and Debra
Smith
all out. “She had gone by my apartment and brought a change of clothes
for me.”
When did Debra realize she’d met
“THE ONE?”
“Immediately,” she said. “It was
odd, I just felt safe and comfortable
with him. He was just the one. Soul
mates.”
They didn’t go out a lot. “We
would just do a lot of socializing. I
cook, so I would cook.”
Their courtship didn’t entail
a whole lot of nightlife. It mostly
involved small dinners with friends
and attending small, private parties.
Debra was the one to pop the
question. “I proposed to him,” she
said. “I said, ‘Will you marry me?’
He said, ‘I thought you’d never ask.’”
They were married on July 14, 1978,
in a quiet ceremony in a JP’s office
with her brother and sister-in-law as
their attendants. After three months,
Tom’s company transferred him to
Cairo. Debra went along. The Smiths
have been all over the globe together
and they laughed and talked the
whole way. They’re grandparents
now and as great as traveling is, it
can’t hold a candle to spending time
with their grandchildren. Sometimes
that whole love-at-first-sight thing
lasts a lifetime. “It has for us,” Debra
said.
Nick says we dated for a while before
I would tell anyone we were dating.”
One of their first dates was a
Cross Canadian Ragweed Concert at
City Limits in Stephenville.
“I think there were about 30
people there and no one had heard
of the band,” she recalls.
But, there wasn’t really that one,
“ah ha,” moment when Natalie
remembers thinking, “this is the man
I’m going to spend the rest of my life
with.”
“I don’t know if there was one
moment, we just had so much fun
together,” she said. “It was easy. He
made me laugh and we were really
good friends.”
There was the traditional proposal.
He was, “on one knee,” Natalie
said, “in the glamorous 1976 model
single-wide trailer he lived in during
college in Stephenville.”
Mentioning their wedding brings
back the warmest of memories for
Natalie. Hot may be a more appropriate word. “Hot! July 20th – outside,”
she said. “Sounded like a great idea
when we planned it. It really was
stunning with bright summer colors,
all our family, and plenty of dancing
afterwards.”
Since Natalie is a big fan of the
movie, Steel Magnolias, Nick even
had a Groom’s cake in the shape
of an armadillo like the one in the
movie. “We’ve lost some of our
grandparents since then,” she said.
“Thinking of them on that day is a
special memory for both of us.”
Agreeable Globetrotters
They met on a blind date, well, sort
of.
“My sister set me up,” Debra said.
“She was always trying to set me up.
Tom was her husband’s best friend.
I was at work and she came in and
said that Tom was going to be there
at any minute.”
Debra was adamant. She didn’t
want to go out with someone she
didn’t know.
Debra’s sister said, “You’ve got
your own car here. You can get in
and leave.”
She was getting ready to do just
that. She was working as a waitress
at the Brown Derby in Columbus,
Ohio and her shift was about to end.
She could go if she wanted to. Then
Tom Smith walked in. “He had me
at hello,” Debra said. “There I was in
my ugly waitress uniform.”
But, Debra’s sister had thought it
Nickolas and Natalie
Parish
FEBRUARY 2016
PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
High School Friends
Become Lifetime
Sweethearts
It seems like they’ve known each
other forever.
“We’ve known each other as
long as I can remember,” Natalie
said. “We grew up in the same small
town (Azle). We went to high school
together, he dated my friends and I
dated his but we never dated each
other. Nick was on the rodeo team
and ran with that crowd; I was more
into playing sports.”
Natalie went to SFA after high
school. “I wanted to be closer to
home for my last two years so I transferred to Tarleton State University
where my sister was a freshman,” she
said. “Nick and many of our mutual
friends were going there and we
picked up where we all left off. We
had some fun! I don’t really know
what I would consider our first date;
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