The summer between my junior and senior year in high school, I spent a week at Western Kentucky University to study journalism. Shelley Street, Greg Stark, Jeff Gibson and I, as the senior leaders at the Heath Post, came to WKU to bring back ideas to improve the newspaper.
The first night, the staff had a cookout on the rocks outside of the Garrett Conference Center, the home of the College Heights Herald, WKU's renowned student newspaper. There were high school journalists from all across the state on those rocks, mostly staying with the people they came with. I decided to livin this group up and went around to talk to lots of people.
Little did I know that one of those people would later be my wife.
Autumn Davis was going in to be the editor of the Madisonville North Hopkins High School newspaper. Over the next week, we got to know each other. One night early in that week, I had made up my mind that I was going to put some moves on her. We were going to go for a walk around campus with another "couple". But the pizza I had for dinner didn't like me and came back up. After that, I chickened out.
We kept in touch over the next two years, sending pictures and letters back and forth. Then, she came to WKU and moved into McCormick Hall, right next door to where I was living in Rodes Harlin. We were both dating other people at the time. But we really solidified our friendship over that year. She was the girl I could be myself in front of.
Near the end of that year, we were both single, just kind of playing the field, when she came up to me one night and laid it all out. She wanted to date me. Well, a few months before that, I told my mom that with Autumn, it would have to be all or nothing. So we started dating. And the rest, as they say, is history.