Teen Marriage Endures the Test of Time

By Kathleen Green

After 50-plus years, Ron Westmoreland and Betty Stewart Westmoreland can sit on their back porch for hours and never run out of things to talk about. "To me, she's still 16 years old. She was a cutie. Still is," he says of his high-school sweetheart. "She's my best friend and always has been. We're one."

Ron and Betty's Fort Worth families were very close, but it wasn't until they were teenagers that they really started talking. Ron was one year ahead in school.

He remembers walking Betty and her best friend (who was Ron's neighbour) from Polytechnic High School back to the junior high in 1949. But a bashful Ron also knew that Betty was popular and always had a boyfriend. A year later, Ron and Betty saw each other again when students headed to the gym after a football game. They've been together ever since.

"My daddy was very upset when I started dating Ronnie," says Betty, now 72. She and Ron didn't find out until years later that her dad was once engaged to Betty's mom, but she broke it off. Apparently it still stung after all those years.

"Ronnie's aunt told us, 'It was written in the stars. You were born for each other,'" Betty says. "I was shocked."

"She was a free spirit before they knew what that was," says Ron, also 72. "She's the happiest person I've ever been around in my life. Everybody loves her." With a possible Korean War draft, Ron suggested that they get married before he turned 18.

Then they decided not to wait even that long. On 28 April 1951, Betty's best friend's mom took Ron and Betty to a county clerk's home. When they were asked their age, both said they were 18, and they were pronounced man and wife. It was their little secret.

"We both went home after we got married," she says. "Nobody knew about it for weeks." Until one day in May when Betty got home and her father asked, "Betty, how long have you been married?"

Betty says they never figured out who leaked the news, but they guessed it was an old boyfriend. After school was out that summer, Betty and Ron made it official when they moved in together.

Before the next summer, they reached a major milestone. "

When I was in the hospital having our first baby at 17, Ronnie's mother came in crying. I was having a very hard time.

They thought I was going to die because I had toxemia or eclampsia. She said, 'You should be going to the prom,'" Betty recalls. "But I didn't want to go to the prom." Betty was happy with her choices. Son Ricky was born 26 March 1952.

"We were parents at 17, and it was pretty difficult," says Ron, who worked for Santa Fe Railroad for a while before taking a job with Chance Vought Aircraft in 1955.

"She took to motherhood like she'd done it all her life." They had daughter Glenda on 12 November 1954, and son Bryan on 15 May 1956.

"Those kids were always sparkling," says Ron, who later earned a high school equivalency certificate and attended some college. "I'd come home from work, and she'd be playing paper dolls with our daughter.

Those are the memories you never forget about. Family means everything."

In 1959, Ron took a job with Marquardt Corporation, which meant moving the family to Ogden, Utah. But on a trip back to Fort Worth in late 1961, they realised how much they missed their relatives. Ron and Betty left their kids with Betty's mom that Thanksgiving and headed back to Utah to collect their furniture.

"We knew it was going to be hard, and there would be trying times. And it was rough," he says. "We were two kids raising kids. We weren't that much older than they were."

They stayed in Fort Worth a while, then moved to Blue Ridge, northeast of Dallas, when Ron got a job with Collins Radio (now Rockwell Collins). They moved to Richardson in 1964.

Over the years, Betty stood by Ron as he shared his love of horses and rodeos with their kids. She spent many hours in arenas watching her boys rope and her daughter barrel-race, which included the usual injuries. "That was very hard, but I had to be there," she says.

"It's pretty bad when the emergency-room staff knows you when you walk in and they start pulling your file.

The youngest broke his back when he was 16," from which he's had a full recovery. Then there was a punctured lung, broken arms, broken legs.

Betty worked for a while as a receptionist at a veterinary hospital to help with the kids' college expenses.

In 1974, after the Westmorelands' youngest graduated from Berkner High School in Richardson, Ron and Betty moved to Caddo Mills. They wanted property for their horses. Ron still ropes, and the kids still love horses.

"We're very proud of our kids," Betty says. "They're very good people. Good citizens, thoughtful. We have a lot of pride in them."

Since retiring in 1990 as an international program manager for Rockwell, Ron worked briefly with the Superconducting SuperCollider in Ellis County. And he's also published five books, including one for children: Wild Horses of Hidden Valley.

"He's been easy to love," Betty says. "I never worried about him taking care of us." They now have 8 granddaughters and 7 great-grandkids.

"It's been a great run," he says. "I wouldn't change a thing."

Betty and Ron Westmoreland say they have no regrets about defying convention by marrying during high school.
"She was a free spirit before they knew what that was," Ron says of Betty.