TALES OF TRUE LOVE: DIFFERENT SETTINGS, SAME SENTIMENT

The stories are different, but the sentiments are the same when it comes to true love.

With Valentine's Day approaching, the Southeast Missourian asked some well-known area residents to tell how they found true love.

Al Spradling III found his true love at a wedding reception. Mary Kasten found hers on a double date. Paul Sander found his true love at the Jackson City Park. Nancy Jernigan found hers on a trip to New Orleans.

Cape Girardeau Mayor Al Spradling III met Pam -- the woman he would later marry -- at a wedding reception.

Spradling's father met her at the reception in the spring of 1974 at the Cape Girardeau Country Club.

The younger Spradling was just starting his legal career, having graduated from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law in 1973.

He was at home cleaning out his basement when he received a telephone call from his dad.

"He called me and said come out to the wedding reception and meet this person," the mayor recalled.

Spradling took his father's advice and went out to meet her. "I bought her a drink,' he said.

Spradling said it was "pretty much" love at first sight. "We got engaged in May and married in October."

State Rep. Mary Kasten met her husband, City Councilman Mel Kasten, on a double date in 1947 at Southeast Missouri State University.

"He had a date with my roommate and I had a date with some other guy," remembered Kasten.

As it turned out, she was more interested in Mel than in her date.

"I saw a little spark there. My roommate wasn't interested, but I sure was," she said.

"We started seeing each other," she said.

Mel Kasten was four years older than Mary and a veteran of World War II.

Mel spent the next two years in medical school at the University of Missouri. "I wrote to him and saw him on vacations," Mary Kasten said.

She said she wrote to him almost daily.

They were married in June 1949 at the First Christian Church in Mary's hometown of Matthews.

The small church had no back door so Mel had to crawl in a window so he could get to the front of the altar without getting in the way of his bride coming down the aisle.

"He had his shoes all shined up for the wedding," Mary Kasten said. But it turned out he had a hole in the bottom of one shoe.

Mel ended up putting on another pair.

Mary Kasten said the marriage has been a good one these 48 years. "It has worked out wonderfully. We have been extremely happy all these years."

Jackson Mayor Paul Sander met his wife while hanging out in the Jackson City Park in 1977.

"It was kind of a gathering place for young people, after school and on Saturdays and Sundays," Sander said.

He said he regularly visited the park. "I grew up less than 100 yards from the park. I did almost all my growing up in the city park," he said.

Sander was a student at Southeast Missouri State University and Pam was still in high school.

"I guess it was attraction at first sight," said Sander, who married Pam in 1982.

Nancy Jernigan, executive director of the Area Wide United Way, previously worked in Dallas.

Jernigan met her future husband, Jeff, while working for a land development company in Dallas in the early 1980s.

They were introduced to each other by a mutual friend who lived in the same apartment complex that she did.

Nancy and Jeff often went out with a group of friends.

"Then a small group of us went to New Orleans for a weekend and that was magical," Jernigan said.

They started dating. During Thanksgiving weekend in 1983, they visited some of Jeff's family in Arkansas.

"We weren't married yet. So they split us up. One of us stayed in one house and one stayed in another," Nancy said.

When they returned to Dallas, Jeff proposed.

Both had been married previously so they didn't want a big wedding.

They were married in December 1983 at a church in Dallas. "It was just as though there was a big wedding, except nobody was there," she said.

The only people there were the bride and groom, his brother, her best friend, the minister, the organist and a photographer.

But even without a crowd, the wedding was picture perfect, she said.