April 5, 2024 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Pat Boone got engaged on a Saturday and married the next day (by his high school principal)—at 19! Here's the story of how he balanced fame and fortune with faith and family.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, the
story from the only man to have ever competed on
the Top forty charts routinely with Elvis Presley. We're talking
about Pat Boone. He's had six top forty hits to
be precise, spending a total of twenty one weeks on
the charts, and today he's here to talk about his
(00:31):
life in music and the love of his life, his bride,
Shirley Boone. Let's get into the story. Take it away, Pat.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
When I met her under the Grandfather Clock and Old
Harding Hall, the main building of our high school, walked
up to the capital of the basketball team. I was
on the basketball team and asked him, who is this
girl you're talking to? Pop? I called him. He said, well,
this is Shirley Foley, the daughter of Red Foley the
Country Music Hall of Fame. He wasn't then, but he
(01:13):
was hosting the Grand Old Ockry, having replaced Roy Acuff
after many years, and then for nine years, Red Foley
was the host. And I was not a big country
music fan till I met Shirley Foley. She came to
our high school. Her mom was not well and so
she had to be in the dorm at the Lipscomb
and we shook hands, and all I can say is
(01:37):
I felt a tingle, and she did too. From then
on through high school, right through when she was homecoming
queen and the senior year, and I was president of
the little student body. We were just teenage sweethearts. We
were already starting to talk about getting married and having
(01:58):
kids and how many we wanted. And I was a
product of two boys and two girls. We thought that
would be great. And we were talking like that when
her mom died. Then Red Foley went to Springfield to
start the Ozark Jubilee. He was taking his three widowed daughters.
I knew what a desirable, beautiful, rare girl she was,
(02:22):
and I couldn't stand for her to be off in Springfield, Missouri,
and I'm in Nashville and some guys are going to
flock around her, and somebody's going to take her away.
And she was protesting, though she wouldn't let anybody take
her away. But I said, look, why don't we get
married where nineteen were capable? And let's ask your dad.
(02:48):
I was not going to ask my folks because they
just said, oh, no, you graduate from college first, and
then you get married. Well, we were independent enough and
in love enough that we asked her dad fearfully because
he was now a widower twice. His first wife died
when giving birth to Shirley's older sister, and then he
(03:08):
married her mom, who was part of a trio singing
trio three sisters in the ws Barn Dance in Chicago.
And her mom was only like seventeen when Red married her,
and so she was like eighteen when Shirley was born,
and then she was like thirty seven or eight when
she died, and Shirley was seventeen. So when we asked
(03:30):
Red her dad for his permission for me for us
to marry, tears rolled down his nose into his coffee
and he said, you're going to take care of my girl.
And I said, yes, mister Red, naive I was, but
I said, yes, I'm going to take care of her.
(03:50):
Is this what you want, Shirley? She said yes, Daddy.
He sniffled, and he said, I'll buy your rings. And
he bought our rings and he said he said he
would bother me. He said, now, when are you planning?
This was Saturday. We said tomorrow, and so we married
the next day by our high school principal of minister.
(04:13):
And since the license hadn't come in in Davidson County yet,
we went over to another county, Springfield, Tennessee, and we're
married a second time that day, so by a justice
of the peace. So we were married twice that day.
And then soon after that we moved to Texas on
our own, and I was in college there and I
began preaching in a little country church in Slydell as
(04:35):
a student, little one room church out in the Wheatfield.
I graduated from college magna cum laude, and the cover
of TV Guide in my cap and gown at twenty three.
He opened up the cover and there's my wife, Shirley,
had four little girls. This all happened so fast. I
(04:56):
had won, seemed like incidentally. I had won the Ted
Macamateur three weeks in a row while I was still
in Nashville, and it was the forerunner of shows like
You Know The Voice and America's Got Talent. The winners
were selected by the viewers with cards and letters. The
show would appear on Saturday night and by Thursday the
(05:16):
votes were counted, and if you won one week, you
would come back for another, and I won three weeks
in a row. Well, I was thinking of being a
singer at that point, but nothing came up, no contracts,
no offers. I just had one I could say in
my resume. I had won the Ted Macamateur Hour, but
nothing seemed to happen from it. And I get a
(05:39):
call from New York and they're assembling all the three
time winners to come back and compete with each other. Well,
I was one, and so I was on that show
and they told me I was winning. But while I
was having to wait in New York, I couldn't afford
to go back to Texas and then back to New
York again in a seedy little hotel off Times Square
(06:04):
until they let me know if I was winning or not.
So while I was waiting, I went on Arthur Godfrey's
Talent Show on a Monday after being on the Talent
Show Saturday, and auditioned for the Arthur Godfrey Show, which
was a Monday night, and they put me on that
Monday night and I won. Well, that disqualified me from
(06:27):
the Ted Macamateur Hour because you can't be a professional
winner on Monday. And then me declared an amateur winter
the following Saturday, and I blew it. It was over.
I came that close to being having a career in music,
but it hadn't happened. I get a call from Randy
(06:51):
Wood of Dot Records outside Nashville. He'd seen all of this.
I was a homeboy, you know, winning these national contests.
Ought that I could make some hit records, and he
asked if I'd like to come to Chicago and record,
and of course I did, not knowing what to expect,
and he had me sing a rhythm and blues song
(07:11):
called two Hearts, two kisses, make one Love. And I
didn't know what R and B was, but I listened
to that record and I picked up on the flavor
of one hearts and a babb two hearts make if
you braze, make.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Hearts two fake one.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
And that song that we recorded immediately sold a million records,
and I had to do a follow up record. So
in May of fifty five, I recorded Fats Dominoes. Ain't
that a shame? His had been number one. R and B,
which was a separate genre called race music, sold one
(08:02):
hundred and fifty thousand. I did his song my way
You made me cry when you said goodbye. Ain't that
a shame? And I did my version of rock and roll,
as we were calling it. Mine sold a million and
a half, ten times what Fats had sold with his
own song, and he was thrilled, and he said many times,
I made more money with Pat Boone's record of my
(08:24):
song than from my own record. But from that time
March of fifty five, for four and a half years,
I was never off the single chart. I hold that
record in the record business, forty one chart records. Elvis
had forty. And he was my opening act the first
time we met. The kids didn't know who he was,
(08:49):
but they liked the way he looked. They didn't like
the way his song sounded, because it was a Bill
Monroe bluegrass song, blue Moon of Kentucky. Keep on shining it.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Keep shining.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Shine on them that's going. And he got lots of
applause when he left the stage that night, and then
I went on and I got all the screams because
I had three million says.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
And you've been listening to Pat Boone share his story
and my goodness, his rise, his meteoric rise in the
music business, it was extraordinary, But my goodness, what he
did with his love, the love of his life, going
on his knees not just to her but to her
father and seeking her hand at the age of nineteen,
and having four kids by the age of twenty three.
(09:45):
Now that's audacious. When we come back more of Pat
Boone's story here on our American story, and we returned
(10:10):
to our American stories and the story of Pat Boone
and his wife Shirley. When we last left off, Pat
had shot into stardom rather unexpectedly. Let's return to the
story here again. It's Pat Boone.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
So this all happened. I wasn't seeking it. It all
just fell on me. I thought it was a fluke.
I didn't think this career thing was going to last,
even though I was having one hit record after the other.
But I was also having one child after the other,
and I knew I had to plan on something I
could count on, which would be teaching. Well, the day
(10:49):
I took my last class at Columbia, I thought I
was going to look for a teaching job. I lay
down on the grass in Central Park by myself and thought,
wait a minute, I've got a seven year movie deal
at twenty century Fox. I've got the record contract I
guess I'm going to have to wait before I apply
for a teacher job. But I always had the sense
from that time on that it was for a reason
(11:12):
that I was going to be a teacher preacher originally,
and I was being given a different kind of platform,
and as a rock and roll singer, not as a
preacher and a teen idol. The weird thing is I
(11:33):
became a literal teen idol. Elvis's only competition, and he
was single and theoretically romantically available, and the girls all
swooning over him. But everywhere I appeared around the world,
they were swooning over me. And yet I was married
with four kids. I mean, it didn't seem likely. There's
(11:54):
never been anybody in show business with that kind of
a life. Was hectic life, it was. You know, my
folks have been very leary of me being an entertainer.
They thought that if I entered the entertainment world, I
would be swept away and I would lose my faith. Well,
my faith was a real part of who I am,
(12:15):
so I wasn't losing my faith. But I was enjoying
being invited to all the souall rats, the parties, the premieres,
and I did some drinking. I was never drunk. They
made a lot of jokes about me. Of course, Dean
Martin over and over again in his shows for some reason,
he'd bring my name up, that bad boone. He's so religious.
(12:37):
I shook hands with that boy the other day. My
whole right side over that.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Y'all know, Pad Boone. I guess y'all know, Pad, But
what care you're putting me honest about.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
He's a beautiful guy.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
He doesn't drink, doesn't go to nightclub, I don't stay la.
That's a nice, clean, monotonous life.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
I brought those straws because I hear you sip a
little oh.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
You know, his idea of a big night of staying home,
drinking cocoa and rinsing out his shoes.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
And then Phil and Andy Williams show, Phil Harris the
comedian band leader. He said, Pat, you drink something sometimes,
don't you. I said no, I knew he meant alcoholic.
I said, no, you don't drink nothing never, And I
just went with it. I said no. He said to Andy,
can you imagine waking up in the morning knowing that's
as good as you're going to feel all day long?
(13:37):
And then he said, oh Boone, we kid you paled,
but we love you. If I ever had a son,
i'd want him to be just like Pat Boone untill
he's about three years old. And you know those jokes,
just I repeat them in my shows. But I just
would show that I could be part of the party
(13:57):
like anybody else. I would go and be home with
the girls, and I'd go and I'd have fun. And
that was without my realizing it. It was pulling us
somewhat apart because I was obviously having a part of
my life with something she wasn't really as much a
part of anymore. She's home taking care of the daughters
and I'm out enjoying my fame. And of course I
(14:20):
was gone a lot. At one point she got out
the calendar and showed me that I was gone fifty
percent of that year. And that's no way to be
a real good father and husband either. Though she was
keeping me involved with the girls all the time. Let's
do what daddy wants here, let's write daddy. She was
keeping me in their lives though I was physically absent.
(14:41):
So now we hit a period where of almost two
years where we began to live like boarders in a
boarding house. We were very polite, loving toward each other,
but there was no romance really, and the kids they
could tell, and there was then a recognition on both
our parts that we needed to make spiritual renewals. It
(15:07):
happened at a moment when I was walking in this
house where I am now, past the piano and a
picture of Shirley is a about a three year old
girl with her arms around her daddy's neck, Redfoli's neck,
this loving being with her daddy and him loving her,
and that picture always touched me. And this day I
stood looking at that picture and I began to well up.
(15:32):
Tears began to well up, and I realized, she's still
that little girl. Her dad's gone, been gone a long time.
Those arms are supposed to be around my neck. And
I am the only hope for my four little girls
to have the home life and the growing up and
the married mom and dad that I want them to have.
(15:53):
And it's up to me to get perfectly straight in
my life. And I told her how that picture had
affected me. Father's Day came soon after that, and she
gave me a picture of herself as a three year old,
but sitting alone as a little child, which she happened
to her a lot when her dad was gone. Just
(16:13):
a picture of that three little child sitting there alone
without her dad, and on the back of that picture
she wrote, take care of this girl. She needs you.
I'm telling you that experience the recognition on both our
parts that for us to have the continued life that
(16:38):
we wanted to have for ourselves and especially for our daughters,
all their friends were coming. They were living in broken homes,
you know, in the entertainment business. And we came back together,
we made new spiritual renewals of our own vows and faith,
and we were suddenly hugging and loving. And the kid
(17:00):
could see that something had happened to mom and daddy,
and then they wanted that too. And it's what we
call the infilling of the Holy Spirit. It is asking
the Holy Spirit to live in you, not just to
be around and to bless you, but to actually dwell
in you. And that's an important commitment to make. So
we did, and that renewal saw us through the rest
(17:21):
of our marriage and into now. And I know that
she's waiting for me. Because he said that he was
in his father's house were many mansions, and I go
to prepare a place for you, those of you who
want to live here and who choose to live here
by the way you live your lives. And I know
she's there waiting for me, and we're going to be together.
(17:43):
So when people say something about my wife passing, I said, yes,
she passed into heaven. She didn't die. She's alive, very
much alive. And I talked to her all the time.
You know, I've had friends saying, you know, there's this
seventy seven year old woman who's very athletic, and you
ought to get with her. I said, no, no, there's
(18:04):
never going to be another missus Pat Boone, and I'm
getting close to being reunited with her every day. So
that's that's our story.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
It's ongoing and a terrific job on the production, editing
and storytelling by her own Monte Montgomery. And a special
thanks to Pat Boone for sharing not only the story
of his pop life, his music life, his life is
a star, but as a father figure, as a husband,
(18:32):
and as a person of faith as a Christian. I
wasn't seeking it, he said about his fame. It all
fell on me. I thought it was a fluke. I
had one hit after another, but I had one child
after another. He was contemplating being a teacher and a preacher,
but he decided to do stardom a different way, without
the booze, without the train wrecks. And my goodness, that
(18:55):
story of seeing the picture of his wife as a
little girl with her arms around her father's shoulders, well
I teared up just listening to it, and I'm sure
you did too. A beautiful story about love, about romance,
about faith and how it rises above everything and preserves everything.
(19:16):
Pat Boone's life story here on our American Stories
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, the
story from the only man to have ever competed on
the Top forty charts routinely with Elvis Presley. We're talking
about Pat Boone. He's had six top forty hits to
be precise, spending a total of twenty one weeks on
the charts, and today he's here to talk about his
(00:31):
life in music and the love of his life, his bride,
Shirley Boone. Let's get into the story. Take it away, Pat.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
When I met her under the Grandfather Clock and Old
Harding Hall, the main building of our high school, walked
up to the capital of the basketball team. I was
on the basketball team and asked him, who is this
girl you're talking to? Pop? I called him. He said, well,
this is Shirley Foley, the daughter of Red Foley the
Country Music Hall of Fame. He wasn't then, but he
(01:13):
was hosting the Grand Old Ockry, having replaced Roy Acuff
after many years, and then for nine years, Red Foley
was the host. And I was not a big country
music fan till I met Shirley Foley. She came to
our high school. Her mom was not well and so
she had to be in the dorm at the Lipscomb
and we shook hands, and all I can say is
(01:37):
I felt a tingle, and she did too. From then
on through high school, right through when she was homecoming
queen and the senior year, and I was president of
the little student body. We were just teenage sweethearts. We
were already starting to talk about getting married and having
(01:58):
kids and how many we wanted. And I was a
product of two boys and two girls. We thought that
would be great. And we were talking like that when
her mom died. Then Red Foley went to Springfield to
start the Ozark Jubilee. He was taking his three widowed daughters.
I knew what a desirable, beautiful, rare girl she was,
(02:22):
and I couldn't stand for her to be off in Springfield, Missouri,
and I'm in Nashville and some guys are going to
flock around her, and somebody's going to take her away.
And she was protesting, though she wouldn't let anybody take
her away. But I said, look, why don't we get
married where nineteen were capable? And let's ask your dad.
(02:48):
I was not going to ask my folks because they
just said, oh, no, you graduate from college first, and
then you get married. Well, we were independent enough and
in love enough that we asked her dad fearfully because
he was now a widower twice. His first wife died
when giving birth to Shirley's older sister, and then he
(03:08):
married her mom, who was part of a trio singing
trio three sisters in the ws Barn Dance in Chicago.
And her mom was only like seventeen when Red married her,
and so she was like eighteen when Shirley was born,
and then she was like thirty seven or eight when
she died, and Shirley was seventeen. So when we asked
(03:30):
Red her dad for his permission for me for us
to marry, tears rolled down his nose into his coffee
and he said, you're going to take care of my girl.
And I said, yes, mister Red, naive I was, but
I said, yes, I'm going to take care of her.
(03:50):
Is this what you want, Shirley? She said yes, Daddy.
He sniffled, and he said, I'll buy your rings. And
he bought our rings and he said he said he
would bother me. He said, now, when are you planning?
This was Saturday. We said tomorrow, and so we married
the next day by our high school principal of minister.
(04:13):
And since the license hadn't come in in Davidson County yet,
we went over to another county, Springfield, Tennessee, and we're
married a second time that day, so by a justice
of the peace. So we were married twice that day.
And then soon after that we moved to Texas on
our own, and I was in college there and I
began preaching in a little country church in Slydell as
(04:35):
a student, little one room church out in the Wheatfield.
I graduated from college magna cum laude, and the cover
of TV Guide in my cap and gown at twenty three.
He opened up the cover and there's my wife, Shirley,
had four little girls. This all happened so fast. I
(04:56):
had won, seemed like incidentally. I had won the Ted
Macamateur three weeks in a row while I was still
in Nashville, and it was the forerunner of shows like
You Know The Voice and America's Got Talent. The winners
were selected by the viewers with cards and letters. The
show would appear on Saturday night and by Thursday the
(05:16):
votes were counted, and if you won one week, you
would come back for another, and I won three weeks
in a row. Well, I was thinking of being a
singer at that point, but nothing came up, no contracts,
no offers. I just had one I could say in
my resume. I had won the Ted Macamateur Hour, but
nothing seemed to happen from it. And I get a
(05:39):
call from New York and they're assembling all the three
time winners to come back and compete with each other. Well,
I was one, and so I was on that show
and they told me I was winning. But while I
was having to wait in New York, I couldn't afford
to go back to Texas and then back to New
York again in a seedy little hotel off Times Square
(06:04):
until they let me know if I was winning or not.
So while I was waiting, I went on Arthur Godfrey's
Talent Show on a Monday after being on the Talent
Show Saturday, and auditioned for the Arthur Godfrey Show, which
was a Monday night, and they put me on that
Monday night and I won. Well, that disqualified me from
(06:27):
the Ted Macamateur Hour because you can't be a professional
winner on Monday. And then me declared an amateur winter
the following Saturday, and I blew it. It was over.
I came that close to being having a career in music,
but it hadn't happened. I get a call from Randy
(06:51):
Wood of Dot Records outside Nashville. He'd seen all of this.
I was a homeboy, you know, winning these national contests.
Ought that I could make some hit records, and he
asked if I'd like to come to Chicago and record,
and of course I did, not knowing what to expect,
and he had me sing a rhythm and blues song
(07:11):
called two Hearts, two kisses, make one Love. And I
didn't know what R and B was, but I listened
to that record and I picked up on the flavor
of one hearts and a babb two hearts make if
you braze, make.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Hearts two fake one.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
And that song that we recorded immediately sold a million records,
and I had to do a follow up record. So
in May of fifty five, I recorded Fats Dominoes. Ain't
that a shame? His had been number one. R and B,
which was a separate genre called race music, sold one
(08:02):
hundred and fifty thousand. I did his song my way
You made me cry when you said goodbye. Ain't that
a shame? And I did my version of rock and roll,
as we were calling it. Mine sold a million and
a half, ten times what Fats had sold with his
own song, and he was thrilled, and he said many times,
I made more money with Pat Boone's record of my
(08:24):
song than from my own record. But from that time
March of fifty five, for four and a half years,
I was never off the single chart. I hold that
record in the record business, forty one chart records. Elvis
had forty. And he was my opening act the first
time we met. The kids didn't know who he was,
(08:49):
but they liked the way he looked. They didn't like
the way his song sounded, because it was a Bill
Monroe bluegrass song, blue Moon of Kentucky. Keep on shining it.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Keep shining.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Shine on them that's going. And he got lots of
applause when he left the stage that night, and then
I went on and I got all the screams because
I had three million says.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
And you've been listening to Pat Boone share his story
and my goodness, his rise, his meteoric rise in the
music business, it was extraordinary, But my goodness, what he
did with his love, the love of his life, going
on his knees not just to her but to her
father and seeking her hand at the age of nineteen,
and having four kids by the age of twenty three.
(09:45):
Now that's audacious. When we come back more of Pat
Boone's story here on our American story, and we returned
(10:10):
to our American stories and the story of Pat Boone
and his wife Shirley. When we last left off, Pat
had shot into stardom rather unexpectedly. Let's return to the
story here again. It's Pat Boone.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
So this all happened. I wasn't seeking it. It all
just fell on me. I thought it was a fluke.
I didn't think this career thing was going to last,
even though I was having one hit record after the other.
But I was also having one child after the other,
and I knew I had to plan on something I
could count on, which would be teaching. Well, the day
(10:49):
I took my last class at Columbia, I thought I
was going to look for a teaching job. I lay
down on the grass in Central Park by myself and thought,
wait a minute, I've got a seven year movie deal
at twenty century Fox. I've got the record contract I
guess I'm going to have to wait before I apply
for a teacher job. But I always had the sense
from that time on that it was for a reason
(11:12):
that I was going to be a teacher preacher originally,
and I was being given a different kind of platform,
and as a rock and roll singer, not as a
preacher and a teen idol. The weird thing is I
(11:33):
became a literal teen idol. Elvis's only competition, and he
was single and theoretically romantically available, and the girls all
swooning over him. But everywhere I appeared around the world,
they were swooning over me. And yet I was married
with four kids. I mean, it didn't seem likely. There's
(11:54):
never been anybody in show business with that kind of
a life. Was hectic life, it was. You know, my
folks have been very leary of me being an entertainer.
They thought that if I entered the entertainment world, I
would be swept away and I would lose my faith. Well,
my faith was a real part of who I am,
(12:15):
so I wasn't losing my faith. But I was enjoying
being invited to all the souall rats, the parties, the premieres,
and I did some drinking. I was never drunk. They
made a lot of jokes about me. Of course, Dean
Martin over and over again in his shows for some reason,
he'd bring my name up, that bad boone. He's so religious.
(12:37):
I shook hands with that boy the other day. My
whole right side over that.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Y'all know, Pad Boone. I guess y'all know, Pad, But
what care you're putting me honest about.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
He's a beautiful guy.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
He doesn't drink, doesn't go to nightclub, I don't stay la.
That's a nice, clean, monotonous life.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
I brought those straws because I hear you sip a
little oh.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
You know, his idea of a big night of staying home,
drinking cocoa and rinsing out his shoes.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
And then Phil and Andy Williams show, Phil Harris the
comedian band leader. He said, Pat, you drink something sometimes,
don't you. I said no, I knew he meant alcoholic.
I said, no, you don't drink nothing never, And I
just went with it. I said no. He said to Andy,
can you imagine waking up in the morning knowing that's
as good as you're going to feel all day long?
(13:37):
And then he said, oh Boone, we kid you paled,
but we love you. If I ever had a son,
i'd want him to be just like Pat Boone untill
he's about three years old. And you know those jokes,
just I repeat them in my shows. But I just
would show that I could be part of the party
(13:57):
like anybody else. I would go and be home with
the girls, and I'd go and I'd have fun. And
that was without my realizing it. It was pulling us
somewhat apart because I was obviously having a part of
my life with something she wasn't really as much a
part of anymore. She's home taking care of the daughters
and I'm out enjoying my fame. And of course I
(14:20):
was gone a lot. At one point she got out
the calendar and showed me that I was gone fifty
percent of that year. And that's no way to be
a real good father and husband either. Though she was
keeping me involved with the girls all the time. Let's
do what daddy wants here, let's write daddy. She was
keeping me in their lives though I was physically absent.
(14:41):
So now we hit a period where of almost two
years where we began to live like boarders in a
boarding house. We were very polite, loving toward each other,
but there was no romance really, and the kids they
could tell, and there was then a recognition on both
our parts that we needed to make spiritual renewals. It
(15:07):
happened at a moment when I was walking in this
house where I am now, past the piano and a
picture of Shirley is a about a three year old
girl with her arms around her daddy's neck, Redfoli's neck,
this loving being with her daddy and him loving her,
and that picture always touched me. And this day I
stood looking at that picture and I began to well up.
(15:32):
Tears began to well up, and I realized, she's still
that little girl. Her dad's gone, been gone a long time.
Those arms are supposed to be around my neck. And
I am the only hope for my four little girls
to have the home life and the growing up and
the married mom and dad that I want them to have.
(15:53):
And it's up to me to get perfectly straight in
my life. And I told her how that picture had
affected me. Father's Day came soon after that, and she
gave me a picture of herself as a three year old,
but sitting alone as a little child, which she happened
to her a lot when her dad was gone. Just
(16:13):
a picture of that three little child sitting there alone
without her dad, and on the back of that picture
she wrote, take care of this girl. She needs you.
I'm telling you that experience the recognition on both our
parts that for us to have the continued life that
(16:38):
we wanted to have for ourselves and especially for our daughters,
all their friends were coming. They were living in broken homes,
you know, in the entertainment business. And we came back together,
we made new spiritual renewals of our own vows and faith,
and we were suddenly hugging and loving. And the kid
(17:00):
could see that something had happened to mom and daddy,
and then they wanted that too. And it's what we
call the infilling of the Holy Spirit. It is asking
the Holy Spirit to live in you, not just to
be around and to bless you, but to actually dwell
in you. And that's an important commitment to make. So
we did, and that renewal saw us through the rest
(17:21):
of our marriage and into now. And I know that
she's waiting for me. Because he said that he was
in his father's house were many mansions, and I go
to prepare a place for you, those of you who
want to live here and who choose to live here
by the way you live your lives. And I know
she's there waiting for me, and we're going to be together.
(17:43):
So when people say something about my wife passing, I said, yes,
she passed into heaven. She didn't die. She's alive, very
much alive. And I talked to her all the time.
You know, I've had friends saying, you know, there's this
seventy seven year old woman who's very athletic, and you
ought to get with her. I said, no, no, there's
(18:04):
never going to be another missus Pat Boone, and I'm
getting close to being reunited with her every day. So
that's that's our story.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
It's ongoing and a terrific job on the production, editing
and storytelling by her own Monte Montgomery. And a special
thanks to Pat Boone for sharing not only the story
of his pop life, his music life, his life is
a star, but as a father figure, as a husband,
(18:32):
and as a person of faith as a Christian. I
wasn't seeking it, he said about his fame. It all
fell on me. I thought it was a fluke. I
had one hit after another, but I had one child
after another. He was contemplating being a teacher and a preacher,
but he decided to do stardom a different way, without
the booze, without the train wrecks. And my goodness, that
(18:55):
story of seeing the picture of his wife as a
little girl with her arms around her father's shoulders, well
I teared up just listening to it, and I'm sure
you did too. A beautiful story about love, about romance,
about faith and how it rises above everything and preserves everything.
(19:16):
Pat Boone's life story here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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