Working in the soda shop on East Carolina University’s campus kept Pat Purvis busy, and she didn’t really pay much attention to the young man who would come in multiple times to order from her — that is, until he asked her on a date.
“I don’t know what made me notice her to begin with,” Doug Brown, now 84, said of his future wife. He finally got the courage to ask Pat on a date in December 1954, and the couple hasn’t looked back.