Chad Roller and Laci Robinson were too busy being carefree to notice one another as kids. As they got older they only had eyes for each other.
Laci was 10 or 11 when she started camping with her friend’s family at the John F. Kennedy campground on Greers Ferry Lake in Heber Springs. Her friend’s mom and Chad’s mom were best friends, so Chad was often nearby on those trips.
“We weren’t super close friends or anything,” Laci says.
They were part of a gaggle of kids playing outside, riding bikes together, swimming in the lake and playing wiffle ball.
Both grew up in Vilonia, and they saw one another around town, but there was little interaction.
“I always saw his brother probably a lot more than him,” she says. “He played high school basketball, and I was always at those games with my friend.”
Chad remembers young Laci as a tomboy.
“She’s very athletic. She had the long basketball shorts, sometimes a short bobbed haircut,” says Chad. “Then she grew that blond hair out and got really attractive.”
The long hair appeared when she was 14 and he was 16.
When he saw Laci in the bleachers at a high school football game, he made his way over.
“I remember he just came up and started talking to me,” she says. “After sixth or seventh grade my friend kind of quit camping, so I really didn’t see him. We hadn’t been around each other for a while at that point.”
Laci’s parents said no to her dating before she was 16, especially someone two years older.
“To my parents that was like 10 years,” she says.
They were both into sports — volleyball, basketball and softball for her and football for him — so in the fall of 2000, they got together to shoot hoops.
Laci, by the way, is the better baller, according to Chad.
“She is, by far,” he says. “She played for the state title and I never made it to the court.”
Chad went to Arkansas State University in Beebe after high school, and two years later he left college to work full-time for a carwash company in Little Rock, at roughly the same time Laci graduated high school and started classes at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.
For the Fourth of July in 2006, Chad and Laci were on a boat on Greers Ferry, waiting for the fireworks show to start.
“We got a boat so we would enjoy that with our friends and family,” Laci says. “We got engaged on the night of the fireworks. That’s kind of the place where we started as kids.”
It was a time of transition, as Laci started X-ray and radiation school, Chad explains.
In September 2006, Chad’s brother, Charlie, died after a battle with cancer. That same year, Chad started a new job in insurance. He had moved back in with his parents while building a home in Vilonia for him and Laci. There was painter’s tape — and there were no blinds — on the windows when they moved in as newlyweds.
They were married on May 12, 2007, at First Baptist Church in Vilonia, with 385 people looking on.
“It was a very big wedding for the town of Vilonia, but we had grown up there and we were a big part of a lot of people’s lives,” Laci says.
The Rollers started a golf tournament benefit in Charlie’s memory — it’s in its 18th year — and they spent the early years of their marriage traveling and having fun with friends.
“We still go to JFK a lot and we started camping at the beach at Gulf State Park as a family,” Chad says. “We didn’t have our daughter, Harper, until I was 30.”
Harper will be 11 in January. Chad and Laci adopted Hadlee and Hayes, 7 and 6 years old, through the foster care system.
The couple has faced some health challenges in recent years. In 2021, Laci had back surgery and acquired an invasive fungal infection.
“I almost lost my life,” she says. “They operated six times in seven days trying to get the infection out.”
She spent weeks in the hospital, and when the infection was under control she needed to learn to walk and talk again, and then had to undergo a series of reconstructive surgeries.
“We kind of exhausted all of our resources in Arkansas because this was so rare, and they sent me to the University of Alabama at Birmingham,” Laci says.
Chad will be at her side this week as she recovers from another surgery, involving a titanium implant, made for her in Germany, to restructure her jaw and cheekbone.
“We have a lot of history in the however-many-years we’ve been together, between fertility battles, and being foster parents and adopting two kids and Chad lost his brother and now this,” Laci says. “I’m thankful that we had all those years together because having that strong foundation prior to all this, I do believe, is what has let us do it all together. We have stuck it out and worked together through all the difficulties that we’ve faced.”
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The first time I really noticed my future spouse:
She says: “He talked to me in the bleachers at a football game. I was nervous because he was older than me, and excited because I always thought he was cute.”
He says: “I thought, ‘Wow, she turned into that good-looking ninth grader. Here I am in 11th grade and I’m going to go back to junior high and get a girlfriend.'”
On our wedding day:
She says: “I felt overwhelmed because there were so many people who came out to support us. I had no idea that many people had come until they opened the doors for me to walk down the aisle. I just remember the tears flowing.”
He says: “I kind of went from having my brother to be very close to, to now Laci was obviously my closest companionship.”
My advice for a long happy marriage:
She says: “You have to work together. No matter what comes, being on the same page and working together, you’re going to get through that situation a lot easier.”
He says: “You have to extend grace to each other. If you don’t have grace and forgiveness, you’re really going to struggle.”
