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8: Interview with Lanora Webb

Date: April 2008

Place: The home of Lanora Webb on the farm north and east of Liberal

Interviewer: Donita Priefert Payne

LW: My name is Lanora Webb. I live in Liberal, Kansas on the farm. I have lived here since 1949. I was married in 1945. We lived a year in Stevens County and the landlord’s son decided that he’d like to have the farm, so we moved to Moscow. We had three good years up there and the landlord’s son decided that he would like to have the farm, so the next time we decided it was time to buy. We moved here in
’49 and bought the place and been here ever since. We built a home here in ’59 so have been in the same house since ’59.

DP: Let’s talk about where you were born, who your family was and where you lived and the Dust Bowl.

LW: I was born in Stevens County south of Hugoton almost on the state line, down in the sand, in 1924. My parents were Haven and Kelly Stevens. They had grown up around Tyrone, so they had been in this area almost all their lives. My dad was born in Missouri and Mom was born in Oklahoma when it was No Man’s Land. They came to Stevens County in 1915 when my brother was just a baby. They built a home.
They were filing on land at that time that most of the land had been taken. This particular place, one of the neighbors had filed on it and then had not kept up everything so Dad bought it, a relinquishment as they called it at that time, on the place. It is kind of fun to look at the Deed because there’s not much on it. It goes back a long way. They built a two-room house there that they lived in for a long time and I
grew up there. They later remodeled it and then eventually moved to Hooker, Oklahoma, built a nice home there.

As we think about the Dust Bowl, I was actually just six or seven years old when the Dust Bowl started. So I thought it was normal. [Laughing] I didn’t really realize that we were having a terrible time. I knew that money was tight and that we didn’t have a lot of extras and things like that, but we always had plenty of food. Mom was a wonderful cook. They raised a big garden. They canned. They butchered their
own meat, they had beef and pork. I think the winters were colder in those days because I can remember that Dad would always hang a quarter of beef up in the windmill and it kept there all winter long. He’d bring it down and bring it in the house and slice off some steaks and put it back up in the windmill. It would keep. It would not keep anymore because the winters are too warm.

I knew that a lot of people were having problems but everybody did, so we weren’t unusual. Most of my clothes probably were made out of chicken feed sacks but they were nice because they made them that way, the material was good. Mom sewed them up and they looked very nice. Now, that was not the only clothes that I had, but I sure wore of lot of them that way. You would think that in two rooms -we had
just my brother and I and he was nine years older than I – four people in a house would be enough. But my grandfather died in 1929. There was a time that my grandmother lived with us and also an aunt who was not married. In fact, it seemed that the folks always had somebody extra that they were taking care of. I had a real good friend who eventually lost both her parents before she was a teenager and she spent an enormous lot of time at our house. There was always somebody there. We never did go on relief or anything like that. I think we had one advantage for the Dust Bowl days in the fact that we were pretty well surrounded by grassland. It definitely blew but it was not what a lot of people had. I can’t remember that Dad ever had a complete failure. He always raised a little something whether it was just cow feed or what, but he always raised something. One thing that I remember about the climate, we would get rains usually one or two in the spring but so many times they would be five- and six-inch rains and they would fall so hard and so fast that they did absolutely no good. They just run off the ground. Of course, we did live in the sand and that helped.

The first real storm that I remember was the famous one on April 14, ’35. My dad and brother had gone to a rabbit drive down by Tyrone. Mom and I were home alone. It was a beautiful, beautiful day. I looked outdoors, there was this terrible cloud coming up. ‘Course we had enough of those that I recognized what it was. This one came up so fast. One of the things that I remember about it was that to me it
looked purple. But nobody else that I have asked what color did they remember that storm that was coming up, they would say grey, or brown or something like that. But nobody used the word purple, so I was so glad when I read your book (The Worst Hard Time) because somebody had mentioned the purple storm that came up. [Laughing] But that is the way I remember it, that it had a purplish cast. I remember that as it hit, Mom and I sat there in our living room and it was very true that you could not see your hand in front of your face, it was that black. Of course, Dad and Glen were gone, and we worried about them, but later in the evening they managed to find their way back.

Never did find out what happened to all the rabbits that they had rounded up at that time. I think probably they had killed some of them by that time. It was just so amazing the number of rabbits that were in the country. I can remember that sometime before that we were having an awful time with coyotes and I can remember my brother helping to poison some of the coyotes. They got rid of the coyotes and then the rabbits took over. So, God knows what he is doing when he puts all these animals here. [Laughing] But the rabbits were horrible. A lot of people ate rabbit. One of our neighbors had rabbit fever and was very, very ill. The rabbits had some sort of a disease, some of them did. I don’t think all of them did by any means, but some did and that is how you managed to get this. Once in a great while Dad would consent to eat a cottontail but never ever a jack rabbit. One of my memories is we would be coming home from Grange or something of an evening and the rabbits would be crossing the road and Dad would try to hit them, you know, with our old Plymouth. [Laughing] He was forever killing rabbits that way. Today we would think that was pretty reckless driving. He was a good driver, never had any problem that way. [Laughing] He killed a lot of rabbits.

I read this book that you gave me. I think that it must have been worse down around Dalhart than it was here, at least in the area that I was living in. From what I have heard I think it was not very far west to where it got worse in a hurry. In the next county west, Morton county, and then into Colorado. We never went hungry. I don’t really know anybody that did. There were people that went on relief. A lot of our neighbors did. We never did. Dad always felt that he could take care of his family and he did. My brother was in high school during those years. He went, I think it was three years, and rather than drive him to Hugoton to school (we were 13 miles from Hugoton) he would spend the week in town from Monday to Friday. He had a roommate and lived at a lady’s house. I think they did their own cooking and all. I did the same thing later on. They decided that they just did not have money enough to send him to school that last year and so he stayed out for two years. Everybody said, well, he’ll never go back if he stays out. But he did and graduated in ’35 I think it was.

One of the things I remember, the summer he graduated he had had several graduation gifts. He had played ball one afternoon, that was one of the things we did for entertainment was go to ball games. He loved to play. We bought our groceries on Saturday afternoon and came home in time to milk the cows. When we got home we discovered that our home had been robbed. Quite a number of things were
taken including my brother’s graduation gifts. He was pretty unhappy. Mom had a new pressure cooker which was also taken. Just a number of things. We never did find out where they went.

You asked about dust pneumonia, one of our closest neighbors died of dust pneumonia . His son later became my brother-in-law. I didn’t know a lot of people [who died of dust pneumonia] but certainly we remember this fellow, I think he was just in his 40s. A lot of us wore dust masks. It kind of looks like a pig’s snout, the dust mask that we wore. They did have a filter, and I can’t remember just exactly how that filter went. There were a lot of people wore them and they did help. The kids were looking at one this week and it says, “Army issue”. I think during Roosevelt’s time that is probably when they came out. [Lanora and Donita look at the dust mask Lanora has.]

DP: That is quite a memento. Interesting.

LW: Yes, it is kind of the worse for the wear, but I thought you would be interested in seeing it.

DP: What was your family routine like in your growing up years?

LW: One of the things I guess that I should tell you is that I did not grow up in a Christian home. My dad was a well driller as he was growing up with the settling of this country and drilled a lot of the first wells in this country, even some of the city wells. He said that the only people that ever cheated him were those that were in church every Sunday. So he had no use for Christians, until finally, I think he saw Christ lived out in a son-in-law and a son and he began to see that maybe he had missed something along the way and he finally accepted Christ when he was 70. He never missed a Sunday in church after that. He was very faithful. What I remember about the family, my dad was strict, but he was a good dad as far as that was concerned. Other than the fact that we did not learn anything about Christ until they did take us to church one time when I was just early teens and I accepted Christ at that time. But I was ignorant. I knew nothing, really, until after I was married. I would say that your mother helped me as much as anybody in teaching. I have gone to many of her classes where we studied from books from Moody Bible Institute and that kind of thing. I started teaching the Sunday·School classes shortly after I was married and have been teaching ever since, that is over 60 years now. Many years with junior highs, the last 14 I have been teaching an adult class.

Back to what it was like at home. Dad was very much the boss of the family. He had a temper that was born into him. The whole family had a terrible temper, it seemed. It started with his dad. His dad used to chase the kids with a bull whip and my dad carried the scars until the day he died. So that affected his life a lot. But he was good to us kids, he never touched one of us as far as hurting us was concerned. He
loved us, he was one that, you know, during those days people didn’t say “I love you”, but you knew it. Mom was very good to us. She was a wonderful cook. Known in the whole community for her cooking. She liked to do fancy work, particularly tatting. She tatted tablecloths, bedspreads, pillowcases, some of which we still have. She had wanted to accept Christ when she was a small child. She wanted to join the
Methodist Church, but her folks were Baptists and they told her “No”. She did not join the church until Dad did . She was so happy that they were both together in church . She died of cancer just before she was 80. They were good parents. They did not teach us Christ. But they were good parents. Dad did not like to work late in the field. He was a wonderful farmer, but he thought you could get so much done in
a day and that was enough. He would get up early, but he always came in fairly early too . He was one that always liked to look ahead. I might say, as long as he had plenty he had the latest things. We had one of the first mechanical refrigerators in the community which was an [brand name not distinguishable], which lots of people never heard of. It looked a lot like a coke box but it had two big balls. He would take one out and[(heat] it and stick the other one in the box. One of the balls hung on the inside and one on the outside and it would keep the box cold and would freeze at least one tray of ice or ice cream.

Things were going very well through the ’20s until the crash. He had to slow down. He liked to work with photography and he developed his own pictures and things like that. He said his first automobile he bought from his brother in pieces and brought the motor home in a cream can. But he put it back together and had his first car. He went to automobile school when he was in his teens and so he got in kind of on the ground floor and he knew an awful lot about automobiles at that time. He just liked doing those things.

Dad was the one that was quiet. He hated to speak in front of anybody. He was very, very shy. Mom could talk on and on. He was, you know, not that outgoing really, but she didn’t have any trouble talking. She did lots of gardening, worked outdoors an awful lot. I think probably part of it was as I was growing up and my grandmother was there and needed to be taken care of that maybe Mom just needed to get out of the house a little bit. So, it was my job to take care of the house, not so much cooking, but just to take care of the house. See if Grandma needed anything. I can remember we didn’t have air conditioning of course, and those summers got pretty hot. I liked to mop the floor and as it dried, it was clean and a wonderful place to lie down because it was cool on that linoleum floor. [Laughing] Probably most of my reading was done lying on the floor. Many times I would read to my aunt and Grandma and Mom. We took the Kansas City Star and the Capper’s Weekly and things like that and they would have a story in them. While the ladies were all busy doing something, I would read the story to them.

DP: That is a very picturesque scene, I think. Don’t you think so?

LW: I suppose. Life was built around the Grange and the school, community life. We were always at Grange. I said that my dad was very quiet, and he was, but he was the one that was voted in as treasurer because they knew that he was honest and that he was capable. He served as Grange treasurer and on the school board for years and years. Our school activities, we would have ciphering matches and that
kind of thing. I was always good at mathematics and so I loved the ciphering matches because I could nearly always cipher everybody down. One of the boys in the neighboring school liked to tease me, he could beat me in subtraction but not in anything else.

DP: Do you remember going to Grange with your parents and what the kids did?

LW: Well, it wasn’t too long until they had us in there as officers. I remember Delmer and I were assistant and lady assistant steward. Boy it has been so long since I have been in Grange, but that is the way I remember it. We were active that way.

DP: Did they have programs after the business and the ritual?

LW: You know, I don’t remember that. I just don’t remember whether we did or not in the Grange. We did at school. We had lots of programs.

DP: Do you remember what some of programs were like?

LW: Dinners. Oh, we would say our pieces, our recitations. Or we would have a play. Had all kinds of programs. Those that were musically inclined, which didn’t include me, would sing or play the piano or something like that.

DP: Did people do silly skits?

LW: Yes. Some. We had a neighbor that did things like that once in a while, but mostly it would be the kids doing it. We did have 4-H Clubs. I joined 4-H when I was ten and went until I was 17, I believe. Went to Manhattan to Round-up. Got several awards in 4-H. Always enjoyed that. Learned probably more about cooking through 4-H than I did from my mother. As I said, Mom was a wonderful, wonderful cook
but she never used a recipe and her measurements were a heaping of this and a scant that and I never could follow her recipes. I learned to cook through 4-H which was very exact in the recipes.

Speaking about how Mom cleaned house during the dirty ’30s. I was an early teenager by that time and cleaning house wasn’t much fun unless we’d had just a really bad duster and you could look at the windows and the sand had collected until it was running off the window sill onto the floor. I thought that was kind of fun because I could tell where I had been when I cleaned the house. I also thought about, it wasn’t just in the ’30s that we had dust, we had it again in the ’50s. It got pretty bad here where we live now. We had planted some land to grass and we got one of the worst dust storms just after we had planted the ground. We did get grass out of it but I am sure a lot of it blew away. It was during the ’50s that money got pretty tight around here and Delmer worked at Light’s Mill for a while in order to have a little extra money to go on. We also had dust again in the ’70s. We did not have rain enough to go around. It is a dry country. There have been many good years but there have been some hard years too, through that time.

I think this is all very disconnected as what I have been thinking is not in order. But I was thinking back to as I was growing up, I graduated in 1941. Was valedictorian of my class in Hugoton. Delmer was drafted in August ’41 and I began to work at Citizens State Bank in Hugoton . I worked there until ’45. As I said he was drafted in August and then that December was Pearl Harbor. We became engaged December 27th
that year. Delmer was in the Army. He did not go overseas until late ’44. He was in the South Pacific. He had a nervous breakdown and was put into the hospital for a while. He also contacted malaria over there. He was discharged in February of ’45. Every month he would come down with a case of malaria until we discovered that if would take his ______ which was the way they treated it, if he would take it before he had an attack that that stopped it and he never did have anymore then after that. We were married April Fools’ Day in 1945, which everybody teased us about. But that was Easter Sunday and we were married in our little country church out west of Liberal. It was a beautiful, beautiful day. Everybody teased us because we were going south on our honeymoon, it snowed that week while we were gone. So, we got the last laugh there.

We had five children. We lost one at three days old, a little boy. We had three boys and finally a girl. The doctor had a terrible time convincing Delmer that he really had a girl. But we did. Howard was our oldest, he is an architect down at Fort . Darrel is next, he lives three miles from me. He is a farmer. He and his wife own the Flower Basket. Arden lives on the old home place where his grandfather and
grandmother lived. He bought that. He is an appraiser in Liberal. He worked at First National for over 20 years and decided that he’d had enough banking and so he resigned and became an appraiser and he seems to have enjoyed that very much. He got into partnership with a fellow that fell over dead these last few months and so that has made it pretty hard as he has tried to put things back together and be the sole owner now. His wife is a homemaker, they have three children . They had two children that they adopted, one boy. The two oldest are married. The boy they adopted is a sophomore this year. Howard has three children, five grandchildren. Darrel and Rozelle have one grandchild and are looking for their second one. They are very, very proud grandparents. Rozelle is the director of the Chamber of
Commerce so she is very very busy. Has done a wonderful job. Howard’s wife is a schoolteacher. My daughter is director of education at our church here in Liberal. Her name is Laura. She was married to a man that went into the pastorate right out of college. He was a Baptist minister for close to 20 years. They had two children. They were coming to see me at Thanksgiving 2004 when another car slipped on the ice and hit them head-on. Jay and the two children were killed. Laura has been by herself ever since. She was hurt in the accident but not seriously. It has been a pretty rough time, but she has handled it beautifully and it has been such a help to so many people since that time. She just seems to always be where there is somebody in need. She was even over to a lake east of here when. a young man died and
was drowned. She was the one that ministered to the family. She is just always better in those times. Seems like there have been lots of them.

There is a break in the tape.

[Name not distinguishable] asking me sometime after he [Delmer] had died, what we used to fight about. [Laughing] I told him that after waiting for over four years during the war somehow or other those little things don’t seem so serious anymore. We didn’t do a lot of fighting.

My husband’s name was Delmer Webb. He grew up just seven miles from me. However, we were in different school districts. We kind of went our separate ways because, like I said, community life was built around the school. We didn’t really get acquainted until through Grange more than anything else. We began to date, and then he was called into the Army. We worked together a lot. Our pastor said
after he [Delmer] died that he never remembers seeing one of us that he didn’t see the other one. We were always together. Not that he hated to cook, he was not about to help me with the cooking, but I can remember many times when he helped with the laundry, especially in the days when the laundry was harder to do than it is now. He was always so good to help with the kids. He was always supportive of me and I appreciated that very much. He was a deacon in the church for close to 40 years, I guess. He always enjoyed that very much. He taught Sunday School, was teaching the adult class that I am teaching now when he died. I had taught in the junior high department for 35 or 40 years and I decided that I was getting a little old for that and so I was considering changing and he had even asked me to
teach the _____ class but we hadn’t done anything about it. He died December 7, ’94 and first of January I started teaching the class. He had thought that he had some heart problems, had been doctored quite a little bit and seemed to be doing fine. He had had a really bad cold that December and he got up that morning and was feeling much better. He worked in Gideons a lot, was the treasurer of the Gideons. He said that he thought he would take the receipts to town and put them in the bank. We had had Gideons on the Saturday night before and he had not felt like going and he had sent me. It was the first time that I had ever gone to Gideons by myself and it was over at Hugoton. I remember thinking as I drove home that night, I hope this isn’t training. But it was. I had brought home the receipts from that meeting, so that morning he decided that he was feeling so much better that he would take them to town. We had had quite an ice storm during the night, and he went out to look at the damage to the trees and there were just tree branches everyplace. He just looked around and came back in the house and he had just walked inside the kitchen door and said I can’t seem to get my breath. He laid down on the floor and died within ten minutes. It was quite a shock but it was – I have never been able to do anything but say thank you because he didn’t have to suffer. As Arden explained it to the grandkids, because it was so hard for them. He said, “Do you remember that I always told you kids to stop playing
while you were still having fun. So that’s what Grandad did .” [Sweet laughing] So I’ve always remembered that, that he got to stop playing while he was still having fun.

DP: I remember him as a very jolly person. He was a jokester

LW: Oh yes, definitely. He never really grew up. Everybody always thought that he was younger than I was but he was five years older [Laughing] I was always older and he was always younger than we really were.

DP: People enjoyed having him around because he was such a pleasant person.

LW: He was very much looking forward to celebrating our fiftieth anniversary. As the years went by, he was even more so. He always liked to do things for me. If I said I wanted something I had to be careful when I said what I wanted because he would soon give it to me. He was looking forward to our celebration. It was to be April 1st in ’95 and we had begun making a few plans. He.had bought a special vase and flower arrangement for me for our engagement celebration, to celebrate our engagement 50 years ago in ’94. It had written on it “50 years”. So, we got to celebrate 50 years of engagement but not 50 years of marriage.

We were married April 1, 1945 and we planted a garden the next week after the snow melted. We never missed having a garden all those years. We raised just about everything through the years. We had peas, green beans, corn, carrots, parsnips, radishes, onions, lettuce, and strawberries. We liked to try new things. We didn’t always have the same thing every year. As the boys got into 4-H they helped us in the
garden. They not only helped in the garden, but I think they learned to eat their vegetables that way. Somehow or other we _____ up before Laura was born and she had so much 4-H by that time that she decided she did not want more 4-H and so she wasn’t in it. She didn’t learn to eat her vegetables and I think … [Laughing] Part of our problem was that she had had an awful lot of trouble with her tonsils as a child and so there were some things that she couldn’t eat for a long time until she had those tonsils out. The boys used to tease her that the only things she ever ate were wieners and applesauce because they were soft, and they went down all right. I remember they also used to tease that she would have to take her foot stool along in order to get on the bus to go to school when she started to school. She was
so little, but she managed without her footstool. [Laughing]

Back to the garden, we liked to work out there. I have been over the garden many, many times on my hands and knees to pick the weeds out. I remember when we had a carpenter out here and he just stood and watched, he said he’d never seen anybody go over a garden on their hands and knees. [Laughing] We got the weeds out. It was beautiful to see the garden. To protect the garden from the
wind we nearly always had morning glories on the fence on the north and the west.

DP: The wind is so constant and so strong here.

LW: In later years we have had more trouble with cotton tails than anything else. There are some things I just can’t find ’cause cotton tails have eaten them, that’s all there is to it. I found out that they don’t particularly care for tomatoes and they don’t care for okra so I can raise those. They really like the little green onions, radishes, so I just quit trying to raise those. I used to can an awful lot, not only out of the garden but we used to buy fruit by the bushel. I remember one time we had a fire in the community, and I sent Darrel to the cellar to get, I think I told him two quarts of each kind of fruit that I had down there. His favorite fruit was pears, so he comes back with peaches, plums and all these other things but no pears and says that I don’t think they like pears anyway. [Laughing] So we always teased him about that. He was just a little fellow.

DP: When your children went off to college where did they go?

LW: I started to say they all went to K-State. They all graduated from K-State. Howard went to Ottawa which is a Baptist University his first year, but he wanted to be an architect and they did not have what he needed there for architecture, so he transferred to K-State. The others all started at K-State.

DP: Where did your daughter and her husband go to seminary?

LW: In Kansas City at the Southern Baptist Seminary.

DP: Midwestern I think it is called . Talk about your life now in the country, how you are feeling about those things, how you enjoy being here.

LW: Well, lots of people think maybe I need my head examined because I have stayed here on the farm. But it is where I am at home. I like it here very much. I have not been afraid to stay by myself, I never had any problems that way. I drive to town unless the roads are terribly muddy or icy in which case Darrel comes and gets me if I need some help that way. For the most part I have been able to drive. I like
to be by myself. I like to have company. I do have company a lot. Last weekend I had eight junior high boys and their sponsor. The youth deal spent the weekend with me. So, there’s nearly always somebody here. I enjoy that but then in between times I like to be by myself. I spend a lot of time studying for my Sunday School class. I like the quiet. I got tired of the kind of TV that was on quite some time ago, so I
have not had a TV for the last five or six ye·ars. I can watch things on TV but I don’t get the regular TV. I have CDs and things like that. Otherwise, it’s really pretty quiet around here. Laura came to visit a few years ago and somebody asked her about how she was going to spend her time . She wanted to know if her mother had a computer and Laura laughed and said that no, Mom doesn’t even have a TV. The lady said, “What are you going to do while you are there? Laura said well, we all visit and we all play cards and we’ll read and rest. We don’t have any trouble finding something to do. The lady said, “Oh like church camp!” Laura said, “Yep, that’s where I was raised, like church camp.” [Laughing] So that has been a family joke ever since.

One thing that maybe I haven’t talked about was how we spent our time for entertainment during the years when I was growing up. We liked to play cards and we played everything under the sun, I guess. I don’t think we ever played poker and we never did learn to play bridge. But we played dozens of card games. There were four of us in the family, so it made it nice for cards. That’s the way I learned to count, was playing cards. Then we also had card parties in the community. We liked to go to ball games. My brother played. Delmer played. All the young men in the community played and we had a lot of teenage boys and early married men that were really good ball players. They were known all over the country. We would follow them around. Baseball or softball, either one. So those were some of the ways. And then, I think I mentioned that we had a lot of company as I was growing up. I remember that I had lots and lots of cousins down around Tyrone and they loved to come up and see the folks. They would come up and you know, maybe eight or ten of them at a time. There we were in our two-room house but they would come up in the summer time and then they would sleep wherever, maybe out in the barn, maybe in the yard. They’d take the cushions out of their cars. Mom would make fudge or popcorn or things like that and they would just have a wonderful time. One of the things that we loved to do and had done for years was have a Dutch oven roast. We used the Dutch oven that my dad used out on the range which was a three-legged iron pot that was about 12 inches across, had a flat lid. You built a fire underneath it
and you put a fire on top of it. You could cook most anything in it, but what we cooked in it that we liked the best was potatoes and chicken together, frying together. There just isn’t anything like it, it was just wonderful.

DP: Did you fry the chicken in lard?

LW: I am sure that in the early days that Mom did use lard, but for years we used Crisco to fry in, that is about all I have ever used.

DP: Lard gives things such a nice flavor.

LW: It was so good. Eventually, I think everybody in the family had a Dutch oven and then when Darrel and Rozselle’s son was married, they talked about what they would do for the rehearsal dinner. He said, “I want a Dutch oven roast.” So, the family that was here and the people that were in the wedding, I think they had 75, came to a Dutch oven roast in their back yard. I don’t remember how many Dutch ovens they used but it was a lot. Rozelle is wonderful at organization so each of us had our job. There were one or two fellows that looked after each Dutch oven when it came time to do the cooking. It just went off as smooth as could be. It was wonderful. What was bothering us was that it was in June and anything can happen with the weather here in June. It can be raining, it can be doing most anything, and Darrel was sure that it was going to be a _____ but it wasn’t. We began to pray about it, Glenda and I particularly, Arden’s wife, quite some time ahead. The thing that was bothering us the most was that we usually had millers about that time. And we could just see the millers around those Dutch ovens so we started praying and would you believe there was not a miller that season. The evening was absolutely perfect. Later that night it rained a big rain.

DP: Talk about the millers. I remember a lot about that.

LW: They can get in anyplace I do believe. They are like a moth. This house has always been pretty tight but somehow or other the millers will get in. One time we had gone to Manhattan for something for one of the kids at school and the boys always kept an aquarium in the basement and they had left the light on in the aquarium. When we got back home that aquarium was full of millers. It was horrible. The
whole house was full of millers. It was just terrible. And they stain up everything so bad. I always hated the millers. They are not here every year, but they seem to have a cycle. Usually every year we have millers, but they are so much worse, can’t remember whether it is every seven years or what, but every so many years, they are just terrible.

DP: Have to scrub the walls, clean the curtains.

LW: They stain the windows. I hate those things.

Lanora talks about her family.

Howard has three. Last year, last July, they all came to see me the same week. Howard and Laura and almost all the grandkids came. One of the grandsons and one of the grandsons-in-law didn’t get to come. Everybody else came. They spent a week with me. We just had a great time. Consumed more food that you can imagine during that week.

Ron is Howard’s oldest. He now has two little boys. I haven’t seen the youngest one yet, so I am anxious to see him. Aaron has a boy and a girl. They are the oldest of the grandkids. His daughter is 11 think and the son nine. Molly is his youngest and she has one little boy. Darrin has one little girl, two -and-ahalf. I don’t get to see her often, she is one of the Texas kids and not around her a whole lot but I got to baby sit her not long ago when she came to see Grandma for a few days. It was the same week they had their big Chamber of Commerce banquet so that left Grandma to babysit. We had a big time. She is a pretty chunky little girl. Somebody asked if I could lift her to put her in bed. I said I think so. Come that evening they had brought along a playpen-like thing for her bed so I started to lift her in and she said “I can do it.” Over the top she went. Didn’t have any trouble at all.

DP: What values do you see running through the generations of your family?

LW: I am proud to say that all of them that are old enough have accepted Christ. They are all Christian. They are all working in their church. I am very proud of that. Darrin and Emily were in a church in Wichita . Emily is a doctor and you would think that she wouldn’t have time to do much of anything because she has just gotten her degree and now has her office with a group of doctors. But they have been very active with a church in Wichita . The pastor, four years ago, took 25 people out of that church and told them they wanted them to start a new church. Darrin and Emily were one of the couples chosen. Darrin is Darrel and Roselle’s boy. Think I am right on the timing of that, and now they are having 600 to 700 in the church that was started. So, they are thinking about getting into a building, they have just been using a school. They have to set up every Sunday morning. They are beginning to feel real good about being in a building except that they have been asked to go on the other side of Wichita and start another church. I am sure that is what they will be working at.

Arn and Glen, the two oldest boys, are married. The second one will graduate this spring from K-State. He had planned to teach history, he has always loved history and so I was really looking forward to him being a history teacher. Except that he wasn’t real sure how he and the kids were going to get along. He has always had a little bit of doubt along that line. Anyway, he has worked in the church in Manhattan.
He got acquainted with a couple of professors and they were starting a project on writing the history of the livestock industry in Kansas. They asked him to be a part of that and they told him that if he would do that, they would pay for him to go ahead and get his master’s degree. So that’s the direction he is going to take with his history. The oldest boy has been married for quite a while. His wife is a traveling nurse. They decided to take a couple of years before they had any children and see the world. While he was still in high school, he went with a mission with a doctor that he knew on a mission trip to Nepal. That was special to him. He also went to Israel before he was married. So, he likes to travel, to see the world. When she decided to be the traveling nurse, they decided that she would just be in one place for approximately three months at a time. It is pretty hard to get a job for just three months for a fellow, so their decision was that he would take care of the place and do the cooking. He is a marvelous cook. Then he would volunteer. When they go to a new place, he picks out a mission that he likes and volunteers there. And she makes the living. They have been pretty much all over the United States. They started in Massachusetts and went to Washington D.C. and they have been to California, Arizona, Alaska . They are in Oregon now. They spent three months in Scotland. It has been quite an adventure. I think that they are about ready to settle down and trade roles. [Laughing] He is in woodworking, he can do anything with his hands. Carpentry and that type of thing. That is what he will be working with and that is what he is doing right now out in Oregon, carpentry work for a mission. Wherever he goes they always beg him to please stay. That has been interesting to watch that.

DP: Have your kids commented that any of their children have characteristics like you and Delmar? That often happens, you know.

LW: [Laughing] Well, it was really funny, just quite recently. Everybody has always said that Laura and I are just two peas in a pod. That we are just alike. In lots of ways we are. When they began to get ready for this youth group that came in, they had some special speakers and they had a band that they had worked with before. They knew those but then they wanted eight or ten college kids to take care of the
kids and teach a class in the home wherever they were for short periods of time. She had worked with college kids so much in Mina, Oklahoma so she said she knew where to find the college kids, so she brought about a dozen for the weekend. I got acquainted with the one that stayed out here, so I already knew him. He went back to town after he had stayed out here and he said, “Your mother got the meals,
snacks mostly. She didn’t even let us clean up the place. She always had the towels washed and ready for us to take a shower. She’s not a thing like you!” [Laughing] Laura just laughed and thought that was so funny. She has always had youth in her house. Even since the wreck there are always youth and college kids, always somebody there. She pretty much lets them take care of themselves. “She’s not a thing like you !”

DP: Do your kids or grandkids resemble Delmer in some of their characteristics? Their ways of doing things, their humor?

LW: Darrel is very much like Delmar. Everybody says he looks so much like him. Darrel and Laura and Delmer always thought slow. They did a good job of it, but it was slow, they were slow to speak. Arden is slow to speak. We laugh about that.

DP: Isn’t it interesting how those characteristics carry through. Do they have the good humor that he had as well?

LW: Yes, pretty much.

DP: We are going to end this session. Lanora has these wonderful scrap books we are going to look at. She is fixing lunch for us so we will end this at least for this moment.

Update as of September 2019: Lanora died in 2017. She was almost 93 years old.