My Mother Was An Amazing Person
Mom was born to Charles and Mary Lewis of Enid Oklahoma on October 25th, 1908. Mom was the oldest of five. Mom passed after a fight with cancer on May 27th 1990 living to be 81 years, 7 months, 2 days of age.
Mom and Dad were Mmarried July 24th 1927 in Oklahoma by Dr. Nation who also married Mom's mother and Mom's grandmother!
Their only child, me, was born December 16th 1944 or 17 years, 4 months, 22 days after they were married.... Yes, I was a surprise!
Ernest, Carl, Charles, and Mary Kathryn (who is now on the web with her own computer) completed her family of seven!
Circa 1946
Looking Back
Hard to believe that only 15 years prior to being born, my mom's parents were in Oklahoma. At straight-up noon on September 16, 1893, a gunshot punctuated the excitement as thousands of men, women, and children began their run into the Cherokee Strip. More than 100,000 people entered the strip on horseback, on foot, by train, wagon, and bicycle . . . all seeking a new life on the frontier.
About 20,000 of these people settled in what was to be designated as Garfield County and the County Seat was Enid! Some sources say that a group of cattle drivers who stopped in Government Springs Park to eat turned the "DINE" sign on the cook tent upside down so that it read "ENID."
Mom The Artist And Creator
Mom would go "junking" anytime she could and bring back home the most interesting "things". Dad would groan and find a place to store the potential work of art someplace in the garage or wash room behind the garage!
A few weeks, months or years later that "thing" would be transformed into something else.
What once was an old telephone became the talk of the neighborhood when Mom put a radio inside it, we are talking vacuum tube radio and the year was 1957!
Lessons From Mom
"It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech." -- Mark Twain
"History, although sometimes made up of the few acts of the great, is more often shaped by the many acts of the small." -- Mark Twain
"Education is something you get when your father sends you to college. But it isn't complete until you send your kids there."-- Anon
"The function of education is to help you from childhood not to imitate anybody, but be yourself all the time." --Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then...do something. Don't just stand there, make it happen". --Lee Iacocca
"A good education is not so much one which prepares a man to succeed in the world, as one which enables him to sustain a failure." --Bernard Iddings Bell Chaplain, University of Chicago
Mom's Middle Name: Agalina
Mom got that name becuase her mother was reading a novel and the heroin's name was Agalina.
Definition/Explanation: The name of Agalina has created within you a lovely, generous nature. You will do your utmost to help others in need, despite inconvenience or even hardship to yourself. You are affectionate, and respond quickly to appreciation. As a child you were lovable, and quite expressive. As an imaginative, impressionable person, you could excel in the theatre, as a dramatist or comedienne, and the enjoyment and appreciation of your audience would be your greatest inspiration. Fine as your nature is, at times the power of your feelings is difficult to control and it unleashes itself through outbursts of temper. The name does not engender emotional stability; nor have you the system and order in your thinking always to finish the things you start. Thus, a scattering of efforts interferes with your finding success in your undertakings. A sensitivity could place a hardship upon your nervous system and you could suffer through goiter, or nervous conditions, or experience hysteria or mental repression.
Enid Oklahoma, Where Mom Was Born In 1909
Enid was founded during the opening of the Cherokee Outlet by land run in 1893. Today, the history of this era is preserved at the Museum of the Cherokee Strip, located in Enid. Vance Air Force Base was founded in 1941 on land leased by the city of Enid to the United States Army Air Forces, now the United States Air Force. Enid was once home to Champlin Petroleum; the H. H. Champlin mansion is on the National Register of Historic Places. The town's early history was captured in The Cherokee Strip by Pulitzer-winning author Marquis James, who recounts his boyhood in Enid.
The origin of the name Enid is something of a mystery, although it is considered likely to be a reference to a character in Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King. However, a more fanciful story is much more popular. According to that tale, in the days following the land run, some enterprising settlers decided to set up a chuckwagon and cook for their fellow pioneers, hanging a sign that read "DINE". Some other, more free-spirited settlers, turned that sign upside down, to read, of course, "ENID". The name, as they say, stuck.
Trivia: Various references to Enid, Oklahoma are made in Jurassic Park III .(ex. "I dare 'em to nest in Enid, Oklahoma!" was the final line of the movie)