My parents, Bill and Ella
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11. Shirley 12. Billy Jean 15. Margie Bell |
Bill was born June 7, 1884
in Gibtown, Jack, Texas. He died January 13, 1961 in his sleep at Fletcher,
Oklahoma and he was buried January 15th in the Fletcher Cemetery.
Daddy and Mama share a double stone. Their grave is on the last
row in the SW area of the cemetery. You will not find a death certificate
on Daddy. Dalton's Funeral Home failed to get one.
Ellie, as Dad
called her, was born October 7, 1898 in Forney, Texas. She died November
17, 1973 in a Lawton nursing home of pneumonia. She had cancer.
On June 21, 1917 at Chickasha, Grady, Oklahoma, our
parents, Ella Elizabeth SEYMOUR and
William Emory ETTER were married
by T. P. MOORE, Justice of the Peace. Their witnesses were
John SEYMOUR and
J. B. (Jess) CACKBURN. John is a younger brother of
Mama's.
Before WW I, daddy worked in the Copper
Queen Mine in Bisbee, Arizona. There is a photograph of him in the
mine. There was a mystery why Dad was at Bisbee, but we have learned, his
sister and brother/law, Callie and Bird
MOBLEY were living there at the time.
In 1981, my sisters, Johnnie,
Lucille, and I toured the Copper Queen Mine during a trip to see
our sister, Gerline, in Maricopa, Arizona.
The guide showed us the original tunnel that our daddy had used. He
showed us how dark in the mine and also how to find our way out of the mine.
We brought home a piece of ore with turquoise embedded as a
souvenir. We felt a little closer to Daddy after the tour.
Daddy enjoyed wolf hunting in his younger days.
Fishing is something Daddy and Mama both love to do. When I was
growing up, as soon as school was out, we were camping out in the Wichita
Mountains at one of the lakes or on a creek bank.
Daddy and I use to watch western movies on television.
I can remember Lawton's Channel 7, "Tales of the West" and it came
on at 5 p.m. Both my husband and I like westerns.
Mama love to crochet. She made
the quilts to keep us warm. How did she find the time to do everything?
I think most of us remember Mama's fried pies. The filling was different
flavorings such as banana, cherry, etc with sugar and butter. My sister,
Shirley, told me that they carried Mama's
fried pies in their lunches to the county schools they attended. They would
have a good variety of food to eat as the other kids would trade their food
for the pies. Mama always canned. I didn't think my hands would
ever get too big to wash the inside of the canning jars.
Mama enjoyed watching wrestling on the television and
she could get very excited. She attended some wrestling matches at
Oklahoma City with our cousins, Elizabeth and George
ALLBAUGH.
Daddy had to work hard to support the family. Daddy and Mama came from hard working families. Daddy loved to tell about his relatives and life in Jack County, Texas. If only we had listened better and wrote it down.
After Daddy's death, Mama married Charlie Levi MORRISON on March 6, 1964 in Wichita Falls, Texas. Charlie was born October 15, 1901 in Caddo County, OK. He died March 29, 1992 at Duncan, Oklahoma and was buried by his first wife on April 1, 1992 in the Paradise Valley Cemetery, Comanche County, Oklahoma. After Mama and Charlie's marriage, they enjoyed fishing. Charlie coonhunted with Paul.
I think often of Mama's life raising 15 children without the modern conveniences that we have today like washer and dryer, dishwasher, (electric, that is), microwaves, electric blankets, modern plumbing, and central air and heat. She and the women of her time had a hard life.
Daddy's parents Mama's parents Daddy's pictures Mama's pictures Daddy and Alice's Children