Celebrating the Temporary

By Paula Severe

In Celebrating the Temporary, Paula Severe recounts her life as a mother, daughter, teacher, and traveler.

Being the wife of an itinerant United Methodist minister required packing and unpacking on short notice. Paula was an avid public school teacher, and each move meant finding a new job to fulfill her passion for teaching children.  Soon after the fall of Communism, she was among the first in a team to visit and meet local Russian people who had never seen an American.  Her travels in Central Europe representing the Oklahoma United Methodists helped raise funds for pastors’ salaries as congregations struggled to survive Communism.  Her stories are humorous, poignant, and peppered with moments of grace and humility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Feb 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781977263797

Paula Severe

Born in Hennessey, Oklahoma, Paula earned a degree in Elementary Education from Oklahoma City University, and a master’s degree in Education from East Central University. She taught elementary grades for 28 years. Upon retirement she became an adjunct professor at University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond for 14 years,  supervising student teachers.  Paula and husband, David are retired in Edmond, OK.  They have two children, four grandchildren, and eight great grands. 

Book preview

Celebrating the Temporary

A Memoir

All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2023 Paula Severe

v4.0

The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.

This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Outskirts Press, Inc.

http://www.outskirtspress.com

Cover Design by Art Severe © 2023 Paula Severe. All rights reserved - used with permission.

Outskirts Press and the OP logo are trademarks belonging to Outskirts Press, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

1 To Live Life Twice

2 Civil War Years and Carrie Nation

3 Family Roots

4 My Hometown

5 Black and White

6 The Little White Church

7 Hopscotch, Horses, and Dreaded Red Rover

8 During WWII

9 Oklahoma Tornadoes

10 Aunt Pearl and the Red Dirt Farm

11 Chickens, Rabbits and Cousin Waltena

12 Henry and Florence Church

13 Grandma’s Will

14 Siblings

15 Teenage Memories

16 Road Angel

17 Preacher’s Wife

18 Parsonage 101

19 Nurtured in So Many Ways

20 The Concrete Bathtub

21 Cutting Corners

22 The Great Chicken Murder

23 Artie Severe, Get Down from That Sink!

24 Nothing Like Parsonage Life

25 Mr. Miller Decides

26 The Day of the Flying Ants

27 Children of Labels

28 On the Road Again

29 Rowley’s Gift of Confidence

30 Pilgrim in a New World

31 What Do Crows Know?

32 Bad Words

33 Dear Daddy …

34 Learning to Do the Right Thing

35 Fifth Grade Girls

36 The Rapture is Coming

37 Teenagers in the Aldersgate Years

38 Two Doors Down

39 Classroom without Walls

40 History Lesson Illustrated

41 The Methodist Strippers

42 On Being a New Grandma

43 Coaches’ Wives

44 Bad Words, Revisited

45 Double Trouble

46 Turtle Race

47 The Long Goodbyes

48 Crows in Mourning

49 Green, Glitter and Gold

50 From Grandma’s House to the E.R.

51 Mrs. Severe, Will You Get Up?

52 Making New Decisions

53 What They Taught Me

54 Robbed!

55 The Feel of Home

56 Grandma Overload

57 Behind the Iron Curtain

58 To Russia with God’s Love –and a Barbie Doll

59 My New Russian Family

60 A Surprise in the Russian Countryside

61 But We Don’t Smile

62 Across the Volga River

63 Conversations with Margret

64 Home by Way of Moscow

65 The Awakening Spirit

66 Return to Russia

67 The Russian Faithful

68 Sisterhood in Christ

69 To Hell and Back

70 Into Ukraine

71 Bulgaria and Pastor Beslov

72 Mariela’s God Incident

73 The Murrah Bombing

74 Must We Live in Fear?

75 My Unplanned Journey

76 I Asked for This?

77 In an Irish Pub

78 Evening Respite

79 Old Recipes

80 Blessed

For

David, love of my life,

Sherri and Artie, children of blessings

Christine, Mark, David Evan and Taylor

Grandchildren of brilliance

And eight awesome great grandchildren:

Madison, Jack, Manakai, Sam,

Emily, Azlan, Macie and Rumi

Special Thanks to writing coach, Carolyn Wall,

and our Dead Writers Class for

constant editing and encouraging.

With special appreciation for daughter, Sherri Brown,

for pictures and loving care,

And to son, Art Severe, for his

expertise in perfecting the finished product,

and especially designing the book cover.

1

TO LIVE LIFE TWICE

In 1989, Communism began to fail. Chunk by chunk, the Berlin Wall came down. Three years after that I found myself with twenty-eight other people from St. Luke’s United Methodist Church journeying to Ulyanovsk, Russia.

From Oklahoma City, we traveled across nine time zones, and arrived in Helsinki, Finland, only to learn that we had missed our connecting flight.

The Russian Aeroflot sent to take us to Moscow was a World War II transport relic of a plane -- one thin sheet of metal with no sound buffers, the seats worn and frayed. We boarded in quiet unease. The thunderous engines drowned out voices. Fear enveloped us.

Before take-off, the pilot invited our pastor, Bob Long, a recreational pilot himself, into the cockpit. To his credit, Bob kept quiet about what he saw. There was no radar with which to navigate and no radio connection with the Moscow airport.

My life was not always so fraught with peril.

Sometime after my marriage and children, Mother shared her early hope for my life. She said, I always thought you would be a missionary and I would go with you wherever you were sent. I was shocked. Mother had presented programs for the Women’s Society of Christian Service, before it was the United Methodist Women. Perhaps her own dreams were unfulfilled.

Some of Mother’s hopes for me may have come to fruition. Being a minister’s wife was a sent profession. And having my own children and teaching were clearly callings.

2

THE CIVIL WAR YEARS AND CARRIE NATION

When the Civil War broke out, my grandfather, James Henry Carmony, served the Union Army for three years, around Shreveport, Louisiana. When the war ended, he took a boat up the Mississippi River to the family’s home near Swiss City, Iowa. That’s where he met and married my grandmother, Phoebe Ann Frakes. Daddy was the fifth child, and grew to be a wonderful storyteller, remembering so much of early day Oklahoma, and his life before and after it became a state. I thank him for his stories and wish I had asked more questions.

Around 1885, with their four children, Rue, Fred, Armitie, and James, Jr., they headed for Harper, Kansas, oxen hauling their covered wagon. Grandfather Carmony rented a small hotel for a home and leased farmland on which to raise wheat and cattle. Crops were good but the Carmonys grew lonesome for their kinfolk back home.

In the next few years, his relatives came west and made the land runs into Oklahoma Territory. Some came in 1889, staked and recorded claims, and stayed the required time to hold their allotments. When the weather warmed, they built homes, barns, and silos. But in the western part of the state, the scarce timber had to be felled, cut, and hauled over long distances by train or wagon.

My daddy, Willie, was born in 1892 in Harper, Kansas. His dad, James, made the run with a brother-in-law, Earnest, in the 1893 Cherokee Strip Land Rush, leaving Willie, with his mother, sisters and one brother, to do the necessary farming. At precisely twelve noon on September 16, 1893, a cannon’s boom unleashed the largest land run America had ever seen. But, on the way, Grandfather’s horse stumbled and fell. A broken collarbone ended his trek.

Two friends, who were sisters, had made the earlier run and built a log house, but now didn’t need their two pieces of land. The ladies offered their claims to Grandfather and his brother-in-law. James and Earnest made it to the land office in time to file their papers.

In 1897, in Woodward County, Grandfather built his family a fine 16’ x 24’ log house. He and Earnest hauled logs from the sawmill across the river and dug water wells. The following January, he returned to Harper, Kansas, to fetch Grandma and Daddy, leaving his son and daughter, Fred and Mittie (Armitie), to get in the wheat crop. Eventually, when summer came and harvest passed, Grandfather went back to Harper, Kansas, taking Willie with him to sell the farm equipment, and bring the cattle down to Oklahoma Territory.

Daddy was barely six years old when he rode with his father by train to Kansas. Returning with the livestock was an adventure as the Cimarron River stood full to the bank from a heavy rain. Several cows had calves that couldn’t keep up, so they put the calves in the wagon, but still couldn’t cross. A widow who owned that farmland allowed them to bring the cattle up into her pasture until the river went down. For three or four days they camped out on the banks.

It may seem like the new cabin was small, and it was, but, by then his sister, Rue, had married and lived in her own home. Mittie had the only bedroom and, for five years, she shared it with the school marm.

Willie slept on the floor, except on cold nights when he crawled in with Mittie and the teacher, at the foot of their bed, between their feet. Other times he slept in the barn. The teacher eventually married and, by law, had to resign her teaching position.

Young Willie also slept there when Carrie Nation came, carrying a hatchet, destroying local bars...

The Carmony family hosted the Methodist Circuit Rider preacher when he rode through, bedding his horse in the barn. Young Willie also slept there when Carrie Nation came, carrying a hatchet, destroying local bars, and speaking for her Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The family had been friends with her in Kansas. Willie gladly gave up his sleeping space because Carrie made especially good biscuits.

His was a truly early Methodist family. His mother prepared Sunday dinner on Saturday because Sunday was a designated day of rest.

3

FAMILY ROOTS

The one-room schoolhouse Willie attended went only through eighth grade. But as it turned out, he rode his horse into the town of Seiling for high school, which was held in a church. Parents got busy and collected money to build a new school, hired teachers, offered classes, and charged each student $10 a month. Daddy was within a year of graduating when he decided he more urgently needed to earn money. He was eighteen years old.

He had loved performing in plays, memorizing poetry, and reading western literature, especially Zane Gray novels. I have a yellowed newspaper clipping telling of Mother and Dad acting in the same high school play in Seiling, Oklahoma. Mother was six years younger, so they must have recruited Daddy to come back and fill in. All his life, he quoted poetry he had learned as a boy.

Being the fifth and last baby of the family, I suspect he was probably pampered – maybe like I was, born so late in my parents’ life. We had that in common.

For use in teaching fifth grade Oklahoma History, our daughter, Sherri, once videotaped an interview with her Grandpa Bill talking about his early life. He reminisced about having a girlfriend for two years before deciding to date my mother, Clara. Mother had told her older brother, Lloyd, that she wanted to get to know Will Carmony. Lloyd promised he would buy her those longed-for elbow-length white leather gloves if she could get a date with him. Daddy recalled Clara made eyes at him at a picnic and, sure enough, he asked her out. Her big brown eyes and tall slender figure were captivating.

Two years later, in 1915, they married and lived on the old home place in Seiling, Oklahoma, where Gyle and Maxine were born. He eventually bought farmland in Woodward County and borrowed the money to build a house. For several years all went well. Then crops began to fail and there was no feed for the cattle. Though he never called it the dust bowl, their hard times began during the late 1920s. He couldn’t make the payments to the bank. Finally they had to sell it all. Daddy was so devastated after losing the farm, and then going through the Great Depression, he would never go in debt again and never owned a home.

Finally, in 1935, they moved the family to Hennessey where he first worked for his Uncle Will Frakes in a farmers’ produce business. I was born in December of that year. My siblings, Gyle and Maxine, were already in high school.

When Uncle Will closed his business and retired, Gyle and Daddy opened the Hennessey Produce together. Four years later, just out of high school, Maxine married Bob (Dale) Clements who joined them on the business and also helped his family on their farm. Gyle was drafted into the Air Force in WWII, and for the final years of the war, Dale joined the army.

During the war years, Mother and Daddy operated the produce. I was in elementary school and witnessed the heartbreak my parents suffered at sending a son into the war, not knowing where he was and receiving only censored letters. Mother sat at our piano in the evenings, playing and singing the war songs of the day: When the Lights Come on Again, All Over the World, and I’ll Be Home for Christmas, among others.

Daddy spent his life carrying bags of chicken feed to farmers’ trucks and loading crates of chickens onto the bed of his pickup and driving them to markets. He graded large cans of cream that farmers brought in and then transferred them to the train that hauled them to buyers. At the age of seventy, he suffered a heart attack. He quit smoking then and lived to be almost ninety-five. He wondered how he had survived so long.

I know why.

From the time I started to school, I had wanted to be a teacher. I had scholarships, but they didn’t cover the costs. He had to get me through college. I worked to earn money, but my parents did too. Then they lived to see my children grow and that we had a good life. He took care of Mother during most of her Alzheimer years.

While he lay in the hospital dying, the nurses kept telling me how they loved his stories, that he entertained them with history. He knew it first-hand and remembered every detail.

Bill Carmony (Paula’s father), unloading chicken and produce at Hennessey Produce

4

MY HOMETOWN

Hennessey, Oklahoma, lies on the Chisholm Trail, with a mystery that will probably never be solved.

Before it became a town, an Irishman named Patrick Hennessey hauled supplies between railroad stops, army outposts, and Indian agencies from Wichita, Kansas, to Anadarko, Oklahoma. He and his men hitched four to six mules to each huge wagon, loaded supplies and set out on the trail for weeks at a time.

In April of 1874, trouble was brewing on the Cheyenne Indian Reservation, a territory already rife with violence and lawlessness that white settlement had brought. American Indians were discontented, for good reason. But whites committed atrocities, too, and disguised their crimes to look as if they had been committed by the Indians.

Government officials discovered the murder of the freighter, Pat Hennessey, and his wagon crew, west of town. Some of the men had been shot to death, but Pat was tied between the wheels of his wagon and burned almost beyond recognition.

Some were eager to blame the restless Cheyenne tribe, but others pointed to a band of marauding, thieving whites. The scene revealed boot tracks, nothing like what the Cheyenne wore.

Officials buried Pat Hennessey, covered the grave with stones, and set out to find the perpetrators. It is said that, nearby, there’d been a vigilante-style lynching of a white outlaw. Some in the know claimed that this was the execution of Hennessey’s killer. Others disagreed.

I remember, when I was growing up, the re-enactment of a wagon train being attacked by Indians west of town at Hennessey Bluffs, a place named for Pat. What a shock to residents, to later learn that it probably wasn’t the Cheyenne at all.

In the Great Land Run of l889, a four-man Hennessey Town-Site Company claimed four quarters of land, soon incorporating a mile south where now Highway 51 crosses Highway 81. In October of that same year, the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad reached Hennessey, and the first doctor opened his office.

Within a year, there was a Hennessey Post Office Oklahoma Territory, and a Hennessey Post Office Indian Territory. The newspaper office, the Hennessey Clipper opened, and the first pay school began.

The public elementary school opened in 1891. That year the First Methodist Church was chartered and built, the same one that I attended as a child.

I was born in Hennessey on December 3, 1935. Then it was a lively little town of 1,200. We students participated in whatever school activities we chose. Parents stayed involved and attended community functions, encouraging us in this nurturing village.

I started first grade in the City Hall and Public Library at the north end of Main Street. In 1942, the WPA’s new brick elementary school opened; I was in second grade. The old stucco building was razed.

5

BLACK AND WHITE

Prince Albert Taylor was born into a large family in Mississippi, where his father pastored a Methodist congregation in the African American Methodist Church. Prince was educated for ministry in the southeast. He eventually was appointed to serve the black congregation in Hennessey, from which he was elected the first black bishop of the Methodist Church in America.

African Americans literally lived across the track. They had their own school and churches. We rarely went there, but when we did, I saw it as a poorer, but well-cared for neighborhood. As youth, we occasionally attended their Methodist Church and their young people visited ours. The women and girls always dressed in white to attend church. I remember thinking what an interesting tradition.

The long Main Street of Hennessey held the stores, cafes, Ortman Movie Theater and youth room, Dinkler Drug and soda shop, and Spencer Drug, Public Library and, at the far south end, the elementary and high schools.

Beyond lay rows of homes and trimmed lawns, shade trees and vegetable gardens called victory gardens during World War II. I still have books of stamps that our family had been allotted. When our stamps for sugar were gone, we could not buy more until the next book arrived. If friends had stamps they weren’t using, we might trade for something we needed, flour for sugar, or such.

Families enjoyed the simple things, outdoors in the evenings, or gathering in parks or on someone’s front porch. Saturday nights downtown were buzzing with people as they met to visit on the sidewalks, in the drugstore, and restaurants. Stores didn’t close until 9:00 p.m.

In the early 1940s, many families had someone who was away serving our country. So, it was a time of caring for each other. My brother, Gyle, was in the air force, and brother-in-law, Bob, in the army.

1950-1953 was an awakening time. I acquired my first real job in Snyders’ five-and-dime store, and realized how blacks were treated in public places, a white drinking fountain – and a colored one. Coloreds couldn’t use the public restrooms. I began to ask questions about separate schools and churches. Of course, I was told they preferred it that way. Even then, I wondered.

I grew up naïve about many things. My hometown was a cocoon that had protected me from the real world. Rather than being freed to become a butterfly, I think I turned into a moth, drawn to the light of truth after truth. I was surprised by each one, but willing to incorporate them – good and not so good – into my faith life.

This is my story, as I remember it. Come with me.

6

LITTLE WHITE CHURCH

My small-town church in Hennessey held a congregation of loving, nurturing people. Its plain white frame belied the warmth inside. The pews formed a cross, curving close to the altar and chancel. Rose-colored windows surrounded the sanctuary on three sides, bringing a warm glow from any direction.

The vestibule was small and, at one side hung a huge rope, knotted at the end, stretching high into a belfry tower. The knot was above my reach, but I loved to watch laymen ring the bell each Sunday morning, announcing to the community the beginning of Sunday morning services.

Dan Dauner was a large, square-built, older man who taught the men’s Sunday School class. He knew every child in the church, and they knew him.

One day as I waited for someone to ring the bell, Dan arrived and picked me up, telling me to hold tight to the rope. As the six-year-old appointed ringer of the day, I grabbed the knot with all my strength, and he turned loose. I rode it down as the bell made a loud, long ding and it carried me back up, dong. Mr. Dauner stood close by and helped me pull for at least five more rings. He was already high on my list of saints but, at that moment, he was right up there with God. I rushed to my mother and dad’s Sunday School Class with the news that I had been the ringer.

In the children’s large room, Sunday School began with several classes singing, passing the collection plate, celebrating birthdays and a closing prayer led by one of the teachers. Mother sometimes played the piano for the opening and then went to her class. We gathered at tables in different parts of the assembly room, according to our age. I remember sitting with seven others at a U-shaped table, facing our teacher in the middle. Miss Brewer was an older lady whom my parents called a spinster. I thought that must mean she used a