Clay was out Sunday to do some work on the office. It is really looking good. He sure goes above and beyond what he volunteered for at the beginning.
We are sorry to lose Tim Curtin, one of our past members.
We have a handwritten letter/note written by Mrs. Ferguson beginning “Dear Friend, I was so pleased to get your letter and glad that you wrote Trad. It takes all the courage at my command these trying days. I’m trying to do my best cheerfully by my boy. Mrs. T.B.'' I wish there was a date on it so maybe it could be determined what trying days she was talking about as well as a name as to who she was writing, besides Dear Friend. I thought it was odd that she signed it Mrs. T.B. and not her name. I learned while doing genealogy that it’s very important to fill in all the information possible so 100 years from now someone won’t be wondering this same thing about some correspondence we had and make sure to label pictures. I was at one of my sisters-in-law’s funerals Saturday and they were passing around photographs asking if we knew who all were in the photos. Right after I learned this when I began genealogy I went through all my pictures and labelled them while I could still remember who was in the picture.
Mrs. Ferguson described what Watonga looked like when they came here in her book They carried the Torch. She said it would be hard for the present generation (the book was published in 1937) to imagine what the younger people would think today. She said to try to comprehend a town or community without telephones, radios, paved streets, sidewalks, automobiles, and picture shows. Now it would be cell phones, Facebook, airplanes, YouTube and the like. I remember when we moved to Watonga in 1980 some of the streets on the East side of the railroad tracks weren’t paved. The movie theater where the Liberty Theater is now was still showing movies. The drive-in theater east of town was still showing movies but closed shortly after. Places to rent VCR tapes were opening. Back to Mrs. Ferguson’s book, she mentioned blanketed Native Americans roamed over the prairies on spotted ponies and lived in wigwam villages, outlaws hiding in the hills north of town, no roads or bridges, no communication with the outside world except for the daily mail and passenger coach from the nearest railroad. I cared for Phyllis Humphrey for 14 years and she told me she lived on the west side of the river just west of town and there wasn’t a bridge at that time. She said she would mount a horse and it would swim or wade across the river depending on how deep the water was to come to town. She said she wouldn’t dream of letting her three children do that when they were small but that was common when she was young.
Plans are being made for Chicken Noodle Dinner on March 18, 2022. It will be at the Watonga Christian Church, 400 N. Noble. Then the Easter egg hunt will be the Saturday before Easter Sunday.
We are open Wednesday through Saturday 10:00 am to 3:00 pm. Be sure and leave a name and call back number if you get the answering machine.