“No man’s life can be encompassed in one telling. There is no way to give each year its allotted weight, to include each event, each person who helped to shape a lifetime. What can be done is to be faithful in spirit to the record and to try to find one’s way to the heart of the man…”
The words above appear at the opening of the movie “Gandhi”. If you change “man” to “woman” you will understand how hard it is for me to write anything that will show the life of my grandmother and her spirit. All I can do is throw out some stories that illustrate what she means to me and to others.
Esther Lura (Kasson) Lietz was born December 17th, 1904, one year to the day after the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. That in itself will give some idea of what she has seen in a long, long life. She was the last of six children, only two of which lived long enough to see their own grandchildren. Life was precarious back then. She says one of her first memories was when, as a very young child, her mother was nursing most of the family through a diptheria outbreak. Many people were sick, but Esther was not, so her mother took her to family friends, a childless couple, so she would have more time for the rest of the family. This couple became so enamored of little Esther that they asked to adopt her. My great-grandmother, on learning of this, immediately fetched her daughter home. Grandma said “They treated me like a little princess!”
Oddly enough, for that time and place, the family was not a member of any church. Grandma told me she attended a Methodist Sunday School a few times, with friends, but nothing more than that.
Esther became a school teacher in a one room school house, the same kind she had attended herself. Back then all you had to do was pass a state test to be allowed to teach. One day she forgot her key to the school and a young man across the road, plowing the field with four mules, helped boost her in the window. It was not the first time she had met Emil, but it sure wouldn’t be the last, as eventually he became my grandfather. She told me once about seeing him in a school play, in which he was the hero and wore English style riding boots. “He was so dashing!” she said.
Emil and Esther began seeing each other. He was from a family of German heritage, Lutheran by religion. On December 24th, 1923, Esther attended her first church service. “I was impressed by the Christmas tree, but I didn’t understand of word of anything, it was all in German!”
The couple became engaged but there was a problem. School teachers had to quit their job if they got married, and she wanted to finish the school year. Heck, the two previous teachers had married Emil’s older brothers, and the school board head had been heard to say they wouldn’t be able to keep a teacher until the Lietz boys got married. The problem became moot when Emil and Esther quarreled and she broke off the engagement. But that didn’t last of course, and it was patched up.
Patched up so well that Emil wanted to get married now, as in * right now.* He knew a good catch when he saw it. But Esther insisted she needed to tell her parents. Besides, they had planning to do if they were to keep the marriage a secret so she could still teach. The following weekend the couple traveled by train to Liberty, Missouri, one county past Kansas City, Missouri. This was so legal notices wouldn’t appear in the KC papers, which some of the country Kansas farmers followed and might see. A Lutheran minister in Kansas City that my grandfather knew married them. Emil, of all his brothers, didn’t want to be a farmer, so he’d left home at eighteen to go to auto mechanics school in the big city. Returning home they lived apart for the rest of the school year, he in Topeka, and she in Paxico. They’d see each other on the weekends. If she came to Topeka they’d go to a hotel, a young couple “sneaking around” Grandma told me * I can still remember how those desk clerks would look at us” *
Then Esther moved into town with her husband. She was finally baptized and confirmed as a Lutheran, an adult convert. She never left St. John’s, the congregation she joined, and became a pillar of the congregation. She taught Sunday School, played for the choir, was in the women’s groups, you name it. She babysat the kids of folks who, following in her footsteps, took membership classes at the church.
Grandma had three living daughters, losing a fourth at birth. She’d carried it to term but the little girl died almost at once, and she doesn’t know why. The doctor advised her not to see the baby. I was told by her that she still sometimes wonders what went wrong. Did the baby have gross deformities? Did the doctor want to prevent what is now called bonding? Grandpa had her buried in a plot where all three of them are now at rest.
The Depression was hard. Grandma had to keep the home while Grandpa struggled with his own auto garage. Sometimes folks paid in kind, potatoes, rabbits, eggs. She worked hard to keep the house up, the kids fed and clothed, doing a lot of sewing.
In the 1950’s Esther started teaching school again at the Lutheran school in Topeka. Teachers had to have a degree so she went to college to get one, graduating in her late 50’s. While I was in fourth grade I looked at her astronomy textbook, and she took me outside and showed me all the constellations for the north. She showed me how to tell what time of the year it was by seeing where the Big Dipper is in the sky.
I was the oldest grandchild, from her second daughter. Grandma was a rock. When I went through hard times she would listen and comfort me. Grandma was a “Family First” kind of person, putting others before herself. Until she died former students would write or visit her. The lives she has touched are too many to count, beginning back in those hard Depression days, when she and Grandpa would let friends who were even worse off sleep in one of their rooms.
Grandma told me once she didn’t believe in “the good old days” and that all she really misses is family and friends that have gone on before her. She says life is much more comfortable with indoor toilets, refrigerators, washers and dryers, vacuums, and especially air conditioners. After all, in the mid-30’s, she told us, they had to sleep outside in the summers, it was so hot.
Her 107th birthday is next Saturday, December 17th, 2011. I wanted to write this now, as her health is really going down, and so are her mental faculties. Up until very recently she was still happy and alert, and it hurts to see the change.
Happy Birthday, Grandma! I love you!
