The best teacher is always the one who has experienced the subject first hand, and if that is true, Katie Owens would make a wonderful history teacher.
Mrs. Owens, a Laredo resident, will turn 100 years old on Monday [Sep 29, 1997] and thanks to a remarkable memory and her life-long passion for saving newspaper articles, she is an excellent source of information about the Laredo community, where she was born and reared. Only 10 years younger than the town itself, she was born Sept. 29, 1897, the daughter of a farm couple, Ethel and Fred Lein and was the oldest of four children. In addition to tending to the family farm east of Laredo, her father, who had immigrated to America from Austria at age five, also did butchering and sold eggs and ice to supplement the family's income. while she said her earliest memories are of not wanting to go to school, she does have fond memories of attending the Bethel School near Laredo. She recalled some of those memories for her great-granddaughter, Betsy Brick, in a letter written in 1995.
"Betsy, I will tell you what it was like when I went to school. We had to have a new dinner bucket for our dinner because we did not have lunches at school. We had to walk to school because we did not have school busses or cars. My dad would pick us up on horseback if it was cold, raining, or muddy. We had to have our own drinking cup. We had a big stove to heat the schoolroom. Sometimes it was very cold. I started to school in a one-room schoolhouse. We did not have any plumbing - we had outdoor toilets.
The teacher taught all eight grades. We had slates and slate pencils to write our lessons on and sometimes we could go the 'blackboard' to write our lesson."
Her early life was spent going to school, doing chores and spending time with her siblings and friends, sometimes even getting into some mischief. She remembers vividly the time she and her siblings were all dressed up, sitting in the carriage ready to leave for a family outing when they decided they needed a bouquet. They went to the garden, which had just been plowed, and made a mess out of the white, canvas-type shoes which were the style in those days. Since there was no time to change, she said they had to go on the outing, muddy shoes and all, which was quite embarrassing.
Another memory of her childhood days occurred when she and a friend, Addie Rooks, hitched a horse to a buggy and traveled to Trenton to see their former "schoolmarm", Opal Gee. [ed note: another account says Addie Rooks was the teacher who was visited].
"We needed an airing," she said. "And we came back the same day."
In those days, Laredo was a bustling little town with stores on both sides of the street and when Katie Lein married her schoolmate Oliver Owens on July 15, 1918, the couple decided to stay in the area. Shortly after they were married they bought a farm east of Laredo where they remained until they moved to town in 1958, when Oliver's health began failing. Mrs. Owens stayed home, raising the couple's three children, Charles, now deceased, Frances Owens Gerdom and Roberta Owens Brick [of Trenton].
Frances and Roberta have fond memories of their childhood, recalling that they could always smell cinnamon rolls or fresh bread as they neared their home after school. Indeed, Mrs. Owens said she felt it was important to be at home with her children.
"I always made it a point to be home when the children got home," she said.
She also stressed the importance of school work, always making sure the homework was done, and she said that when the children were young, she remembers thinking "it's going to take a long time to get them grown up."
In her 100 years, she has witnessed many new inventions, including automobiles. She said the first time she saw a car coming down the road, she thought, "Oh, my land!"
"We were just flabbergasted!", she said.
She also remembers electricity becoming available in Laredo, making the old kerosene lamps unnecessary, and telephone service, which she said was used heavily right from the start, as there was a lot of talking and a lot of listening on the party lines. She can even remember the first mail delivery out of Laredo in 1905.
"Now, when we got a mail route, that was something," she recalled.
Battery-powered radios provided entertainment for the family as did yard parties and get-togethers of all kinds at the homes of friends and family.
Over the years, Mrs. Owens has collected an unbelievable number of scrapbooks, filled with articles taken from area newspapers on any subject that she found interesting. In those books are the history of this entire area, especially Laredo. One scrapbook details the fires of November, 1946, when a Kansas City man, Elopus Walker, set fire to three businesses, one house and the Christian Church, destroying all of the buildings, with a loss estimate of about $75,000. The entire town was in fear of who had set the fires (which started in different locations) and why, as well as wondering if the arsonist might strike again. In fact, when Walker, who had just come into Laredo on the train that night, was arrested and confessed to the arson, he said he had sat on a hillside and watched the residents scramble to save their town from the flames.
She has other memories as well, including the "grasshopper years" of 1934 and 1936, when grasshoppers, descending in droves, destroyed crops and caused farmers to cut down trees in an effort to save their cattle by feeding them leaves. To make matters worse, drought also took its toll on the area. Going through her scrapbooks is like reading a history book written as it was happening. When the Laredo Centennial was celebrated in 1987, Mrs. Owens' collection provided much of the information for the Centennial book.
While she loves Laredo, she has had many travels, from a 1912 train trip to a family reunion in Arkansas, to a trip to Washington, D.C., that involved getting to see the White House kitchen (she was in a wheelchair and was allowed to use the elevator) and a hot-air balloon ride in 1982. She has had her share of adventures and loves to relate those stories.
At 100, she is not as active outside her home as she might like to be, but inside her home, she keeps her mind active by reading three daily newspapers (her daughters say she is a speed reader), and of course, cutting out the articles she finds interesting. Her great-granddaughter Lisa Zang Schmidt, tells the story of when she began dating her future husband, Kris, a few years ago. Her grandmother, Roberta Brick, told Mrs. Owens that Lisa had a new boyfriend, but said she had not had the chance to meet him. When Mrs. Owens learned his name, she immediately asked for one of her scrapbooks and turned to a page detailing Schmidt's rescue of two children from a burning home in Trenton as part of his job as a Trenton Police Officer. According to Lisa, that was a story that caught Mrs. Owens' attention, so she saved it.
"I don't miss nothin'," she told me.
In addition to reading, Mrs. Owens loves to have company, and usually has plenty. Just visiting her immediate family takes some time, as her descendants now number 44 including her own three children, nine grandchildren, five step-grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren, seven step-great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren. She lived alone following the death of her husband in 1975, but about five years ago, Frances and Roberta began taking turns staying with her in her home. As to what she attributes her good health to, she promotes good, clean living:
"I didn't get drunk and I didn't smoke," she said proudly.
She also credits farm-fresh foods such as eggs, milk and meat to her long life, which she said has been filled with a lot of happy memories including being named the Laredo Centennial Queen, an honor she relishes.
"I know a lot of people might think it's kind of corny, but I loved it," she laughed.
As the world prepares for the year 2000, it is strange to realize that there is one among us who was born even before the turn of this century. Within her mind and her collection of scrapbooks are the stories of what this area was like in its early days, before their was any discussion of four-lane highways, multi-million dollar prisons or economic development. Sharing those memories with each new generation is one of her favorite pasttimes.
"I love to have people come," she said "That's what keeps you up on your toes."
