 |
|
 |
By Jeff Barton, October, 2000
When she got off the bus in Kyle in the summer heat of 1928, a man was waiting.
He claimed he came to greet her on behalf of the town. But by coincidence he was a bachelor businessman and, one of his daughters said years later, he had heard there was a good-looking woman on that bus.
She had come to teach school. She stayed to marry that first man she met in Kyle, to raise a family, to plant gardens, and to help organize the town's first public library.
She was Louise Gossett and became Louise Word, nicknamed "Bobby" to her friends for the stylish Roaring '20s fashion in which she wore her bobbed red-brown hair. This Tuesday, more than 72 years after coming to Kyle and meeting Lex Word - 96 years after her birth in Taylor, Texas - Bobby Word died peacefully in an Austin care facility, her daughters at her side.
For decades, Bobby and Lex Word were involved in just about every civic endeavor in town - schools, church, reading clubs, garden clubs, politics, Lion's Club.
They married in January of 1929, less than six months after meeting, and built a rare partnership that lasted until his death in 1982. Together, they weathered the Great Depression, then prospered running a general store known as the Bon Ton, organizing a local bank, a farm implement company, and later managing a small farm-and-ranch "home place" just north of town on Burleson Street (now part of the city).
Bobby Word gave birth to four children - first Lex Jr., then three girls. They lost Lex, Jr., as a young teenager to rheumatic fever during World War II - and forever after Bobby was a loving but slightly frantic nag to friends and family with minor colds.
The three girls - Wynette, better known as "Tutta," Nancy, and Jane - all graduated from Kyle High School and followed their mother's footsteps to Baylor University, where Bobby had graduated in 1926, one of the early co-eds to attend Baylor.
All three daughters live with their families in the area today - Tutta Barton on the home place, Jane Kirkham near Kyle, and Nancy Osgood in Austin.
In addition to the daughters, Ms. Word is survived by three sons-in-law: Bob Barton, John Osgood and Calvin Kirkham; by seven grandchildren: Jeff Word Barton who lives between Kyle and Buda, and David "Beau" Barton of Santa Fe, New Mexico; Brenda Osgood Hogan, John Osgood, Jr. and Charles Osgood, all of Austin; Kimberley Word Kirkham Certain of Plano, and Lex Kirkham of Austin; and by eight great-grandchildren, including one who bears her name: Abbigail Louise Osgood.
Ms. Word is also survived by nieces Carolyn Jackson, Jeanette Hamilton Gant, and Nancy Darden; and by nephews Charles Hamilton and Jack Hamilton; and their families.
Like her husband and her son, her two sisters and her brother died before her.
In Kyle, Bobby Word soon gave up her teaching career, with Lex Jr. born in December of 1929. But she remained active in school affairs, and was a Girl Scout leader and a teacher and leader in the First Baptist Church of Kyle, where husband Lex was a deacon. Despite occasional differences of philosophy - Bobby and Lex had no truck with the church's prohibition on dancing, for instance - she remained a faithful church member all her life.
Ms. Word was one of the first to recognize that great short story writer Katherine Anne Porter had lived in Kyle as a child, identifying the house that decades later would become what is now the Katherine Anne Porter museum and writer-in-residence program with Southwest Texas State University.
She was devoted to beautifying her adopted home town, and planted flowers and gardens pretty much wherever anyone would let her.
In the 1950s, she was one of a handful of local citizens, mostly women, who organized the first library for Kyle, using donated books set up in what is now the kitchen area of Kyle City Hall, bringing in the state bookmobile and establishing story times for children. She continued to work with the library for decades, and it was one of her great prides to see the town grow its library into a building of its own with a professional librarian on staff.
By the early 1960s, she was diagnosed with a tumor deep behind her ear. A successful operation nonetheless left the muscles on one side of her face weak and thereafter she sometimes wore a patch on one eye.
Known to her grandchildren and their friends as Bamma, her home was for generations the nerve center of a close extended family that gathered for summer swimming and extraordinary holiday games, contests and fellowship.
To her grandchildren, she was one of those legendary southern grandmothers who always had snacks and extra pajamas on hand, taught manners and tolerance, would listen to every hurt, was delightfully easy to shock, and could never be provoked into saying anything bad about anybody - except in the most gentle and indirect ways about people who cheated, challenged her family, or tried to persuade her to accept yet another large dog into the menagerie.
Several of her descendants are among the owners and founders of the Free Press.
She was born at the beginning of one century, Feb. 6, 1904, to Charles and Nancy Rainwater Gossett, of English and, according to family lore, American Indian ancestry. She died at the beginning of a new century, in the morning of Oct. 17, 2000. While her body had remained healthy, illness had made it difficult for her to remember friends and family in her very last years. Near the end, she seemed to recognize the family who surrounded her.
|
|
|
Digg this!
Email this page