Marie Florence House

Marie Florence HouseThings you should know about our Mother.She was born in Chicago to John and Florence Kurtz on July 8, 1926, a member of what Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation.” When she died eighty-four years later, she had read the Bible from beginning-to-end ten times, and was well into her eleventh reading.If you knew the challenges our Mother confronted, and the strength and depth of her faith, you would not find this surprising.The oldest of four girls, Mother grew up German Lutheran in the small town of Burlington, Iowa during the Great Depression. She met our father in high school, the same time World War II was decimating Europe and island hopping through the South Pacific. Dad enlisted in the Navy, married Mom in a simple ceremony, and shipped out on an attack transport called the USS Randall, named after a county in the Texas Panhandle that would later become our home. Over the next two years, Mom received letters from Iwo Jima, Guam and Okinawa, and worried. When Dad came home at the end of the war, they moved to Iowa City, where he attended the University of Iowa on the G.I. Bill. They lived in a small trailer. Mother worked as an assistant in a photography studio to bring in money and learned to hand-tint photographs. They got by.After graduation, Dad found work with a defense contractor, which enabled him and Mom to move into barracks-like apartments at the Iowa Ordinance Plant west of Burlington. There they began — some say furiously — to make a family: first Cheryl, then Randall, Rhonda, and Doug, all in five years. Soon after, Daddy got fixed. In 1956, our Dad was transferred to Pantex in Amarillo. Our Mother, herding the four of us, followed. We moved into a modest three-bedroom home. It was the home Mom would live in the rest of her life.That home became our staging ground. There, Mom prepared breakfast every morning, packed lunches, and sent us on our way. She cleaned while we were gone and had dinner waiting when we returned. She organized Brownie and Cub Scout meetings, baked and frosted Valentine cookies for school, checked our homework (at least until the new math was introduced) and made sure we said our prayers… out loud. Our Mother was Donna Reed and June Cleaver, sans the pearls and pretty dresses and upper middle class affluence. She was frugal to a fault, but made sure we always had what we needed, if not always what we wanted. Mom saw that every item of clothing received maximum usage. She ironed on patches to cover the holes in the knees of our jeans. She bought clothes we could grow into and made sure clothes we outgrew were handed down. She made us eat everything on our plates because children in China were starving. And she made sure that, on Christmas morning, among the requisite socks, shoes, and underwear, there was also at least one gift we really wanted.Our Mother was a master juggler, but even that great skill could not keep her marriage from failing, though she worked long and hard to save it. Anticipating the inevitable, she enrolled in junior college and then nursing school, caring for and watching over four growing teenagers while struggling with college level biology, psychology, and physiology. Five years later, on the day Mom received her nursing diploma, Dad received divorce papers. She was on her own, with only 37 cents to her name. She started slowly. She learned. Our Mother worked as a Registered Nurse in Intensive Care at Northwest Hospital and then the VA Hospital for seventeen years, usually asking for the night shift because it paid more. She delighted in every paycheck she earned and every house payment she made.Every birthday, each of us would receive a card in the mail with a letter and twenty dollars, a practice that, when we began to have children, extended to them, and then to their children. Our Mother took up snow skiing in her mid-fifties and traveled as far away as Steamboat Springs two, three, even four times a year. You would have thought she had experienced the Rapture when she turned sixty; it entitled her to free lift tickets.Our Mother was a big Texas Rangers fans; not the guys with horses and guns, but the ones with gloves and bats. This was because, after the war, her younger sister Dorothy married Joe Macko, a baseball player who, after years of playing and managing, joined the Texas Rangers organization when the club moved to Arlington. With Joe and Dorothy in Dallas, and their children’s ages pretty much mirroring ours, we suddenly had family within striking distance. We shared a lot, including the death of Joe and Dorothy’s oldest son Steve from cancer. (Please see Mother’s request below.) When Mom retired from nursing, Joe and Dorothy invited her to work with them at several of the Rangers’ spring training camps in Florida, which she thoroughly enjoyed. Later, when she traveled less, Mother faithfully watched the games at home on TV, though her hearing became so bad, all her neighbors could keep up with the play-by-play.Our Mother had several favorite catchphrases; her favorite being “ach du lieber” — German for “Oh, dear.” Our children and grandchildren placed bets on how many times she would say it when the entire family showed up in Taos, NM to surprise her on her 80th birthday.Our Mother invested herself wholly and unwaveringly in her family. She rooted for us when we were young and became our friend once we had grown. And when we started our families, she widened her reach to embrace them, praising every good grade, every run scored, every brave step taken. That’s what we will miss the most: That our Mother was always here and, until the very end, always Our Mother.Marie Florence House died on September 10, 2010 at Odyssey Hospice in Amarillo, Texas. She leaves behind her children Cheryl Evans and husband Charley, Randall House and wife Candice, Rhonda Durrett, and Douglas House and wife Joan, nine grandchildren and four great grandchildren, and her sisters Frances Mickelson and Helen Voigt. We invite you to celebrate our Mother’s life at 2:30 p.m., Saturday, September 25th at the Southwest Church of Christ, 4515 Cornell Street, Amarillo, Texas. Our Mother requested that, in lieu of flowers, people make a contribution to the Macko Scholarship Fund. Please learn more about Steve at www.SteveMackoFund.org. Arrangements by Schooler Funeral Home, 4100 S. Georgia, Amarillo, Texas.

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