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ROY GRIFFITH NEELY September 15, 1898 - February 1, 1980; 81 years old
By Roy “Buddy” Neely Jr.
In the summer of 1898, our grandfather, W.H. “Will” Neely, was a tenant farmer having difficulty providing for his family of six children. Grandmother Ulah was pregnant and due in early fall. R.W. Griffith, an early settler on Boggy Branch in the region and a landholder for whom Will farmed “on the shares,” made a deal with Will that if the baby was a male and he was named Griffith, he would give Will a horse. On September 15 the baby boy was born and was named Roy Griffith Neely. For reasons lost to history, Grandpa did not receive the horse, but it is said that Griffith was known to take advantage on every occasion. At least Roy thereafter knew the source of his middle name. Roy was the eighth of fifteen children and the sixth of eleven brothers.
All of this took place near the hamlet of Maypearl in Ellis County, Texas, which is about 13 miles west of Waxahachie, the county seat, which in turn is some 30 miles south of Dallas. At that time, a hundred years ago, Maypearl had a few modest mercantiles and a cotton gin on the rail line. Today the town is much the same except that the gin is shut down and the railroad has been removed; there is a new modern post office and a savings and loan on the old railroad right of way. The surrounding rural area is being developed with substantial homes for folks who wish to get a bit of distance from the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, nearby to the north.
When Roy was born, the family was living on a farm near Venus in Johnson County, Texas which joins the west side of Ellis County. That was close to Maypearl and in the vicinity of at least two or three different farms in the area that Will (with his children) worked from 1892 until the family moved to Nolan County, about 200 miles to the west, in late 1905. At that time, Roy was seven years old. There the family lived on a farm near the small town of Wastella which had been named by Will for Roy’s oldest sister, and to which Will had given land for a school and a church. Growing up there was a continued story of diligent work and modest means, but happy times as well. Pictures have been found of picnics, and memories include singing around the home, and regular church attendance.
The family lived at Wastella for six years until late 1911, followed by one year at nearby Loraine, and then another year near Colorado City in Mitchell County, Texas. It was later remembered by Roy that his first “for pay” job was a helper for a butcher, and that could have well been during this period. He probably meant that it was the first job he had when he was allowed to keep the pay. It is well remembered by U.R. and Miles as well as Roy that during some lean years around Loraine, that at least four of the children, including Fairye, S.T., Roy, and U.R., worked in the fall picking cotton for other farmers, for either seventy-five cents or a dollar a day for wages that were all turned in to sustain the household.
In early 1914, when Roy was 15, the family moved to Barstow in Ward County, Texas. By that time, the three oldest boys, Erastus, Clyde, and Grover had left home to be on their own.
Roy was apparently not a very accomplished student. Probably all of the Neely children, especially the boys, suffered some degree of educational handicap due to having been kept out of school when necessary to assist with both the field and home work. Without having finished high school, Roy went to Kansas City for a few months’ course in auto mechanics. After that in 1918, with the country at war, he enlisted in the Marines and spent a number of months training at Parris Island, North Carolina. When growing up, Wastella and Roy were the family barbers, although later U.R. and Ellis were assigned by Will to cut each others’ hair. In Marine boot camp, Roy responded to the call for “someone here ever cut hair?” with a half nod. He was promptly given comb, scissors, clippers and brush and told “You are the company barber.” He just barely missing being sent to France after WW I ended in November of 1918 . He had been in a group of Marines selected to go to France with President Wilson for the Paris Peace Conference but was deleted at the last minute in a logistics conflict.
Returning home to Barstow for his senior year in high school, he played interscholastic league basketball with brother U.R., the two Miller brothers, and two others, those six comprising the entire Barstow High male student body. That team proudly took on and defeated all comers in the district, including much larger nearby Pecos. It was there during his senior year in high school that he met his future bride, Elizabeth Tenney, who was living with her older brother, B.K. Tenney, then the pastor of the Barstow Presbyterian Church.
In the fall of 1920 nearing the age of 22, Roy entered Texas A & M. The question has been asked why Roy was the only brother up until that time to go to college, and the answer is that Elizabeth had told him she would not marry him otherwise. His father, Will, wanted him to stay home and help work the farm. Nevertheless, Roy went to A & M with very little money and earned his way through by waiting tables in the dining hall and as a barber, cutting other students hair. On Sundays after church, students lined up for haircuts down the hall to Roy’s dormitory room . His four years education cost approximately $400 and he graduated with more than he took as a freshman, the major part of his earnings coming from cutting hair. Although he had never touched a football and had only seen part of one game before going to college, he tried out and made the A & M varsity as a sophomore and lettered his junior and senior seasons. In his senior year as a running back he was the team’s leading ground gainer, and second highest in minutes played. Although small at 5’8” and 160 pounds, he was the team’s fastest man, but was not very effective defensively in those days of 2-way players. Because of his prior poor scholastic preparation, he labored academically and his degree was not assured. In his senior year, taking chemistry for the second or third time, it was fortuitous that an accidental explosion destroyed the laboratory, because the professor then decided that the only fair thing to do would to be to award all the students a passing grade. Roy graduated.
After leaving A & M in the summer of 1924, nearing his 26th birthday, Roy secured employment as the football coach and a part time teacher at Schriener Institute at Kerrville, Texas. On December 22, 1924, Roy and Elizabeth Temiey were married and soon began their family with the birth of Sarah Beth in 1925, Roy Jr (Buddy) in 1927, Kate in 1934 and Barbara in 1936. Fourteen years later Leota was born, in 1950, after the family had relocated to Brownwood, Texas. After one or two years of coaching and teaching, Roy worked for a period at the Schreiner Mercantile in Kerrville, and in the late l920’s he opened a feed store on Water Street there.
Those were the early Depression years and work was exceedingly scarce, and providing for a family was often a desperate matter. Apparently the feed business was sufficiently successful so that in the early 30’s three additional Neely brothers worked with Roy in the feed business at Kerrville. Miles came in late 1930, Bud probably in early 1931, and U.R. in late 1931.
For about a year in 1931-32, Roy embarked on a get-rich scheme with some others to develop, patent, and sell an automatic transmission for automobiles. To do this Roy moved to San Antonio for one year, leaving the feed business to be handled by his brothers. The scheme failed with loss of investment by Roy and probably the three brothers as well. Aunt Ethel retains possession to this day of a stock certificate in the worthless venture.
After returning to Kerrville in 1932, Roy also opened a grocery store on Water Street almost directly across the street from the feed store, and called it the Pay-Way Grocery. Bob remembers that his parents, Bud and Velma, related to him when he was older that they operated the grocery store and that they later had their own grocery for a period in Kerrville. In any case, beef and pork for the grocery was obtained from cattle and hogs slaughtered in a small room for that purpose in a barn on Roy’s place “across the river” from town. Watching that process is still a vivid memory for Buddy and Sarah Beth.
In 1933, when he was 18, Clyde’s son C.W. (Buck) came to live with Roy’s family and working the feed store as well. He remembers in his history (that June has) driving the truck delivering feed to ranchers all over the area, on narrow rocky trails, across swollen creeks, and following poor directions. His salary was $30 per month plus room and board. He only drew a dollar or two a week, and so when he returned to Arizona after about a year, he had a big check due, which he didn’t get for a while because the feed store didn’t have that much cash available at one time.
In 1934, a man who was a credit customer at the feed store and who operated a small dairy 29 miles away at Medina, Texas came in and told Roy that he would never be able to pay his bill and that Roy would have to take his 13 cows to “settle up.” So they agreed to that deal. Since Roy could not afford to hire a cattle truck to haul them, the small herd was driven on foot back to Kerrville, a 2-day trek, camping overnight by the side of the road. It was a memorable adventure for 6-year old Buddy. That began what was Roy’s almost uninterrupted dairy enterprise until his death in 1980. For a year or two during WW II when materials and help were hard to obtain, the dairy was shut down. In the beginning, Roy had milked the 13 cows the first year by hand and in so doing permanently damaged his arm muscles. One milking machine was obtained the second year. Although it would be inaccurate to say that the dairy thereafter flourished, it did remain for the rest of his working life Roy’s most dependable means of adequately providing for his family. In most of the years until 1963 the dairy was almost entirely a family affair, with Roy, Elizabeth, Buddy and Kate providing most of the labor 365 days a year. The dairy at Kerrville soon proved to be a better income producer, and the feed store was shut down sometime around 1936. Miles opened his own feed store at another location in Kerrville and stayed there until the mid-WW II years. Bud went to Beaumont and opened a barbecue stand. In 1933 Unice returned to Baylor in Waco for a year in graduate school, and then two years teaching at Bryan and Grand Prairie, Texas before returning to Mesa, Arizona in the fall of 1936.
At Kerrville the initial dairy operation “across the river” produced raw milk for delivery to the local creamery in five and ten gallon cans. In 1938 after the feed store had been shut down, Roy obtained a lease on a larger and more suitable facility which was updated so that milk could be bottled both raw and pasteurized and delivered retail to front porches throughout town, morning and afternoon. Buddy was a regular on the delivery vehicle, a 1937 Chevy panel truck, before and after school. Milk was 12 cents a quart in long-neck glass bottles with cardboard stoppers, and featured long cream-line Jersey milk. The name Roy chose was the Island Dairy, for the islands of Jersey and Gurnsey in the English Channel.
In 1940 the major competitor wanted badly to regain his previous monopoly on the Kerrville retail milk business and Roy agreed to be bought out. He then moved his family to Brownwood where there was an irrigation district from the local lake. He obtained a little bit of farm equipment, leased some land and attempted to farm, mostly oats and sorghum, as well as watermelons and cantaloupes for local sale, but without much success financially. He soon reverted to the dairy business, putting up a small dairy facility on a leased place including 409 acres of land, about 150 being worth a decent chance of farming. He continued that operation with about 75 to 125 cows for 22 years until the lease was lost in 1963 and another move was necessary. By that time Buddy had grown up, left home and started his own family, but had always had a desire to get away from his work in engineering and manufacturing in Dallas and Houston. He had been investing in the dairy in a modest way and was ready to think about eventually succeeding Roy when the right time should come. Therefore Roy and Buddy, then 36, decided to move the dairy to Midland, Texas and build a California style dry-lot dairy. That was accomplished in early 1963 on a 35 acres sandy plot they acquired 2 miles south of the city. It was a more successful dairy situation than ever before and grew and improved over the years after that, although not without fits and starts, as they say. However, enough progress was made so that Buddy was able to leave his day job with Texas Instruments in 1971, and having acquired majority ownership of the operation, moved his family to Midland. Although no longer responsible for getting things done, Roy continued his full interest in the dairy and worked at least a half day most of the time doing the things he enjoyed until his eightieth birthday. Roy and Elizabeth enjoyed a period of some seven or eight years in the l970’s when they were able to relax and travel a bit and visit, and when the fear of being old and having no money had disappeared. They owned a nice comfortable home in Midland. Roy died in 1980 from stomach cancer, and Elizabeth followed in 1984 from a heart attack. They are buried in Midland. In the fall of 1979, the four Neely brothers then still living (who were Otto, Unice, Bud, and Red) drove from Arizona to Midland for a farewell visit with Roy before his illness became so severe that he couldn’t appreciate it. Although unspoken, it could be seen in Roy’s face as well as his brothers’ how comforting the bond among them was.
Roy was universally respected as a very hard worker, unquestionably honest, clearly outspoken, and with the highest moral and ethical values, all of which were expected of his children. He was devoted to Elizabeth and always accorded her respect and affection. However he often did not follow her advice and wishes to be more careful in business and financial matters. In that regard he had a poor record of over-reaching and poor planning in a number of ventures in which he engaged simultaneously with running his dairy, and which seriously threatened the family finances a number of times. Some of those ventures in addition to the previously mentioned auto transmission matter included a failed fruit and vegetable cooperative, a frozen food locker plant, and a new family home, ironically called “Dunmovin”, for which financing had not been arranged and which had to be sold less than two years later. Nevertheless he provided enough assistance so that all five of their children graduated from college. At each of the places they lived, the Roy Neelys always had an extensive vegetable garden producing a wide variety of healthy foodstuffs for the family table. The production was bountiful as would be expected from access to fertilizer from the dairy. Dad and Mother had high scholastic expectations for their children, and while there was never anything implied that was threatening, it was clear that a good report card every six weeks was the desired result. Our mother, Elizabeth, said that she thought she got the best of the bunch of the Neely boys. She is still always remembered and loved as the dearest and most compassionate mother, friend and teacher. Roy and Elizabeth were throughout their married life devout Presbyterians. Her paternal line, the Tenneys, were many generations strong in the clergy of that denomination.
The Children of Roy and Elizabeth Neely
Sarah Elizabeth Neely, always known as Sarah Beth.
The first home I remember was the “house across the river” in Kerrville, Texas. About 1926 our folks had bought two acres with a three room “shotgun” house which Daddy later enlarged in 1931, adding two bedrooms and converting the previous middle room into a hall and a bathroom which had our first indoor plumbing. Once Buddy and I picked all the leaves off the three fig trees because we were playing “Jack Frost”. I remember walking about two miles to school although sometimes Daddy would take us part way in his truck on his way to work at the feed store. One time Buddy and I got caught in a rain storm walking home from Sunday School and had to go around the long way across a pasture and through all the weeds and mud and waded waist deep across a fast flowing (usually dry) draw.
The Guadalupe river flooded over its banks nearly every year and we watched in fascination all that turbulent muddy water with debris and occasional logs floating by. In 1932 it came up within a few yards of our house. Mother and Daddy placed a stake at the high point to see if the water was rising further. It was very near our water pump. Mother was really worried about us as she saw the river getting higher and higher. Another time after a flood, the receding water left small cray fish in the lower edge of the cow pasture. Daddy picked up 69 which Mother cooked and served for dinner that night.
Mother was a gentle compassionate person with a wonderful way of handling kids and a concem for everyone who was having trouble or needed help. Roy and Elizabeth were good parents. We were occasionally spanked; the worst offense was leaving the gate open so that the cows could get out.
It was a big event when Daddy robbed the bees of their honey from their hive out by the garage. We were warned not to step on a bee that might be in the grass, and it was a big treat to chew on a chunk of honeycomb. Once on a very cold day I only had a short jacket to wear; I realized that I didn’t have a long coat so maybe we were poor. Later I did have one that I wore for years. It never occurred to me to be bothered that I wore the same blue dress with the white lace collar every Sunday, but later Mother asked me if it did.
When I was in the sixth grade I fell off the horse in the cow lot behind our house and my right hand got ripped really badly by the barbed wire across the posts of the gate the horse wanted to go through. It resulted in a serious infection that (in those days before penicillin) Mother later said caused fear for my life.
In 1940 in the middle of the school year we moved to Brownwood and I graduated third in my high school class of 127 students in 1942. That fall I enrolled in a small 2-year Presbyterian college in Brownwood called Daniel Baker, and in the spring of 1944 graduated as valedictorian the same week that Buddy was valedictorian of his high school class. Our parents were congratulated on the front page of the Brownwood Bulletin for our achievements.
Although Daddy was not himself a good student, due most probably to interrupted schooling as a boy and, therefore, never having learned to read well, he and Mother both always had the highest expectations for all their children in regard to academic success. Mother had been a school teacher before their marriage.
I later graduated from the University of Texas, having majored in English and minored in Spanish. I went to the school of nursing at Parkland Hospital in Dallas and graduated with the class of 1950, after having to drop out for a year to be treated for and recover from tuberculosis which I had contracted from a patient.
In 1951 I married Marion A. Tennison. We moved to southern California and first lived in Palmdale as “Mat” worked at Edwards Air Force Base. We later lived in Oxnard and then two different houses in Camarillo where we still reside. Our three daughters were born in California and now live in the Los Angeles area and Oregon, convenient for staying in touch. Barbara works at UCLA in Los Angeles. Margarite (“Margo”) and her husband Mark Swann, whom she married in 1986, work and live nearby in Camarillo, and they have two children, Patrick and Heather. Marian Kay is married to Brook Taylor and has two daughters, Martina Hewitt and a baby born last year, Clare Gabrielle Taylor. She had for many years been a nurse in ICU at a Santa Barbara hospital, before moving last year to Oregon where she is engaged in specialty nursing at an eye clinic.
Mat has worked over the years in several jobs, all relating to electronics and the aircraft industry. I have not been employed outside the home except for teaching quilting classes from time to time. Making quilts has been my hobby; I have made over 200 quilts of one size or another. I have been president of the Camarillo Quilters Association three times and some of my quilts have been published in national quilt magazines.
My medical history includes breast cancer requiring major surgery and radiation therapy in 1961. Later large skin graft surgery was required in 1987 to repair resulting radiation damage. In April 1999 I had open heart surgery for aortic valve replacement plus a double bypass. My recovery has been very good and I have resumed most of my activities. Mat has emphysema but is a good patient and mostly takes care of himself.
At church, Trinity Presbyterian in Camarillo, I have been busy with one job or another, grown in my faith and felt God’s hand on my life and His healing in my body. At this point I am 75 years old, feeling fine and enjoying life.
Roy Griffith Neely Jr. “Buddy”
I enjoyed a country boyhood in the l930’s eating lots of red beans and fried chicken, running barefoot in the woods and playing in the clear water of the Guadalupe River at Kerrville. In 1932 there was a big flood on the Guadalupe that stayed high for two or three days and we were cut off from town without much food. I didn’t know that it could be done, but Dad rode his horse, swimming, across the river and came back with enough groceries to get by. My growing up years were remembered as a great time with no awareness at all of being poor during the lean years of the Depression. During the early 1930s when three of Dad’s brothers (U.R., Ellis, and Miles) and their families lived in Kerrville, I had the opportunity to get to know some of my relatives, which has always been an important tie to our far away Arizona Neelys.
I worked with Dad in the dairy and the fields more and more as I grew bigger, especially in my high school years. Much of my interaction with him was as we worked together. He was always demanding yet fair. He taught by example to be resourceful and self reliant. It was just expected as a matter of course that whatever the problem or how great the obstacle, it could be solved and success would come through hard work and sheer determination. In 1937 Dad bought brand new bicycles for me and Sarah Beth for Christmas. They cost $17.50 each and although I realized that was a good bit of money at the time, it later dawned on me just how much of a sacrifice it had to have been to spend that much during the Depression. Later, when I was in the fourth grade, he also paid $40 for a new clarinet so that I could join the newly formed school band. I have always appreciated that gift from him because it was my initiation into music which has been an important interest in my life.
After high school I went to college at Texas A & M where I graduated in electrical engineering in 1949 after a one year interruption while in the Navy. Marge Purvis and I were married later that year and to us were born two children, David and Louine. David and his wife Marie now live in Austin and have five children, including two boys, Jeffrey and Wesley, and three daughters, Emily, Melanie, and Kimberly. Louine (Lou) and her husband Robert Briley have two sons, Zach and Parker, and live in Abilene, Texas. Parker and his wife Natalie’s son, my first great-grandchild, John Preston Briley, was born in 2000.
I worked in industry as an engineer and manufacturing manager for some 22 years, the last 15 being with Texas Instruments in Dallas and Houston.
In 1971, Dad and I reached an agreement by which I acquired a majority interest in the dairy, which was reorganized as Roy Roy Dairy, Inc. I then moved my family to Midland and operated the dairy for the next 25 years. Our children having left home for most of that time, Marge immersed herself in the work of the Presbyterian Church in many of capacities from the local through the state and national levels. She was good at it and was truly God’s servant. The cows were dispersed at public auction in 1996, ending the dairy after 62 years of almost continuous operation since being started by Dad in 1934. My main interest has always been my work, but I have also had a broad interest in things scientific (astronomy, aviation, physics, ancient history)
as well as music, sports, and current events. I owned several airplanes which I flew frequently for 30 years or so, mostly for business in connection with our dairy.
Marge contracted Parkinson’s Disease in 1993 and further developed Alzheimer’s in 1995. She died in 1997 here in the same house in Midland into which we moved in 1971. It continues to be my home where I remain in excellent health at age 75. Marge and I were most happily married and blessed together for 47 years.
Eula Kate Neely
I was born February 18, 1934 when we lived on the place “across the river” at Kerrville, Texas. I remember standing in Daddy’s arms on the edge of the porch and his teaching me to say “Mother” instead of “Mama”.
I went to kindergarten at Miss Collier’s in Kerrville where I pretended that I could read so that I could be put up into Mary Frances’ (Red’s daughter) group, and faked my way into actually reading. I’d been practicing on the cartoons in the Saturday Evening Post. I started first grade in Brownwood and we moved on my birthday, or Barbara’s, from town out to the Lucas place in the country, and so I then went to nearby Early school.
Barbara and I fought fierce physical battles. I still have scars. Sometimes I bribed her to leave me alone for an afternoon by reading her a story. When we were about 8 and 10, I read her all of Tom Sawyer if she would leave me alone until after Christmas. I secretly hoped that she would have got out of the habit of bothering me if she did not for two or three months. Nope, she went back to her irritating ways on schedule and wanted me to read to her all of Huckleberry Finn for her to agree to leaving me alone permanently. I didn’t make it.
I was a bookish child. One Christmas I got thirteen books and almost no other presents. I started on the piano about third grade. After elementary school at Early, I transferred to Brownwood, three miles away, for junior and high school. I never quit enjoying living on the farm. When I wasn’t in school, reading, or on the piano I could usually be found wherever Dad was: driving the truck to be loaded in the hayfields, helping in the dairy, moving the cows, whatever. In my sophomore year I had undulant fever. Leota (whom we sometimes call Baby Sister) was born during my senior year. I graduated from high school in May of 1951. In the fall of 2001 I attended the fiftieth reunion of my high school class. It is amazing what nice people some of those nerds have grown up to be.
I went to North Texas State College at Denton, majoring in music. I spent my junior year at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and did most of my minor, history, there. I graduated from NTSC in 1955. I then took a job in Dallas, teaching music to fourth through seventh graders. It was in Dallas that I met Jim Hillhouse, petroleum engineer and wonderful guy. We were married June 1, 1957 in Brownwood and honeymooned in the Texas Hill Country. We promptly started a family; our fourth daughter being born before the first was five years old.
Jim’s work took us to Houston, then to California and back to Houston at the beginning of 1967 where our last child, our son, Dobbins, was born in 1968. Jim’s favorite pastime was collecting, cutting and polishing petrified wood. There were always new piles of rocks in the yard and a garage full of rock saws, tumblers and hand-built polishing equipment.
I spent the nineteen years from ’57 to ’76 occupied with raising children, doing church work, and music, and nature work with the Girl Scouts. Jim started his own consulting engineering business in 1973; I did the accounting. At 42 years old, with the first of our four girls off to college and our son in the second grade, I took a part t1me job at PhotoLabs, Etc., and stayed there working in a lot of different capacities until 1992. In the early 80's I got deeply and actively involved w1th the Native Plant Society of Texas and worked and played hard at educating myself about native plants and natural habitat.
The kids started graduating from high school in 1976, and from college in 1980. Weddings started in 1980, and grandkids began to appear in 1985. Jim retired about 1986, not having successfully jumped the hurdle to computer engineering and being crunched by the sharp slump in petroleum activity at that time.
Once our last chick was in college and away from home, we began looking for another place besides Houston to spend the rest of our lives. We found in October of 1990 ten acres of pristine, if not virgin, forest in the edge of Texas' Big Thicket country. We called it Redschance: a chance for Red (Jim's name for me) to do something she'd long wanted, to start a small native plant nursery. Jim built a shop, potting shed and bunkhouse, and kept a watchful eye out as a contractor built a modest but wonderful house, into which we moved in July of 1992.
Ooops! A bump in the road on the way to a well planned future. In early September 1992 I was diagnosed with a big bad breast cancer. Treatments and recovery ate up the next year and within a year after that I knew that I would never have the physical energy and stamina to do the nursery. However, I found enough other interesting things to do in the native plant and native habitat area to get a lot out of life and living. I teach classes in wildflower identification, give slide shows and talks, and lead nature walks wherever I can find an audience. I've created a couple of native plant gardens. Jim enjoyed reading woodworking and being my chauffeur, helper, and companion. We both loved our piece of the woods, and the peace of the woods. Jim died July 4, 1998. I'm over the worst of missing him personally and am grateful for the forty-one years we enjoyed together.
Our oldest daughter, Jane, is a chemical and computer engineer who is married to Todd Chronis, a software architect. They live near Rochester, N.Y. with their sixteen year old twins, Griff and Lanthe, who are mathematical and musical. Evelyn, a quilter married her high school sweetheart, Richard Judson, who is a scientist in the biotech industry. They live in Connecticut with Catherine, who plays violin; Roy, jazz saxophone; and Sam, whose arms are just now long enough for him to get the trombone he has yearned for since he was six. Ruth is married to Chris Mason and they live in Seattle where he is a lawyer. She is mothering mischievous Andrew and trike-riding Claire. Carol is an agricultural educator on the staff at the University of California at Davis. Her husband, Steve Schoenig, works for the state of California in biological pest management. They live in Davis, California. Their son Elliot w1ll tell you that he is a herpetologist, and that his sister, Lyla Kate, is "just the cutest" thing. Dobbins left the University of Texas without a degree, but is now, after ten years working at a commercial print shop, back in college and doing very well.
Barbara Neely
I was born in Kerrville, Texas on February 5, 1936. An early memory is of enjoying okra and wieners in fresh tomato sauce made by Aunt Ethel.
I was anxious to get out of high school so graduated in three years by taking correspondence courses in the summer. After graduating from the University of Texas, I taught school for two years and then turned to social work.
I found that work interesting and exciting and stayed with it until 1976 when I ran for County Commissioner of Benton County in Corvallis, Oregon where I was living. I held that position for ten years. I was then recruited by our new governor, Neil Goldschmidt, to come to work for State Government, where I worked for seven years in the director’s office in the Department of Human Resources. I then ran for the State Legislature where I completed three terms. I am presently a candidate for the State Senate of Oregon from a district which includes my home town of Corvallis as well as the capital city of Albany.
I have been married three times: four years to Phillip Isett, twenty-seven years to Dick Ross, the father of my children, and seven years to Joe Omelchuck, my present husband. My three married children are Jennifer, Serena, and John. One of my greatest pleasures is playing with my five grandchildren.
Leota Ruth Neely
I was born October 12, 1950 in Brownwood, Texas and raised at “Crestfallen Manor”, the old house on the Lucas place in Early, Texas where Daddy was farming and operating a dairy. I most remember walking in the woods, playing with my good friend Sandy Milam, following my father Roy around the farm, talking to my mother Elizabeth, and reading.
When I was twelve we moved, dairy and all, to Midland, Texas. The schools were much better, which I enjoyed, and I graduated as valedictorian from Midland High School in 1968. I attended Austin College in Sherman, Texas for two years, then married my husband, Stephen Goodney on August 15, 1970.
We moved to Pittsburgh, an eye-opening experience for a girl from small town Texas who had never seen a bagel, a submarine sandwich, public transportation, or much in the way of hills. I finished a degree in elementary education with a minor in mathematics at Duquesne University. My plan to save the world as an elementary teacher being undone by my inability to cope with large groups of small children, I got a job as a bookkeeper and went back to night school for a degree in accounting. In the meantime, Steve finished his course work on a PhD in mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University.
We moved to Ossining, New York, where I worked for a public accounting firm and Steve taught at Marymount, a women’s college in Tarrytown, New York. I finished my accounting course work at Pace University, delighted that my course work had some noticeable relation to my professional life, and passed the CPA exam in 1979.
In 1980, we moved to Northfield, Minnesota where Steve started work as a computer programmer. Because I didn’t want to commute to Minneapolis or the surrounding suburbs, I started an accounting practice, first in our house and then in an office in Northfield. We also started a family. Benjamin was born in 1981 and Elizabeth was born in 1986. In 1988 we moved into our present house in Northfield. Steve’s brother Paul came to live with us in 1990 and continues to make our life easier.
My accounting practice has grown and I now employ up to four people. Computers have vastly changed accounting, tax, and business practice, and it is a continuing challenge to keep up with changes in the technology. Steve now works for Unisys a manager of a programming group.
We are active in the United Church of Christ (Congregational) and enjoy the vital political and cultural life of Northfield. I still like the outdoors best and often walk to work. Our son Benjamin is a freshman at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and our daughter Elizabeth attends the Village School, an alternative progressive public school in Northfield.