Monday, July 28, 2008
Stories of Linda
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Below we will be adding new stories from Linda's family and friends, please email your stories to lancemiller777@gmail.com |
| Eulogy | Story 1 | Story 2 | Story 3 | Story 4 | Story 5 |
We are here to mourn the passing of a daughter, a sister, a mother, and a grandmother. All of these were in one great woman-Linda Sanders.
Linda was the most caring woman I've ever known. She was a loving sister and friend who readily helped others within her family, from her daughter and grandson's to her nieces, nephew, and mother.
Linda also had a mischievous side to her, something that will no doubt stun many of you. I can remember her vividly when she and her friends though it would be fun to visit the local police department and throw eggs at their windows to toast Halloween. The police didn't find it quite as funny as she did.
I can also remember a time when she decided that it would be a good idea to have a dance party at my mother's house and invited a few people to come over. Well, apparently it was a good idea because half of Conway showed up. We literally danced the finish off the hard wood floor. And her friends at the police department decided to show up too.
In closing I'd like to leave you with the words of a poem called "The Poem of Life" which I think would be what Linda would have to say to us all:
Life is but a stopping place
A pause in what's to be
A resting place along the road
To sweet eternity.
We all have different journeys
Different paths along the way
We all were meant to learn some things,
But never meant to stay
-by Rose, Linda's sister
When I think of Linda, I remember a little sister with big brown eyes and dark hair looking up at me. I was almost five years older than her. She was mischievous sometimes, too. Her and James were closer in age and they played together but also fought a lot. She could beat him up until they started getting a little older and then found out she couldn't. She couldn't bear it.
She was a little tomboy and liked to play out of doors. All of us loved to climb trees and play hide and seek. She was very athletic and was good playing in our neighborhood baseball games that the kids loosely organized just to get together and play. We played volley ball and badminton too and she excelled at those.
When I got married, Linda was just fourteen and I when I would go back to visit, she was still a tomboy but was growing up to be a very pretty girl. I especially remember how pretty her dark shiny hair was and she was wearing it long on one of my visits. I tried to fix it up fancy and put it on top of her head but the next thing I know, she was outside running around and it all had fallen down so I just pulled it back into a ponytail for her.
She worked at the Dandee Dog one summer when she was old enough which was only about a half mile from the house. I went down to buy a dandee dog from her more than once when I was home visiting. She had a group of friends that she ran around with and as far as I can remember, not any special boyfriend.
She moved to Little Rock after graduating from High School. and began working for Southwestern Bell Telephone Company and lived in an Apartment with Rosemary who worked at Southwestern Bell, too.
Then she got married to Mike when she was nineteen. She always enjoyed coming over to visit us and to see the kids. She loved them and liked seeing me, too. She would take them and me to the Zoo or to the Park, which I couldn't do at that time since I didn't drive. They loved to see her come to visit and would get so excited.
It was always fun to go somewhere with her because she had such a love of life and made just everyday things fun. She was very funny, too and could tell some funny jokes which had us all laughing.
There was one day in April when the weather was perfect and with beautiful blue skies and a little windy that she came over and had bought a kite. We went and found a grassy space and flew the kite and afterward she took us to a little Drive In where we got strawberry shortcake. I told her this has been the most perfect day, ever.
-by Martha, Linda's sister
I can remember when Linda still lived in Little Rock and I was probably 3 or 4. I loved to dance and she would have me dance and she would have her friends over and they would all clap and tell me what a great dancer I was. I loved going over to her house because I always had so much fun with her.
When I was 13 I went to Houston to live with Linda. Michelle was only 3 at the time. I only brought 2 pair of jeans and a few t-shirts with me. She took me to the mall and bought me so many nice clothes and shoes. She took me and Michelle to our first concert at the Astrodome to see Donny and Marie Osmond. She also took us to see the Houston Astros there. On the weekends she would take me and Michelle to Astroworld which is like Six Flags.
We would ride rides all day and have a blast. When I was 17 I went to live with her once again in Bartlesville. I worked for a local grocery store and went to school. I usually got home from work around 10 pm or so and there would be Linda waiting on me with a warm plate of food. She loved to cook and she would make us pork chops which were the best I've ever had. She also loved to make steaks and she would saute mushrooms with the steak and there was nothing better. She loved to cook for other people and you could tell it made her happy.
Linda was not just my aunt. She was also like a mother at times and she was also my best friend. When she found out I was having twin baby girls she was so happy and excited. She loved children so much. She really was the most giving person I ever knew. I miss her so much and I always will. I will never forget her and I still tell my friends and people I work with what a great person she was and how lucky I was to have had her in my life. As long as I am alive I will always tell the stories of my aunt and I will keep her memory alive.
- by Renee, Linda's niece
This is a somewhat funny story of when Linda was living in Little Rock. She was the best person about being able to find four leaf clovers that I've ever seen. We would be in a Park or wherever and she would search a little bit among the clover and find a four leaf clover. So I would try to find one too and never was successful.
There was one day when She had taken us to McArthur Park so that the kids could play on the playground. We would swing them and then we would get on the swings ourselves and have so much fun swinging high. . Then we sat down to rest while the kids ran around laughing and playing. Linda looked in some clover and found a four leaf clover. So, I tried to find one and couldn't. I was getting frustrated and she said she would help me to find one. We looked for a little while and she found one. I picked it and put it in my purse.
Then we needed to go to the restroom so we all went inside the old Arsenal building which was a museum, to use the restroom. When we got out I realized I had forgotten my purse. We went back to the Park bench where it had been and it was gone.
We started looking around the area and finally found it on the ground. I opened it up and everything was gone except for the four leaf clover.
I didn't have anything of any real value in the purse. Later, someone told me that the four leaf clover doesn't bring good luck except to the person who found it. I found that out the hard way.
I sure did miss those days of having Linda in the same Town with me when she and Mike moved away. Life wasn't the same without her around even though they would occasionally come to visit to see us and to see Mother in Conway.
Having her living close while the kids were very young was a blessing to me and to them because she brought fun and excitement for them and for me too.
-by Martha, Linda's sister
When Linda was living in Bartlesville and especially after Mother moved there to live with her, I would try to go and visit every year. We had a lot of enjoyable times together.
I think the year may have been 1996, which was one year after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma city which killed many people that we decided to go on a day trip out alongside old Route 66. It was me, Linda, Mother and Mikey, who was a small boy at the time.
We started by driving to Tulsa and eating breakfast at the Route 66 Diner and then started out. The Route was Hwy. 44 west. Soon after leaving Tulsa, the old road works its way back into the country and heads for the little Towns that will always be Route 66 havens.. Along the old road between Tulsa and Oklahoma City stand Route 66 Memorial Highway signs. The two-lane is still well traveled and resurfaces through Sapulpa, Chandler , Luther and many other towns. Alongside one section of Route 66 is a graveyard with simple white crosses. We were able to drive on a few sections of the old highway. It runs right alongside Hwy. 44 west.
We saw some of the old Motels and Towns and small town Cafes that were there in the old days of Route 66. We stopped in Stroud, Oklahoma where the street is brick covered and stopped to eat at the Rock Cafe. There are Route 66 souvenirs for sale and I bought a Tee shirt that had on it "From Chicago to L.A. don't miss the Rock Cafe, Historic Route 66, Stroud, Oklahoma. Established 1939." I still have that Tee shirt today.
Then we went through Chandler and saw the Lincoln Motel, which opened in 1939. It's a very neat motel with about twenty small cabins, and I bought a postcard with a picture of it from the office. Further into Chandler, we went to a museum in the downtown and a pie shop.
The next Town we came to was Arcadia. It is the home of the famed Round Barn. It's a big round red barn and impressive. It's listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was built in 1898. By the time we parked beside it, the rain was pouring down but we went in, anyway. There was a man that gave us some details on the Barn. he told us that in one instance it was in the path of a tornado and because of the round shape, it didn't have much damage. I bought a postcard with a picture of the barn.
We had also planned to go to Oklahoma City to see the Memorial to the victims of the bombing but because it was still raining we decided to go back to Bartlesville instead.
From there we turned north and went through Guthrie, Oklahoma which was a very charming little Town. We headed back to Bartlesville. I only wish I had taken a camera with me and taken some pictures along the way. But, I did buy some postcards with pictures.
Another year when I was visiting them, I asked Linda about taking us to the Tallgrass Prairie which I had read about in a National magazine with some beautiful pictures of it. It was in Osage County, just southwest of Bartlesville. It was after we drove through Pawhuska, which is the gateway to the Tallgrass Prairie that we were able to get to it. It was amazing! In some places the grass is up to almost ten feet. It was something to see the huge expanse of grass reaching into the horizon without any trees to obscure the view. When the wind blows, the grass ripples like the waves of the ocean. It gave me such a feeling of freedom.
We would drive and then stop and get out to look at the Prairie. There were Prairie flowers and plants and it was as awesome as I had imagined it would be.
Then we drove back through Pawhuska and started on our way back to Bartlesville. We stopped at a small Cafe on our way back to Bartlesville where the specialty was Barbecue and it was very good. It was a place that Ben Johnson, the actor had frequented some when he was a Rodeo Cowboy. They had pictures of him on the wall. I was amazed that Linda knew about the place. She always knew about interesting places to go.
Several times she took me out to Woolaroc, which is a game preserve and also a Museum of Western Art with huge room sized paintings of Western scenes. It's very interesting too and fun to visit. I bought some Indian Pottery one of the times I visited it with her. I still have it.
I can relive those memories any time I want to and just wish that she was still here to share them with me..
-by Martha, Linda's sister
I was born in the early 60's and really aware of all the changes going on in society. One big example that stood out was Linda having a job most would only consider for a man -a telephone tech. I believe she even climbed telephone poles in the job. That was very impressionable on me. I remember her when she was still a teen, but most of my earliest memories of her were as a newlywed to Michael, and they had a neat little rental house a few blocks from the Arkansas Governors Mansion.
A few years on they moved to Fayetteville. We went to visit them in the winter of 1969. I remember feeling like theirs was a charmed life there. Fayetteville was nice and cold, in the mountains, they lived in an apartment complex that like most of the town back then, was full of college students. Linda had a Volkswagen Beetle, which I really liked. Beyond the general coolness of their college lifestyle for me to be excited about, on my birthday the Arkansas Razorbacks and Texas Longhorns played against each other in Fayetteville. That game went down in history as one of all college football's most important. I saw on TV that Richard Nixon was there, and less known at the time; Congressman George Bush and student Bill Clinton were there too.
We went to visit the site of a Civil War battle at Pea Ridge/Elkhorn Tavern on Sunday the 7th. I got a souvenir musket bullet, which I kept through many years and may still be at my parents.
All these details kind of add up to a story of how cool Linda was to me. She was a tomboy and liberated woman, by Arkansas standards in those years, and her and Michael were a couple focused on getting him through a Masters degree. All that was unique and inspirational in my eyes, just what a little boy needs to see.
-by Lance, Linda's nephew
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