The ‘Seniors 38’ stone outside the one-room jail in Texola.

JACK LOFTIS

Abner James ‘Jack’ Loftis was born in Texola on December 4, 1919, to Uriah Bee and Brooks Bernice Loftis, one of three children – Jack had two sisters, Helen and Tommie.

Jack graduated as the valedictorian of his class at Texola High School in 1937. Not yet 20, He married Lottie Belle Ingle in a quiet ceremony on January 3, 1939 – she wore a wine velvet afternoon gown with black accessories. At the time Jack was attending the Centra State Teachers College in Edmond.

Jack at his graduation

In December 1940, after divorcing Bee, Jack’s mother Brooks moved to Los Angeles where, a year later on December 5, 1941, she was killed after being hit by a car while crossing the street.

It being wartime, Jack went away to fight in the US Navy and served in the Pacific. In fact, he was at Iwo Jima to witness the historic raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi. When he returned to Oklahoma, it was not to teach. By now he had a young son (James, born in 1943) and a new two-bedroom house in the Venice suburb of Oklahoma City, and so he went into retail. For the next 34 years, until he retired in 1979, he worked for Safeway, becoming a manager.

The little house at 2541 E Eubank that Jack and Lottie bought when they moved to Oklahoma City.

Lottie died in 1984 and Jack remarried to Laverne. He passed away in 1996, still living in the little house he and Lottie had bought.  

DORIS NELMS

Doris Nelms was the youngest of those names on the plaque, having been born on August 18, 1921, to Otis and Agnes Leon Nelms. Otis had lived all his life on a farm just outside Texola where he and Agnes raised six children, Doris being in the middle. An older sister, Ruth, had died as a baby two years before Doris was born.

The farm where Doris grew up and where her fatherr Otis was born and died.

Then, in 1933, tragedy struck the family again when Doris’s younger brother Henry died of a burst appendix on July 8 at the age of just 9. Otis was so grief-stricken that he himself died of a heart attack just two days later. He was only 49 and he left his wife not only with six children, but five months pregnant with their last son, Eddie. Agnes continued to run the farm into her 60s, long after the children had left.

Doris Nelms

Like several of her classmates, Doris went to Weatherford College after graduating. She married Winford Harold Chick in September 1940 and their first son, Winford Harold Jr was born the following April. (Ten years later, in 1950, the family ties would become even strong when Doris’s little brother Curry married Winford’s half-sister Juanita.)  

They moved to Oklahoma City, Winford working as a gas station attendant and Doris as a waitress at the Edwin Café. A second son, Joe Wayne, followed in 1943.

Winford served in the US Navy at Okinawa during World War II while, in June 1945, Doris took up a job as the bookkeeper at local paper, the Beckham County Democrat. When Winford returned from active service the couple moved to Fort Worth where a daughter, Darla, was born in 1951. Winford worked in construction, becoming the superintendent of Lydick Roofing and then general manager for Chas F Williams Co. He later set up his own company, Chick Specialties Inc, with Doris acting as the Company Secretary. However, she died of a heart attack on February 1, 1974, aged just 52 years.

GEORGE BLAIR

George Allen Blair was born on June 24, 1919, southeast of Texola, to Beveley Hanford and Emma Pearl Blair, the second youngest of five children. Unlike most of those in his graduation class, George never left Texola. He continued to live on the family farm, ranching and taking care of his father in his last years. His parents’ marriage seems somewhat convoluted. In the 1940 census, Emma is listed as head of the house, divorced, and running the farm; George and his sisters Jeffie and Jean. She would also be listed as divorced on her death certificate when she passed away in Shamrock, Texas, in 1949 following a stroke. However, in 1947, she and Beverley were together in San Joaquin, California, looking after their grandchildren, Frances and Richard, the children of their eldest son Hanford.

Beveley and his wife, Ethel, had moved to California in late 1941 and Hanford was working as a farm labourer on the George Berry ranch near Linden. His parents had moved as well and, one April evening in 1942, the whole family were together, sitting on the lawn of the ranch. Around 7pm Hanford went into the house, took a .22 calibre rifle and shot himself in the head. He died two hours later. The official line was that he was despondent over recent ill-health, but the fact that Ethel had filed for divorce twice the previous year may indicate all was far from well in the marriage, and possibly why his parents had moved to California with them.

The stone of the complicated family of George Blair.

Perhaps, unsurprisingly, given all this turmoil, George never married. He looked after his father until Beverley died in 1969. George himself reached the age of 90 before succumbing on August 27, 2009, to injuries he’d sustained in an automobile accident. He was the first last of the plaque’s graduation class.