Charlene Abimial Ewing

Charlene was the youngest of 10 children born to Charles Benjamin Walter and Edith Mae (Richards) Walter. She was born at home on October 6, 1926 in the family home in Musselfork, Missouri. She died on November 30, 2019 at the age of 93 in Olympia, Washington. During World War II, when her brothers were engaged in the war effort, her father relied on her for work on the farm, including plowing fields with a team of mules. After graduating from high school and obtaining a teaching certificate from the Kirksville State Teacher’s College, she was employed as a teacher in a one-room country school with all eight grades. After a year of teaching, she moved to Kansas City and worked in an airplane engine plant in support of the war effort. It was during this time that she met and married Raymond Leroy Ewing on June 3, 1946 – a marriage that lasted 59 years until Ray’s death in 2005. Shortly after their marriage, they headed west, living in Idaho, Montana and Arizona before moving to Eugene, Oregon in 1951 and then, in 1953, to a farm near Linslaw, Oregon. Charlene managed the farm and raised her four children until the youngest (twins) were in high school, and she then worked at variety of jobs in the timber products industry. In 1988 she and Ray retired and moved to the Idle Wheels Mobile Home Park in Eugene. Charlene wasn’t one to sit around so she learned to swim, became a regular at the gym, and took up walking. She participated in many walking events, including multiple Portland Marathons. She is survived by daughters, Sharon Ewing-Fix of Longview, Washington, Betty Griffin of Eugene, Oregon; son, Al Ewing of Olympia, Washington; sister, Esther Wolf of Kansas City, Missouri; 12 grandchildren, 2 step-grandchildren, 25 great grandchildren, four step-grandchildren, a great-great grandchild, and a great-great step-grandchild. Charlene’s husband preceded her in death in 2005 as did a son, Bill, in 2007 and a granddaughter, Amy, in 1999. A memorial service will be at Saturday, December 14, 2019, 1:00 p.m. at the First Baptist Church of Eugene, 3550 Fox Meadow Road, Eugene, OR 97408. In lieu of flowers, please make donations to your favorite charity. Eulogy for Charlene Abimial Ewing “Born alive before I arrived!” Those are the words of Doctor C.A. Freeman, recorded on the birth certificate of Charlene Abimial Walter. Mom was born in the upstairs bedroom of the family home in Musselfork, Missouri on October 6, 1926 just a little more than 93 years ago. She was the 10th and last child of Charles Benjamin and Edith Mae Walter. Mom held her parents in high esteem. She said they were kind and hardworking and they taught her to work hard and to obey the “golden rule”. She said she didn’t get into trouble much as a child, but when she did, her father never spanked her. She said when he talked to her she felt worse than if she had gotten a spanking. Being a youngest child with 4 older sisters, as one would expect, Charlene was a bit spoiled and that carried over to her adult life. She always liked being the center of attention and she always had stories to tell about her hard work on the farm and in later years about her accomplishments as a walker. Mom started kindergarten at 4 years of age. She says she didn’t remember learning much at that age but enjoyed playing games and listening to her teacher read stories. In later years she became a more serious student, worked hard and did well. She liked all of her teachers and all of the subjects, but particularly math. She said that when other students were missing, the teacher would ask her to deliver their homework so they wouldn’t get behind and sometimes she would have to walk several miles to make the delivery. She told about when the school house caught on fire and they couldn’t put out the fire because they had no running water. The students helped move the furniture and books out before the school burned down. Her extra-curricular activities were limited. Her mother didn’t believe in dancing and her dad told her that school was for learning and there would be plenty of time for socializing after high school. She was involved in a Christmas parade when she was in grade school and played Mary in the Nativity scene. In high school she played basketball and told of trying to guard a girl who was over 6 feet tall – not easy considering she was only 5 feet 2 inches tall. She also once participated in a boxing match. That was probably one of those times her Father gave her one of his stern lectures. She graduated from high school at the age of 17. When Mom was not at school she was working on the farm especially during the time her brothers were involved in WW II. She was very good with animals. She could ride a horse and drive a team of horses or mules. Once when her father sold a team of mules to a neighbor, the neighbor asked if they were gentle. Her father assured him that they were. A few days later the neighbor returned and said, “I thought you said they were gentle. They kicked my hired hand right out of the barn.” Her father replied, “My little girl manages them quite well.” After high school Mom went to teachers college and got a teaching certificate. It only took 3 months during the summer and that fall at the age of 17 she was teaching grades 1 – 8 in a one room country school. Other duties included cutting wood for the wood stove that heated the building and keeping the school clean. After a year she decided there were easier ways to make a living. She moved to Kansas City where she had several jobs simultaneously including inspecting airplane engines, working for an insurance company and in her spare time as a soda jerk. With all these jobs, she was likely still not as busy as she had been teaching school and the money was a lot better. Somehow she found time for the social life that her dad told her there would be time for after high school. It was during this time that she met our father who had just finished his Army enlistment and was teaching dance lessons at night. It must have been love at first sight because he offered to take mom home. However, there was one problem. Mom had come to the dance class with 7 other girls who planned to go to a movie afterward. Dad solved that problem by taking all 8 of them to the movie. To make a long story short, 3 months later, on June 3, 1946 they were married. Their marriage lasted for 59 years until Ray passed away in 2005. Shortly after the wedding they decided to head out west to seek their fortune. For the next several years they were migrant laborers bouncing around from Utah to Idaho and Montana and to Arizona in the winter. During this time four children (Sharon, Alvin, and the twins Betty and Billy) joined the family and mom and dad decided it was time to settle down. Mom liked to tell the story of the birth of Betty and Billy. She had agreed to pay the doctor $35 for the delivery, but they didn’t know she was having twins. She says she got a good deal and the young doctor got rooked. They moved to Eugene, Oregon in 1951 and bought a house with no indoor plumbing which was what they had been accustomed to all of their married life. Mom said that Dad got really crazy and bought her an electric clothes dryer. He said he wanted to make things easier for mom, but she said it was because he got tired of getting hit in the face with the wet diapers that were hanging all around the house to dry. Living in town was not to mom’s liking, she wanted to be back on a farm where she could raise animals and where her kids would have room to roam. In 1953 Charlene and Ray found a 115 acre farm 36 miles from Eugene, on mostly gravel road that they fell in love with. It was on the Old Stage Coach Road and it had a house, a barn and a nice orchard on the Siuslaw River. In short order they bought a couple of cows from a neighbor and acquired a dog. Mom was happy to have cows to milk, fruit to can and plenty of room for a garden. While Dad was commuting back and forth to Eugene for his employment, mom assumed the role of farm manager. There was lots of timber on the land that was quite valuable, but mom and dad didn’t have the equipment or money to buy the equipment to harvest it. They were able to buy a cross cut saw and their initial efforts at timber harvest involved mom on one end of the saw and dad on the other. They used the family car to pull the logs out of the woods. After selling a few loads of logs they were able to buy a 1929 International steel wheeled tractor and an old chain saw. They were off and running. They were able to harvest enough timber in a little over a year to pay for the farm. Over the years the cattle herd swelled to about 40 animals and at one time mom had over a 1000 chickens laying eggs for the market. There was also a rooster that roamed and ruled the yard. One day he attacked mom and caught her right under her eye with his spur leaving an inch long gash. Well, he had met his match. In short order she killed him, butchered him and sold him to the Lions Club for 50 cents. The hens were a little more respectful and got to live until they weren’t laying eggs on a regular basis. They would then be butchered and the ones she didn’t can she sold to the Lions Club. Mom, with the help of her children carried the major responsibility for the day-to-day operation of the farm, and she loved it or so it seemed. The farm and her family kept her busy, but somehow mom found the time earn a correspondence school nursing degree and at the same time help my father earn a law degree from the Blackstone School of law. A close observer might have concluded that she earned the law degree as well. She never practiced nursing professionally, but her training was often useful for the variety of injuries suffered by her family. Mom was pretty athletic and she demonstrated her speed on day when she and a couple of us kids were working in the field and mom riled up a yellow jacket nest that was buried in the ground. She took off across the field at break neck speed trying to out run the bees but wasn’t successful. She soon realized that the bees had gotten under her clothes and were riding along and stinging her as she ran. She found an old growth stump and ran behind it and started stripping off her clothes to get at those bees. For all of her experience on the farm, one thing mom had never learned to do was drive a car. As her children were starting to get their drivers licenses she decided she needed to learn as well. Unfortunately her learning came at the expense of her oldest son’s cars. She first slid Al’s 57 Ford into a parked pickup on the farm. The ground was muddy, but she was convinced she could get it away from the pickup by backing up and moving forward but with each movement the damage got worse. A year later, when Al was giving her some road driving experience, she forgot to turn on the lights when entering a tunnel which resulted in her running into the side of that tunnel. Then, a couple of years after that when she was working in Eugene, it snowed, and she wanted to drive Al’s 61 Ford because it had posi-traction. It didn’t help – she slid it off the road and banged it up pretty badly. With her children getting more independent and with her driving confidence increasing she decided it was time to go to work off the farm. Over the next 20 years she worked in a variety of timber products mills and at one time owned and operated her own restaurant. By all reports she was the most dependable employee an employer could hope for. It didn’t matter how bad the weather was or the road conditions she was almost always at work on time. She had one job in a cedar mill that almost killed her but she refused to quit or to miss work. It took some strong arming from her daughter Betty to get her to call in and quit. For years after she retired, mom proudly displayed a millionaire’s club plaque given to her by one of her supervisors. It was given to her after she drove 40 miles through a terrible snow storm arriving 30 minutes early when employees living just a half mile from the mill said they couldn’t get there. By 1988 the farm had lost its allure and mom and dad decided to sell and move back into Eugene. They settled down in the Idle Wheels Mobile Home Park where Mom lived until 2017 when her children decided she shouldn’t be living alone and moved her to the Sequoia Assisted Living facility in Olympia, WA. When mom moved to Eugene she said she wasn’t going to sit around and watch television. She was true to her word. She got a gym membership and spent several hour a day at the gym. She learned to golf with her daughter, Betty, she learned to swim and dive, and she took up walking. Claire, a wonderful friend of mom’s tells the story of mom jumping off the high dive and doing a belly flop in the pool. The class had been practicing going off the low diving board and were working their way up to the high dive, but when no one was looking, mom headed for the high dive and was up there and ready to dive. As the class spotted her, their hearts stopped as they yelled for her to stop but mom was ready to dive and dive she did! She participated each year for about 10 years in the Portland Marathon, the Portland to the coast walk and many, many local walks in the Eugene-Springfield area. Many of these walks she did with her daughter Sharon. She would be out walking for miles every day all around Eugene. Her walking caught the attention of the Register Guard which did a feature front page story on her. It seemed that everyone in Eugene knew Charlene. People everywhere would call her by name, but frequently if you asked Mom who they were she would say “I have no idea – everyone knows my name, but I don’t know them.” Mom was a very independent woman, but she had become very accustomed to having a very talented handy man at her side for the 59 years of their marriage. When Ray passed away in 2005, her son Billy stepped in to fill that role. He lived a few miles outside of Eugene, but worked in Eugene and would stop by to see what mom needed to have done a few times a week. Mom tells the story of Billy stopping by just a few days before he died to repair a fan in her bath room. Billy hid his terminal cancer from everyone including mom until the very end. When her son, Al, was living in Alaska, she went up for several visits and on one of those visits she got to realize a dream of riding in a dog sled in the dead of winter. She was so bundled up she was hardly visible, but she was thrilled to have that experience. When Mom moved to Olympia, she missed the independence she had in her mobile home and she missed her flowers, but most of all she missed the many friends she developed in the nearly 20 years she lived in Eugene. Over the years mom developed several distinct circles of friends. One circle was the people she worked with in her various jobs; another was the people living in the Idle Wheels Mobile Home Park including the owners of that park; another was her fitness center “family”— and many of them were truly as close as family; and another was those she walked with over all those years. Except on event day, she almost always walked alone because she didn’t want to wait for someone to show up and she didn’t want to be slowed down when she was walking. Al came to understand how fast she walked when she came for visits to Alaska. She was in her late 70’s or early 80’s and it was all he could do to keep up with her as they walked for 4 or 5 miles. Mom also had a circle of friends from her Church a few of whom stayed in contact with her after she moved to Olympia. Her final circle was her fellow residents and the excellent staff of the Sequoia Assisted Living facility. She is a richer person as a result of all of these associations and in her last years of life she would light up when she got a phone call or a letter from anyone of them. When her children were at home, Charlene enjoyed baking bread and making pies and she made the very best cinnamon rolls on the planet. She would often send one or more of her children out to pick black berries so she could make a black berry cobbler, and there was never any hesitancy on the part of the children. The bread she made was so good, our pet deer would smell it cooking and paw on the back door to get some and mom was always accommodating. She lived a full and productive life, but she was ready to go home to her Father in Heaven. A few days before her passing Al overheard her say “mommy, I want to come back and be with you”. I am confident she is no longer suffering. She is with her loved ones who have gone on before and she is in the care of our loving Heavenly Father. Immediately after Mom’s passing one of her care givers at the Sequoia Assisted Living Facility left a bouquet of roses with a note that read as follows: “It has been nothing short of an absolute pleasure to get to know Charlene for the last year. She has brought me many laughs, many smiles and so much joy in my short year of knowing her. To say she will be missed is a gross understatement. A small piece of me left with her and I keep a very precious piece of her with me and that truly is all of the joy she has brought me.” -Signed, Kia Juarez- Mom has graduated from this earthly estate, and she has left her mark. Congratulations Mom! Job well done! NO FLOWERS, PLEASE.