Laura Ceila Newton - by Marcus Newton

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Used with permission by the Newton family

Laura was born in 1901 into a family of German-via-Canada immigrants on a homestead southwest of Sterling near the little settlement of Le Roy. She was the seventh in a family of eight daughters and one son. Her father died when she was 5 years old. Before his death, he had taught her to play an old organ; he whistled hymns and she pumped and played.

On the plains homestead, she would learn to ride horses, herd and milk cows, hoe and weed, carry water, tend chickens, to cook and bake, dress chickens, butcher cattle, to sew and darn, to grow a garden, can vegetables, to tat and crochet and knit, to manage a household. Prairie life would teach her the truth and the value of faith in God. Grasshoppers, drought, hail, tornadoes, piddling prices for wheat, far horizons, family life, star-filled skies and glorious sunsets will do that.

She would attend a one-room school for a total of eight years. She was working at a store in Sterling when she met her future husband, a Kentucky man who was working with a threshing crew.

Married in 1919, the couple set out on a farm life that take them from Le Roy to Sterling to Longmont to Highland Lake (Highlandlake) and Mead in southwest Weld County.

Wounded and gassed in the battle of Meuse-Argonne in World War, her husband would never make much of a living. He would work for 15 cents an hour during the Great Depression of the 1930s. She would make do.

She would, from 1920 to 1946, bear 20 children, 12 boys and 8 girls - including two sets of twins and a set of triplets. One boy and one girl would die of childhood diseases; 18 children would grow to adulthood.

She was generally optimistic, fair, a good manager, slow to anger and abounding in largely unexpressed love, reticent, resourceful, a tireless worker. She would teach her children to work, to contribute to the family, not to sass, to respect their elders, to tell the truth, to be responsible, to make something of themselves.

After years of ramshackle rentals, she would, in 1939, scrimp and save and engineer the purchase, for back taxes, of a barn-like house in Mead for $600. She would not get her first indoor bathroom and her first electric stove until 1954. She would wait a few more years for her first non-wringer washer.

She would cook and bake and clean and sew and wash and work and teach her children from dawn to night. Twice a week, she would bake 10 loaves of bread. One day, she ironed 69 shirts. She sewed beautifully. She made an endless number of flour-sack shirts and sheets, darned hundreds of socks and pairs of jeans, altered countless coats and pants as clothing was passed from one child to the next.

Every year, she and her children would can hundreds of quarts and pints of vegetables and fruit; all the canning was done on a coal stove in the heat of summer.

Her flower gardens were beautiful, especially the cosmos.

She taught herself to play the piano and laughed with her children as she learned. She would, in the 1950s, become the organist at Guardian Angel Catholic Mission Church in Mead.

She cared for - and made her children care for - the widows and the elderly. After-school evenings and Saturdays were filled with extra chores - pulling weeds, mowing lawns, shoveling snow, carrying coal, splitting wood, cleaning, going to the store - for Mayme Akers, Mary Johnson, Mrs. Snyder and others.

She would, in the 1950s, feel some respect from the community and begin to see her children succeed. Two sons served in World War II, two went to Korea. There were high school academic and athletic laurels, and college graduates; two career Marines, an airline stewardess and teacher, a daughter AT&T executive, bankers, teachers, professors, businessmen. And lots of marriages with lots of beautiful grandchildren.

For cash-flow, she became the assistant at the Mead Post Office. When the Postmaster died, she was in line to take over. But she was a Democrat and President Eisenhower chose a Republican. So she went to work in the school cafeteria.

In 1962, her eldest daughter and her husband and their eldest daughter were killed in an auto accident - hit by a drunken driver near Longmont. The daughter had seven other children, ages 4 to 17.

Ever thinking of family, she and her husband sold the Mead house, moved to Longmont to a house bought by two daughters, and took in the seven grandchildren. Five months later, at the age of 61, her husband of 43 years died and she found herself a widow raising seven grandchildren.

The last grandchild would leave home in about 1980.

She spent her later years reading, sewing, watching television, and writing letters to children and grandchildren. Learning to cook for one. Gripes about home-heating cost would bring her retort: "Whatever the cost, it was better than chopping wood and carrying coal."

She died on May 10, 1986, at home, as one son and two daughters held her hands. We remember the day. The lilacs were in bloom. Laura Celia Dreier Newton 1901-1986, was our mother.

We have surely been blessed in life.

Marcus E. Newton

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