Who would buy 48 bottles of water and go about Humboldt handing them out?
Vicki Wood did last summer.
“I went around wherever there were people, the bank, the library, City Hall,” Vicki said. Why? “It made me feel so good to brighten their day,” a trait she long has embraced.
Vicki also relishes opportunities to help people at Humboldt’s food pantry. “I don’t know who they are. That doesn’t matter. I just like helping them.”
While working in Uniontown schools — 31 years total — three kids were living with their parents in a camper. They seldom had a chance to bathe and their clothing was far from new, usually unwashed.
Vicki arranged for showers at the school and helped get them new underwear and socks. “The little boy, in kindergarten, pulled on a pair of new socks. He asked me to feel the socks. He said, ‘I’ve never felt anything this soft before.’”
She also gave hugs when students asked, figuring “they’d just have to fire me if that caused a problem,” with concerns nowadays about touching a child.
She reserves a good portion of her giving spirit — more in love than tangible things — for her family. “Family is what you make of it,” Vicki said. For her it is the world.
VICKI WAS born at the tiny hamlet of Waynoka, Okla., about 70 miles west of Enid. Her parents, Ernest and Hazel Lord, raised turkeys and some cattle on a 500-acre spread. The turkeys, 100,000 each year, ended up at a Tyson processing plant.
Dad thought he could do better with cattle.
One sweltering summer day much of what the family owned was sold at auction and they packed up for Kansas, a trying experience for 13-year-old Vicki. “I didn’t want to leave my friends. I cried all the way.”
Destination of the Lords’ grain truck and car, loaded to the gills with kids and possessions, was near Uniontown. They had a large herd of cattle on grassland for years.
Everything her dad did quickened Vicki’s love of family.
All the while, before and after the move, Mom was keen on saving money. She gardened, canned, cooked daily and, skilled with needle and thread, sewed the kids’ clothes.
“I didn’t have a store-bought dress until I was 18,” Vickie recalled. “It was kind of a square dance dress” colorful with all the frills. “Prettiest thing I’d ever seen.”
Marriage came right after high school. One day, when she was 32, her first husband burst into the house. “I want a divorce,” he declared.
“Here I was with bills, and no income,” she lamented. Over the next several years she often worked three jobs, at the school from early morning until late afternoon and sometimes on Saturdays, as well as at an elevator — “until the owner went a little too far” — and the night shift at a bar in Bronson for $3 an hour. In her “spare time” she kept books for a restaurant.
In 1989 she married Kenneth Wood, a contractor, and moved to Hume, Mo. Times were good.
