Louise Schomaker, 91, the longest tenured resident of the Townhouse, has lived by herself nearly 20 years, but at Christmastime or at any other time of the year she’s seldom lonely.
“My son, Marty, takes good care of me,” Louise said Thursday afternoon, while snowflakes swirling outside her first-floor window gave Iola a Christmas look.
She frequently flashes a smile and likes to talk about her friends in the Townhouse. How they meet in the lobby on afternoons to visit because “it’s better than coming to our houses (apartments),” which are a little too small to accommodate much of a crowd. “And, mine’s kind of crowded anyway.”
Her three-room apartment got that way because of photos and trinkets from her four children, 14 grandchildren, 23 great-grandchildren and six great-great-grandchild scattered all about.
She will spend Saturday afternoon at son Marty and his wife Mary’s home in Piqua, where she and husband Bernard lived for years in an older house her son replaced with a manufactured home.
She regularly attends St. John’s Catholic Church, taken there by Iolans and former Piqua residents Steve and Pat Haen, usually for Saturday afternoon Mass. This week, though, she’ll go Christmas morning.
That will be the extent of Louise’s observation of the birth of Christ.
TIME WAS Christmas was much more involved for Louise.
She grew up in her grandparents’ home near Piqua after her mother died when she was 3 years old.
She recalled how they’d cut a cedar from a pasture each Christmas. That was a ritual that carried forward when she and husband Bernard farmed near Piqua after marrying in 1943. He later ran a car and tractor repair shop in town.
“That was always fun, decorating for Christmas and buying a few toys — also clothes and things they needed — for our kids,” she said.
When Louise was in school, gift exchanges between classmates were limited to purchases of 25 cents.
In addition to Marty and daughter Joyce, who lives in Garden City, the Schomakers adopted her sister’s children, John, who lives in El Dorado, and Mary, Garnett.
LOUISE WAS ONE of 11 children and after finishing elementary school her brother insisted that she attend high school.
“I went to high school in Vernon (a small community northwest of Piqua) and stayed with a family there,” she said. She helped out with daily chores in exchange for room and board.
She was working as a waitress at the coffee shop in Iola’s Kelley Hotel, when she met her future husband. They had been married 46 years when he died in 1989.
