Photo taken at the time of her highschool graduation.
Photo taken at the time of her highschool graduation. |
Our mother, Frances Beatrice Nutter, was born November 20th, 1891 to John and Anna Carlson Nutter. Most of her Nebraska experience was spent on a farm near Gibbon. She also lived in Kearney where her father was sheriff. In her teens she came west to Salem, Oregon, graduating from Salem High School. Directly out of high school, she passed the requirements to become a teacher and found employment in the backwoods of Silverton, Oregon. In 1912 she married John A. Hogg and came to Vancouver. The early years of her marriage were spent in raising seven very lively children.
During the war years she worked at Barnes Hospital in a diet kitchen on the wards. Most of the patients called her "Mom". She related to them in the same way she related to us. During these years Mom saw the need for blood and became a regular donor with many gallons to her credit. Having experience with hospital life, she took the training to become a LPN, working in Vancouver Memorial Hospital until she was 73 years old. In retirement her pleasures were her grand and great-grand children, her neighbors with whom she exchanged vegetables, flowers and chit-chat across the fence, and her flower garden. Mom also enjoyed her long association with the Martha Washington Chapter of the Eastern Star. She received her 50-year pin in 1967.
We grew up in the years of the Great Depression, but through it all we remember the touching and hilarious moments - our parents love of music, poetry, reading, crossword puzzles - the challenges of the intellect. Mom especially loved to quote the poetry which she had learned in the old #8 school by listening to the older students recite or by her own insatiable appetite for reading. She loved the rhythm, the rhyme and the sound of words. Latin was another of her "favorite things".
We know Mom had her very practical and independent side, she was such a free spirit - a vagabond in soul - attuned to the call of the wild geese, the swooping and dipping of the gulls, and the swift running determination of the road-runner. Mom added the "Fifth Freedom" which she called the Freedom From Limitations. She was sure the birds had it all by not being limited or tied to earth. The nearest she could come to them was to fly by plane - "the only way to go". She loved flying. Through the adventures of children and grand-children she roamed the world - from Europe to the Near East and Arabia, from Guam to the Orient and the Arctic and Antarctic.
Mom always involved the youngsters in her continual search for four-leaf clovers, which she pressed and sent to anyone whom she felt needed a "bit of luck". She told us of taking some to Barnes Hospital on day, where she heard a badly injured and depressed young soldier call out, "Mom, did you say four-leaf clovers?" With one in his possession, his spirit recovered and his will to live revived. These clovers still drop out of her beloved books from time to time.
As each grandchild came along, he or she became "another one for me to love and hold." Each was encouraged in the art of "puckering up", and what joy when the puckering and blowing became a whistle. Ladybugs were something special, and she instilled such reverence for these little red creatures that some of the great grandchildren still guide them across the swimming pool to safety if they are trapped in the water.
We miss our mother but our memories are on the positive, up-beat side. We know that at age 93 she was beginning to fret about the curtailment of her "Fifth Freedom", and the loss of her independent spirit. We feel that the death was quick, she did not suffer, and that perhaps it was God's way of sparing her these worries. In the words of a granddaughter, "She left us a little of the gift of faith and joy she walked in throughout her life. The Lord truly blessed us when he gave us Grandma Bea."
This poem was one of Mom's favorites, and truly expressed her feelings.
| High Flight |
| By |
| Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr. |
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there I've chased the shouting wind along and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air Up, up the long, delirious burning blue I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or eagle flew And, while with silent, lifting mind I've tread the high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God. |