Dear Moore Residents, I feel compelled to write to you as a fellow Moorite. I left Moore when I got married in 1980, but to me, Moore is always and will always be my home. I was born in Tulsa, but Im an Okie and Sooner Boomer will always be just down the road a ways for me. I lived in Moore from 3rd grade until I got married with my parents, at least that was the theory. When my father died he was 86, and he died in a nursing home in Norman in February 1982. He was born in 1897 in Whitburn, England. He lived in Moore for 23 years and is buried in Tulsa, Oklahoma with my mother and a baby son, who was born in 1945 and died in 1946 at the age of 8 weeks. My baby brother died of pneumonia, following surgery to correct pyloric stenosis. My parents blamed themselves for this sad event. They did the best that they could back in 1945. It was war time and everyone was exhausted and messed up from the war. My mother blamed herself, knowing that she had post-partum depression. My father blamed himself, as he was working 60 hours per week and not following the babys growth closely. Therefore, when I was born ten years later, I was the do-over child and a girl! I was my parents angel..... and my brothers little sister, 18 and 22 years younger than they were. Growing up in Moore was very similar to being Beaver Cleaver or one of the Nelson children on Ozzie and Harriet. My life was charmed. My mother lived in Moore from 1963 to 1993, a total of 30 years. She lived alone in that little house for seven years after my father died. I dont know how she did it. She was cognitively and emotionally impaired and nearly deaf. She was moved out of our little three bedroom house in Moore after she had a fall and broke her hip and narrowly escaped death, being found by a social worker on the floor of the dining room. My brother Paul had hired her only a few weeks before. My brother arranged for my mother to be moved to Arlington to the Lutheran Home for the Aging there. In 1991, the house in Moore was sold to the Roman Catholic Church and is now visible as part of the complex of St. Andrews Church. It looks totally different than it did when I lived there....unrecognizable. It has escaped all the tornado damage, thank God. There is something comforting about that. I was devastated by the deaths of the children at Plaza Towers Elementary. Even though I went to Southgate, I rode my bike all over Moore, and my parents used to buy meat at a little butcher shop there, right next to the KOMA radio towers. I got through my teen years singing my head off to Gary Puckett and the Union Gap and Bridge Over Troubled Waters, broadblasted a mile away to my little bedroom. I was kind of a nerd, back when everyone called me Brain and I was not able to date boys from my school for that reason. But I dated boys and fell in love like every normal teenager does. I later grew up, got married and had kids. I went to college, got a job and learned how to cook, not in that order. Moore is my home and will always be my home. I havent been back to Moore since my aunt and my mother died in the same year. I found my old best friend from 7th and 8th grade. My best friend fro 7th-12th grade went to my fathers funeral in OKC with me, and she is so close to me still. We are like sisters, all these years later. We are both medically frail, but mentally strong and determined to live to see our grandkids married. My father and my two brothers all got engineering degrees from OSU. My father was a learned man and a scholar. He was a self-made man, as he was just a poor coal miners son in the north of England. He came to this country after fighting in WWI in Salonica (Thessalonica to readers of the New Testament). He was in the army of King George..... better known as Bertie, If any of you have seen the movie, The Kings Speech, you will know exactly what my father lived through. He fought for his homeland, Mother England. He fought to defend his mother, his sister, his neighbors and his friends from the enemy. Back in WWI, the enemy was, believe it or not, Germany. They bombed England. Then they did it again in WWII. Trust me, Queen Elizabeth is a very strong, very scarred and very tired royal who would like to become the Queen Mum, but she knows that Prince Charles and Camilla are not King and Queen material..... but I digress. If he were alive today, my father would have been 118 years old. These days, people do live that long, thanks to modern medicine. I was born when he was 59 and my mother was 45. She turned 46 the following week. My mother was the strongest woman I have ever known, and I believe that she was a saint. My father was the kindest, wisest man I have ever met, and I am still so sorry that he didnt live to see his grandchildren from me. They would have adored him and vice versa. I was in the class of 73 at Moore HS on the east side of town. When I was in 11th grade, I got called to the principals office because, you played hookie and you need to report to the laberry. Anybody who ever knew me knows for a fact that this was not my style. I was a straight A student back then. So I left Moore HS in the middle of 11th grade and went to Interlochen Arts Academy in Traverse City, Michigan, but only for a semester. It cost as much as most ivy league colleges at that time, $4,000 per year. My parents bought their new new in 1963 for $12,000. My father made only a little more than that per year in his OK state job. Looking back on it, he must have been civil service or a state employee. He must have had a pension from the state. I thought all these years that he and my mother were poor. I later found out that my father died a millionaire. He just lived a simple and modest life, as did my mother. That was the north of England way, and the Oklahoma way as well. I returned to Oklahoma for my senior year. I really returned for my beloved flute teacher, Jean-Louis Kashy, who was principal flutist in the Oklahoma City symphony, and a firy red-headed Frenchman who had attended the Curtis Conservatory in Philadelphia. I was bound and determined to follow in his footsteps. He was a wonderful flutist, role model and genuinely nice person. His wife was a string bass player and a music therapist. I heard later that they divorced and he married one of his flute students a year older than me. Sigh... if I had only stayed in Oklahoma.......I would have married a much nicer guy than my ex. I am my fathers daughter, I hear his voice in my head every day, Never be afraid of anyone who is not in authority over you, and dont pass up opportunities to learn. He taught me how to change the oil in my car and how to fold bed sheets, as my mother was too sick to keep our house properly. I never invited my friends to my house, as I was ashamed of it. My friends all understood that my parents were old enough to be my grandparents. They were all supportive. So at the age of 17, I promised myself that I would live a good life and make my parents proud of me. They were, as nearly all Oklahoma parents are. Oklahoma is a state of fiercely independent people, hard workers and right-believing Christians..... with a few other folks thrown in, a lot of Native Americans. I remember studying about the Trail of Tears in my Oklahoma history class in 8th grade. Mr. Garrison was studying to be a lawyer. Im sure he was a good one (but not a great civics teacher, lol). I think he disliked me because I asked too many questions.....heh heh. I ended up returning to Oklahoma, but not living with my parents in HS. I went to ... so so sorry to confess this.........the University of Oklahoma lab school which was founded originally to give teachers a place to student teach while they were getting their masters degrees. It was on the North Campus of OU in a bunch of barricks that were eventually condemned. I went there from September 1972 to May 1973 and graduated from there, in a class of 30 students. At commencement, I played Syrinx by Claude Debussy, a solo piece that is unaccompanied. I had horrible stage fright! I had just been first chair flutist in the Oklahoma All-State Orchestra only a couple of months before. Then I had zero stage fright and easily aced the music, Bizets LArlesiene Suite, which has a huge flute solo. Yet, in front of my peers in Norman, OK, I had stage fright! Some things never change....... My biggest shame, however, is that my high school transcript shows me graduating from ..... alas, Norman High School, the arch enemy of Moore HS in football, band and just about everything else. To be from Norman was not to be normal, as the state psychiatric hospital was there. We used to joke about being locked up in Norman. Ha! Now Norman OK houses one of the very best state universities in the country, which draws scholars from all over the world. Good ole OU has turned out to be a great place to watch OU football..... but also produced Jim Ross... dare I say Brad Pitt? He may not have gone there, but if that is the case, it was because his SAT scores werent high enough to get him into a university. We all know about the two year community colleges and vo-tech schools, dont we? Well, guess what.... I am a professor in one in NY--the largest two year college in New York State! Ive been there as a tenured full-time college professor since 1995, two years after I graduated from my masters program in occupational therapy. After graduating HS from Uni High in Norman, I did go to Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin, Ohio. There I met a Russian scholar and expert on Solzhenitsin and the Gulag Arcipeligo in the Soviet Union, John B. Dunlop. I took two courses from him on the history of the Russian people and the Russian Orthodox Church. I also took Platonic Greek for two semesters. We read Platos Apology in the ancient Greek. I made a B in that class.... and I studied like crazy several hours a day, in addition to practicing the flute several hours a day. I wasnt the only flutist from Oklahoma there. I was one of three Oklahoma flutists out of 12 flute majors in Oberlin in the 1972-73 school year. On the day after Christmas in 1973, I became Russian Orthodox in Brookline, MA, in a Greek Old Calendar Monastery. The following Christmas, I had moved to Oinoussis, Chios, Greece where I became a novice in a womens monastery, Evangelismos Tis Theotokou. I lived there exactly three years. Then I had a massive, catastrophic illness and was hospitalized in Athens for three months. Basically, I went to bed in October and woke up on a few days before Christmas 1974. The convent had let my passport lapse, and I was unable to move back to the US for medical treatment. In a panic, the clergy contacted my father in Moore and begged for his help in getting my passport renewed so that I could leave the country. My father went to the governor of Oklahoma, at that time, David L.Boren, and requested an emergency passport be issued so that I could leave Greece and get medical treatment. I wish I had that passport, as I have no pictures of myself as a Greek Orthodox novice. Im rather nostalgic for those days. I returned the US in January 1978. I didnt get back to Moore until 1980. I got married legally in OKC in August 1980, got my Social Security card in my new name and sent my husband back to Randolph-Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio. I was again a Moorite!. Yay! The old stomping grounds! For two months before my wedding in September 1980, I lived with my parents. We watched the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Di in my parents dining room. We prepared for my wedding. My poor sick mother! She had been depressed since 1960..... back then, psychiatry wasnt what it is now. She was never a normal person after that, even though she had worked in downtown Tulsa for the five years before I was born and the five years after that, a total of ten years as an executive secretary. When we moved into our house in Moore it was a three bedroom, 1.5 bath, 2 car garage, air conditioned house, which made us the richest folks on our block. My father worked for the State of Oklahoma in the Office of Commerce and Industry, right across the street from the Oklahoma City Capital Buildings, and the governors mansion. After he retired, he incorporated himself (and my mother) and continued to do the exact same work up until his death in 1982. He drove and worked until eight weeks before he died. My parents were poisoned by a slow gas leak in their home. It was discovered by a dear friend of mine who went to check on them after I became alarmed about their health. My father called me in NY, Long Island, out of the blue and said, I feel like Im going to die. He died exactly eight weeks later in Baptist Hospital. My mother was there, too. She was so sick that she did not attend my fathers funeral. Fourteen years later we buried her next to my father and baby brother in a small but lovely cemetery in Tulsa. We had buried my aunt only a few months before that in Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral..... its a lovely church. Im 60 years old now and getting grey. Moore is still my home, the one and only. Tulsa is just where I was born and Norman is just where I got my HS diploma. It is Moore that I want to go back to some day, just to hang out and feel at home and loved. Only my cousins are left in Oklahoma and they live in Tulsa. But if I moved back to Oklahoma as a retired person, it would be to Moore, and no other place. I love that treeless, grassy plain, in spite of all the sadness, tornadoes and the bleak winters that I remember from my childhood. It is the place where I learned to be human. --Susanna Iosifovna Maklakov (nee Mary Susan Dickinson) Susanna Maklakov, MSOT/L, Occupational Therapy Practitioner Asst. Professor of Health Careers, Suffolk County Community College Brentwood,Long Island, NY President, Maklakov Services, Inc.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 13:29:04 +0000
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