Norma Jo Hassler

Norma Jo McGuire Hassler, 93, passed away August 26, 2023, at Hewitt Nursing and Rehabilitation center in Hewitt, Texas. There will be a funeral service to celebrate her life at 4:00 p.m., Thursday, August 31, 2023, at the Wilkirson-Hatch-Bailey Chapel, in Waco, Texas, with visitation for friends and family to follow until 7:00 p.m. Interment will be at 11:00 a.m., Friday, September 1, 2023, at the Garden of Memories Cemetery, in Stephenville, Texas.

We are here to remember and celebrate Norma's life and influence. She influenced me, of course, more than anyone else here. Without her, I would have likely died years ago from cirrhosis of the liver.

Norma was born to Bass and Valma McGuire, on a cold November night in a primitive Okie farmhouse on the Tamaha Prairie, in Haskell County, Oklahoma. That is a few miles from the Arkansas River just east of Ft. Smith. That is very near the confluence of the San Bois Creek and the Arkansas River. Named by the French who first explored the region, it means "No Trees" from Sans (without) and bois (tree), as in Bodark Apple tree. I was born in Erath County Texas near the Bosque River. Bosque means wooded, the opposite of San Bois. That is an inauspicious beginning for a union that lasted nearly 56 years.

It gets worse, more of a portentous omen. She was born on the fourth of November, following the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, which is the frequent marker for the Great Depression. Worse yet, Haskell County, in the prettiest part of Oklahoma, has been and continues to be the poorest county in Oklahoma. Once as we were driving over the river bridge with Valma and Bass, her father pointed out to me a bottomland farm and said that he could have bought it for fifty cents an acre during the ‘thirties but did not have the money.

But economic hard times had already come to the rural areas and Norma's dad, Bass McGuire, who was born in 1901 before statehood, had been fattening a hog for the year's meat until the first cold snap of hog killing time. While Bass waited for the birth of his daughter, someone stole his hog. The culprit was never identified, nor the hog recovered, nor was the incident ever forgotten. Nevertheless, Valma successfully delivered her second pregnancy with her daughter Norma. Her first child had been lost when the umbilical cord wound around the neck of her stillborn son. As it was, Norma grew up an only child on Tamaha Prairie, nine miles out of Stigler, forty miles west of Arkansas in the foothills of the Ozarks.

Valma Hunter came to Haskell County as a single schoolteacher, she taught early on in small country elementary schools and later, for years in the Stigler school system, after taking college classes at the nearby Northeastern State in Tahlequah, the heart of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Valma and Bass married in 1921, lost their first baby in 1923, and welcomed Norma in 1929. Valma had a half-sister who had three children, Norma Lou, Betty Jo, and Jack Latham, now all those cousins are deceased and without descendants. I plan to come back to adult Jack, but now a story of when they were little. While on a family visit to one of Bass's sister's, Norma and Jack were given the assignment of getting Mason jars down from a pantry and ready to use for the canning season. Young Jack stood on a table, reached into the shelves above his head, and handed jars down to Norma. The bending over, reaching up, and handling glass all were distasteful to him. Soon he put his hands on his hips and said, "I have did my part." This became a signoff statement for Norma and me when either of us was ready to quit a chore.

The other McGuires, however, were more prolific. Bass had eight siblings and they had 37 children in all. So, Norma had 40 cousins in all, most of which grew up in Haskell County, though they differed in age by over two decades. Bass moved to Stigler in 1938, leaving farming for town employment, the town was barely urban with only 2 to 3,000 inhabitants, then and now. He was a deputy sheriff, sheriff, policeman and for a year a prison guard in Muskogee, which became Norma's only time out of Stigler until she also went to Northeastern.

Norma worked close to full time while a student, as secretary to Dean Balley and then at the pleasure of President Harrison's insistence, in the business office, as an assistant to the Business Manager, 0. J. Pyland and becoming a lifelong friend of Lela Canada, the school nurse. Lela was an obsessive bridge player who intimidated Norma's learning the game. She harbored that reluctance to be so competitive and did not enjoy the game even after I, another bridge enthusiast (though not so skilled at it) tried for years to convert her attitudes toward the game.

The vicissitudes of life, personalized in the Elementary Consultant for Houghton Mifflin Company, Delores Rowe, brought Norma to Dallas in the late 'fifties. She was the head of a pool of correspondents, there was one correspondent in the office for each travelling college textbook salesman. The Regional Director of College Sales (Texas and four adjacent states) was Joe Wiley. When his salesman for West Texas and New Mexico was promoted to the Boston office as an editor, Joe told Norma who told Linda, who was one of the EL-HI correspondents of the vacancy. Linda told her sister Joella, whose husband was Charles, my cousin, and Charles told me. I applied, interviewed, and was hired in 1964. I built an A-frame cabin on Lake Nasworthy near San Angelo and stored things in it as the center of my territory while I travelled. I finished an MA at Texas Western College while teaching three years at Bel Air High School in El Paso. I had suggested to Charles that he teach in El Paso, which he did for several years. After a couple of years, Joe fully retired and I was promoted to his title, though I had been spending a lot of time in the Dallas office as an ex-official aide. I travelled months at a time with occasional visits to the Dallas office, and Norma and I became respectful friends and eventually had a business romance, mostly by mail. At Joe's retirement party I remember my little speech thanking him for three things: giving me a job, a promotion, and a wife. But we had surprised everyone by announcing the marriage plans. One of the other ladies in the Dallas office (who happened to be from Stephenville and knew my family before me), said at the news of our marriage, "I don't believe it. Not neato Norma and messy David. I'm so glad they found each other so they would not ruin two marriages." You see what I mean by the vicissitudes of life. Some of the challenges to that marriage might be worth recounting for an insight into Norma's character.

When we married in 1967, I moved into Norma's apartment and continued to travel extensively in West Texas and New Mexico. We then rented the cabin I built to a fellow. The years 1966-68 were very dry and the value of the cabin declined as the lake dried up. (The water supply was a pump/filter system piped from the lake and as the shore receded, had to continually extend the intake pipe.) The renter bought it at a bargain and finally the rains came to make his gamble a wise one, our first real estate venture not so much.

Norma and I talked of how to invest the proceeds from the cabin sale, and I remember looking for a land parcel around Grapevine. I chickened out and started looking for apartments. Very soon the Dallas Ft. Worth airport bought up most of the area we had considered. I found an eight-unit apartment and seriously considered buying it and living in one unit as manager and renting the other seven ... but, it was not as nice as Norma's taste, so we thought about how most people started with a house. We chickened out and bought a house in East Dallas when our office was in West Dallas, so we bought lots of commuting time. We decided to follow the crowd again by buying a dog, Dawn, who soon had eight pups. We found that we had six friends handy and eventually two more gullible acquaintances. Norma would not give up a pup without extensive interrogation and promises from the new owners.

The first notice of a family death on either side came soon in our marriage when a phone call from Oklahoma told Norma that Jack had killed himself.

Norma's favorite of my extended family was Aunt Rhesa, mother of Charles; she was killed at 51 in a head-on wreck by a drunken driver in 1969.

My father died at 59 with an unexpected heart attack in 1973. My mother died at 87 in 2002. Norma's mother, Valma, died at 77 in 1976 after a couple of strokes.

Her dad, Bass, died at 101 in 2002 after nine years in the Stigler Nursing Home. While visiting with as many of the McGuire cousins as could crowd into the living room waiting for Valma's funeral, I looked around the room and realized that I was the only man in shoes. Cowboy boots were de rigueur (duh ree gor). Three of Bass's nephews were in that room and later died in the same Stigler nursing home. Norma remembered them all from childhood and knew stories about each one. She remembered riding her bicycle rapidly from town to tell Bass and Valma that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. She remembered when two of those nephews went to war and then returned. Bob was decorated for forty-six continuous days in combat in the Philippines. As a youngster, Bob loved trading horses and his father told him, “Someday you will come home carrying your saddle." He would then end his own story with, "Sure ‘nuff, I did." His brother, Estil, had his feet frozen in the Battle of the Bulge. He came home to work for the local rural electric co-op as a lineman and was electrocuted on a pole with the current coming out of his feet. He survived this also, but thereafter he limped and at the last funeral we attended before his death, I noticed him, still wearing cowboy boots, struggle to climb into his pickup. Those two favorite cousins put flags on veteran's graves and played taps on a tape recorder for Memorial Days and occasional military funerals until they checked into the nursing home. Best I know, one younger cousin remains of all the McGuires, Ronnie and his wife, Cathy, still in Stigler, with their five children mostly scattered around Oklahoma. Second cousins

Coleta Garland (Kenneth) Spears and her sister Euleta Garland (Ed) Richison correspond from the general Stigler area and there are others unto the third cousin twice removed relationship. One of the distant cousins is an active genealogist, Chuck "Butch" Harris; he will be more interested in this account than anybody here is. I will try to elaborate a bit more for his sake, in a private letter to him for yours.

Many of Norma's cousins are buried in the Garland cemetery, about four miles from Tamaha, a village on the prairie near the farmhouse where Norma was born. She had expected to be buried there, until 1973. When my father died on a Saturday without any prepared arrangements, I went out Sunday morning and bought six cemetery lots near Stephenville, for Mom, Dad, David, Norma, Eric, and his wife. Time passed, with vicissitudes, and Norma and I discussed which plots to use for us, Stigler or Stephenville. I suggested putting a cenotaph in Stigler at the foot of her parents' graves and her coffin near Stephenville. That brings us to this point. And we leave few friends and relatives in either area to ever visit a grave.

With my promotion I felt that I had found a lifetime career with HMCo and looked at how little of Norma's salary benefited us after taxes, commuting, business attire, etc. So, she quit and became the president of her college sorority's local chapter, Alpha Sigma Alpha. An Old English Sheepdog showed up in our yard and became our second dog, Stranger, after no one could be found to claim her. A few years later and several dollars to the vet, Stranger died with an incurable liver disease. Later Dawn died from an auto-immune type ailment, similar to Norma's problems with her immune system. Without elaboration, most of you know of Norma's love of dogs and losing the two (or 10) was somewhat similar to losing a child we never had. But in the interval, we had them, we boarded the dogs, when necessary, at a kennel owned by a dentist; he called it Toothacres.

We bought a pickup camper and usually spent one spring week vacation in Arkansas and two summer weeks in the Rockies, indulging my fishing interests. After several years we sold it and bought a fixer-up cabin on Lake Whitney. While I was fishing one day, a grass fire approached the cabin and Norma and a neighbor fought it and managed to save both houses. Once Norma did not lock the cabinet doors securely so one came open when I hit a bump driving by the Crystal River in Colorado. A can of grease fell and spilled all over the floor. I parked the camper and let Norma clean up her mess while I fished the river. I think now that she was pretty far advanced into dementia before she forgot that episode.

If anyone is curious enough to ask, I'll tell you how I came to leave HMCo, but to keep this focused upon Norma's challenges in our marriage, I'll skip to our going to Longmont, Colorado for me to work for another publisher. We sold the Dallas house just a year before the big inflation in house prices. We bought a new house in Colorado, and during the move, we drove in a snowstorm pulling a bass boat loaded with Norma's houseplants (which I had to unload and take into the motel en route). Norma had a back operation and when her mother had a stroke, we drove back to Stigler before she should have gotten in a car. Norma could look out her kitchen window and see Long's Peak, the namesake for Longmont, just north of Denver. She loved that house, but, coming back over Wolf Creek Pass I threw the snow chains (which I had installed) off a tire and had to coast downhill with little control. When I walked into her new house I told Norma, "Pack up, this is no place for a flatlander; let's go back to Texas."

Remember Charles, my cousin. I told him I needed a job to return to Texas and he told me of a salesman for the National Federation of Independent Business who called on him and eventually I wound up working for them. I got Norma back to Longmont to sell that house and I stayed in the Whitney cabin to learn a sales pitch and then be trained to work in Arlington, commuting every day. We moved to New Braunfels, and I worked mostly in Austin, San Antonio and the surrounding towns. Norma got to be a volunteer docent at the museum in New Braunfels and learned much about the history of Germans in Texas. Interesting combination with her Irish and Cherokee background. We bought a house on Gardenia Street, grew a garden, and I got bored with prosperity, tranquility, serenity, and my sales pitch. I went back to teaching and Norma and I acquired our Real Estate licenses. There were a few more zigs and zags and a spell of midlife crises and we moved to Waco via a year in Malakoff. Recognize that Mal means bad and a cough is not something you want and you can see the polarity, the bookends of Gardenia and Malakoff. Norma would say that there were two ruts in the highway left by my dragging her feet from New Braunfels. As you have just heard, the ruts of reluctance were longer and in more than one highway as I drug a patient, longsuffering Norma around seven states. After a few years in Waco, we wound up meeting most of you all here in Robinson Church of Christ, and each of you has your own remembrance of Norma.

Norma Jo McGuire Hassler, 93, passed away August 26, 2023, at Hewitt Nursing and Rehabilitation center in Hewitt, Texas. There will be a funeral service to celebrate her life at 4:00 p.m., Thursday, August 31, 2023, at the Wilkirson-Hatch-Bailey Chapel, in Waco, Texas, with visitation for friends and family to follow until 7:00 p.m. Interment will be at 11:00 a.m., Friday, September 1, 2023, at the Garden of Memories Cemetery, in Stephenville, Texas.

-In remembrance of Norma, written by her husband, David Hassler, who she is survived by.

The family invites you to leave a message or memory of Norma on our "Tribute Wall" at www.WHBfamily.com.