Wearing Granny’s wedding dress sparks many Strong memories

Gainesville resident Lyndell Strong recently invited her granddaughter Kristin Solomko to browse through her clothes closet to see if there was “a sweater or something she might wear,” Lyndell said. Instead, it was a simple dress – black crepe printed with pink fountains and flowers – that caught Kristin’s eye. 

It was her granny’s 76-year-old wedding dress. And it fit Kristin perfectly.

Seeing her granddaughter wear the dress brought back many memories for Lyndell, who will be 95 in August.

A young, hardworking teenager 

She grew up on a farm near Bakersfield, the daughter of Earl and Roxie Farel, and attended school in Bakersfield. 

“The summer between my junior and senior year in high school, I lived in town [Bakersfield] with a widow, Allie Hughes, to help in her little restaurant,” Lyndell said. 

Her daily duties began before dawn when she “milked the old milk cow.” Next, she and Mrs. Hughes walked to the tiny cafe down the street in Bakersfield.

“That was before electricity or anything. We would get to the cafe and build a fire in the old wood stove,” Lyndell said. She also walked down to the city water pump in the center of town and carried a bucket of water back to the cafe, where she spent the day waitressing. 

“All we had was a little counter and four or five little stools that people sat on. There weren’t any tables,” she said. 

Mrs. Hughes did all the cooking while Lyndell served the customers. Sometime before dark, they walked back to the Hughes home, where Lyndell usually “milked the old milk cow” again.

Her pay was $1 per day.

After graduation from Bakersfield High School in 1945, Lyndell’s relative J. L. “Bug” Farel asked her to help him in the cafe he had opened off the square in Gainesville, near the current location of Doug Hawkins’ Shelter Insurance office. Bug knew Lyndell had waitressing experience, and he needed her help, he said, because of a lack of waitressing talent in Gainesville. “He said he couldn’t find a girl who could carry two cups of coffee at a time, and he wanted me to come waitress for him,” Lyndell said. 

She moved into Gainesville, sharing a room with Ernestine Mahan, who worked at Skeeter’s Cafe. The young gals lived in a boardinghouse over what is now Shenanigans game and pizza shop on Main Street.

At Bug’s Cafe, Lyndell made $2 a day, and she didn’t have to milk a cow.

A short courtship

“We served meals family style with food in big bowls we set on the table – as much as you wanted for 60 cents. And of course, there was no such things as tips,” Lyndell said.

“There was a bunch of single men who came in to eat – Wilbur Mahan, Don Eslinger and his brother,” Lyndell said. 

And there was Utah Strong, an Army veteran who had just returned from serving overseas with the occupational forces in Italy and Germany.  

One day one of the men, Harry Davidson, asked Lyndell, “I wonder what you’d say if I asked you for a date?”

“I’d say you were too little,” Lyndell blurted out, referring to Harry’s short stature. Then Utah, 6-foot-one-and-a-half-inch tall, dark and handsome, said, “I’ll bet she wouldn’t say that if I asked.”

She didn’t. And two months later they were married.

Utah was born in Oklahoma while his parents, Ethel and Lisses Strong, were working there before returning home to Ozark County. Utah and his brother Carl, the oldest of nine children, didn’t get a lot of schooling because they were needed on the family farm. “Utah always said he thought he made it to eighth grade because he took fourth grade twice,” Lyndell said with a chuckle.

Utah enlisted when he was 17, and while he was overseas, he sent his Army pay home to his parents, who saved it for him until he was discharged. Then he spent the money to buy a used Dodge box truck from Aubrey Farel. He used the truck to haul cedar fence posts to Iowa, where he would pick up loads of corn or other cargo to haul back to southern Missouri. 

When he was home, Utah and Lyndell dated in the truck. “It was all we had,” she said. “We’d usually just go to a movie in Gainesville. They were all westerns.” 

“He never did really ask me to marry him,” Lyndell said. “He went out on a trip in the truck, and when he came back he picked me up to take me to the show, and he had my rings. He just gave them to me and said, ‘These are yours.’” 

Then she added, “And he might have said he loved me.”  

 Roxie Farel had always told Lyndell and her sister, Glenda (now Glenda Donley), she didn’t want them to get married until they were 20. 

“My birthday was on Monday, and we were married on Saturday,” Lyndell said. It was Aug. 28, 1948. She and Utah were married by Justice of the Peace Quimby Herd in the courthouse in Mountain Home, Arkansas, which was open on Saturdays in those days. “And you didn’t have a waiting period,” she said. She wore the wedding dress she had bought in Gainesville “at either Grady’s or Johnson’s store,” she said. “I can’t remember which one, but I know I didn’t pay more than $10 for it.” 

Afterward, they ate lunch on the Mountain Home square and then headed back to Bakersfield to spend the night with Lyndell’s parents. “There weren’t any hotels in Bakersfield,” she said. There was no Highway 101 bridge spanning the newly impounded Lake Norfork then. “It was more like a river than a lake, but they were working on it,” she said. They rode the ferry over the new lake – in Utah’s truck, of course.

Lyndell’s parents knew the couple’s plans and welcomed the newlyweds. “Then on Sunday, he took Mom and Daddy, and we rode the ferry again,” she said. 

Two rooms in a boardinghouse

and an infant son with polio

The young couple settled back in Gainesville, where Lyndell returned to waitressing at Bug’s Cafe and Utah left on his truck, headed for Iowa. 

“Utah had rented us two rooms up in the old Harlin house,” she said. “Orr and Cosby Hill lived on one side of the hall, and we lived on the other.” 

The three-story home, built in 1912 by Johnny and Clara Harlin for their family, had been sold to Frank and Jesse Johnson in 1946 and converted into a boardinghouse.  

The Strongs’ son Joe was born a year later. Lyndell made a discrete slit and tie in the bodice of her wedding dress so she could breast-feed her newborn son. Her granddaughter Kristin would find it 74 years later when she discovered it in Lyndell’s closet and wonder why it was there. 

The Strongs were a happy little family, but then, in 1949, when he was 10 1/2 months old, Joe was afflicted with polio. 

“He was crying and fussy. He had a fever and cried all night. . . . The next morning, I took him to Dr. Hoerman, and he said, ‘We have to get him to Columbia as fast as we can. He’s got polio,’” Lyndell said. 

Utah got home on the truck a few hours later, and the two of them borrowed Bug Farel’s car to drive their baby to University Hospital in Columbia. It was a terrifying ride.

“They didn’t know what caused it, so all the polio patients were quarantined. They said they would have to keep him, and we would have to leave,” she said, adding sadly, “I thought I would lose my mind.”

That night, Joe’s cries were heard throughout the quarantined polio ward – where Bug Farel’s daughter Dorcas Rackley was also a patient. 

In an April 1, 2020, story comparing the covid-19 pandemic with the polio crisis 70 years earlier, Dorcas told the Times, “One of the nurses came to me and said, ‘Does he know you? Do you think you could hold him?’ So they brought him in to me, and I held him awhile.”

It was something Lyndell and her husband would not be able to do for two long, agonizing months. “We would go back, and they would let us peep through the window, but they didn’t want him to see us,” she said. “He was the youngest one there.”

Lyndell’s heart soared when, as they arrived two months later to take Joe home, “We walked in, and he said, ‘Mommy! Mommy!’ He remembered me. Oh, I was so glad to hear him say that,” she said.

A family of five

The Strongs brought Joe home to Gainesville and resumed their family life. As Joe grew and started walking, his legs were supported by braces. 

In 1953, they spent four months living in North Dakota, where Utah and his brother Mearl worked on the Garrison Dam. Gainesville resident Frank McClendon was a supervisor there and had wanted them to come for the well-paying jobs.

“We saved $1,000 while we were there,” Lyndell said, “but oh, they worked long hours, and it was dirty work.”  

Back home in Gainesville, the Strongs bought some land, and Utah began farming in addition to driving the truck. When they felt comfortable leaving Joe with a babysitter, Lyndell accepted an office job. 

“Jollie Pace came to me. He had bought Bernie Hicks out from MFA Insurance, and he wanted me to go to work for him as a secretary. Then I made $4 a day,” she said. Later, Jollie Pace teamed up with Don Rackley to sell insurance, and Lyndell worked for them in their office on the east side of the square.

The Strongs’ second son, Jack, was born in 1955. 

About that time, Gainesville postmaster Frank Johnson offered Lyndell a job. “He wanted me to go to St. Louis and take the post office test,” Lyndell said. “I didn’t really want to go, but Utah said, ‘Yes, you’re going.’”

Working part-time at the post office brought a pay raise. “Gosh, I made $1.23 an hour,” Lyndell said. “I thought I was rich.”

Joe had gradually grown out of the braces and other supportive apparatus. As a boy, he’d never been able to ride a bicycle like other kids, because of the brace or other polio aftereffects, Lyndell said. “But then, his daddy bought him a horse.” 

Joe became a talented horseman and especially enjoyed riding with his friend Danny Wade. 

“They would ride down the field together,” Lyndell said. “But one day they were out riding, and Danny came running back on his horse. He was just give out, and his horse was too. He said, ‘Lyndell, Joe’s hurt.’ Danny’s horse had kicked Joe’s horse, and he had fallen off. I got on Danny’s horse and hurried down to where he was. I could see his leg was broken. There weren’t cell phones back then. So I had to leave him there and ride back to the house and call for help. Junior Peters was driving the ambulance then. He took Joe to Dr. Hoerman and then on to Springfield. They set his leg and put it in a cast, and I actually think that helped him. It helped straighten out his leg and foot.”

Joe, now 74 and still an expert horseman, acquired many championship saddles and belt buckles for team-roping during his rodeoing years.

The Strongs’ younger son, Jack, preferred baseball to horses. His athletic skill earned him several ribbons and trophies – and even a college scholarship. 

On their farm, Lyndell and Utah built a chicken house, “and me and the boys raised chickens – broilers – and turkeys,” she said. “And we raised cattle and hogs.” 

Their daughter Jerri Sue (now Jerri Sue Crawford) was born in 1966. 

The night tragedy struck

Their life rolled along, filled with love and hard work. Then, one day in 1973, Utah called Lyndell “from a truckstop somewhere. He said, ‘I’ve got a man here who wants to buy the truck and the load of grain I have on it. What must I do?’” Lyndell said. 

She told him, “Sell it!”

Although Utah sold his own truck, he continued to drive sometimes for Warren Snelling, hauling cedar closet lining, and he also drove for what is now Rockbridge Trout & Game Ranch, hauling fishfood for their trout-raising operation. The Strongs’ daughter, Jerri Sue Crawford, remembers riding along with her dad to Salt Lake City sometimes to pick up the trout-food order. 

After Utah retired from truck-driving, he became a full-time cattle farmer with a cattle-backgrounding operation. Lyndell retired from the post office in 1986. 

Five years later, in 1991, the Strongs were babysitting their granddaughter Kristin overnight at their home in Gainesville when tragedy happened. 

“Krissy was 3 years old, and she was going to spend the night with us. Utah had left with a cattle buyer to see some cattle, but he said he’d be back in time to go to a music deal on the square that night,” Lyndell said. 

But Utah didn’t make it home. “I was worried sick. I thought maybe he’d gone to see some more cattle, but I didn’t hear anything, and of course there were still no cell phones then,” she said “At 5 the next morning, I called Jerri Sue and said, ‘Something’s wrong. Daddy didn’t come home.’”

Their son Jack was the one who found Utah. He had left the other cattle buyer and returned alone to the family’s land near Tecumseh the night before, and he had died when some portable corral-fence panels fell on him, trapping and suffocating him. 

Lyndell’s years of public service

Since then, Lyndell has continued on alone, living and staying busy with a wide range of activities. For several years, she served on the Ozark County Health Department board and the board of the Missouri Ozarks Community Health Clinics in Ava and Gainesville. She’s also a member of the Gainesville Lions Club.

She was on the Gainesville City Council for a term and half. And then, after retiring from that position, she was re-elected in the 2012 election. No one had filed for the eastern ward seat, but she got the one and only write-in vote. A rumor circulated that her neighbor, Bob Guffey, also got a write-in vote but that ballot was improperly marked. 

“It’s a good thing his ballot didn’t count,” Lyndell quipped at the time. “My goodness, we would’ve had to have a runoff.”

Now just five and a half years from the century mark, Lyndell has stepped down from her public-service duties, but she is still enjoying life and especially loves spending time with her family. She meets friends and relatives at the sale barn cafe in Gainesville for lunch most Mondays. 

Another favorite activity is strolling through the memories of her long and eventful life, an experience prompted again recently when she saw her granddaughter Kristin wearing her 1948 wedding dress.