News General News Karen (Owen) Maroney Mom Big Red
Karen (Owen) Maroney Mom Big Red
In loving memory of my wonderful mother,
Brigid Elizabeth Lupton Owen- 2/28/07-07/6/11
Rest in Peace.
A teacher’s talent doesn’t end with the classroom.
And pioneer teacher Elizabeth Lupton Owen, who began teaching in 1924 when she was 17, kept teaching family members and others through conversation and sparkling lines of humor after she stopped going to a school building in 1977 at 70.
She especially remembers her first job in a one-room school eight miles out in the country from Lovington, N.M., where ranch children rode horses to school and kept them in a barn and corral until classes were over for the day.
She was appalled at the poor quality of food the children were bringing for lunch, and changed it with a .22-caliber rifle.
“Some of those little kids had an old half-cooked biscuit,” she remembers. “It wasn’t real brown and nice like a biscuit ought to be, but a big old fat biscuit and a big old piece of about half-cooked salt pork.”
She revolutionized their lunch by walking across pastures with her .22, where she gathered the prime ingredient for rabbit stew. The students brought the carrots and potatoes, and the meal was cooked on a stove in the same classroom where they were learning math.
“The days we didn’t have a rabbit, we just had soup,” is the way the teacher remembers it.
Owen had been born into a ranch and farm environment in 1907 in the Lubbock area, and became intimately acquainted not only with responsibilities, but necessities.
In an oral history session with her great-granddaughter, Courtney Smith, Owen remembered she had replaced a teacher who couldn’t take the conditions anymore.
“I got my first job at the High Lonesome Ranch. They had run the teacher off — she just couldn’t live in that very spooky schoolhouse, way off by itself. It was half a mile from the people I boarded with.”
On that first day on the first job, there was no pretense about sophistication as a teacher.
“Now imagine: I was 17 years old, and I didn’t know beef from bull’s foot about teaching school.”
Never mind, she would begin.
“I got everything set up, and made them a speech at the beginning of school.”
Her mother, Mary O’Mahoney Lupton, an immigrant from Ireland who possessed literary abilities and was herself a teacher who emphasized education for all of her family, had advised her to address the class on the first day.
“Mother said you always make a little talk, and I guess I gave a good talk, and I assigned them all to some grade,” Owen remembers.
She had 15 students ranging up and down the scale from elementary to high school. The school’s basketball court was outside on uneven barren ground, where the students attempted to play with a half-inflated ball.
Two of the boys who needed high school courses were about her own age, maybe a little older ... and they smoked.
“After we had lunch, these two big boys lit up a cigarette. I said, ‘Boys, it’s against the law to smoke on school grounds. You have to put those cigarettes out. And be sure they’re out — we don’t want to start a prairie fire.’
“I was so scared of prairie fires.”
Owen now acknowledges she had bluffed the boys: “There was no such law; I just made it up.”
She remembers, “The next day they went across to the bar ditch.”
Like the teacher she has always been, Owen pauses in the story to explain a point to Smith: “You know, that’s really supposed to be called a borrow ditch — you borrow dirt from that ditch to put up on the road. Did you know that?
“Well, anyway they went across the road to the borrow ditch to be sure they were off the school grounds, and they lit up their cigarettes. I said, ‘That’s OK, just put your cigarettes out in the ruts of the road — we don’t want to start a prairie fire.’
“I couldn’t tell them not to, as long as they were keeping the ‘law’ of staying off the school ground.”
But the two high school students were also capable of benefitting the school, according to Owen.
“They kind of helped with the kids’ playing — the little kids. All ages played basketball — can you imagine what a mess it was?”
There was one particular accomplishment at the school where she taught for a year that she has never forgotten — the best poster of New Mexico. There was money at stake in the contest for the best poster. Owen thinks it was either $7 or $10, but in 1924, that was a significant prize. Under her guidance, the entire class worked on it.
“We had the whole history of New Mexico — Coronado, the padres, the missions, the ranchers, the farmers and the city of Lovington.”
It was made of an assortment of construction paper sheets.
A friend who sold oil leases had told her that oil would be discovered in Lea County. “Sure enough they did, and up in the clouds in this poster I cut out a tiny oil well and put it up in the clouds above the city of Lovington.”
With the cash prize they bought paint, crayons, a basketball that would stay inflated, and a baseball bat and ball. In those days, teachers provided their own school materials and equipment.
Friends of Owen talked her into taking a teaching job in the mountain town of Reserve, N.M., the following year, and she stayed there until 1928. Then, her mother’s eyesight began to fade, and she moved to Pep near the town of Littlefield to teach school and help her mother grade papers there.
“She was a very smart person, and she emphasized education,” Owen said.
Owen’s daughter, Mary Owen Jeansonne, said her grandmother, Mary Lupton, had been serving as principal at Pep. When her eyesight worsened, she retired as principal.
Although Owen was teaching first, second and third grades, she was made principal at Pep after her mother retired.
In 1931, while Owen and her sister, Jean, were occupying living quarters in the school building, it caught fire. They lost everything they had in what was for a time their home.
But Pep ordinarily was blandly routine, with not much going on in the farming community after school. It was frankly boring to Owen, and she complained about it to the young man whom she would play cards with in a foursome with another couple.
“Well, what do you like to do,” he asked.
“And I said, ‘I like to dance.’ So he said there was a school place at Lehman, they had an old school building and it was real nice. They had dances at least once or twice a month there, and they had real good bands from Lubbock. He said this week they were having The Buffalo Rhythm Stompers from Lubbock, and said, ‘If you would like to go over there I’ll take you.’
“And I was all dressed up in a real pretty dancing dress I’d bought from Hemphill-Wells here in Lubbock. I was so proud of that dress. I was going to go someplace and dance. And I had more fun ... and I met Lewis Owen, the principal of the school there.”
The courtship between Lewis and Elizabeth took more than four years. “Mother was Catholic, Dad was a Baptist,” Jeansonne said.
The friction between Catholics and Baptists and other groups extended to parents of students in the schools, where a Sunday School was taught after classes were over.
Owen remembers it this way:
“We would have Catholic Sunday School and Protestant Sunday School too. Well, that didn’t work very long, and they fussed about it. The Church of Christ didn’t want the Baptists teaching their kids, and the Baptists didn’t want the Church of Christ teaching theirs, and the Methodists didn’t want anybody teaching theirs, so it didn’t work.”
Elizabeth and Lewis were having long talks about many things, and there was one volatile disagreement after she was wearing an engagement ring.
“He came over that day and he said, ‘You know, I just decided this week ... I’ve been thinking about it all this week ... that children just cause their parents so much grief and suffering that we just won’t have any children.’
“And I said, ‘Well, Lewis Owen, if that’s how you feel you just might as well take me home.’ I didn’t really mean it. I didn’t think he would, and he just turned the car around and took me home. We were engaged and I had that ring, this big ring, which cost him eighty bucks. I just slammed that door, and I didn’t wait for him to go in with me. I just walked into that schoolhouse. I was so mad.
“And all that week I was so sad, because I loved him, and I was thinking ... every day I’d think of a different way I’d get this ring back to him. I wasn’t going to go see him, and I couldn’t mail it, it might get lost. The ring seemed awful big to me — I could hardly pray in church the Sunday after I got it.”
Maybe work was best. She decided to give her schoolroom “a real grim, great scrubbing.”
“I put on my basketball bloomers — at Tech back in those days for P.E. you had to wear a special shirt and these big old black bloomers that had elastic in the legs. But I’d just wear them because you could get on your hands and knees and not get your dress wet. I got on my hands and knees and scrubbed my old schoolhouse, and had my head tied up in a rag ... and he drives up in that beautiful new car he bought.”
Smith asked, “Was this the blue car?”
“Yeah, the ‘Blue Heaven.’ He drives up right under my school window, and I thought, ‘Oh, heck, now what?’
“And he comes walking into my schoolroom, and said, ‘what are you doing?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m cleaning my room.’ And I said, ‘I thought we called this whole thing off.’
“He said, ‘No, all this week I’ve been thinking and decided that if you wanted to have 17 children, we would have 17 children.’
“And that just tickled me. I just laughed and laughed and laughed. It was so funny. To think of having 17 kids. I couldn’t imagine that. I just wanted three or four at the most.”
The eventual number was 10.
In a lack of communication, Lewis resigned his job to go to work at Pep, and Elizabeth resigned her job at Pep to go to work at Lehman.
It was a crisis until the school board at Pep allowed them to live in the teacher’s home if they would get married. Lewis was made principal, and Elizabeth kept her job there as an elementary school teacher.
Throughout her teaching career, Owen would teach in the fall and spring, and take university courses in the summer. The colleges she attended included California State Teachers College at San Diego, Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, West Texas State University in Canyon, and Texas Tech.
In Lubbock, her teaching jobs were at the St. Elizabeth’s Catholic School and Christ the King Schools.
She remembers that wherever she lived, she always taught school.
Jenifer Smith, her granddaughter, remembers living with Owen while attending Tech.
“She had just retired, and some mornings she would wake up and say, ‘I am exhausted — I taught school all night long.’
“She would dream about teaching every night.”
Jeansonne currently is visiting her mother, and during an interview prompts conversation by asking about her next birthday.
“It’s the 28th of February,” Owen volunteers without hesitation.
But age is such an incidental thing, and she isn’t particularly concerned about which year this one might happen to be.
“I think its over 100,” she offers after a pause.
“How about 104?” Jeansonne suggests, and gets an immediate response:
“Oh, my heavens!”
Brigid Elizabeth Lupton Owen was born in Lubbock, TX. on February 28, 1907. The oldest of 7 children, she was raised on ranches in Yoakum County and Hereford, TX. and attended boarding school in Stanton, TX.
Elizabeth began her teaching career near Lovington, N.M. at High Lonesome School at the age of 17 in a one room school house. Some of her pupils were older than she was. In the winter she arrived at school early to start a fire in the wood stove that heated the school room. Some days she would shoot a rabbit on the way to school and cook it in a stew for the children to eat for lunch.
In 1928 she met Lewis Owen in Lehman, TX. where he was teaching. She was teaching in Pep school at the time. They married in 1932. Elizabeth and Lewis raised 10 children, 5 boys and 5 girls. Lewis died in 1959 and Elizabeth went back to teaching to support her family. She retired from Christ the King school in 1977 after 20 years.
Now at the age of 94, Big Red (as she is affectionately called because of her red hair), has entered the computer age. Always thirsting for knowledge and eager to learn new things Elizabeth was very receptive to the idea of having her own computer. It has enabled her to keep up with her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren who are spread all over the United States and Europe. She especially enjoys receiving news and pictures from her 71 grandchildren, great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren. She would encourage all seniors to use e-mail to communicate with their families.
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