Missouri Ruralist
October 1993

Missouri sketchbook

A Friendship Rekindled
Childhood chums reunite after reading letter in Rural Missouri
By Heather Berry

It is raining softly in the small town of Buffalo as two old Ford pickups slowly wind their way through the park to the covered pavilion. The trucks are parked side by side and out pop two energetic ladies who are about to embark on a journey through 42 years of their past.
“I never knew where Lola was,” says Sarah Stanbrough, one of the long lost duo. “I never knew she was living so close to me until I found her through Rural Missouri.”
As of January, Sarah thought Lola Boswell was only a friend from her past. But as the member of Laclede Electric read her January issue of Rural Missouri, she saw a letter in the Mail Bag section signed by Lola Boswell of Collins, Mo. Wondering if this was the Lola she knew in high school, Sarah called her that very day.
“Do you remember what you said when you called me?” Lola asks Sarah. “I can tell you. I answered the phone and you said, ‘Are you Lola Boswell? The Lola Boswell who use to go to Tabernacle Baptist Church in Kansas City?’ and I paused and said ‘Who are you?’ We must have talked for an hour! I hate to think how much that call cost you, Sarah.”
“Didn’t matter how much it cost,” says Sarah, smiling at Lola. “It was so good to talk to you again. That’s all that mattered to me.”
Sarah and Lola’s younger sister Criss, of Chesapeake, Va., attended Paseo High School in Kansas Cit together in the late 1920s. They also attended the same church and that’s how Lola and Sarah became friends. But after four years, the three lives took different turns leading them miles apart. It was the 1930s and the depression made travel, long phone calls and letters luxuries for many. Sarah saw Lola once more in 1951. The two had no further contact with each other until now, 42 years later.
Sarah is now 78 and Lola has long since stopped keeping track of her age. The lives Sarah and Lola lived took separate ways. Lola attended business college in Kansas City and worked for Western Union as a telegraph operator in her early career. Any spare time was filled by studying for the Civil Service exam because Lola wanted a job with the government.
“I just didn’t want an appointment anywhere,” says Lola, a member of Sac Osage Electric Cooperative. “I wanted a job in Washington, D.C.”
And that’s exactly where she ended up. Lola packed up her things and headed to Washington in 1931 to work for the War Department filing records for World War 1 veterans. Later she worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture as office manager and editorial clerk. But 1946 found Lola wanting more out of life, so she went to law school in Washington where she took a four-year law course in three years, something admirable for a 39-year-old woman to tackle.
When Lola headed east for her job with the War Department, Sarah married a Baptist minister’s on and finished high school. Her husband worked for General Motors in Leeds, Mo. at the time and was soon transferred to GM in St. Louis.
Having worked her way through high school, Sarah just wanted to be a wife, mother and homemaker. But tough times forced Sarah to take a job outside the home.
“My husband said it would only be for a little while,” says Sarah. “That few years turned into 50 years working as a sales clerk for Sears, J.C. Penney and Curtis-Wright (now McDonnell-Douglas) as a key punch operator.
“When the war came, they began taking all the boys from our office and sending them to the military,” says Sarah. “Management asked if we girls wanted to learn to run the big machines making parts for planes. I figured if the guys could do it, so could I!”
Over the next 20 years following the war, Sarah worked in key punch jobs for a temporary service and ended up in Belleville, Ill. where she worked at Scott Air Force Base in the computer department for 10 years and retired in 1980.
By then the friendship the two had shared was a distant memory. Lola had gone into private practice as a lawyer in Washington fighting domestic relation and abuse cases before the court. She chose not to marry. When Lola retired she moved back to the family farm in Collins, a home that has been in her family since 1837.
Sarah, on the other hand, married and was a working mother to eight children. After retiring, she moved to Long Lane. The ladies never knew they lived so close to each other until this year.
“Now that we’ve found each other, we hope to get together when my sister visits,” says Lola.
“We plan to keep in touch,” says Sarah, smiling. “We don’t want to lose each other again.”

Submitted by Stacy Kelly
 

BACK