Maxine Bartel

Hilda Maxine Bartel, beloved mother of five, died early Saturday morning at her home in Wichita. She was 95. Known to friends as "Maxine," she was born January 8, 1921 on the family farm in Norway township, eight miles north of Concordia, Kan. She was the sixth of eight children born to Orval and Charlotte "Lottie" Barleen. The attending physician pronounced her "a fine, healthy little gal" and charged her father a dozen eggs for the routine delivery. She attended the "Old 81" one-room schoolhouse, just north of the homestead, and graduated "near the top" of the 1935 eighth-grade class of three students. She attended Norway High School, living in an unheated attic room and subsisting on what she described dubiously as "potato soup," before transferring to Concordia High School for her senior year, 1939, as the Second World War erupted in Europe. In 1941, Maxine moved to Hutchinson to help an older sister with a new baby. She waited tables part-time at a local cafe and was introduced one evening to a bedraggled, rough-looking construction worker named Albert W. Bartel. "Definitely not love at first sight," she said many years later. "But he came back a few nights later, combed, clean-shaved and wearing a suit. That's when I thought, 'Oh my.'" They married on her 21st birthday, January 8, 1942, one month and a day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. After Albert received a medical discharge from the Army, the couple crisscrossed the country from Pennsylvania to Oregon and back on a variety of construction jobs. Over the next 10 years, they had five children but they divorced in 1955. Maxine was left alone with five small children, no job prospects and only occasional financial support from Albert. For the next 30 years, she worked a variety of home-based jobs, including telephone caller for the Disabled American Veterans, and then served as a housekeeper for the Kansas Masonic Home. Maxine was preceded in death by two of her children, her oldest son Robert Lee Bartel and her youngest daughter Pamela Lipscomb. She is survived by her oldest daughter Patricia (Wayne) Walters of Columbia Falls, Mont., and two sons, David (Miki) Bartel of Vancouver, Wash., and Jim Bartel of Wichita. She also is survived by two younger sisters, Lois Hill of Independence, Mo., and Wilma Mikesell of Courtland, Kan. She also has 12 grand-children, 22 great grand-children and three great, great grand-children. The family gives thanks for the hard work and dedication of the doctors, nurses and staff of Via Christi-St. Joseph, Right at Home, Life Care Centers of Wichita and Amedisys Hospice of Wichita. "Our Mother received excellent care from so many health care professionals in her final months. We give special thanks for all the great people at Amedisys who gave her such loving care in her last days. Our Mother's sweet smile and wry sense of humor will be missed, but her loving spirit will go on and on and on." A memorial service will be held Thursday, March 17, 2016 at 3:00 P.M. at Resthaven Gardens of Memory. Memorial contributions may be made to Wichita Meals on Wheels, 200 S Walnut St, Wichita, KS 67213.