After a lifetime of quietly serving her Lord and her family, Norma Ellen Hanna Happel passed away early Saturday, July 31 at the Mill Pond Care Center in Ankeny, Iowa, just six months after the passing of her beloved husband of 64 years, Alfred Elmer Happel.
She was the daughter of Arthur and Nella Thompson Hanna, born on a farm three miles east of Northwood, Iowa, on April 29, 1929. The historic Wall Street stock market crash was still a few months away, but the Midwestern farm economy was already in the depths of the Great Depression. The previous year, her father, Art, was forced to give up farming just over the border in Claremont, Minnesota, where Norma’s older brother Jack was born. They moved to Northwood where he became a farmhand and he later spent a year working for the WPA, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal economic stimulus initiatives in the early 1930s. The Hanna family scratched out a living in the northern Iowa dirt, moving five times before Norma was seven, from one rented farmhouse to another. In a good year, Art’s boss would butcher a hog and give the family half, to help them get through the winter. Otherwise, the family members lived largely on what they raised themselves, from the hens that Nell tended along with the produce from an enormous and abundant garden. Nell made the kids’ clothes out of hand-me-downs, never new material. Jack and Norma shared in the chores, fostering the work ethic they both carried throughout their lives. Times were hard and poverty was widespread, but in Norma’s country school, most of the children came from families who owned their own farms. Norma sensed a clear separation from other children as a “hired man’s kid.” She admitted that it was difficult not harboring some resentment towards the fortunate few who had more and was especially hurt that she was the only one at her school who didn’t get to take piano lessons, which cost 25 cents. The pain of missing out on that privilege remained with her years later. The resentment was sometimes felt by adults in that era as well. Nell huffed about a dinner host she deemed extravagant for expending an entire paper towel to wipe a ketchup bottle.
In 1936, the family moved to Manly, where Norma spent most of her childhood. Art rose at 4 a.m. each day to milk 22 cows at 4:30 a.m. and again at 5 p.m. so that it was ready for the milkman who arrived at 7 a.m., then handled regular farm duties the rest of the day. The work was year-round with no vacation and Nell often helped with the milking. Art and Nell remained in the Manly area the rest of their lives. Jack and Norma attended multiple country schools, making the daily trek by foot or on horseback. The first school was Deer Creek Number Five, with 12 kids in one room. The children all played together but the older kids made the decisions. Snow forts were prevalent in the winter with games in nice weather. The children broke so many windows playing ball that the teacher made them play on the back side of the school, much to their annoyance. Norma loved playing outside on the Manly farm in the summer as it had a hill and a creek that ran through the pasture, with lots of room to explore. They were also fortunate in getting electricity before some other families because it was required for the milking equipment.
Art and Nell were raised as church-going Methodists but living out in the country with poor transportation, regular attendance was difficult. However, after the move to Manly, a neighbor invited Jack and Norma to ride along to Sunday School at the Bethel Evangelical United Brethren Church in Manly. In 1941, Norma was baptized and confirmed there on the same day. The family also got to go to town on Saturday nights, where Nell took along 15 dozen eggs which she traded for groceries.
In 1941, Art took a job farming for Clarence Mitchell west of Manly with an opportunity to share half the profits, a huge benefit. But while the farm economy improved during World War II, it was still a time of sacrifice for rural families like the Hannas as sugar, gas, rubber and, less famously, nylon hosiery, were in scarce supply. Following the war, Norma recalls the glorious sensation of again tasting cakes baked with sugar instead of unsatisfying substitutes. Yet the Hannas did not escape the tragedies of war. Nell’s younger brother, Delbert Thompson, was killed in combat in Luzon, in the Philippines in 1945. Thus, Norma recalled, at war’s end, there were many families “who did not go to town and do a hat dance” in celebration, because of the conflict’s grim toll.
Norma graduated from Manly High School in 1947. She was a bright and capable student, but with the family’s meager income, attending college was never an option for her or her friends. Looking back, she quietly conceded, it was her life’s greatest regret. Instead, after being contacted by a family acquittance, she began work as a bookkeeper at Fullerton Lumber Company in Manly. In 1950, Norma spotted a full-page newspaper ad in the Mason City Globe-Gazette for higher-paying positions at the First National Bank in Mason City. She was hired as a secretary and made the 10-mile move. She searched the ads and found an upstairs room in a local house to rent, then walked to the Globe-Gazette offices to place an ad for a roommate to help cover the expense. She explained her request to the newspaper office receptionist who replied that, in fact, she herself was looking for a place to live and agreed to move in. The ad was never placed and Berniece became one of her closest friends.
Passenger trains were widely accessible and affordable in those years, and Norma enjoyed having the freedom to explore the region. Her parents never ventured farther from home than the time Norma took them to Omaha to visit two of Nell’s brothers. But Norma took a train on her own to visit a high school friend in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and also made treks with Berniece to Minneapolis and St. Louis. More typically, they found entertainment locally and one weekend evening met Alfred Happel of Latimer at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake. Looking back, Norma found the meeting’s setting ironic, since neither could dance. Yet the match proved fitting in many other ways as well. Alfred was in the midst of a brief stint as administrator at the Hampton Lutheran Hospital but, like Norma, was a devout Christian raised on the farm, first near Cedar Rapids and later Latimer. After a courtship that featured several trips to Mason City for ice cream cones, Alfred and Norma were married in Manly in 1956. In 1955 Alfred had taken a job in the policy service department he eventually headed at Lutheran Mutual Life Insurance Company in Waverly. While Norma’s father, Art, viewed the 70-mile distance between Manly and Waverly as excessive, he nonetheless quickly gave his blessing to the marriage.
After moving to Waverly, Norma initially worked as a secretary at Lutheran Mutual, but then gave up her business career to raise a family, eventually caring for sons Larry, Charles and Joel. It was a loving sacrifice she never hesitated to make. As the lone female in a five-member family she endured much and as is too typical, it was only in later years that the sons developed a level of appreciation that even approached what was merited for all she sacrificed and provided. Their gratitude continues to grow. She fueled the engine for many of the families’ memorable experiences, sewing Halloween costumes, hosting birthday parties and hiding Christmas presents in a location the sons have still not identified, although not for lack of searching. The Happels’ station wagon towed their Starcraft pop-up tent camper on family vacations to Rocky Mountain National Park, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Washington, D.C. and the Great Smoky Mountains as well as on weekend treks to Backbone and Pine Lake state parks. Those trips for Norma were inevitably preceded by days of packing, cleaning and other tasks, including freezing water jugs to place in the cooler where she packed the Hartman’s Summer Sausage or dried beef from the Janesville locker for the family’s sandwiches consumed at roadside rest stops, along with grapes, chips and cans of Shasta cola. Camping trips in the evening for Norma meant cooking hamburgers and fried potatoes on a camp stove and making occasional treks to small-town laundromats.
And there were always the ballgames. They sometimes seemed endless to her and often disrupted family events. Each of the sons played various sports in their childhood and, in particular, Larry and Joel were consumed by them as spectators as well, as was Alfred, albeit on a more responsible level. Norma often bemoaned that the lone source of family conversation was the fate of the local Go-Hawks, Hawkeyes and St. Louis Cardinals. Yet she dutifully took an interest in it and, in fact, enjoyed watching basketball and occasionally professional golf. She claimed to have been an above-average childhood athlete in an era when competitive athletics opportunities for girls were scarce. She played baseball with the boys and based on the throws she hurled off the target she drew on the side of the family’s barn, was reputed to have a strong pitching arm. Remarkably, in her 50s she learned how to golf and performed capably into her early 80s.
As the boys reached high school, Norma ventured back into the job force, working part-time for the Social Services office in Waverly and later as a secretary for attorney James Coddington. She also performed volunteer work for St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, where the family worshiped. Yet while she didn’t outwardly complain, there was a sense during those times that she wished she had the same career opportunities available to her that a college degree provided for Alfred and her sons.
Alfred retired in 1988 and in 2001 they moved to Clear Lake, initially in a house a few blocks from where they first met and closer to their childhood roots, as well as near the family homes of daughters-in-law Anne Happel and Susan Oltrogge. They joined Zion Lutheran Church and volunteered each week at the Opportunity Village Store from 2002-12, enjoying not only the ability to serve but the camaraderie with co-workers. The move also allowed her to reconnect with a remaining handful of her Manly High School classmates for coffee each month for several years. For many years Alfred and Norma looked forward to packing the golf clubs in the trunk for six-week winter escapes to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for playing golf, cashing in restaurant coupons, taking excursions to outlet malls and listening to Sunday sermons with Pastor Bobby at First Presbyterian Church. They also made an awe-filled 50th-anniversary cruise to Alaska and a memorable autumn bus trip to the New England states, among other journeys.
Travel offered an interesting diversion, yet Norma’s roots were firmly planted in the rich, black Iowa soil. She couldn’t envision living anywhere else and shook her head over why anyone would want to move “so far away.” She had relatives in southern Minnesota, including her mother’s younger sister, Dorothy Martin of Clermont. She cherished her tight relationship with Aunt Dot—which mirrored the special connections she later developed with her own nieces, Marsha and Janet Hanna. But to her, the Land of 10,000 Lakes never quite measured up. Likewise, she had no interest in city life and was horrified by the steady growth of traffic they encountered each winter at Myrtle Beach. Sunday trips to the Bishops’ Buffet to more populous Cedar Falls or Waterloo were fine, but she was more comfortable in towns the size of Clear Lake and Waverly, where the church and the Fareway store were only 3-4 blocks away.
That preference was likely grounded in her belief that joy was found in life’s simple things. Glamour and extravagance never appealed to her personally, although she did secretly harbor a fascination with it. When son Charles and Anne attended a formal banquet for work, she always wanted to know what kind of dresses the women wore. Yet she did not crave social status and, in fact, was sometimes resentful of it. Only her faith exceeded her devotion to her family, including not only Alfred and her sons but the daughters-in-law she adored. She eagerly awaited their visits. There were few occasions she savored more than a laughter-filled family brunch that included bacon, eggs, fresh pineapple and French toast with powdered sugar. She was a talented seamstress and enjoyed quilt-making. Rather than a dinner party, she preferred coffee with a friend, backyard visits with neighbors after pulling weeds from the garden, tugging a golf cart as the dew lifted from a green fairway on a sunny morning, or eating watermelon on the porch on a warm August evening, none of which required lavish spending or an urban zip code.
Yet while she would never be found at a Broadway opening, she did like show tunes and ‘50s artists like Judy Garland, Dean Martin and Gisele MacKenzie. And she was an avid movie-goer in her youth, recalling seeing “Gone with the Wind” when it debuted in 1940, although as a girl she was largely limited to the free Wednesday night movies projected outdoors on a white building wall in nearby Kensett. She even wrote to Hollywood stars for photos which she taped to her bedroom walls. Nonetheless it was years before Alfred and Norma ever purchased a home stereo and they rarely turned on the car radio, preferring conversation or the gentle quiet of an evening ride to the radio’s “blare.”
Her wise advice was that work, play and diets were best pursued in moderation and she never really lost her Depression-era frugality. Even in later years when Alfred and Norma had more substantial resources, on many evenings they could be found in a living room illuminated only slightly by the fading sunlight with the overhead lights turned off to save electricity as he read the newspaper and she solved another crossword puzzle.
Any event where she was present was punctuated by laughter. Her sons long ago determined that the dry sense of humor they routinely take to an extreme was inherited from Norma and most probably could be traced to her father, Art. She loved watching Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart reruns from the ‘70s and had a special affinity for The Far Side cartoons, particularly any that featured dogs.
She and Alfred always retained their love for the land, carving out a part of the yard wherever they lived for a garden, even in retirement. Space for tomato plants took priority, with space also devoted to flowers and vegetables. Many family suppers featured lettuce from the garden along with sliced tomatoes sprinkled with sugar.
The quality of her final years was steadily eroded by the crippling effects of Parkinson’s Disease on both body and mind. She and Alfred moved to Apple Valley Assisted Living at Clear Lake in 2013, she agreeing out of concern for his health and he for hers. One benefit of the move was that it freed Norma from cooking meals, which she revealed she never enjoyed, to her family’s great surprise. As Alfred and Norma’s health needs grew, they moved to Mill Pond Care Center in Ankeny in 2017, reluctantly adopting city life for the opportunity to be near their children’s residences. Norma said as much as anything she missed having a garden, but not even Parkinson’s could rob her of the joy she found in visits with her family or being with Alfred. She and Alfred spent nearly every moment together in retirement until they were separated by the global pandemic. The heavy toll that took on her was evident, as was Alfred’s passing, and there is comfort in knowing they are together again.
Looking back, Norma said, her heart was filled with gratitude. Whatever she was deprived of as a youth due to finances were not the things that matter. Some she knew from her youth who were better off financially endured troublesome lives. Norma was blessed with a long life and a loving family. She said she decided it takes about a lifetime to realize that sometimes the have-nots survive the best.
Norma is survived by her and Alfred’s children, Larry of Pella, Charles and wife Anne of Whitefish, Montana, and Joel and wife Susan Oltrogge of Ankeny. She is also survived by her sister-in-law Dorothy Hanna of Manly and brother-in-law Lester Happel and wife Alma of Cedar Rapids. She was preceded in death by her husband, Alfred, her parents, her older brother Jack Hanna, brother-in-law Richard and wife Lois Happel, brother-in-law Paul and wife Kathy Happel, sister-in-law Helen and husband Jim Jorgensen as well as brother-in-law George and sister-in-law Elaine, who both died in childhood.
A memorial service will be conducted at Second Reformed Church in Pella Friday, Aug. 6 at 1:30 p.m. A reception with refreshments will follow in the church Gathering Space. Video of the service will be streamed live on the church YouTube channel and will also be accessible after the service. Alfred and Norma’s ashes will be buried later in August at Memorial Park Cemetery in Mason City. Memorials in her name can be designated for Hope Ministries of Des Moines or the American Parkinson Disease Association, organizations intended to reduce suffering and assist others in building better lives as she believed Christ calls all to do.
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