Marian I. Winter

Blessed with an elephantine memory she could recall as a very young girl, bringing in the cows and milking them especially on a sweltering-hot August day. She could tell her stories of growing up on the prairie as if it were yesterday. She sold her farm eggs in town for five cents a dozen. She was the class president of her 1934 class of Nashville High School and for many years reigned as the one of the oldest living alumni of the school, usually presenting the address for the reunion.

Being the oldest of five children she was the tomboy who helped her father raise his black jack mules, raise and train his coyote-hunting greyhounds, plow the fields on the tractor, and helped him make his locally-revered Kentucky moonshine. A natural-born storyteller she never met a story she didn’t like. She spent the most cherished days of her youth on the front porch of her grandparent’s nearby home. They were in Kentucky during the Civil War, and Marian could paint the vivid pictures of the stories they told her of war times and bad times. Her grandmother, a true-blue Kentuckian “chawed terbakkey” and could crack walnuts with her teeth. She was said to be able to “hit a coal hod at five paces” (which we assumed to mean she could spit tobacco juice with the best of them). These Twymans were a strong line of people!

Long before ancestry.com Marian was an amateur genealogist, which required her to take many trips to study telephone books in remote towns and visit many overgrown graveyards where she could study the tombstones for clues. She tracked her Twyman roots back to the earliest settlers and became a member of Colonial Dames, Daughters of the American Revolution and Daughters of the Civil War. She was secretly proud of the fact that her chosen ancestor in the Civil War had deserted several times, each time selling his horse, saber and gun. Marian excused the fact that, being a Southerner, he was “on the wrong side of the war”.

The Twyman family was one of the earliest families to settle in the Nashville area. Then came the day when the farmers from Germany arrived. They had come to the vast prairie to grow winter wheat, which they did. That is, until the first Dust Bowl came in the 1910’s which wiped out most of them financially, never to recover. The unsaid rule in town was that none of the girls should ever date or, God forbid, marry the “German” boys. Of course, most of the “English” girls, including Marian, did just that!

Marian married Willie Winter during WWII and moved to Wichita where Willie went to work at Boeing making war bombers. Before moving, Marian had previously operated the Nashville switchboard so, during these hard times, she went to work at the Wichita Trinity Lutheran Church, where many will remember her good cheer and friendship. Marian lived on past Willie’s death and continued to reside in her home for a total of 70 years. It was only at the age of 98, when she could no longer pass the vision test for her drivers license that she relented, moving to an apartment at the Georgetown complex in southeast Wichita. The sadness of missing her home was quickly replaced by the joy of a whole new audience for her stories!

Throughout the last dozen or so years, Marian was cared for in every way by her loving and devoted granddaughter, Michele Aspinall of Cheney, KS. For years, Marian has said that she doesn’t want any sad, mopey hymns played at her funeral, and said that if anyone starts singing “The Old Rugged Cross”, she would jump up out of the box and clobber someone. Note taken. She will be held forever in memory by her son William Winter, daughter-in-law Rebekah Leonhart, granddaughters Michele and Steffanie, Michele’s husband Aaron, near-godson Jimmy Willingham, Pastor Boyle’s son Micah, loyal friends Roger and Mary, and many nieces and nephews. She will be interred in the Lutheran Cemetery of Nashville, KS next to Willie and near many of her childhood friends (which she said is the only thing that makes that windswept place tolerable). Marian will be happy to know that her stories will not die.