I didn’t ever have to take my turn milking cows.

My brothers—I had two older brothers. We had a neighbor up the hill who had four cows, and he had a milking machine, but they drove away, or they moved away, and my dad bought that milking machine, and so that was quite an improvement.

Anyway, my dad’s dad, my grandpa Stava, emigrated to the United States with his parents when he was 12 years old, and I regret that I never had an opportunity to sit down with him and say, “What was your impression? You were 12 years old. What was your impression?” But in those days, children were seen and not heard, and I can’t ever remember sitting down with any kind of discussion with my grandpa Stava.

My husband’s parents, Charles and Eugenia Loosvelt, came here from Belgium, and they came as young adults, married, and had a place down on the river. And they were staunch Catholics, and I remember that the story is that my Grandpa Loosvelt would take a team and a bevy and go to Chadron to get a priest to come down to their house to say mass.

My parents raised me in the Methodist Church, but I became a Catholic when I married my husband, and my husband was a rancher. When artificial insemination came in, he was one of the first in our neighborhood to utilize that, that resource, and took quite a bit of guff about it because he did an Angus and Limousine cross. The neighbors were talking always joked that, “Limousine, I thought that was a car,” but it proved to be successful, and he became a very respected cattleman. And for all those years, well, we lived about 15 miles north of town.

When our children were ready for high school, we purchased a place four miles out of town, and I got a job at the courthouse in the county treasurer’s office, and I told my husband I would work 10 years to help pay for that place. Well, 32 years later, I retired, having spent 23 of those years as county treasurer.

Me and my parents, we did what we had to do to have a successful life. Country life is a great life. My husband passed away in 1996, and I stayed on the farm with the help of my family for 15 years, but I moved into town in 2010. I always will miss the sunrises and the sunsets. Yeah, so that’s my story.