Indeed You Can: A True Story Edged in Humor to Inspire All Ages to Rush Forward with Arms Outstretched and Embrace Life. Elleta Nolte

       Indeed You Can

       A True Story Edged in Humor to Inspire All Ages to Rush Forward with Arms Outstretched and Embrace Life

       Elleta Nolte

       CCB Publishing British Columbia, Canada

      Indeed You Can:

      A True Story Edged in Humor to Inspire All Ages to Rush Forward with Arms Outstretched and Embrace Life

      Copyright ©2011 by Elleta Nolte

       ISBN-13 978-1-926918-54-9

       First Edition

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

       Nolte, Elleta, 1919-

       Indeed you can [electronic resource] : a true story edged in humor to inspire all ages to rush forward with arms outstretched and embrace life / written by Elleta Nolte.

       Electronic monograph in PDF format.

      ISBN 978-1-926918-54-9

      Also available in print format.

      1. Nolte, Elleta. 2. Texas Tech University--Students-- Biography. 3. Adult college students--Texas--Lubbock-- Biography. I. Title.

      LD5314.N65 2011a 378.764'847 C2011-902659-7

      Cover artwork by: Micah Nolte

      Extreme care has been taken to ensure that all information presented in this book is accurate and up to date at the time of publishing. Neither the author nor the publisher can be held responsible for any errors or omissions. Additionally, neither is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the express written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America and the United Kingdom.

      Publisher: CCB Publishing

      British Columbia, Canada

      www.ccbpublishing.com

       To my longtime friends Jeanetta, Reed, and Eloise Their years equal 268 But their strength and spunk equal youth in its prime

       Also by Elleta Nolte

      Westward, Ha!

      For the Reason we Climb Mountains

       Gray County Heritage (co-editor)

       Little Chapel of Brookhollow

       Chapel of Brookhollow (revised and updated)

       A Place Set Apart

       Deeds & Misdeeds of an Indian Territory Doctor

      At eighteen, I knew little except at thirty I would know everything

      At thirty, I knew I knew little

      At forty, I was too busy to know if I knew anything

      At fifty, I knew the more I knew, I would never know enough

      At sixty, I was grateful to know the little I knew

      At seventy, I knew how to know; I enrolled in college

      At eighty, I toted textbooks, finished finals, graduated at 89

      At ninety, I flirted with graduate school, found tuition too steep

      At a century of my age coming up, still I am learning

      These words “still I am learning,” translated from Italian ”Ancora Imparo,” and credited to Michelangelo, are inscribed on a necklace given to me. The words symbolize my inherent nature. God gave me two indisputable traits for learning: curiosity and motivation, along with the distinct drive to turn defeat into determination, to turn “No, I cannot” into “Indeed, I can.” But I was long into life before I realized these qualities, for I was painfully shy and inhibited in my early years. I believed anything I could do, anyone else could do better, an ingrained streak that sometimes hovers and keeps me humble. My mother dragged me to a little country school three mornings before she could disentangle me from her side and enroll me in first grade.

      Perhaps my timidity and fear of people outside of my immediate environment was due in part to the fact I was a child of the Great Depression and its most disparaging forms of poverty, as were many others in Oklahoma where we lived. When my parents divorced in my early teens, my mother and I had little means of survival. In order to remain in high school my senior year, we rented an apartment for $3.00 a week, while my mother kept house for a large farm family, working seven days a week for $3.50. (Looking back, we wondered what we did with the extra 50 cents a week.)

      But in the midst of deprivation throughout these years, something unexplainable within me promised, “In time I’ll learn and achieve much.” The vow remained, for shortly after high school graduation in 1937, I dated a young petroleum engineer who proposed marriage. Although I cared for him, I turned down his proposal with the assertion, “I have things to achieve before I marry, and no, we cannot do them together.”

      Those “things” began when my mother and I moved to a small town in New Mexico where we lived in a one-room shack for three months. This enabled me to attend a business training school during the day and to work as a carhop at a drive-in during the evening. The training led to another place and position in late 1939, to the small town of Pampa in the Panhandle of Texas and the early-day Radio Station KPDN.

      Radio work and I became well suited, but I changed locations, for my curiosity and motivation surfaced as I realized the tremendous changes occurring in our country, and I had seen little of other places. Not long after the attack on our naval base Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in December 1941, I rode a bus across the map to Seattle, where my brother lived. In answer to my resumes to radio stations, three job offers awaited me. I accepted a position at KIRO, the most powerful radio station in the Northwest during the war years, with its transmitter on Vashon Island. The personnel found my accent unique, and they always addressed me as “Texas.”

      I was enchanted with Seattle, the beautiful city built on hills, its parks strewn with rhododendrons in brilliant colors, with ferries to enticing islands in Puget Sound, and with Saturday night USO dances for the many servicemen who awaited further orders. Their images remain in my memory: John, a soft-spoken sailor from Alabama; Garth, a self-seeking airman from Maine assigned to Officers Training School; and Ray from Michigan, the one I could have fallen for but did not. The one who had a fiancé back home.

      I left Seattle and KIRO in October 1942, and returned to Texas to Pampa, now dotted with servicemen, for the city had lured an Army Air Force base to establish nearby. It was there I met Quenton, a newly recruited tech sergeant from Iowa, one of the first five enlisted men to activate the field (and the last to leave the base after its closure). Shy, dark-haired, and handsome, I thought he could have doubled for movie idol Tyrone Power. My shyness briefly took a holiday, for shortly after we met, I dropped a telephone number and a comment to his co-worker, “If Quenton doesn’t ask me for a date, I’ll ask him.” Quenton called that night and showed up at my door. It was Halloween, and he always said I tricked him. I did. We married in January 1944 in the little chapel at the Air Force base, followed by an eventful 63 years that blessed us with nine children. During that time, I found that indeed, I could do a great many things.

      As my single years were seldom dull, neither were the long years Quenton and I shared as we worked to provide for our growing family. Yet even now, it’s difficult to realize the major step we took in 1960, the action culminated in my book, Westward, Ha! Its flyleaf gives a glimpse of the struggles:

      When the Noltes and their eight youngsters left a comfortable