IRMA RIDENOUR

I would like to celebrate the life of my mother, Irma Ridenour of Springfield. She was 88. Mom was a bookkeeper in Evansville, Ind., in the ’30s. She said that one of her accounts was Halliburton. (I guess they had oilwells in southern Indiana in the 1930s.) She told me once that she and some of her friends took off from work one afternoon and saw the opening of Gone With the Wind at a Lowe’s theatre in Evansville in 1939. She loved to travel and we took her to L.A. every year to visit my brother. We called it Operation Go Granny Go.

After she and dad married, she was a homemaker and raised five kids. Birthdays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter…she loved the holidays and always made them special for us. We lived in southern Illinois in the sixties and there was an earthquake in the New Madrid fault. When it hit, I remember her shouting, “You kids settle down, you’re shaking the whole house!” She cooked us breakfast every morning and dinner every evening. Once when we were looking to buy a house and there wasn’t a dining room, the realtor said, “Well, no one ever eats dinner together anymore.” She said, “I beg your pardon!” This will be the first Christmas without her and we miss her very much.

This article appears in Dec 23-29, 2010.