Some Observations from the Hill
By HH (Hub) Brown of Owego

Two or three weeks ago we went to the funeral of Wilma Russell. We became acquainted with Charles and Wilma Russell when we joined the DHIA. At the time, we had a small dairy of mixed breeds and the DHIA was an organization that, once a month, sent a tester to weigh and take a sample of each cow's production, night and morning milkings. The tester took the samples home, tested for butterfat, and compiled the figures for each month's production. Chuck and Wilma were our testers.

They were younger than we were, and friendly and full of fun. Chuck, especially, always had a story to tell of some wry incident that had happened to him or someone he knew. Wilma paid strict attention to her work. When the figures were all down, then she had time to visit some.

She was a pretty woman and it was hard to believe that she had five daughters and a son. At that time, they lived on upper Main Street in Owego, and when my wife, Ag, hauled our milk to town she would sometimes stop and visit Wilma. Their daughter Dorothy told me that before they moved to Owego when the children were growing up, they lived in Pennsylvania near Little Meadows. Even though this was during the Depression they never knew hungry times what with having big gardens and their own chickens, and nearby farmers with lots of cheap milk.

Chuck and Wilma moved to Fort Myers, Florida, in 1965, and after we began spending some time in Florida, we would be invited to spend a week with them. This usually ended up as 10 or 11 days because Wilma's sister Dorcas - who lived next door and loved to play Bingo - was always finding new Bingo games and we'd have to stay another day so the three of them could play.

After Chuck retired we would go fishing or he would get his AMX sports car out and the two of us would go bucketing around Ft. Myers like a couple of youngbloods. One time, we drove across Florida and visited at Sebastian. Next morning, he and I went fishing on a long bridge east of town. Chuck hooked a stingray and played him over into shallow water but the line broke when he tried to lift him up to the bridge.

One evening some years ago when they Wilma and Chuck were visiting the folks up north, they stopped in at the farm. Chuck said he had had some trouble with his throat. They were going to do an exploratory operation and then he would be glad to get back to Florida. They did the operation, closed him back up, and within two weeks he was gone. That seemed to take the sunshine out of Wilma's life. She took little interest in things and, after she came down with Parkinsons Disease, she lost weight so that she only weighed 70 pounds at the end.

I'll always remember what Chuck said one time when Ag showed him the big handful of vitamins we took daily, "God, Ag, with all that, you eat, too?"