Orlena Fay (Casad) Palmer (1889 - 1960)

My mother, Patty, was her oldest daughter. My mother adored her mother and always held her birthday as a special day in her heart. Orlena was a special, loving soul.

I don't think Orlena had an easy life. She was the youngest in a family of overbearing sisters. I've always heard that her older sister, Kicki, whose birth name was Ethel and married name Larkin, was bossy and very difficult to get along with. Like her father, Orlena became a school teacher and was an old-maid by the time she married.

Orlena's husband Fred A. Palmer was a very difficult man. Orlena's family was upper-crust with her father being a judge in his later years. They lived in a big Victorian house on the main residential street, 9th Avenue, in Pittsburg, Kansas. Fred's family was lower-class. He and his brothers all worked on the railroads. Everyone thought Orlena married beneath her when she married Fred, and maybe she did.

Orlena and Fred had 7 children together. Patricia, John, Parker, Phillip Paul, Mary, Ann, and Peg (Orlena Fern). Fred was away from home often with his job and seldom sent money home for the family. They lived in a rural home outside of Joplin, Missouri and struggled just to dress themselves and feed the family. Even after she was grown and working, my mother lived like a pauper so that she could send money to her mother so that the 3 youngest girls who were still minors would have decent clothes to wear to school. My mother had been made fun of in school because she had inadequate clothing and she didn't want her sisters to experience what she did. When Fred was home he was violent and abusive with the children. My mother swore that she never saw him hit Orlena but I think he must have. If you look in the records you will frequently see one of the children or another living for a time in Pittsburg, Kansas with their grandparents. That happened because of Fred's abusive behavior. I also believed that he sexually abused the girls when they became teenagers. My mother ran away and married a traveling salesman at the age of 16. She said it was because her father caught her talking to the boy on the porch of their home and started beating her. I think he was abusing her sexually and didn't want her associating with boys because they were competition.

The situation came to a head a couple of years later after my parents were married. Fred came home and lost his temper one day but this time he raised his fist to Orlena. The three youngest girls were there and Peg picked up a shovel and hit him in the head, knocking him out cold.

Everyone was terrified of what would happen when he woke up. My father and the older brothers took action. They moved Orlena and the girls out of the house to get them away from Fred. My father was a lawyer and he began divorce proceedings to protect Orlena. She didn't really want to get a divorce but her children all insisted so she agreed. Later, during WWII, all her children moved to California and took her with them.

The 7 siblings took care of her for the rest of her life. She had a crappy husband but she still had a life filled with love. All of her children were devoted to her.

I, her granddaughter, became a schoolteacher, as did two of her great-granddaughters. We all kept a picture of her in her classroom in our own classrooms because we wanted to honor her legacy.