MY LIFE
MARJORIE SUZAINNE BARNARD WALLACE

I was born on February 14, 1935, Valentine's Day, at Beatrice, Nebraska, in the midst of a Nebraska blizzard and in the depths of the Great Depression, not a good time for a new baby! I was named Marjorie after my mother, with "Suzainne" chosen as my middle name because my parents had heard it somewhere. I've never known anyone else with that name except my own daughter Cindy and granddaughters, Katye and Sabrina.

My parents lived on a small farm just north of Beatrice. Times were hard, but they were hard for everyone, so no one felt poorer than anyone else. The first year of my life, my parents earned a total of $100. They grew all their own food, including chickens and cows. There weren't many bills, for instance, no utility bills because there were no utilities! Going to church and playing cards with friends were the entertainment of the day.

We had no electricity, used coal in a stove for heat, had no running water, and our bathroom was outside down a path. Not-so-good memories were of pouring hot water down the well in the Nebraska winter to thaw it enough to even pump water. Then we had to heat it on the stove for hot water. I was twelve years old before we had electricity and didn't have running water and indoor plumbing with a bathroom until I went to college.

Baths were taken in a tin washtub once a week. You hoped you were the first one in! Nebraska winters were much harder then, probably because it was dust bowl days, and there weren't nearly as many trees. So, the wind blew drifts twenty feet high. I remember having to hold on to a rope sometimes to not get lost when the wind was howling and the snow blowing so hard you couldn't see anything. We had to be careful hanging clothes out on the line to dry because there were swarms of grasshoppers eating everything, including clothes. Sometimes the sky would be black with grasshoppers. The Biblical plague of the locusts wasn't just a story to us! During the winter, the clothes would freeze before we got them out of the basket to hang up. They would freeze dry. Our lights were Aladdin lamps (like a kerosene lamp). When we got a telephone, it was a party line (you had to listen before you try to get on the line as someone else may be talking. What a day it was when I was twelve and electricity arrived. It meant reading by bright lights, a refrigerator, and even a freezer for the chickens, beef, and vegetables.

Special times were always getting to play with my cousins. Their dad, Merle, was my favorite uncle, and he would come and take me on a sleigh in the winter to piano lessons when the roads were bad. We always went to our grandparents for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, along with all the aunts, uncles, and cousins. Everyone lived close by. Then in the summers, everyone got together to harvest, and the cousins got to chase fireflies. By the time I was twelve, I was cooking for everyone while mother helped in the fields. We hired men from the state home for the mentally disabled to help in the fields and they loved to come to eat at our place.

World War II brought new difficulties but also changes in our lives. Posters were up all over our school with pictures of Hitler, Mussolini, and ToJo warning that "loose lips sink ships." I don't know what secrets elementary school children might have had, but we believed it! My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Sincil, cried a lot that year because her husband was missing in action. Every week we brought dimes to buy savings stamps to put in a savings book to help the war effort.

My dad didn't have to go to war because of his asthma. Farming was considered essential, and he rented more land while other farmers were off at war. Money began to be easier but work harder. Rationing meant having very little sugar, coffee, or gasoline. New tires were obtained mostly on the black market. We were better off than most because of the farm. It was during this time that my parent's farming really began to be profitable.

My brother Kent and sister Betty were born in 1942 and 1944. Kent developed asthma on his first birthday. During the last year of the war, when I was 10, we went on the train to Roswell, NM to spend the winter because of Kent's asthma. It was scary because we had never been anywhere away from home. We stayed in a one-room motel with a kitchenette all winter, and I went to school there. Daddy joined us as soon as he could get away from the farm. We went back to New Mexico for another winter when I was in 10th grade, and the family moved to Roswell when I was a senior in high school. I stayed in Nebraska to finish out my senior year at 16 years old.

Summers were good because we could go to Pickrell once a week and see an old movie they showed outside while we sat on wooden benches. Also, that was when a niece of our neighbors came to stay, and I had someone to play with. She cajoled me into going to the movie "I Walked with a Zombie," which remains a terrifying experience to this day. Otherwise, I didn't have anyone to play with and read books all the time. Mother kept telling me I would go blind. It was a real treat to go to the library to get books and even as a teenager, when once a week on Saturday nights, my parents would go to town to get a hamburger and malt at "Bud's" and then park the car and watch the people go by. I was allowed to get a "Seventeen" magazine. What a treat that was!

I loved school, spending my first six years in a 2-room schoolhouse. I was only 4 1/2 when I started kindergarten and weighed 27 pounds. I was too small to reach the bottom step of the bus, so the driver would have to pick me up to put me in the bus. I was a pretty child with long black curls during the time Shirley Temple was popular and remember getting lots of attention because of those curls! As all my family knows, I won the county spelling bee in the eighth grade. Bad memories which stick with me to this day are of a family with lots of boys and mean dogs. The boys loved to sic the dogs on girls like me. I'm still scared of big dogs.

At Beatrice High School, I embarked on a new life. High school was fun for me, with lots of friends and dating, and "going steady" with a boyfriend one after another. Somehow, I was popular and got in with the "in" crowd, becoming a freshman queen candidate right off the bat. My girlfriends like to come to the farm, even with the outhouse and no running water! It was like camping out for them. Mother always cooked a great meal and used her sterling silver, which was her pride and joy.

The church was always a big thing in our lives. I went to youth group, camps, and conferences. Conference was held at a college and was almost like going to college. I felt God wanted me to do something special, and a speaker said once, "It's your job to put yourself where God can use you." That is how I ended up at Phillips University in Enid, Oklahoma. Thus, starts chapter 2 of my story.

College was a wonderful adventure. I started dating a boy who was an accounting major right off but then had a blind date and I met Paul Wallace. There was never anyone else after that. It occurred to me much later that perhaps he was the "something special" God had in mind for me. We met in October, were engaged in January, and married in August. I wouldn't advise that for my children and grandchildren, but it was a wonderful 67 years. It took a while to train him (like not to drop me off on a country road for pledging in Comets or to forbid me to kiss the class president when I was Freshman Queen). However, I think he would do those same things today.

We started our married life with both of us still in college and no money. He made $40 per week preaching at a church in Cement, Oklahoma, plus $15 per month from the Van Buren church where Paul grew up. Out of that, we owed rent of $22.50 per month, a car payment, seminary pay books, and $5 a week for groceries. Often when we drove to our church in Cement, we had 50 cents, and that was it. Kind church people always invited us to eat, and we had our check to get gas to go back to Enid. Paul's folks always brought groceries and materials when they came to visit.

Mike was born in September the next year. His first Christmas we had $5.00 to spend. I began making all my clothes and Mike's too. I finished my second year of college with an Associate Degree in Secretarial Science while Paul started his first year in seminary at Phillips University. I moved to Cement when Paul started seminary in Ft. Worth at Brite on the TCU campus. We had a church on either side of us and oil wells pumping across the street. To keep from being afraid, I stayed up late and sewed and then took Mike to bed with me to keep me company when I finally went to bed. Paul was gone during the week and home on weekends. Sewing our children's clothes was a part of my life all during their growing up years.

My first experience that being a minister's wife means people automatically think you also have seminary knowledge was at Cement. Paul had been teaching a Bible study during the week while we lived in Enid. When he went to Ft. Worth, they said I could do that just fine. Here were these rough oil field men who had studied the Bible many years that I was supposed to teach, but they were kind and forgiving and I got along fine with the help of the Interpreter's Bible.

Cindy was born during an ice storm just like her mother. We moved to Paris, AR, when she was two weeks old to a huge old parsonage. Shortly thereafter, we had the youth group over for a Saturday breakfast which I fixed with a newborn. It was at Paris that I learned I wasn't cut out to "have hired help." Everyone there had a Black maid for $.50 per hour and they all convinced me that I certainly needed someone to help with two little ones and Paul being gone during the week. I would work hard getting the house cleaned up ready for her to come, and then she held Cindy while I worked around the house. It finally occurred to me this wasn't for me. This was during the civil rights days and being in a small Oklahoma town is when I truly learned that people respond to how they are treated. The lady that helped us was a cultured Black woman working to send her children to private school. Church people would ask me "Doesn't she just drive you crazy asking for things?" She never asked for anything. I didn't know until later (remember I'm from Nebraska) that it "just wasn't done" to eat lunch together at the same table. We just treated her like anyone else, and she responded in kind.

Steve was born in October just before we moved again to Rogers, Arkansas.
After three and 1/2 years in Rogers, we succumbed to the persistence of the pulpit committee at East Side Christian Church and moved to Tulsa in 1963. Sure enough, the next year we had Missy. We finally decided that moving was the reason we had babies and decided not to move again. We didn't and no more babies! After 31 years at East Side, Paul retired. Each church we served was a joy. I was always able to "do my own thing" and not have to fit a mold. I liked to teach Sunday School and do special programs for Christian Women's Fellowship, etc. Paul and I worked with the youth group for 25 years. I was President of the Arkansas Ministers' Wives in 1960 and Vice President of the International Council of Minister's Wives in 1973. I was a member of my PEO women's circle for 61 years and served in various leadership positions. We volunteered. It was a very good life, made most special because of our four children. They were always the joy of our lives.

I guess I developed my "gypsy" spirit from the farm. I loved to roam around looking for new things, finding acorns to make dolls, creating a hideaway in some bushes, and climbing a mulberry tree where no one could see me. We vacationed through the years each year from coast to coast, mostly in our pop-up camper, taking Paul's folks with us. They were always such a joy, never complaining, always ready for whatever we had in mind. Later we branched out into taking groups on 12 different world-wide trips, and finally we've just traveled ourselves a great deal. So far, we've been to 44 countries.

I went to work part time in 1978 for The Trust Company of Oklahoma and D.B. and Elizabeth Mason, starting out with simple clerical and bookkeeping work and gradually taking on more and more responsibility for the Masons. I learned and was responsible for investment work and overseeing their household staff. Paul retired from East Side in 1995 and I retired in 1998. We had purchased a house in Colorado in 1992, so retirement allowed us to keep traveling and also spend considerable time in Colorado at what I call our "magic place", because of its incredible view of the mountains, the deep pine forests, and the sunsets. It has been a special family place also.

Childhood values are certainly still a part of me--don't waste anything (wash the baggies and the aluminum foil), appreciate what you have, and love the sunsets! However, I hope I have embraced a wider world and learned from the incredible opportunities I have been given. A love of reading and intellectual curiosity has always been a part of me. Certainly, the opportunities for service and travel are great blessings. It was wonderful all those years to have a built-in place to practice my faith and serve my Lord and that continues to this day at our present church, Yale Avenue Christian Church. But most important still is my husband, the love of my life, my most amazing children, and now my incredible grandchildren and even great grands. Thank you, God, for leading me to "something special." May I be worthy of it.

In Lieu of Flowers please make a charitable donation to the:

Suzainne Wallace College Scholarship Fund.

Make checks to:
P.E.O. Chapter DX
8263 S. Harvard Ave, #509
Tulsa, OK 74137


Memorial services for Suzainne will be held at 2pm on Saturday, February 4th, 2023 at Moore Southlawn Chapel, 9350 E 51st St, Tulsa, OK 74145