THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 17, 1996 TAG: 9603140140
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Ronald L. Speer
LENGTH: Medium: 99 lines
In an era of unequalled change, Charley Letcher was always a symbol of stability.
Born in June of 1903, just before man's first flight, Charley lived through the advent of automobiles and radio and telephone and television and movies and four big wars. He survived the Great Depression of the '30s. He watched as man exploded atom bombs and explored space and stepped on the moon.
He heard that in other parts of America, courtesy had become old-fashioned, kids paid little heed to their elders, crime was rampant and divorce was common.
No other generation ever saw such changes - and yet in nearly a century of turmoil and discovery, Charley never changed.
He lived for 72 years with the woman he married in 1924 in Sacred Heart Catholic, a mission church nestled among the farming flatlands southeast of Hay Springs, Neb.
Home to Charley and Elsie was always the house he built below the flats on a meadow overlooking the Niobrara River as it carved through the Sand Hills, where their cattle roamed.
Every Sunday - never mind 20-below weather, raging blizzards, land to be plowed, hay to be stacked, wheat to be thrashed, calves to be branded - they knelt in Sacred Heart, which he built decades back to keep the bishop from closing the mission because the original edifice was crumbling.
On special occasions - such as their 30th, 40th, 50th, 60th and 70th wedding anniversaries - Charley and Elsie went to church in the Model T Ford he bought in 1924 for their honeymoon.
And a favorite way to spend an afternoon or evening - or both - through all those years was playing cards, with friends, neighbors, kids.
As a boy, I played cards hundreds of times with the Letchers. Outside of my folks, Charley and Elsie were the first adults I remember. They came to our house and we went to theirs through my teenage years.
We didn't know anybody who had been divorced. Charley didn't tolerate nasty language, and no kid would ever have dared to disobey him or challenge one of his edicts.
His values were old-fashioned - but he wasn't.
Charley put in electric lights, powered by a generator, long before most. And woe to kids who left on an unneeded light. He had gravity-powered running water and an indoor toilet, the first I'd ever seen, although he generally used the outdoor privy. On overnight visits to city friends, Charley usually made a trip out to the darkest corner of the yard before he went to bed.
He was an early activist in conserving the land and the water, adapted quickly to irrigation when he saw what water could do to dryland farming, and was an honored leader of the Soil Conservation Service.
Charley worked hard, all his life, and even in the '30s when farmers were going belly up, his farm and ranch operation grew, to what in that part of Nebraska is an empire.
But he found time for company, and dances at the Letchers' barn drew hundreds of folks for decades. The barn dances ended about 40 years ago when Charley - who liked a beer - decided that drinking by young men was getting out of hand.
I was a little afraid of Charley when I was a lad, and still remember how nervous I was when his second son, Alvern, sneaked the old Model T out when his folks were gone, and I got to drive a car for the first time.
After I grew up we became friends, and I discovered he had a sense of humor. When I was about 30, I got a postcard from Charley, vacationing in Hawaii. The photo on the front showed a voluptuous, bare-breasted hula dancer.
I never saw Charley much after that. My folks died 20 years ago, and I didn't get back to the Sand Hills until last summer, when I visited with the Letchers for an hour or so, reliving with them the memories of my youth on the Niobrara.
My last view of Charley was on a blazing afternoon as he helped stack hay to feed the cows in the winter, when the prairie would be deep in snow.
He was under Elsie's orders to stay out of the fields, but he sneaked away on a tractor to help out, and worked all day.
A few days ago Charley played a game of pitch with Alvern before he went out in a wintry afternoon with his eldest son, Gerald, to fork some feed to the cows.
Without a word, Charley Letcher dropped in the hay, dead just a few months short of his 93rd birthday.
More than 300 friends went to the burial at Sacred Heart, and stayed for a dinner in the church.
``He was the patriarch,'' one admirer told Alvern. ``If we could still do it, we'd probably build a pyramid.''
I didn't go back for the funeral, but I talked by telephone with Elsie, also 92.
She recalled 72 years of happy times.
``We never fought, although sometimes when he got home late I'd be mad.'' Ever think of divorce, Elsie?
``Heavens, no! There were times when I could have killed him, but I never imagined life without him.''
After all these years of knowing that Charley Letcher would never change, I can't imagine life without him, either. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by RONALD L. SPEER
Charley Letcher at 92 on his farm in Nebraska's Sand Hills.
by CNB