This story is written by Charlotte Sarah Elmitte Church with a few additions by Rhonda Wall
"Today is January 29, 2009 and it has been four years since my mother, Charlotte Sarah Ellen Hightower passed from this life. I am thankful for the sixty-six years I spent with her and I have missed her more than I can ever express. I did not spend all sixty-six years with her in a physical sense, because for many of those years, I was raising a family of my own. Even though she lived some distance from me, we were always in close touch by telephone, letters and visits as frequently as I could make them.
During the later years of Moms life, after her retirement and mine too, we were able to do some traveling together, visiting family and friends in distant places. Most of them are also gone now. When we traveled, we did a lot of fishing as my mother loved fishing for as long as I can remember.
After my own retirement, I lived in Colorado for a few years and during that time, I would drive to Atascadero, California every summer and pick up my mother. We would usually take one long trip, visiting family and friends, which lasted two or three weeks and then return to Colorado to fish the Deweese Lake in Westcliff, Colorado and the smaller lake above Salida, Colorado which was situated just above the fish hatchery. Those were the two favorite places to fish.
I need to lay some groundwork now, before I go any further so that those reading this will know who and what I am talking about. With that in mind, I'll simply say that when my mother's dad, Charles Hightower married Sarah Ellen in 1905, she was a widow with four daughters. Liza the eldest was already away from home, probably married. Clara was the next to leave. That left only Amanda and Jewell. Charles Hightower and Amanda, his step-daughter had an affair which produced my mother, Charlotte [and her little brother Harry].
There were defining times in my mother's life which influenced her development and subsequent life. The first was, I think, the separation from her birth mother, Amanda Elmitta Carter at the age of five. My knowledge of this comes from what I have been told by family members and also from my own digging into historical documentation. The 1920 census shows that, Charles Hightower, mom's father, and Amanda Carter, her mother, were living in Peoria, Ottawa, Oklahoma with two children, my mother Charlotte and her brother Harry Mallory. The same year, 1920, another census sheet shows Charles Hightower living in Park Hill, Cherokee County, Oklahoma with his wife Sarah Ellen Taylor Hightower and their two sons, Albert and Robert Hightower. Charles was, therefore, maintaining two households and two families.
Sometime after 1920, Amanda took her two children and moved to Kansas City, Missouri where she married Randy Schultz. Amanda got a job cooking and keeping house for a weathy family. While she worked, her two children, were cared for at St. Anthonys Home for Infants and Children, in a section of the orphanage where children of working mothers were kept. However, when Amanda lost her job she could no longer pay for the care of her children. That is how the story goes from Amanda's side.
Because no payment was being made for the children, contact was made with the nearest relative listed on the records, which, of course, was Amanda's mother. Sarah Ellen Hightower.
Sarah sent her husband, Charles Hightower to Kansas City to pick up her grandchildren and bring them to her. It was on their arrival at her home, she found out the whole story. Charles, her husband, was actually the father of her grandchildren. This secret affair between Charles and his step-daughter, Amanda hit her hard because she then sent Charles away with his two children. He took them to a lumber camp where he had been working off and on for a few years and they lived there together for about a year.
Upon their return to the home of Sarah, she agreed to take the children in and raise them as her own. Sarah dealt harshly with her daughter Amanda by never allowing her to reclaim her children. Charles was banished from her home and never again lived inside the house but slept in the barn or in a small cottage near the main house. Thus, my mother never again saw her birth mother.
[Before she died, she was able to be reunited with her half-sister, Joan Valentine Schultz whom she never had met before. Here is a letter to Joan dated 23 July, 2004 and was inserted by Rhonda Wall]
July 23, 2004 (6 months before she died)
“Dear Sis. It seems so funny “writing dear sis”, you know I was raised with three boys and I always wanted a sister. I don’t know if mom ever told you, she put my brother and me in a home. They would take care of kids if you paid them so much a week but if you could not pay, the kids was put up and adopted. But mom got a job and came up ever Sunday and paid it and took us for a walk. But then she got pg and the company she worked for didn’t want her working anymore and Randy, [her husband] was not giving her any money for us kids so the house mother wrote to grandma and told her, she was putting us up for adoption, so grandmother sent her husband up to get us.
We lived with our grandma; we called her granny [Granny Hightower]. Granny and papa raised us and they were good to us, but, we was raised in a home without any love. I never did see papa put his arm around granny or us kids. We got a lot of care but it did not seem like anybody was happy."
On one of our many trips across country, we hunted down Amanda's final resting place which we found in Butler, Missouri. It was not marked and the cemetary caretaker helped us find it under a lovely old shade tree on a grassy incline. It looked like a perfect spot for a picnic. One would never have known there was a grave there. My mother, Charlotte, sadly remarked, "She doesn't even have a marker."
The second defining time of my mother's life which had an enormous impact on her subsequent life was the loss of her two eldest children, a daughter, Cleo Uldean and a son Eldun Loy. Uldean died in June of 1937 (aged 3 years 8 mo.) of pneumonia. Six months later in November of 1937, three year old Eldun died in a house fire which burned our home nearly to the ground. I was eleven months old and my uncle John Church was able to get me out of the house but could not find my brother.
The newspaper account brings that scene onto the screen of my mind and my heart aches for my parents, even now, seventy two years later. The Salida Daily Mail, a semi-weekly newspaper, sensationalized the news of my brother's death in a way I thought insensitive of my parents grief. For example the article starts with the words, "While the horror-stricken mother looked on helplessly a child was trapped and burned to death." The article goes on to describe the attempt to cut a hole in the side of the house with an ax. They end with a description of the finding of my brothers body, and the appearance of the body. Reading it today, tears fill my eyes. It seems so cruel to publish something like that.
My mother had an emotional breakdown at some time afterwards. It was kept secret of course and her illness was claimed to have been caused by a poisonous spider bite. Breakdowns like that were, at that time, considered shameful and weak. So the story was spread about the countryside, and few people in the family even knew the truth. Mother recovered and two years later my brother was born on 11 August 1939. My mother was a blessing in my life and in the lives of my siblings and I am sure of one thing, I shall miss her for the rest of my life.
Mother remarried in 1943 after the accidental death of Eldun Church, my father. She married John A. Rambish and had two more children, a son born in 1944 and a daughter born in 1945.
These are notes from Rhonda:
My mother and her brother Marvin were adopted by John Rambish. That's where the name Rambish fits in. They are Churches by birth. John Church who saved my mother's life was the brother of her father.
My grandmother said she liked the children's home and the nuns who cared for them. They were fed well and they had activities and they got treats. She had nice memories from that time. My grandmother played the violin and Harry played the guitar. See the inserted picture of them with their instruments. They played for local dances and would often be asked to play at night and their grandma would let them go out and play for the dance.
Amanda Carter met Randy Schultz through the children's home. He had his children there too. Amanda never forgave him for continuing to pay for his children and he eventually got them out. He never gave her money to get her own children out and she had to raise those kids of his too. This was heartbreaking for her. My grandmother Charlotte always regretted that she did not go to the deathbed of her mother when she was invited. Her husband John cruelly questioned why she would want to do that when he felt that her mother never did anything for her.
