Maybelle L. Kammeyer

Maybelle Kammeyer gave her whole self to everything she did. Because she was curious, she approached life with optimism and delight and found the world a marvelous place. Her smile was her trademark. She was a woman of great faith, intelligence, grace, compassion and determination ¬- a storyteller, lover of books, laughter and music, a generous hostess and inveterate bridge player. She loved her four children with her whole heart and treasured hundreds of friends, many of whom she corresponded with for over 60 years. Throughout her 89 years her mind and memory were sharp. She died on Monday, March 31 - a month shy of her 90th birthday - at the Reed House in Denison, where she had lived for the past three years. She loved the staff there and was immensely grateful for the daily love, care and attention they gave her. The Reed House residents were her second family. Maybelle Leona Magera was born May 2, 1918, in Yankton, S.D., the youngest of six children of Austrian-Hungarian and Russian immigrant parents. Her next oldest sibling was 14 when Maybelle was born. By the time she was a teenager in the heart of the Great Depression her parents were worn out and poor. But they were also resourceful. They owned their little home and drank sweet water from the family well. Her father made knives from old saw blades and her mother baked apple strudel that teachers bought on their way home from school. Maybelle cut the hair of her high school classmates for a quarter - any honest work to make money. Later, Maybelle would become a sociable extrovert who could talk to anyone about anything. But in high school she was shy and studious. Her precise grammar was gleaned from reading stacks of books borrowed from the public library. Her father saved enough to buy her a Smith Corona typewriter. She studied the manual, practicing faithfully every day and teaching herself to type 60 words a minute before starting her high school typing and shorthand class. When her teacher needed someone to fill in as her substitute, she chose Maybelle. She would have loved to become a teacher. For a year after graduating from Yankton High School in 1936, she worked as a bookkeeper at Johnson Bakery in Yankton, saving virtually everything she earned to pay her way through Chillicothe Business College in Chillocothe, Mo. "I had to graduate in six months, three weeks. I had it all figured out. I had just barely enough money," she recently recalled. In those pre-World War II college days Maybelle lived with five other co-eds in the Blakemore?s boarding house. On Saturday nights the women went with fellows from the business school to the movies or USO dances, rushing home to meet their 9 p.m. curfew. One signature night they were to go to a dance in Jefferson City, Mo. "We stepped out on the porch at Blakemore?s," Maybelle recalled. Standing quietly at the back of the pack was 6?5" Armin "Kam" Kammeyer. "I looked at Kam and he looked so nice and tall. I took the crook of his arm and sailed off the porch with him." They had just a few dates before the Army Air Corps shipped Kam off to New Guinea. He wanted to fly. But the Air Corps said he was too tall and they didn?t have shoes to fit his size 14 feet. So he worked in aircraft parts supply. Every day he wrote to Maybelle, recounting the mundane details of daily life that censors would not remove. She responded in her flowing Palmer-perfect script. While he was away, Maybelle became an executive secretary for Robert Lee Hill, former president of Rotary International, at the University of Missouri. Later she worked at the Columbia Building and Loan. By then she was earning $75 a month, a "mountain of money." It was enough to send $25 a month home to her mother and, once, to splurge with a girlfriend on a ride in an open-air plane. "We thought that was a pretty big adventure. We told everybody we had been up in a plane and they couldn?t believe it." When Kam returned, he took Maybelle to meet his taciturn German parents in Alma, Mo., who were astonished to have this warm, talkative woman hug them. Only after Kam proposed did she learn that he had told them before her arrival that he intended to marry her. "We didn?t do anything in little steps," she said. "We did things in big steps." They married Dec. 17, 1944, in Columbia, Mo., eventually settling with their four children, Jerry, Steve, Kay and Greg, in Joplin. Over the years she worked intermittently as a medical secretary. But mostly she cared for a growing, rambunctious family. She read them "Little Golden Books" by the dozens, served as a Cub Scout den leader, sewed smocked dresses for Kay, coaxed Steve down from the rafters of houses under construction and let the children cart home an astonishing array of stray animals. She sang as she washed the dishes and made sure each child had music lessons ? clarinet, trumpet, piano a