Another dear friend is gone
I have just lost another dear friend, Phyllis Melton. I have known her since she was a child. She was a dear friend of my sister Marge and in later years, a close friend of mine.
She and five other women and I were a group that did things together. We celebrated birthdays and anything else that came along.
We traveled together, too. Phyllis would pick up a car load and off we would go — through the Flint Hills, maybe as far as St. Joseph, Mo., or Leavenworth. We might end up in Cassoday for lunch at the famous restaurant there. One time she picked some of us up and took us to a lake over east, near Emporia, where she would serve us fruit, coffee, and some of her wonderful breakfast rolls.
Of course, she and Lorraine Hadsell saved our museum by voluntarily working there for years. While there, they started indexing all the articles and also preserved some of the early history of the pioneers who settled in Marion.
Besides writing notes to anyone she though needed praise or cheering up, she hemmed over 2,000 tea towels for the hospital auxiliary's shop.
Phyllis was an amateur astronomer. I have gotten up at 3 a.m. to accompany her out into the country, away from city lights, to watch a comet streak across the sky. I imagine that one of the highlights of her life was the time she and Dr. Melton traveled to Cape Kennedy to watch a space vehicle launching.
Now when I look up at the heavens, I will think of Phyllis up there among those stars she loved to watch.
— NORMA HANNAFORD
