This is the first portion of the story of my mother's variegated life. I started trying to put the story of her life on paper while she was still with us, with the hopes of letting her read the final draft. That was more than forty years ago. After all these years, I am still working on it.
Even though this is only a start, may it keep her memory alive in the minds and hearts of all of you who knew and loved her, especially her grandchildren. To future generations, my desire is to give you a glimpse of the extraordinary woman of faith from which you have come.
In the story, sometimes I call her by her given name, Marjorie, and sometimes I will call her Mamma, the name I knew best. (Nina May Flick)
Marjorie Alice Lidikay was born October 4, 1904 in a four-room house - two rooms on the ground floor and two rooms upstairs, with a cellar below. Her parents were William Lidikay and Sarah Malinda (Stephens) Lidikay. William's parents were John Lidikay and Martha Shaver. Sarah's parents were John Phares Stephens and Catherine Coopers. John Stephens, Marjorie's grandfather, was a pioneer Baptist preacher, who established churches in different parts of Kansas.
When Marjorie was about 9 months old, her parents moved the family to a place their papa had built nine miles north of Cimarron, Kansas. The house was 12 x 14, part "dug out" - in the side of a hill. In a short time, "Papa" traded those eighty acres for a homestead in Finney county, eighteen miles from Garden City, Ks., where he built a sod house. The door had a wooden latch like a bolt. No screen door. The floor was dirt.
Marjorie told us that a dirt floor could be mopped, and would be shiny. The dirt must harden enough to make that possible.
Marjorie lived with her mother, two sisters, and one brother on the homestead. To get a homestead, settlers would build a house on land given by the government. They would stake a claim on x-number of acres that they wanted to build a house on and raise their families. This was occupied as a "homestead." It was a chance to homestead as much as 160 acres and receive title to the land at no cost, from the federal government.
Majorie said, "I know very little about my family history, but my father's folks came from Germany. Lidikay was the name, and I have never run across any other Lidikays. Papa was a broom-maker, and a good one."
As a baby, she (Marjorie) was fed home-made postum, since her mother didn't have milk for her.
She (Marjorie) told us about being baptized in a Baptist church when she was about eight years old. As she stood there before the altar, she knew she was saved. God saw the desire of her young heart, and made her a new creature. It isn't the water, but the cry of a heart that God sees.
Marjorie's sister, Nellie, told how Marjorie thought it was wonderful to go to school, and take bread and butter in a gallon bucket. Nellie says since they didn't have their own meat, sometimes a jack rabbit, or once in a while, a chicken was their meat.
World War 1 began in 1917, when Marjorie was thirteen years old. In 1918 and 1919, the flu killed more people than World War 1 had killed. Somewhere between 20 and 40 million people died with the flu. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. One fifth of the world's population was infected. The flu was most deadly for for people ages 20 to 40. Influenza is usually a killer of the elderly and young children, but not the flu of 1918. An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war.
Marjorie was on the basketball team in high school. The pants were full, and were called bloomers.
Marjorie took normal training in her last year of high school. This was in preparation to be a school teacher.
After graduating from high school, Marjorie rode her horse out to the York place, where she was to stay. Mr. York was on the school board, and had offered to take in the new teacher. She taught two years in the country schoolhouse, and loved her students and her job. She must have ridden her horse to the country schoolhouse every school day, too.
Marjorie said, I started teaching school at eighteen years of age, at the York school (Prairie Lea), teaching their two youngest children. I loved teaching school, and the kids and I would cry on the last day of school. We had to carry our own water to school in gallon buckets. I cleaned the schoolhouse. I played out with the children at recess. They didn't want to go play unless I did. I had children in six of eight grades, and loved them all."
Marjorie started a Sunday School for all ages in the Prairie Lea schoolhouse. More than thirty attended - men, women and children.
In those days, a man would work all day (long hours) with a team and wagon for a dollar. This is what Mr. York (Lloyd's dad) did many times.
Marjorie married Lloyd Henry York in 1924 - probably by a justice of the peace. Lloyd's younger brother and sister - Charley and Helen - were in her classes at Prairie Lea school. Staying in the York's home while teaching, is how she and Lloyd got acquainted. She had dated a Nazarene preacher boy before she moved out to the York place.
Lloyd and Marjorie's first home was in the "Dust Bowl" of western Kansas, not too far from his folks. The house had dreamed of better days. It sat on a barren spot of ground with no grass in the yard - just a small wooden frame house covered with tar paper on the outside to help keep some of the dust from coming through the cracks. The dust still came through, where the tar paper had come loose in the Kansas wind.
The windmill provided water from a pipe over the tank, where the cows came for water. She could get water from the pipe to carry into the house.
When a dust storm would come up, she would go after the cows by following the fence. She couldn't see her hand in front of her face for the thickness of the dust, but holding onto the fence, she could get close enough to the cows to call them in. God brought her safely through the storm.
Some have said the worst year in Kansas for dust storms, known as "black blizzards," was 1935. That is the year we moved to town.
Some days a dust storm would come up suddenly. We would see a black cloud boiling on the horizon and barrelling toward us, and the wind shook the walls. One day in March the storm grew steadily worse until it was dark as night before noon. The 1930's is the only decade when the state as a whole lost population. These were also the years of the Great Depression.
Marjorie had been a school teacher and loved her pupils and her job, but when she married Lloyd, she gave up her teaching. Instead of teaching, she called in the cows, and battled with dust. There were no near neighbors. Drought and dust and meager income made for hard times, but she determined to make the best of it.
In Kansas, the rainfall was too little to grow enough wheat to keep the topsoil from blowing away. Lloyd said, "If it doesn't rain in two weeks, we'll have to move to town, because we won't have any crop."
Marjorie told him, "If we move to town, I'm going to go to church." Marjorie cooked Russian thistles when they were green. They fed dried Russian thistles to their cattle. I don't know how anything grew. The cattle found what they could in the pasture. I have heard her talk about feed cake for the cattle.
The most severe area of the Dust Bowl included the Oklahoma panhandle, northwest Texas, northeast New Mexico, and southwest Kansas, and southeast Colorado. Those years are known as the "dirty thirties," and brought in the Great Depression.
When dust-storms were bad, she told us when we had finished eating, there would be a ring of dust on our plates where the food hadn't been, so we knew we had eaten dust.
Mamma hung whatever she could over the windows and doors to keep the dust out during a storm. It helped if things were dampened, like a wet cloth over your nose to keep from breathing the dust.
Marjorie had battled with dust until she had what they called, dust pneumonia. She didn't know that's what it was until several years later, after moving to town. Some X-rays were taken that showed scars on her lungs. The doctor knew they were caused by dust pneumonia.
I'm sure coyotes could be heard howling from the house.
In March of 1931 a school bus load of kids died in a blizzard. Mamma and dad & family lived in a dug-out at the time. They kept it warm by burning the chicken roosts a little at a time.
Marjorie bought the house in town with her school teaching money. She paid Mrs. Anderson, who lived down the block, $200 for it. She probably had saved it for something special, and a house in town must have been it. A chance to raise her girls in church would be special. After we moved to town, Mrs. Anderson would visit us. She sat at the front room window and reported everything going on outside.
Their new home was one block outside the city limits. We had a pump a few feet from the kitchen door, where we got our water. We had a bucket of water with a dipper in it. We dipped water from the bucket to get a drink or to put into a wash pan for our hands. In those days, we all drank from the same dipper.
Water was brought into the house by carrying buckets from a pump outside. Someone said that was "running water." You grabbed a bucket, and went running out to get the water.
Also, we had a coal bucket that had to be filled, and brought in for the heating stove. Coal was used for cooking, too. Years later, a gas range and a kitchen sink was put in, with water running into the house.
We had chickens both in the country and in town. Chicken hawks would sometimes get them, especially in the country. We raised baby chicks, ordered from Montgomery Ward.
To iron clothes, dresser scarves, etc., she heated the iron on the cookstove. The iron would need to be heated over and over to do much ironing.
A stove pipe went from the stove and into the chimney to carry the fumes up and into the outside air. Only the front room had a heating stove. The bedrooms were cold in the winter. A brick could be heated and wrapped to help warm our feet.
Sometimes, she would fry home-made potato chips - slicing a potato into very thin slices, and deep frying them. That was a special treat for her girls.
She called a dish cloth, a dish rag. That really is what it was. Mamma would get a piece of something out of the rags, to wash dishes with. The stores may have had dish cloths, but she was careful to not spend money on something she could do without.
Lloyd died on April 14, 1947, after a siege of illness, doctors, and hospitals. He was in his early forties - a young man still.
Living alone, she worked wherever she could get a job. After the of her husband, Marjorie taught herself to drive. She picked up a lot of people in her car, to take them to church. Those days, seat belts were unheard of, so they packed in pretty tight. She helped pack many boxes to send to missionaries overseas.
When she was hired as a telephone operator for the Border Telephone Company, she worked there several years until the office was moved to Garden City, and the system was changed.

Marjorie's life was lived in twenty year sections. She was approximately twenty years old when she first married. She lived with Lloyd twenty years before he died. Then, she was a widow for twenty years. After that, she was married to Burnis for twenty years.

Marjorie and Lloyd had 3 daughters; Mrs. Thelma Rose Bush of Syracuse, Kansas, Mrs. Frieda Alice Fay of Arizona and Mrs. Nina May Flick of Oakley, Kansas. Marjorie next married Burnis Barnes in Campo, Colorado on April 3, 1967. (Source: Nina May Flick.)