The school year 1952-53 was an unusual year in the Marshall family. My sister Wanda Marshall was a senior at Lohn High School, and I was just entering the first grade.
In a large school, those two events might have had little connection. Lohn was not a large school. There were only about a hundred students from the first through the twelfth grades, so Wanda and I were at opposite ends of the same little school. I was beginning. She was finishing. And 1953 belonged to Wanda. Wanda was the Eagles Homecoming Queen at Lohn High School.
I was too young then to appreciate what that meant to a young woman in a small community. In a place like Lohn, school activities belonged to practically everybody. The students knew one another, the parents knew one another, and the teachers often knew entire families. Wanda was beautiful, but there was much more to her than that. She was also a worker. At home she helped with the responsibilities that came with belonging to a large family that did not have much money. She ironed clothes and did her share of whatever needed to be done.
I remember Wanda ironing the family’s clothes. She and Charles argued about almost everything, as brothers and sisters often do. But there was never any doubt about her willingness to work or the responsibilities she carried.
But there was another side of Wanda that deserves to be remembered. She was a protector.
My Big Sister
I always thought I was Wanda's favorite. But Wanda had a way of making everyone feel that they were her favorite. There were eleven years between us, so when I was a little boy, Wanda was already becoming a young woman. That age difference made her almost another grown-up in my eyes. But she was still my sister. And if one of her younger brothers needed somebody to stand up for him, Wanda was capable of doing exactly that. Charles had been a very small boy and was sometimes bullied by bigger boys.
Wanda had fought some of his battles for him. That was Wanda. She was very different from our sister Ann, who was painfully shy and would avoid confrontation whenever she could. Wanda wouldn't. If somebody was mistreating one of her little brothers, Wanda was not likely to stand quietly and watch. When I think about that today, the word Homecoming Queen describes only one small part of the young woman she was. There was some steel underneath that crown.
Opposite Ends of the School
While Wanda was preparing to leave school, I was meeting Mrs. Gassiot, my first-grade teacher. Her husband, Clegg Gassiot, was the principal. My first-grade class had only eight students. By the time I left Lohn, there were only six students in my sixth-grade class. That is difficult to imagine today, but it tells you something about the Lohn I remember. We weren't numbers in a large school system. Everybody knew everybody. Years later, after Mother moved to Brady, my sisters and I visited Mrs. Gassiot. She lived into her nineties.
By then, the little first grader and the young Homecoming Queen she had once known were grown, and Lohn itself had changed.
Wanda Leaves Lohn
After graduation, Wanda attended Western Union School and went to work for Western Union. She later married Don Williams, who served in the Air Force. They had two children, Don Jr. and Steven Williams. Eventually, she and Don lived in Columbus, Indiana. Wanda became the family’s principal breadwinner and worked for Cummins Diesel until she retired. Like the rest of us, Wanda had left the little world where our family began. She built a life far from Lohn. She worked. She married. She carried a great deal of responsibility for her family. But McCulloch County was not finished with her.
Coming Home
After Wanda retired, she and Don moved back to Brady. By then Mother was growing old. The daughter who had once left McCulloch County to build a life of her own came back and helped care for the woman who had raised us.
Wanda died on August 18, 2026, and was buried at Pear Valley. Of Hardy and Marie’s five children—Wanda, Charles, Ann, Jim, and me—I am now the only one left. Her memories of the farm, our parents, and Lohn went back further than mine. The crown lasted for a night; her loyalty to her family lasted a lifetime.