Lela Delk Cooper

When I told my sister Tracy I was going to write about Mamaw, she said, “You could do 100 blogs about Mamaw and still have more stories to tell.” That statement is very accurate. She was a hard-working, creative woman who was our favorite person when we were growing up.

Lela Mae Delk was born on April 14, 1925, on a dairy farm in Greenwood, Indiana. Her parents, Irene and Vertrice, moved from Kentucky to Indiana to work at Polk’s Dairy. I remember her saying that when city kids came to visit the dairy, they told them the black cows gave the chocolate milk.

When the Great Depression hit, the family moved back to Kentucky. She attended school in Middleburg, participated in sports, and was a cheerleader in high school. The day after graduation in 1943, she moved to Columbus, Indiana, to work at Noblitt-Sparks (Arvins). She and her mom were “Rosie the Riveters,” supporting the World War II effort by joining the workforce. Mamaw was a welder who made bomb casings and gas cans.

After the war, she decided to move to Indianapolis and go to beauty school. I have no idea why, because this didn’t fit with the woman I knew. She was already starting to go gray, and her nickname was Frosty. Her hair was completely white by the time she was 30, and she gave up on coloring it. She never practiced as a “beauty operator” because she married my Papaw shortly after completing the program, and then my dad came along.

Her contribution to building the business my grandpa started is often overlooked. In our first blog, I talked about her work on the farm, but she worked just as hard in the shop. She worked side by side with Papaw to construct the first part of the shop. She did the bookkeeping and organized the parts. She could diagnose mechanical problems and find many of the parts to fix them without consulting a book. Despite all this, when people called the shop and she answered the phone, they preferred to talk to a man.

Although Mamaw would have liked to have lots of kids, my dad was an only child. I think that’s why she enjoyed me and my sisters so much. She would stop whatever she was doing to have fun with us. She took the cardboard from lawn mower boxes and made us a slide. She pulled us around the farm in a wagon pulled by a Wheel Horse and built us a teepee in the garden. In the spring, we would take toy boats and sail them down the creek, and in the winter, she taught us how to sew.

My Granny, Mamaw’s mom, lived in Columbus. Occasionally, we would load up in the green Dodge Monaco to go visit her. The backseat of that car was huge—one time I remember trying to do tripods while going around curves on State Road 58. The car probably had seat belts, but obviously I wasn’t wearing one! But I digress… I knew we were in Columbus when we passed a realtor’s billboard that said, “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home.” Mamaw would always read it aloud. Ironically, years later she constantly fought a ladybug infestation in her house.

In the summer of 1986, I was driving a tractor pulling a fully loaded hay wagon. As we were headed to the barn, the load fell forward, a bale hit me in the back of the head, and forced my nose into the steering wheel. With my nose gushing blood, I made it home and called Mamaw to take me to the emergency room. She showed up in the Monaco, and we headed to Bedford. I was lying in the back seat as she rushed me to the medical center. As we passed the Plaza Motel, I lifted my head to see the speedometer approaching 90 miles per hour! That told me how worried she was. I told her to slow down! My nose was broken, but I didn’t want to crash on the way to the hospital.

As the years went on, she was still a big presence in my life. Before I had a car at college, she would come to Bloomington to pick me up for the weekend. She helped me buy furniture for my first apartment in Indianapolis and was among the first visitors when I had my kids—she was lucky enough to get to know all seven of her great-grandchildren.

Mamaw passed away on May 27, 2016. My sisters and I think it’s a sign from her when we see a butterfly. She loved flowers, birds, rocks, and butterflies. She "visited" Stacy recently while she was taking prom pictures of her son, and I saw her in the butterflies of Argentina. She travels a lot as a butterfly.

It was somewhat fitting that she passed right around Memorial Day, because she was devoted to keeping family graves clean and decorated. She and my Granny would make two trips a year to Kentucky to “decorate the graves.”

Memorial Day is just around the corner, so don’t forget to decorate the graves of your loved ones. If you happen to visit the Clearspring Cemetery, you might see some of our cattle grazing nearby. Hopefully, you won’t see them in the graveyard.