Lester Loyd Nielson, Wilmore, passed away Sunday, March 2, 1980 at the Pratt County Hospital, at the age of 72 years and 8 days.Services were held in the Hatfield-Prusa Chapel, Coldwater, on Wednesday, 2:00 p.m., March 5, 1980.
Officiating Minister was Rev. William McFall, Soloist Bill Proctor sang, "Softly and Tenderly" and "Open Thy Merciful Arms." He was accompanied by organist, Mrs. Hazel McMurray.
Pallbearers were: Harlow Peaster, Darrell Smith, Vernie White, C. W. Naumann, Bill Hoofer and Ed Baker.
Interment was in the Crown Hill Cemetery, Coldwater.
Obituary Lester Loyd Nielson was born at Coldwater, Kansas.
He was the 10th child of Lars and Annie Katherine (Nickolson) Nielson.
Growing to manhood he attended school at Coldwater and Protection where he lived and farmed with his parents till 1954.
He purchased a farm 6 miles northeast of Wilmore where he moved to make his home and continued farming and raising livestock for the remainder of his life.
He is survived by 2 sisters, Mabel Katherine Upton, Joplin, Mo.; and Anna Nielson, of Coldwater; 2 two brothers, Lewis Nielson, of Marion, Ill.; and Emery Howard Nielson, of Wheatridge, Colo., and a great number of nieces and nephews and friends.
Those having preceded him in death were his parents, Lars and Annie Nielson, 3 sisters, Mary Henretta Matticks, Grace Florence May, and Ellen Gillet and three brothers Frank, Crist C. and Charles. He will be missed by his relatives and friends.
Pepper for the Guests
Lars Nielson was an old-time Danish settler who lived about 2 & 1/2 miles northeast of the Ridge Summit Schoolhouse in West Powell Township, Comanche County, Kansas. He was the father of Frank, Charlie, Chris and Lester of Wilmore, Ks, and several more whose names I can't remember. I was told by the sons that one Sunday they were to have house guests for dinner and didn't have any pepper. He instructed one of the boys to go to the barnyard and find the blackest mixture of dirt and manure he could find and fill the shaker. They didn't lose face: they had "pepper" for their guests.
Crazy As A Pet Coon
Lester was one of our nearest neighbors when I grew up in West Powell Township, and I have a vivid memory of him coming over one day, so angry that he was "frothing at the mouth", as Dad described it, because another man, he knew, had been slipping around to see Lester's wife, Mary, while Lester was away.
That other man was the town idiot, to put it as kindly as possible. Dad had caught him stealing gas from his tractor gas tank more than once as he made his way out to see Mary, except that he couldn't pronounce Mary. He said something slurred like "Meh-E".
One time when all the forward gears in his car's transmission had stopped working, this fervent fellow started backing up out of Wilmore to go see Meh-E until his transmission failed at about the time he was going past our house. This was at about the same time as Lester came out to comlain to Dad about it, and was threatening to shoot the Wilmore fellow if he ever caught him.
Lester was always frightening to me when I was a child, as he didn't talk so much as he raved. I can't recall ever seeing him when he didn't have dried spit bubbles at the corner of his mouth. When he got "worked up", as he was the day he came over to complain to Dad about the doings of the dastardly diddler who had sullied his home and wife, he would literally slobber from both corners of his mouth and down his chin. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) It was a human behavior I'd never seen before, and haven't seen since, in all my life.
Actually, I think Lester came over to see Dad a time or two about that problem, which was both annoying and mildly amusing to Dad. It went on for a while, and I know he caught G.R. stealing gas from him at least a few times. (We lived along a graveled road, and you could hear the sound of a car's tires crunching gravel for at least a 1/4 of a mile in either direction as it passed our house. So when Dad would hear G.R.'s car stop just west of our house, he'd walk on down to the barn to the gas tank on a trailer to wait for him. I don't recall what Dad said he did when he catch him, probably gave him the gas along with a good cussing telling him to stop trying to steal from him.)
Dad wrote a story in his memoirs about Lester jogging to Coldwater for medical help when he was bitten by a rattlesnake while burning weeds in a ditch about 6 miles NE of Wilmore. He could have ran east a few hundred yards to his pickup and driven to Coldwater, but the pickup was in the wrong direction, so he jogged for about 20 miles instead, right through the middle of Wilmore and past any number of people who would have gladly given him a ride to Coldwater, "not looking right or left", Dad said. Dad said that if the snake had gotten a good dose of venom in Lester that he would have been dead long before he got to Wilmore.
As I recall, that was a story Dad told when I asked him to explain what he meant by saying "Lester was as crazy as a pet coon".
Whatever happened, Lester didn't shoot and kill the "offender", as I saw him in November of 2004 when I was back in Comanche County. I note, though, that Lester's wife is not mentioned in Lester's obituary.
-- Jerry Ferrin, 13 June 2006.
Thanks to Shirley Brier for finding, transcribing and contributing the above news article to this web site!
This website is being created by Jerry Ferrin with the able assistance of many Contributors. Your comments, suggestions and contributions of historical information and photographs to this site are welcome. Please sign the Guest Book. This page was created 13 June 2006.