Last week, I wrote about my late Aunt Melba and how I missed her Easter conversations on the porch. Then, as if on cue, I came across a column I wrote six years ago about her and Easter.
It published the week after Easter 2019— six years ago this week on April 26, 2019. It was still relevant and, yet, nostalgic at the same time. It is a wonderful coda to last week’s column. As such, I am moved to share it with you here:
I spent some time with a special lady over the weekend.
I’ve written about her before.
My great-great Aunt Melba (Lewter) Yankovich spent her 92nd birthday with us on Sunday.
She is the baby sister of my great-grandfather Dorsey Clay Lewter.
She was born six weeks after Easter 1926 at Gordonville.
She was the daughter of a Grayson County cotton farmer.
Her father still plowed the fields with mules until the second World War.
She married the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner.
The coal miner’s son was on an Army troop caravan through Gordonville while Lake Texoma was under construction.
He saw the farmer’s daughter from the road and the rest was history.
After the war, his career with IBM took them all over the country, but they eventually settled back in Grayson County.
Uncle John passed away in 2010, but Aunt Melba keeps his memory alive with the stories and artifacts of their epic life together.
I love her stories. Her stories are a history, not just of our family, but of Western Grayson County.
Her grandfather came to Gordonville after the Civil War. Her father was born there during the year of our country’s centennial.
She can remember the ferry at Willis, Oklahoma, well before Lake Texoma and the Willis Bridge.
She can remember the first airplane she ever saw. It was the first anyone in Gordonville had ever seen and people came from miles as if it were an alien aircraft.
At the time, it was.
She remembers when the road that connected Whitesboro and Gordonville was gravel and the person who drove the school bus was a high school student.
All able-bodied men of a certain age were fighting the war.
She can remember Sunday dinners cooked on a wood burning stove and her father talking to his mules as if they were part of the family. She will tell you they were.
I treasure our conversations together. They are usually rooted in history and faith before we veer into politics and current affairs.
We discussed the current state of media on Sunday.
We talked about how drastically the news business has changed during her lifetime.
“This cable news business has gotten out of hand,” Aunt Melba said. “When I was a girl, my dad got the Denison Herald every morning. A man drove over to Gordonville, through Flowing Wells, to deliver the paper. Dad read it, cover to cover, every morning. That was our news, and it was better news. The newspaper told us the facts about the stories that mattered. This cable news today is not news. It is a whole bunch of what people think about the news. The actual news is lost in all the noise.”
Truer words have never been said.
Cable TV, the internet and social media are all great advents of modern communication, but the accuracy has been lost in the immediacy they all demand.
A morning newspaper is all the news one really needs in a day. Beyond that, electronic media companies are only concerned with harvesting our attention.
The want to be entertained has outpaced the need to be informed.
As a result, people are not talking to one another anymore.
The lack of true conversation has resulted in a devaluation of proper discourse as a cultural currency.
Readers once chose their news. Now it chooses us.
Quantity of entertainment has replaced quality information.
We can do better.
Slow down.
Find news to read instead of doom scrolling memes.
Start a conversation at the coffee shop instead of an anonymous feud on social media.
And, above all, keep an open mind. The lessons of our past are not too far removed and it behooves us to pay attention.
Melba (Lewter) Yankovich passed away on Feb. 14, 2023 at the age of 96.