P.E.O. Record
How We Met
Upon retiring, my husband and I moved to live permanently in our condo on the beach. Knowing very few people here, it was wonderful having local P.E.O. chapters contact me and I soon dimited to Chapter BU, Pensacola, Florida. Through some of my sisters I heard about a ladies “fun group” which met monthly for lunch, program and social activities such as bridge, bunco, golf, etc. Wanting to get to know some people in our area, I joined that.
Soon afterwards, out by our swimming pool, I met this lovely couple from Indiana, who also had just retired and moved into their condo, two floors above us.
Carolyn heard me talking about my “fun group” and indicated that she too would like to get to know more people and so I offered to take her to our next meeting.
Now, my predicament was that where I really wanted to take her was to one of our P.E.O. social hours so my sisters could meet her as I knew right off that she would make a super P.E.O.
I was afraid that if she went to the first group she might not be inclined to go to the second one (P.E.O.), and that was the one I really wanted to take her to.
Taking it gradually, she did meet the P.E.O.s and I think it was an instant love affair—both ways!
In due time we initiated Carolyn and she has become one of our greatest advocates of helping educate women—she herself having been an educator before retirement. Since I was program chairman that year, Carolyn agreed to give a video presentation on one of her classroom teaching techniques, which was awesome!
Carolyn also showed much interest in P.E.O.’s B&B program and presented to the chapter her idea of starting it up with her being the chairman and contact person. It has become a tremendous success, thanks mainly to her.
Now we both in time have dropped out of the “fun group,” but are steadfast sisters in the organization which truly does make a difference in the lives of women, and to all humanity, for that matter.
Even though our condos are not too large, we have entertained the P.E.O.s by having the social hour in one condo and going to the other for the meeting. Our sisters love coming to the beach!
My unique tale of my dear sister Antoinette Snyman happened about 15 years ago when her husband Michael accepted a position here in Rhode Island. They came from Johannesburg, South Africa. They attended my church, The Greenwood Community Church, Presbyterian in Warwick, Rhode Island, and I was introduced by our minister. He thought it would be nice to meet them since I have so many distant cousins in that area in South Africa. Our friendship has grown over the years including my children and two grandchildren. My happiness has been adopting the Snymans as a family who came in my life. I am especially proud to by their daughter Kate’s godmother.
It did not stop here—I thought about her becoming a P.E.O. sister, so in May 2007 she was initiated in Chapter A, Providence, Rhode Island. She came as a friend to me, now is a sister. A wonderful tribute to a beautiful sister!
In 1957 Liz and I became roommates on the delivery floor of our local hospital where we were in training to become medical technologists. The room was provided so that we could take night call. Liz completed the program; I married a Marine and became a teacher for 44 years. From that year forth every time we returned to Maryville, Tennessee, to visit family, we also shared a meal and played cards with Lisa and Charles. Ten years ago I was invited to become a P.E.O. of Chapter PF in Fallbrook, California. A year or two later I read in The P.E.O. Record of the formation of Chapter AU in Maryville, Tennessee. I immediately wrote a letter to Ellie Gilmore, a mutual friend and founding sister, to suggest Elizabeth Blackburn for membership in the Sisterhood. She accepted and became my “sister” as well as my best friend.
I was never blessed with a birth sister and I’ve had only a few friends that qualified for the sister title. I had pretty high standards for the friendship of sisterhood. It would be a woman that was loving, forgiving, thoughtful and gave willingly as she would to one of her own family. A few years ago, I was asked and accepted membership in a local P.E.O. chapter. They talked a lot about sisterhood but so do a lot of other women’s organizations that don’t always deliver. I began to notice how they willingly stepped up to help each other. Not everyone jumped on the bandwagon each time, they just stepped up in the right amount, at the right time, and the right numbers. Let me speed forward to this past year:
My husband became very ill and I became a primary caregiver. As the year sped by, it became more consuming and exhausting—the kind of exhaustion that eventually robs you of every ounce of production outside your primary duties. I had to stop being chapter recording secretary and was told, “Don’t worry, someone will do it.” And someone did it without fuss and without complaint. When I half-joked that I guess I couldn’t live on just jelly beans forever, the social committee chair organized bringing in food and scheduled the days someone would be bringing things to the house. Someone would send a card or an email just at the time I needed to hear from them. Someone would call or stop to give me a hug just because they thought I might need one. Someone would tell me they were praying and they would tell me when and just how they were doing the prayers. Someone would be going to the grocery or to town and call to see if they could pick up something. Someone was always doing something.
Those many some ones of this organization became my sisters. I now have what I have never had before, my family of sisters. Did others help me, of course they did. But without my sisters in P.E.O., I would not have had the warm embrace of a group of women who cared beyond friendship but as my family. This is what the original founders had in mind when they created this sisterhood. Through the quiet, loving, forgiving, thoughtful members, it is still P.E.O.’s most enduring and endearing quality.
My newest friend here in Clarion, Pennsylvania, is a beautiful lady from my church who came up to me one day and simply said, “I think I’d like to get to know you better.” Never having been approached that way in my life, I was immediately intrigued and anxious to get to know Nancy. I was also amazed by her uncanny resemblance to my beloved Aunt Mary, whom I miss so much. I even called my cousin after church and said, “Your mother sent an angel today.”
For the past year Nancy and I have visited by phone; had tea and lunches together; sat on her deck and soaked up the rare sunshine in the summer; and in general become fast friends. We just seemed to have a natural affinity for one another.
Two days before Christmas I stopped by Nancy’s house to deliver a little gift and a poinsettia. She insisted that I come in and sit in the living room (where I had never been before) so that I could see her newly re-upholstered couch. We talked for a half hour and as I got up to leave I noticed something familiar on her coffee table. I bent down to be sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing and there was The P.E.O. Record. I came back up yelling, “Are you a P.E.O.?” She grabbed me and screamed, “You are one, too!” We stood there in each other’s arms and laughed and cried. Nancy had lived here 38 years and had never met another P.E.O. Yet every month she puts The Record on her coffee table because, as she says, “I knew I’d hook one someday!”
That was three years ago and to-date we are still the only P.E.O.s that we know of in our little town. Nancy has become more than a sister to me—a friend, companion and soul mate. We even talk of retiring together on a cruise ship!
I moved to Cedarburg, Wisconsin, more than 20 years ago. While looking for houses in an ideal family neighborhood we heard that there was another couple looking at the same two houses as my husband and I. We debated about the two homes but decided on the ranch. After all, the two story was nice, but we were really worried about the large crack that we noticed in the basement wall. The last thing we needed was a finished basement full of water from a cracked wall! We moved into our house the same week that our new neighbors moved into theirs. Not long afterwards, I heard the doorbell ring while I had a house full of neighbor kids along with my three preschoolers! It was my new neighbor, Anne, holding a baby in one arm and a piece of gauze over her eye with the other! She had been trying to pry open a window in the new home with a screwdriver. It slipped and cut her eyelid. I took the baby, we found her a doctor and she was off for stitches.
Just a few months later, we had an unusual thaw in Wisconsin in the middle of January. Wouldn’t you know, we got a basement full of melted snow and water. Anne’s basement was dry as a bone! I like to think that blood and water brought us together. We became even closer in 1997 when Anne Sprenger, BP, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, introduced me to P.E.O. Now not only are we neighbors and good friends, we’re also sisters!
I learned about P.E.O. in the Middle East while on my first Overseas Adventure travel tour of Jordan and Egypt in late fall ’05. A delightful P.E.O. from the Washington, D.C., area got to know me well enough during the first few days of the trip to ask me more about my volunteer work and then shared a bit about P.E.O. By the end of the trip, she told me she was sure I’d enjoy knowing more about P.E.O. We maintained an email friendship after the trip because we’d had to much fun together, and then the following August, after a very spontaneous 10-minute conference call with a travel adviser, we made travel arrangements to go to Ecuador with OAT in September as roommates. By that winter, I was ready to consider exploring the possibility of P.E.O. and she sent a referral to Michigan officers.
I love my P.E.O. sisters, people I never would have met if my travel friend had not considered me a likely candidate for membership when we met half-way ‘round the world – and then followed through. We haven’t seen each other since the trip to Ecuador in September 2006, but still email frequently and consider ourselves quite close.
My story in brief: my daughter began to date this nice young man who had been in high school with her. His family lived only about a mile away, but our paths had never crossed…not even at school events. Sarah and Chris continued to date and we met the family a few times. Now Sarah and Chris are married and Leslie and I are not only sisters in P.E.O., but we are friends and family.
My grandmother-in-law, Laura Reast McJunkin, was a charter member of Chapter A in Whitesboro, Texas. Her only child, Willie, became a member of that chapter when she was 18. After her marriage to W.W. King she moved a few miles away to Denton, and joined a chapter there. She held all local and state offices and in 1946 organized and became a member of Chapter BK. She was state president in 1950. Her only child, Bill, and I were married in 1954, and she naturally wanted me to be a P.E.O.
We moved around quite a bit during our first years together. After graduating from medical school at Northwestern in Chicago, Bill had a year of internship in Houston, two years in the Army (6 months in Thule, Greenland, and a year and one-half at Fort Hood, Texas), a year of general practice residency in Houston, a year of Orthopedic Surgery residency in Oklahoma City, and then we moved to Pueblo, Colorado, where he was in general practice for four years before entering radiology residency in Denver.
So during those four years I became a P.E.O., in an unusual way! Mom King read an article in The Methodist Home magazine about Tommie Jean Holloran who had grown up in the home, gone to college, became a dietitian and married a realtor in Pueblo, Colorado. Well, of course, Mom got in touch with Tommie Jean immediately, with the hope that she could meet and get to know me. Tommie Jean replied that she already knew me; I was in her Sunday school class! So, my friend became my sister in Chapter CG, Pueblo, Colorado.