By Donna Smith

Born in Grandfield, Oklahoma, 90 years ago, June Helton Stromberg has come to a turning-point in life. Recently returning home to settle business affairs, she shared past memories with friends and family.

Okie Pioneers, Stromberg's mother made the Oklahoma Run with her father, Stromberg's grandfather. Her father, then a child, came to the Oklahoma Territory in a buggy with his father and a sister. Together they made the Cherokee Strip Run.

Bent on community service, her father, in 1913, built the still-standing grain elevators in Grandfield for $10,000. She recalls that when the three banks in Grandfield became insolvent, her dad took it upon himself to take checks for cashing to the bank in Wichita Falls, Texas.

"In those years," said Stromberg, "banks closed at noon because more robberies occurred then than at any other time. "One day, I came back to work early from lunch. As I started through the door, I saw a man swinging his arm around, and I realized he was robbing the bank. I backed out and ran across the street for help."

The bank was robbed of $3,000 and a lady, Vera Collyer, was kidnapped but was later safely released.

"My daddy was something else." Stromberg shook her head. "Daddy called the insurance company before he called the police."

She recalls her daddy as a workaholic who took no excuses from anybody. "When he said, 'Get up!' we knew it was time to go to work."

Today, she's thankful, too, that her father was a strict disciplinarian.

"He didn't spank us-never used the belt, as was the 'rule' of the day-but we definitely didn't rule the household. We minded. Daddy disciplined with voice tone and words. He could always make me know when I'd done wrong, and guilty feelings kept me from doing the same thing twice."

She also remembers the time when cows were within the city limits.

"When I was a little girl, I was afraid of the neighbors' cow. When the cow was in the alley, I went down the sidewalk. If she was under the mulberry tree in the yard, I went down the alley. As I grew older, I learned not to be afraid and even learned to swim in Marvin Anderson's cow pasture pool."

She tells that even the school's football field was a cow pasture.

"We didn't have bleachers then. Goalposts were tree limbs. We watched games from a car fender, or to keep up with the action, we tromped up and down the sidelines thorough patches of cockle burrs."

Stromberg remembers her favorite teacher as Lois Poole Crawford. "When we studied literature, she had us dancing around the May Pole. I never was very good in trigonometry, but she taught us how to diagram sentences in English, and I learned to love that subject. And," she added, "I still do today."

Her recollection of music brings back the memory of trekking a mile through the cotton field to take piano lessons from Mrs. J. B. Stout.

"I was just a mediocre kid when it came to pecking the piano, but I had fun doing the tango."

That enjoyment came from the home of Mrs. L.G. Harvey, who liked to entertain the neighborhood children.

"She'd let us push back the furniture against the living room walls, roll up the carpet, and dance. We not only tangoed till our toes twitched, but we'd get together to jump rope, play jacks, and skip around on sidewalk-sketched hop-scotch squares.

"All these games and the care of family, friends, and neighbors," said Stromberg, "made me feel secure and very loved by the whole town."

Remembering her own childhood, she regrets what so many children seem to be missing today.

"About the only physical exercise they get is the 'dancing and hopping' of their fingers manipulating computer games."

Another fond memory is of the Christmas season.

"We never had a Christmas tree in our homes. We went to church on Christmas Eve and celebrated the holiday there. I once asked a friend why we didn't have our own Christmas trees, and she said, 'There aren't any trees to get.'"

Then, the only trees were in the Wichita Mountains, and the park officials allowed only area churches to cut trees for the holidays.

"And," she disclosed, "I almost forgot! Movie tickets cost 10 cents. Theaters ran serials like today's soaps so we had to go to the show every Saturday afternoon. Oh, and one more 'money' thing-the cost for my college education was about $1.000 a year, and that included travel, tuition, books, board and room, and clothes."

Stromberg received her associates of arts degree from Stephen College in Columbia, Missouri, and her bachelor's degree from the University of Oklahoma.

"I studied to become a teacher, "she explained, "but at that time, we were in the Great Depression, and if I had taken a job, we would have been ostracized. Because of so much poverty and job shortage, if two in a family had jobs, the community rejected them."

During that period, her father owned the First State Bank. She worked for him as a teller and bookkeeper. Even though she had a guaranteed job, working in a bank was not her chosen vocation. She wanted to be a teacher, and wanting to be of service to the community and to use her training in some way, she became a Girl Scout leader.

"I was a Scout leader for 17 years. That was a kind of teaching, and I loved every minute of it."

She married in 1936, and she and her husband, now deceased, moved to Artesia, New Mexico, and opened a lumber company. After living there 43 years, they sold their business and moved to Ardmore, Oklahoma.

Now decision-time has come. Stromberg is closing her home in Ardmore and moving into the retirement center owned by her daughter in Claremont, California.

"If I didn't have to live in Claremont," she said, "I'd live out my life in Grandfield. But the time has come that, in all fairness to my children, I need to be closer

to them so they won't have to travel half-way across the nation to 'see about Mama.'"

Stromberg is the mother of two daughters: Ann Stromberg, a professor of sociology for Pitzer College, Claremont, and Sara Jones, homemaker and support staff for the public school system in Allen, Texas.