Marcia Harriet Staton

Marcia Harriet Staton, nee Burcalow, 80, passed away on Thursday the 1^st of November. She was born on the 11^th of July 1932 in Monroe,Wisconsin, but grew up in Bruce,Wisconsin, graduating from Bruce High School in 1951. She attended the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire from 1951 through 1954 before transferring toCarrollCollege inWaukesha,Wisconsin where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology in 1955.  From 1956 through 1959, she taught first grade in El Paso,Texas. Pursuing her love of reading, she worked on a Library major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed the work at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, graduating with an Extended Library Major (Considered equivalent to masters) in 1961. From 1963 through 1964 she worked as a high school librarian in the Glidden/Butternut and Ladysmith Public Schools, then moved to southern Wisconsin where she served as the elementary school librarian in the Franklin and Muskego Public Schools and as head librarian of the Muskego Public Library from 1964 through 1966. In 1967 she became an elementary school teacher at the Lakeview Elementary School in the Muskego Public Schools system and taught there until her retirement in 1987. During the summers she took education courses at Carroll College and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts – Remedial Reading degree in 1974. After a brief stint as head librarian of the Mukwonago Public Library from 1988-1989, Marcia moved to Tomah. From 1992 through 1996 she served as a substitute teacher in the Tomah Public Schools and as a part-time teacher at the alternative school from 1995 through 1999.

Marcia was active in the communities in which she lived. At the Big BendBaptistChurch, she served as a Sunday-school teacher and on the education, finance and music boards. Music was a big part of her life. She loved to sing and had a beautiful voice. She was a junior choir director in Big Bendand sang in various choirs for more than twenty five years. She served as a 4-H leader in Muskego. She was on the bargaining team of the Muskego-Norway Public Teacher’s Unionfrom 1974-1982. She served as the historian of the Muskego Historical Society from 1967-1987 and as the co-chairman of the Muskego Civil War days in 1986 and 1987. In Tomah, she was active in the Family Education Resource Network, serving as director from 1993 to 1996 and as grant writer in 1995. She was involved in HCE-Home Community Education Network and was secretary of the local chapter in Tomah. She was on the Chief Tomah Scholarship committee. She served on the Tomah Library board. Love of family led Marcia to do extensive research and compilation of family genealogy starting in 1960. This led to strong interest in the Civil War, since her great- grandfather William Henry Outhouse fought in the Battle of Vicksburg as well as in many others. She was a member of the committee that staged the 1^st annual Civil War weekend activities during the Tomah Sesquicentennial on the 1^st-3^rd July 2005. Operation Homefront was very important to Marcia. She worked tirelessly putting together packages for troops and was instrumental in starting a chapter here in Tomah. Recently, she was awarded a plaque by the La Crosse chapter of Operation Homefront to honor her for all her efforts. Marcia loved to write and was a published author. Her mystery, Kin Dread Spirit, was released in 2002. Her compilation of family recipes, The Outhouse Family International Cookbook, was printed in 2000. Potawatomie Puffs, her book ofMuskego history was printed in 1975.  She has also written numerous children’s books and short stories. In 2002, Marcia won first place in the HCE Monroe County Adult Short Story contest. In addition, she has won numerous writing awards from the Coulee Region Scribes for her short stories, essays, articles and poems.

Marcia is survived by her siblings Mary Kinney-Kangas, Marjorie Balis, Harry Burcalow, Lucy Shampo, Emily Henderson, Helen Melzl and William Burcalow, by her daughters Lucy Staton and Marguerite DeLaney, by her grandsons John and Anthony DeLaney and by her great grandchildren Cienna and Salvatore DeLaney. Marcia will be buried in the family plot inBruce,Wisconsin. A memorial service will be held for her at this time. Any donations made to Operation Homefront in her name will be welcome.

 

 

AGE IS RELATIVE

By Marcia Harriet Burcalow Staton (2002)

            About seven years ago, I was substitute teaching in the ED room at the high school. “How old are you, Teacher?” The query came from seventeen year old Jed.

I consider my age a classified secret, and that it’s a woman’s prerogative to lie in self-defense. “Ninety-seven,” I said, adding thirty four years to my age. “I’ll be 100 in the year 2000.”

Jed’s jaw dropped clear to his toenails. “Ninety-seven,” he gasped. “I didn’t think you were a day over seventy-five.” I looked at him, torn between rage and disbelief. He surely couldn’t have taken me seriously.

He had. Which led me to believe that age, after all, is relative, and that, to a seventeen year old, sixty-three is so far over the hill there is little difference between the sixties and the nineties.

I remembered my first year of teaching and the tiny girl in first grade who had asked me the same question. “Are you one-hundred years old, Teacher?” Then I could laugh. I was twenty-eight. Time stretched before me in an infinity of riches.

Time is also relative.

I was fortunate to have ancestors who showed me the way.

My grandfather, born before the Civil War, was ninety-six when he died. He went deer hunting and got his last deer when he was eighty-six. It’s true the deer was one my uncle bought for him on the way home, but that’s beside the point. It was a deal that left both him and the other hunter happy. It wasn’t his fault the deer failed to pass the stump his son had propped him up against. The point is that he was still in there pitching. He was out hoeing his garden the last months of his life.

His daughter died at the age of ninety-five, interested in life to the end. Until she broke her hip at the age of eighty-nine, she could out-walk me and out-think me any time. She and my mother both had macular degeneration, losing their central vision after the age of sixty-five. It never stopped them. They spent three months touring the world when my mother was sixty-five and my aunt seventy-five, going to England, Holland, Egypt, Greece, The Holy Land, India and Nigeria. Two years later they touredAustraliaandNew Zealand.

I was nineteen the summer several of my cousins and I helped my aunt pick her strawberry patch. My uncle’s sister-in-law helped also, out-picking all of us, although she must have been in her sixties at the time. A fervent Catholic, and a woman of rigid principle and unlimited energy, she rose at five every morning to make raised doughnuts for her husband’s breakfast. I was being my usual flip, heedless self. Somehow my cousins and I got to talking about growing old. “I hope,” I said, “that when I turn sixty and am not good for anything anymore, someone will give me a push to the other side.”

Aunt Mary overheard. She hit the ceiling and blistered me up one row and down the next.  It seemed an eon before my carrier was full and I could escape.

Sixty no longer seems old to me and seventy is the start of a new career.

I look back now, wondering how I reached seventy so soon. No one ever warned me about the change in velocity once I reached fifty.

Reaching the big 3-0 was a shock. It was the end of my childhood. I found it hard to believe I had gotten there so fast. But turning fifty was no big deal. I got up the morning of my fiftieth birthday feeling exhilarated. After all, I had grown up with Helen Trent – Life Begins at Forty – and I could see freedom ahead of me on the horizon. My children were young adults, able to stand on their own two feet. After years of being first a daughter, then a wife, and finally a mother, I faced a future where I would be free to do my own thing, be my own woman for the first time in my life.

My sister threw a birthday party for me and a good share of my relatives were there as I drove up, including her son, Aric, aged eight. He welcomed me with a “Happy Fiftieth Birthday, Auntie. How does it feel to be half a century old?” in tones of such awe that I immediately felt the need for a wheelchair and crutches. He completed my downer by handing me a birthday card. The King and Queen on the cover standing in front of their castle welcomed me to the Middle Ages. I consoled myself that it could have been worse. It could have been dinosaurs welcoming me to Prehistoric Times.

Looking back, I can remember that it took me ages to reach the age of twenty-one. My college years sped by quickly, time always does when one is having fun. I don’t remember cracking many books, but there are a lot of other memories even more worth keeping.

By the time I was thirty I had been married and divorced. Those years from thirty to fifty don’t really stand out. They return to me as a steady round of teaching and  working summer jobs, and of being a mother, 4-H leader, choir member, Sunday-school teacher, and gardener.

But the fifties! Ah, those were to be the days. My youngest daughter was married, my oldest in the Army. Only my cat and I were left, and as long as I provided instant food and affection on his demand, he left me free to do my thing. No one had warned me that raising grandchildren could be such a full time job.

I retired at fifty-five. The next three years were unexpected trauma. Two serious operations, radiation therapy, and financial plans that didn’t work out left such bitterness that to this day I blank those years out. The fifties that I had expected to be my golden years, instead became the decade I would most like to forget.

I’ll turn seventy this year. The future still stretches before me – no longer the unlimited future of my youth, but still my future. I am old enough now to have a sense of the finiteness of life, the knowledge that I am eleven years older now than my father was at his death, and only five years younger than my mother was at hers. I can accept that, not in the sense that growing old leaves one useless, I could never believe that, but that growing older does leave one free to choose what is important, to recognize that death, although its causes can be horrible, is not in itself a horrible thing. A passage in a book I read shortly after my father’s death comes back to comfort me. I have paraphrased it to meet my own needs:

For if there is no life after death, neither is there any pain, nor fear, nor sorrow. But if there is a life, and I do believe there is, then it is a better life than we have here.

 

And that means it has to be good, so very good. For in spite of the trials and tribulations, of which sometimes I have felt I had more than my share, I have had a good life: I had a secure childhood, parents who loved, provided well, and saw to it that I had a good education; I have loved and been loved; I have been a parent and a grandparent, and those blessings have outweighed the grief; I have been able to provide for myself and my family because the miracle of medication has completely controlled my epilepsy, and there have been highs as well as lows; and I have a broad, extended family of brothers and sisters and cousins I know and care for to the seventh degree. I have always been a protected woman, but I am wise enough now to know how rare a blessing that is, and I am grateful.

Of course I have fears for the future. For anyone my age, financial well-being and physical health are concerns. Few people would mind growing old except for the physical and mental degeneration that so often accompanies that stage.

But though my body may mature and my mind eventually degenerate, internally I will always be young. For time has taught me what Jed had yet to learn – that when you are down, there is no way to go but up, and that in the midst of sorrow and tragedy, there can be also joy and laughter; that when the whole is leavened with love, hate and resentment can not endure; that freedom is internal. We are responsible for ourselves. That is the glory as well as the bane of life.

As I said, age is relative.