Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009

Thelma Farris, longtime correspondent, passes away

by Kenneth Lassiter

Longtime Oskaloosa Independent correspondent Thelma Farris, Winchester, passed away Saturday at the age of 91.

File photo

Thelma Farris, Winchester, is pictured at her typewriter just before her 90th birthday last year. Farris rapped out many a newspaper column from her typewriter in more than 40 years of local news reporting for the Oskaloosa Independent.

Farris had submitted local news items to the Independent since
at least the 1960s. She was featured last year in an article before her 90th birthday and couldn’t remember then how
long she had been writing for
the Independent. With the
use of her trusty typewriter
and a fax machine, she
submitted column after column for publication.

Farris remained active until her
final days as she played the
organ at Winchester United Methodist Church only a week
before passing. She called in to give the Independent editor a tip recently about the reopening of the restaurant in town and even went to the trouble of finding out the phone number and calling back to tell him that as well.

Farris grew up in McLouth as the oldest of six children of Matt and Devena Woodhead, and she is survived by her five brothers and sisters. She and her late husband, Eldon, a Winchester native, raised a family of three boys who produced 10 grandchildren and 12 great-granchildren for Thelma. She got to know many people throughout the area in helping with Eldon’s auction business, which the couple ran together for 54 years before Eldon passed away in 1992.

The auction business also helped lead to the role as the writer behind the weekly Winchester News column in the Independent.

“I’ve never used anything but a manual machine,” Farris said before her 90th birthday. “I’ve never even gotten an electric typewriter.”

Thelma was a 60-year member of the Pleasant View Grange. She liked to read, crochet and embroider and quilted from time to time. Her three sons still live close and one lived with Thelma on the Farris homestead that the family moved into in 1961.

“I’ve had a good life,” she said last August. “I’ve had some medical problems, but my mind is still good.”

Read her obituary here.