There are seven of us girls who think Elsie Hamaker is a very special mother.  After serving in the Navy Nurse Corp. in Hawaii during WWII, she and her husband Maurice Hamaker (an Air Force pilot) returned to South Dakota to started their family.  While her husband was tending the farm or traveling all over the upper Midwest auditing insurance companies, Elsie Hamaker was home taking care of seven girls, the oldest just 13 years older than the youngest. 

While Dad set many of the rules, Mom set a few of her own and carried all of them out in his absence.  She managed to do so with a caring heart and a soft touch.  However, if you did something wrong, there were appropriate consequences. 

She taught us to get our work done before playing and that nothing was more important than doing our school work.  She taught us to sew our own clothes, how to clean a house, and how to dress properly and act like ladies.  Blue jeans were for men and boys, not girls.  But if you had to work out at the farm, blue jeans were just fine.  As teenagers, she taught us to stand up for what was right, even though it wasn’t popular.  Most importantly, she taught us to love and respect each other.  The skills and values she taught us have carried over into our adult lives. 

Her life has not always been easy.  When the third oldest was getting ready to go off to college, Mom had surgery to remove her thymus gland.  She had been very weak from myasthenia gravis, a muscle disease from which Aristotle Onassis died.  At one point the only muscle she could move was her little toe.  She recovered from the surgery and has been in remission for over 40 years.  While she was at her sickest, we girls carried on with the house work, cooking, doing the farm work and going to school in her absence as if she were there.  The self discipline she instilled in us helped us maintain a sense of normalcy when our lives were in chaos.  The youngest of us was only seven years old when all of this was going on, and it was her age that gave Mom the strength to keep on fighting for her life. 

The second big test in Mom’s life occurred about a dozen years later when she and Dad divorced after about 35 years of marriage.  All of us girls had left home by then, with only the youngest still in college.  As with all challenges, that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.  I think her internal strength is what I admire most about my mother.  She survived and thrived in a small community in the middle of South Dakota after the divorce.  However, it was after she had a surgery, when no family members were present to help out, that she decided to move to Dallas to be around family again.

Most people cannot even contemplate uprooting their lives and moving 1,000 miles away at the age of 64 to start all over again, but that is exactly what she did.  She quickly became engaged in the Richardson community by helping out at the Senior Citizen Center and joining the First Presbyterian Church.  She is an active member of a local PEO chapter and has developed many friendships over the last 22+ years. 

In 2000 she was named as Outstanding Older Texan of the Year in Richardson.  We are all so proud of our mother for all her outstanding qualities.  She is the glue that holds the family together (that would be 7 daughters, 13 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren).  For us, she is the best mother anyone could have.