♀Ora Emogene Walrath

Ora Emogene Walrath (10 August 1925 – 15 February 2014) was a Tulsa, Oklahoma, woman whom her death notice calls a retired school librarian, and who had begun her working life as a teletype operator for a commercial airline. She was the grandmother of the compiler of this family history.

Early life

Ora was born at Raymond, Kandiyohi County, Minnesota, the youngest of the six children of Clarence Eugene Walrath (1878–1934) and Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977), who married on 18 January 1910 in Illinois. Her elder siblings were Glen Eugene Walrath (1911–1993), born in Peterson, Iowa; Lorene Mary Walrath (1914–1988); Charlotte Mae Walrath (1915–2007); Elmer Alvin Walrath, born in May 1918 and dead within nine days of his birth; and Nicholas Melvin Walrath (1922–2015). Lorene was born in Iowa on 1 June 1914 and Charlotte in Minnesota on 24 November 1915, so the family moved from Clay County, Iowa, to Kandiyohi County, Minnesota, within those seventeen months. Ora herself was born seven years after Elmer’s death and never knew him.

The family farmed at St. Johns Township, Kandiyohi County, Minnesota, and Ora was still living there, unmarried, at the 1930, 1935 and 1940 census counts.

Marriage and career

Ora left Minnesota for Tulsa, Oklahoma, where on 26 June 1948 she married Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014). The couple made their home there and raised a family.

By April 1950 the couple’s household in the Dawson section of Tulsa held just the two of them, and the census taker recorded Ora, listed as twenty-five (by her recorded birth date she was twenty-four), working a forty-hour week as a teletype operator for a commercial airline — her earliest recorded paid work, years before she turned to library work. A teletype operator sent and received typed messages over a wire circuit. Floyd, in the same household, was recorded as a radio repairman, also in the airline industry.

Her death notice in the Tulsa World of 16 February 2014 calls her a retired Tulsa Public Schools librarian, and her funeral home’s obituary fills in the career: after some years at home she joined the Tulsa Public Schools in 1970 and spent most of her twenty years there as librarian of the Teacher’s Professional Library. After retiring she volunteered for the Tulsa City-County Library at its Maxwell Park branch; a 2004 newspaper notice recognized her for fifteen years of volunteer service, meaning she had been giving her time there since about 1989.

Death

Ora Emogene Walrath died on 15 February 2014 in Tulsa. The same notice gives her funeral as 2 p.m. on Monday, 17 February 2014, at Yale Avenue Presbyterian Church in Tulsa.