The Stairs Going Up

The Life of Beverly Jane Strotman Homann, as told in her first interview — March 6, 2026

Before Judy could ask a single question, Beverly had already said the truest thing anyone would say in this whole project.

"Aren't we kicking ourselves for not getting this after, you know, Mom and Dad."

She said it plainly, almost as a joke, the way people say true things they've made peace with. But it sat there in the room anyway — the regret of an entire generation, folded into one sentence, delivered thirty seconds into a phone call. Beverly was ninety-two years old, sitting in her home in Mattoon, Illinois, about to spend the next hour handing over what she could still remember of a life that started in Oklahoma in 1933. And the first thing she wanted known was that she wished someone had done this sooner, for the two people who could no longer answer.

What's Memory, and What's the Photograph

Beverly is careful with herself in a way that makes everything she does say feel more solid. Asked for her first memory, she didn't reach for one. She paused instead, and told the truth about the limits of her own mind.

"I wonder if it's in my memory, or the pictures that I have seen," she said. "I really don't remember that much, actually remember, as remembering. I would just think about it as what was in the pictures."

She says some version of this more than once over the hour. It would be easy to hear it as an old woman being modest, or apologizing for herself. It isn't that. It's precision. Beverly is drawing a line — this I actually hold, this I've reconstructed from a photograph album — and she refuses to blur it just to make a better story. Which means that when she does say I remember this, it's worth leaning in.

Born in Blackwell, Raised on the Lease

Beverly Jane Strotman was born March 21, 1933, in Blackwell, Oklahoma — a detail her brother Wes, in his own interview days earlier, never mentioned. He'd said only "Oklahoma." Beverly filled it in without being asked twice: Blackwell first, then somewhere near Tonkawa, and finally the oil lease at Fitts Town, where most of her childhood memories — hazy as she insists they are — actually live.

The family that raised her there was already large by the time she came along. Her sisters Willa Mae and Eileen were nine and eleven years older, old enough that they weren't playmates so much as second mothers. "Wilma and Eileen basically took care of me and Wes," Beverly said — a small detail that quietly explains a lot about who she trusted, and who cleaned her up when things went wrong.

Which happened more than once.

The Slush Pit, From the Other Side

Wes had already told this story in his own interview: his sister sinking into an abandoned slush pit, himself pulling her free. Beverly's version, told days later without knowing exactly what Wes had said, lines up close enough to trust — and adds one detail that changes the whole picture.

"I slipped in," she said. "I wasn't in under or anything." Wes did pull her out, that part holds. But — and this is purely Beverly's memory, nowhere in her brother's account — "he was reading a comic book, so he wasn't paying any attention to me."

It's a small correction to family legend, and a funny one. Not a dramatic rescue so much as a boy glancing up from a comic book just in time. Willa Mae and Eileen cleaned her up afterward, the way they always did. Beverly doesn't remember what her mother said when she got home. She only remembers the girls doing the work of getting her presentable again — mud and oil sluiced off, dress dealt with, no harm done, at least none that made it into the story she still tells.

Watching Eileen Steal the Car

If there's a set-piece in this interview — the story Beverly tells with the most detail, the clearest sense of I was there and I saw this happen — it's the Sunday her older sister took their father's car.

The family was in the living room. They heard an engine outside and went to look. It was Eileen — sixteen years old, alone, driving CW's car with no lessons and no permission. "She wanted to learn how to drive," Beverly said, "so she was out there driving everywhere." The gravel roads of Fitts Town were not forgiving, and Eileen was having trouble getting the car stopped. Their father was outside, on foot, trying to catch up to his own moving vehicle.

Beverly watched the whole thing from inside the house. It's a different picture than the one Wes gave — he remembered Eileen revving the car in the driveway, a smaller moment, over quickly. Beverly's memory has Eileen actually driving, actually loose on the property, actually hard to stop, with their father in genuine pursuit. Two people, two windows onto the same Sunday afternoon eighty-some years ago, and the versions don't quite match — which, if anything, makes them both feel more real.

The Door That Wouldn't Stay Shut

First grade, and Beverly's mother had come to collect her from school. Aunt Minnie was in the car too. For no reason Beverly can explain — she genuinely doesn't know why she did it — she opened the car door while it was moving, and fell out.

"I got a good scolding for that," she says now, which is likely a significant understatement of a first grader's afternoon after falling out of a moving vehicle in front of an aunt. She doesn't remember the reasoning behind the door-opening any more than Wes could explain why he decided to walk five miles rather than ride a school bus. Whatever runs in that family, it apparently runs young.

Sundays at Grandma and Grandpa's

The best of Beverly's early memories aren't from the lease house at all — they're from the road to Billings, Oklahoma, where her mother's parents lived on land her grandfather had claimed in the 1889 Land Run.

Most Sundays that her father wasn't working, the whole family loaded into the car for the two-hour drive. It was worth it for what waited at the other end: a house her grandfather Joel had built himself, with a staircase up to the bedrooms, a big living room, a dining room, and a kitchen with no running water — a bucket under the sink to catch what needed catching, hauled out and dumped, over and over. And it was worth it, most of all, for the family. "That was Mom's family," Beverly said, and on the good Sundays, all the aunts who could make the drive did — Pearl, Alma, Grace, Minnie — with husbands and cousins trailing behind, everyone converging on the old homestead for fried chicken and mashed potatoes that someone, somewhere, had cooked from a chicken someone else had killed that morning.

There was an order to those Sunday dinners that Beverly describes without any bitterness, just clear-eyed remembering. "The men got to eat first, and they sit at the dining room table. And then the kids got to eat, and we usually just sit on the steps going upstairs. I can remember doing that. And then the women got to eat what was left over."

She says it evenly. It was simply how things were arranged, and she was a child on those stairs long before she was a woman who might have thought to question the arrangement. But she noticed. She's telling you, ninety years later, exactly where she sat.

The Land Run, and the Man Who Wouldn't Move

Beverly doesn't carry the family's founding story firsthand — it came to her through her cousin Harold, who'd heard it straight from their grandfather and told it best at a family reunion in 1993, the one Beverly hosted at her own home in Mattoon to mark the Land Run's hundredth anniversary.

Here's how she tells it: in 1889, her grandfather Joel lined up with thousands of others at the edge of Oklahoma Territory, waiting for the signal that would let them race for a claim. He'd already picked his spot. When the signal came and he got there, someone else — a "sooner," who'd jumped the start — had beaten him to it.

"They took pot shots at each other," Beverly said, "until the other guy got tired of doing it."

With a real gun, she confirms, when Judy asks. Whoever was less willing to die for that particular stretch of Oklahoma dirt eventually rode off, and Joel staked his claim — poorer ground than what he'd wanted, with a creek running through it, but his. He and his wife built a sod house first, then eventually the real one, the one with stairs and a dining room and not quite enough water. Two of their children, Pearl and Alma, were born in that sod house.

It's a story that arrived to Beverly secondhand, through a cousin, at a reunion, decades after it happened. And it's still one of the most vivid things in this entire interview — a measure of how well a good family story survives, even passed hand to hand across a century.

Ida Fern

For two full interviews, Wes Strotman never once said his mother's first name.

Beverly said it in the last few minutes of her own interview, almost as an aside, the way you'd mention something you assumed everyone already knew: **Ida Fern**. She was twenty or twenty-one when she married C.W. Strotman around 1920, in or near Billings, Oklahoma — Beverly isn't certain whether it was at a church or whether the minister simply came to the house. Ida Fern had held a job before the marriage, though Beverly doesn't know what kind. The honeymoon was by train to Colorado, and from the photographs, Beverly gathers they weren't hurting for money at the time. She drove a Chrysler of her own, while C.W. drove Fords.

And there's a quieter thread Beverly pulls out almost apologetically, calling it maybe her own imagination: that when the family left Oklahoma for Illinois, her mother wasn't as happy there as she'd been at home. "It just took her away from her family," Beverly said. The Sunday drives to Billings, the aunts, the whole warm chaos of that extended family table — gone, once they moved north. Beverly didn't ask her mother about it at the time. She just noticed, the way children notice things they don't yet have words for, and carried the noticing for eighty years until someone finally asked.

After Willa Mae and Eileen grew up and moved on with their own lives, Ida Fern's Sundays shrank down to something smaller and, in their way, sadder — she'd take Beverly and Wes into Mount Carmel, where there were two movie theaters. One film, then down to the drugstore for a soda, then the second film. "That was about the only entertainment Mom had, really," Beverly said, without any particular weight in her voice — which is exactly what makes the sentence land as hard as it does.

The Cheese, the Phone, and Other Proof of Her Father

Not every memory from these years is heavy. Some are just funny, and they tell you plenty about C.W. Strotman without needing to say so directly.

Every Christmas, one of his bosses gave him a wheel of Limburger cheese — nobody remembers why, or why the tradition kept going year after year when the response never changed. Every year, C.W. made a production of carrying it out to the woods and burying it. Nobody in the family would eat it. Nobody wanted to be in the same room as it.

And there was the telephone — a party line, shared with neighbors, in the house at Kingsburg. C.W. sat by it often enough that the little table it rested on had become, in Beverly's words, "his desk." One day, worn down by some business frustration Beverly can't recall the details of, and maybe by neighbors who lingered too long gossiping on a line they all had to share, he yanked the phone loose — off the table or out of the wall, she isn't sure which — cursing the whole time. Beverly barely remembers the incident itself. She remembers, clearly, that it was shocking.

Both stories are small. Neither one is really about cheese or telephones. They're about a man whose frustration, when it arrived, arrived completely — the same man who thumped his son's head with hands like hammers, who drove down gravel roads sideways for the fun of it, who Beverly, without bitterness, describes as having given his son more of himself than he ever gave his daughter. "I always felt like he got a lot more treatment than I did," she said, "or whether it was my imagination at that time, you know, which could be." She doesn't push the point. She's simply telling you it was real, and that she's carried it, quietly, for most of a century.

What Beverly Knows Now

Ninety-two years old, sitting in Mattoon, Illinois, talking to her great-niece on a Friday evening — Beverly closed her first interview the way she opened it: grateful, and a little wondering at the whole undertaking.

"This has been so interesting," she told Judy. "It takes some imagination to be thinking about doing this."

She is not a woman who oversells her own memory. She'll tell you flatly when something might just be a photograph she's mistaking for a recollection. But underneath that caution is a mind that held onto a slush pit and a comic book, a car nobody was supposed to be driving, a staircase she sat on as a child while the men ate first, a name — Ida Fern — that nobody else in the family had thought to say out loud. She is the corroborating witness this whole project needed. Not because her memory is perfect. Because she's honest about exactly where its edges are — and everything inside those edges, you can trust.

There's more still to come. Beverly's own adult life — her husband Walt, their children, whatever came after Mattoon became home — hasn't been touched yet. Neither has the full shape of her grandparents' lives, or what became of Willa Mae, or the story of how she and Walt drove to Oklahoma for a library table and left the property "sideways" in the rain. But the foundation is set now, and it's sturdy: two accounts of the same childhood, told by two people who lived it side by side and remember it just differently enough to prove neither one is making it up.

Based on Interview #1, conducted by Judy Birchler, March 6, 2026 (~55 minutes). Story compiled from interview analysis and transcript.