Living High on the Hive

Wes Strotman and Beverly Homann, together — Joint Interview, March 9, 2026

Some interviews are about a person. This one is about a woman who spent much of her life in the background of other people's stories — a wife, a mother, "Mom" — even though her own children knew exactly who she was.

That's the gift of this joint session: two people in their nineties, on the phone together, filling in each other's memory of a woman who ran a household mostly alone, in an oil patch full of men, and did it with a kind of quiet, exacting grace her children are still, all these decades later, trying to do justice to.

A Woman Alone in the Oil Fields

Before there was a Kingsburg, before there was a Mattoon, there was a lease house out past Fittstown, Oklahoma, with no neighbor for a mile in any direction. Their father moved for the work, the way oil men did, and their mother moved with him — into a landscape that was almost entirely men. Roughnecks, superintendents, drillers. She knew the grocer. She knew the woman at the clothing store. She was rarely, if ever, invited into anyone's home, "because she wasn't acquainted," Wes said — not unkindly, just as fact. A young wife, out in the oil patch, building a whole domestic world essentially alone.

And she built it well. She baked — pies cooling on a shelf just outside the kitchen window, bread rising under a house rule so strict Wes still remembers it word for word: don't jump around in the kitchen while she's baking, "she doesn't do the baking goods any good." She canned tomato juice by the quart, stored in the unheated garage against the coming winter. She picked blackberries wild. When dust storms rolled through — real Oklahoma dust storms, the kind that don't ask permission — she laid damp towels along every windowsill and under every door, and both her children remember it independently, confirming each other in real time on the call: "You remember that, Beverly?" "Yeah, yeah, I do."

She had a gas stove, too, when almost nobody else around them did. Wes calls it "living high on the hive" — a phrase that captures something bigger than the stove. They had more than their neighbors and never once thought of themselves as having more. "We didn't recognize there was any higher or lower people," Wes said. "It was all the same." A whole childhood philosophy, delivered in one sentence by a ninety-four-year-old man remembering a kitchen appliance.

The Pie and the Man Who Earned It

One story tells you more about this woman than any timeline could. A homeless man passed by the lease house one day and saw — or smelled — a pie cooling on that shelf outside the window. He asked if he might have a piece.

She didn't turn him away, and she didn't just hand it over either. You're going to have a piece, she told him, if you get it. He said he was willing to work for it, and she put him to a chore. When it was done, he got his slice — and by every account, he could not get over how good it was.

It's a small transaction, but it's a complete moral education in miniature: generosity, yes, but generosity with dignity attached, for both of them. Wes tells it like a man who's turned the memory over many times and still finds it exactly right.

The Tomato Juice, and a Daughter Who Meant Well

Not every domestic story in this house went smoothly. One winter, some of the canned tomato juice in the garage went bad. Their mother sent Aileen — Judy's own mother — out to pitch the spoiled jars and save the good ones.

Aileen couldn't tell which was which. She threw out most of them, good and bad alike.

"I can remember mom being very upset with her," Beverly said, and there's real affection buried in how she tells it — not at her sister's expense, just the plain comedy of a task that seemed simple and wasn't. It's a small story. It's also, quietly, one of the only surviving portraits anyone has managed to give of Aileen as a girl still living at home, still capable of a completely understandable mistake, decades before she became someone's grandmother.

Rice Bowls and Rare Affection

If their mother's love came out mostly through labor — pies, jars, damp towels — their father's came out sideways, through teasing that could tip either way depending on the day.

One dinner, young Wes started sniffing around his bowl of rice like a dog, clowning for the table. C.W. didn't say a word. He just pushed his son's head down into the bowl. "That'll teach you," Wes said, laughing about it still. "Everybody got a kick out of that but me."

It's the kind of memory that could easily have curdled into something bitter, and in Wes's telling, it never does — it sits right alongside the one piece of real tenderness he can offer about his parents' marriage. "I can remember Dad patting her on the butt," he said, "when she was at the stove or in the kitchen. That was about as lovey-dovey as I guess I can remember." A pat on the way past the stove. That's the whole visible record of affection between C.W. and his wife, as far as either of their children can recall — and Wes offers it not as a complaint, but as a simple accounting of what was there.

A Man Who Never Went to War

C.W. Strotman was called up for the WWI draft in his early twenties. He bought a new Hudson, drove all the way to Pennsylvania to report — a serious undertaking in that era — and was told, on arrival, we don't need you now. He turned around and drove home. He was never called again, never served, and by the time WWII came around he was already in his forties, too old for it. His younger brother Elmer went instead, serving in the Coast Guard out of St. Louis, while Elmer's wife, Aunt Merle, worked for a wealthy older woman named Mrs. Cousley near the St. Louis zoo and, in her spare hours, hand-made a lace tablecloth that Beverly still keeps on her own dining room table today — a direct, touchable thread back to a woman most of the family never met.

The Party Line and the Wall

Every account of C.W. eventually circles back to his temper, and this interview adds its best example yet: the telephone.

Out at Fittstown, and later, the family shared a party line — a dozen households on one wire, everyone waiting their turn. C.W. needed that phone for business, for suppliers, for the endless logistics of keeping wells running, and he had no patience for neighbors who lingered on gossip while he waited. "He perched it until he was getting mad," Wes said. And then, more than once, in a fury: "The phone ripped off the wall."

It's funny in the telling. It's also completely consistent with everything else this family knows about him — a man whose frustration, once it broke, broke all the way.

Wildcatter Blood

C.W. spent his working life as a superintendent, managing other men's wells with real skill and real authority. But something in him never stopped wanting to gamble on his own. After his working years wound down, he kept drilling — speculative wells near Mattoon, ten and twenty and thirty thousand dollars at a time, money that came out of the family and caused real arguments at home. He was still drilling one after his wife had died. He eventually owned five separate drilling machines and sold one of them for a hundred thousand dollars — real money, put right back into another well that came up dry.

"He had wildcatter blood in him," Wes said. "Had to go out there, had to spend his last penny, drill the wells." And then, without much drama: "He always had dreams of getting rich in the oil fields, and it didn't work out that way." No bitterness in it. Just an honest final tally on a man who dreamed in a specific, expensive language his whole life.

Eloise, and the Marriage of Two Misunderstandings

After his wife died, C.W. eventually met a woman named Eloise — a secretary at Hot Springs, Arkansas, decades younger than him, in her twenties or thirties to his sixties. Wes, at eighteen, had driven his father down to Hot Springs himself, in the family's big white Chrysler, while C.W. was recovering from hip surgery. C.W. later left his Ford there for Eloise to drive — which meant, to her, that she was marrying a man of real means, two cars and all.

The truth came out on a visit to Mattoon, when Eloise saw photographs Aileen had taken of C.W.'s well-drilling operation and realized, for the first time, that he'd sunk a hundred thousand dollars into speculative wells without ever telling her. "Eloise blew the ceiling," Wes said.

Looking back on the whole arrangement, Wes offers what might be the single driest sentence in the entire project: "She thought she was getting a big money man from Mattoon that had two cars. And he thought he was getting a young companion that was going to drive him all over the country. Both of them got fooled." He adds, of Eloise herself: "She was hard to take. For me, anyway." Beverly agrees it was a common feeling in the family. Nobody pretends it was a happy marriage. Nobody pretends to be surprised.

What Jerry Williams Taught Him

Not everything in this childhood was oil and arguments and canned tomatoes. Nearby lived a family called the Williamses — self-sufficient farmers with a smokehouse for pigs, apple and pear trees, beehives, a garden that fed themselves and, generously, sometimes the Strotmans too. Jerry Williams, a hunter and trapper, taught young Wes something he still describes in loving, exact detail nine decades later: how to hunt wild honey.

"You go out in the woods and you sit down," Wes explained. "You hear a bee. You watch which way it's going — is it a zigzag or a straight line? Zigzag, it's just looking for food. Straight line, it's heading for the hive." Follow the straight-line bee far enough, and it leads you home — and if you rob that hive in cold weather, when the bees are too sluggish to fight back, you come away with the honey and your skin intact.

It's a small, glowing memory in the middle of an interview otherwise full of family friction and money trouble — proof that even inside a hard, moving, oil-field childhood, there was still a man willing to sit still in the woods with a boy and teach him how to read a bee's flight like a compass.

What Wes Wishes He'd Said

Near the end of the interview, without much preamble, Wes offered the line that this whole project may end up circling back to.

"If I knew what I knew now, there was a lot more discussion I'd have had with them," he said — about his parents, about everything left unsaid. "We never did sit down and talk birds and bees or anything with anybody. And I didn't sit down anytime and tell mom that I loved her, because I assumed she knew. But never said that."

There's no self-pity in it. Just a plain, late accounting — a ninety-four-year-old man naming, out loud, the one sentence he never got around to saying to a woman who put damp towels on windowsills to keep the dust out and gave a stranger pie only after he'd earned it. Beverly, for her part, closes her own version of it gently: "I know she was proud of them," she said — of Wes, of her sisters, of all of them. Not claiming credit for herself. Just affirming, for the record, that the pride was real, even if it was never spoken either.

What Was Still Missing — and What Turned Up

At the time of this interview, their mother still had no maiden name in the family's spoken record — not after three sittings, not after ninety-some combined years of two children trying to remember her. Neither Wes nor Beverly could say where she was from, or how she and C.W. had met, though Wes suspected she must have worked before marriage. Both of them pointed, hopefully, toward a fifty-page family history written by Wes's son Jim — a document that might hold what memory alone couldn't supply.

It did. Jim's research fills in exactly what this interview was reaching for: her name was **Ida Fern Burch**, born December 12, 1897, on a homestead claim her own father, Joel Mickelberry Burch, had held in Noble County, Oklahoma, since the Cherokee Strip Land Run of 1893 — the same land run Beverly had described secondhand, through a cousin's retelling, in her own interview days earlier. Ida Fern married Charles Wesley Strotman on June 23, 1920, in Billings, Oklahoma, not far from the homestead where she'd been born. She died July 29, 1969, in Mattoon, Illinois — the same town where, decades later, both of her surviving children would sit for these interviews and try, without quite realizing they already had the pieces, to bring her back into focus.

She is not just "the mother" in the background of her son's stories about riding on car fenders anymore. She is Ida Fern Burch Strotman — a homesteader's daughter, born on land her father had defended through years of nighttime gunfire before she ever drew breath, who grew up to manage dust storms and homeless men and spoiled tomato juice and a husband whose love came out sideways, in rice-bowl teasing and a hand at the small of her back by the stove. She did it largely alone, in a landscape built for men, without a single neighbor for a mile. And now, at last, she has her whole name attached to the whole life her children have been handing down, piece by piece, one interview at a time.

Based on Joint Interview #3, conducted by Judy Birchler with Wes Strotman and Beverly Homann together, March 9, 2026 (~50–52 minutes). Story compiled from interview analysis and transcript excerpts.