Transcript Staff Writer

With a big smile on her face, as usual, Mary Johnnie Meadors Lester, greeted friends and family at a 90th birthday party given in her honor. Her son and daughter-in-law, Marvin and Glenna Terrell, hosted the event at the Norman Veteran's Center this past week.

Marvin Terrell said his mother was born with a smile on her face and has smiled every day since.

Born Oct. 8, 1916, in Chickasha, she was the youngest of three of John Thomas Meadors and Cornelia Belle Eaton Meadors. She was raised in El Reno, graduating high school in 1933.

An acrobatic dancer, she represented Oklahoma at the Worlds Fair in Chicago in 1932.

In 1933, Lester enrolled in the Morning Side School of Nursing in Tulsa. The school discovered that she was only 17 during the second semester and sent her home until she was the legal age of 18. Instead of home, she went straight to the Oklahoma College for Women at Chickasha and enrolled in their baccalaureate nursing program.

She graduated in 1938, and began serving her clinical requirements at University Hospital in Oklahoma City. There she met a good-looking medical intern named Marvin Terrell, Lester said. They were married in 1939. Their son, Marvin Jr., was born in Lawton in 1940.

After divorcing in 1942, she became an original "Rosie the Riveter," at Douglas Aircraft Co. at Tinker Army Air Base building "gooneybirds" or DC-3s.

During World War II, each family who had someone serving in the armed forces had a silver star in their living room windows. Lester's brother did not enlist and wanting her parents to have their star, she enlisted in the Women's Aarmy Corps in 1945. She had to get a waiver because she had a child.

She was offered a nursing commission as a second lieutenant Lt. but wanting to become an X-ray tech, she entered as a buck private.

She was discharged in 1946 and went back to work for Douglas. In 1947, she enrolled at the University of Oklahoma and she and her son lived at the Woodrow Wilson Complex, a 20 foot by 20 foot military Quonset hut used primarily by returning military. Lester said many of the state's future lawyers, judges, architects, engineers and educators lived in those meager facilities.

Graduating in 1949 with a bachelor's of science degree in sociology, she went to work for the Oklahoma Welfare Department in McCurtain County, headquartered in Idabel. She said Idabel was more meager than college living. The streets were dirt and there were board sidewalks.

Many times traveling on dry creek beds in her 1937 Ford model A, Lester never failed to find her clients in the mountains and hills of southeast Oklahoma.

In 1950, she went to work in Shreveport, La., as a social worker. In 1951, she transferred to New Orleans and attended Louisiana State University at night, where she obtained her teaching credentials. Her first teaching assignment was in Campo, Colo., where she taught eight grades in a one room schoolhouse. She met Birchel Eden and later they married. They lived in a real dug out, with dirt floors.

The Edens moved to Denver where she taught at Loviers and Westminster. She attended the University of Colorado and worked towards a master's degree. Her marriage fell apart, so in 1957, she accepted a teaching position in Trona, Calif. There she met the love of her life, she said, Tillman Larkin Lester. They were married in 1958.

Lester taught in Ridgecrest, Calif., Beatty and Round Mountain, Nev., Moses Lake, Wash., and Mackay, Idaho. She obtained her special education certificate from Fresno State University and taught special education for 25 years. Lester said this is what she had always been searching for; to be able to work with special needs children.

While in Mackay, she lived in a cabin that in was the oldest remaining cabin in the state, she said.

"Her students never forgot her, and were constantly checking to see if she needed anything special," Marvin Terrell said. "And that was because Mom is special, and there is only one 'Mother Mary.'"

In 2000, Lester became a resident at the Oklahoma Veterans Center in Norman.

"She has won the hearts of every one who knows her," Marvin Terrell said. "There will never again be another 'Mary Sunshine.' I know because she has always been my 'sunshine,' my mother Mary.

"I thank God for her every day," Terrell added. "She is the happiest person you'll ever meet, the last of the great generation."

Peggy Laizure 366-3546 Plaizure@normantranscript.com