Karolyn is ready for anything
“I
was going to paint and then after I had my first child discovered that you could not paint and take care of a baby, too, “says
Karolyn Rogers of Midland, “because you can get lost in a painting for twelve hours or more and I realized I could not do that. And so I was going to wait until I had time to paint. That would be now and now I don't want to.”
Karolyn loves to dress up, even when she's at home. “I just can't get used to people wearing jeans a t-shirts and thinking it's OK to go to public places dressed like that.”
Karolyn also has a love of Bloody Marys, fine foods and cars with caramel-colored interiors. “They don't show dirt and are easy to keep clean. They just look nice all the time.”
Once a friend suggested she buy a fancy foreign car. “I said are you kidding? I grew up in the oil patch. Where we go we need to have a car that's easy to work on.”
Karolyn has amazing patience and has used it several times in Las Vegas. She has won the $10,000 jackpot many times playing the two and five dollar slot machines. “I don't know how many times. I've been playing them a long time. I work at it and stay with it until it's going to give. That's what I do. If I think it's about to hit I won't quit. I guess when you play long enough you get a sense of when it's about to hit.”
A prime example of her patience is her effort to discover how her father died during World War Two. Karolyn was five years old at the time. Her father died on April 22,1945, just two weeks before the end of the war. About the only thing the US Army told her mother was that he died in combat. No further details.
For fifty years Karolyn struggled with not knowing what happened. Finally at age 62 she went to work to find out. She went through stacks of letters her father had sent home. She leaned that his outfit, the 12th Armored Division held reunions every year and she went to many of them, making new friends and meeting her father's fellow soldiers. At one reunion she met the doctor who treated him after he was wounded.
“I found out he was driving a half track and it got blown up going up an embankment leading to a bridge they were going to take.”
In 2013 Kathryn wrote a book about her family and what it's like to lose a dad. It's titled WHEN DADDY COMES HOME and has gone through four printings. She says writing the book has given her a sense of peace end even some joy.
Her husband Jerry has a restored 1942 Ford pickup.
“I found out it's called the Fighting Ford because it was in World War Two. It's pretty cute. Real Sharp. Inside on the dashboard, as a surprise to me, Jerry had them paint the 12th Armored Division insignia.