Vol 40 • No. 3
www.theactiveage.com Kansas’Award-winning Award-winningTop Top55+ 55+News NewsSource Source Kansas’
All That Jazz
Friends U. prof retiring, but not from music
ACTIVE AGING PUBLISHING, INC 125 S West St., Suite 105 Wichita, Ks 67213
Nonprofit Organization U.S. Postage PAID Wichita, KS 67276 Permit 1711
By Joe Stumpe Lisa Hittle discovered jazz as a seventh grader in Winfield. It wasn’t just the swing and soul of what’s been called America’s only original art form, it was the chance to do something creative with others. “The jazz band gave me a place where I fit and belonged,” Hittle, a saxophonist and Friends University professor, said. Hittle has spent the last three decades creating something similar at Friends, turning one not-verygood jazz band into a multi-faceted, award-winning program. She’s retiring May 31, but will first oversee the 26th annual Friends University Jazz Festival, which she started as a recruiting tool for those students. The Feb. 15-16 festival is built around two days of clinics for some
Courtesy Photo
Lisa Hittle tutors students in one of Friends University’s jazz combos. She also works year round on the Friends annual jazz festival, which takes place this month.
850 high school, junior high and junior college students from around Kansas. It concludes with a concert at the Crowne Uptown Theatre featuring The Four Freshmen, an international touring group. Also performing will be the Friends Jazz Vocal and the Friends University Alumni Big Band, a group Hittle put together just for the occa-
sion. “We talk a lot in my program about it being family,” Hittle said. Indeed, when citing influences, Hittle names not just musical greats but a certain former football coach, known for his family-oriented approach and "16 goals for success." See Jazz, page 7
A second chance at love By Amy Houston There is life after divorce or the death of a longtime spouse. This Valentine’s Day, three couples will celebrate the new partners who helped them find love when they least expected it. Rick and Faye Thornton It took time after they met – and some good-natured pushing from friends – for Rick and Faye Thornton to begin dating. Faye was an administrative assistant whose husband died in May 2005. When he was sick, he bought a house in Valley Center because he had children in the area. That’s what brought Faye from Houston to Valley Center. Rick was a Methodist minister whose wife died in November 2005.
Questions about services?
Photo by Rob Howes
Faye Thornton wasn't looking to marry when she met her husband, Rick.
Central Plains Area Agency on Aging or call your county Department on Aging: 1-855-200-2372
See Love, page 14
February 2019
‘Farm girl’ looks back on 107 years
By Joe Stumpe Don’t expect Edna Hall to single out one remarkable day from her remarkably long life. “My life was all pretty interesting,” Hall, who will turn 107 on Jan. 31, said. “I was a farm girl and there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do on a farm.” She might keep a walker handy these days, but Hall has a firm grip, vivid memory and mischievous laugh. Born in McPherson County, near Conway, in 1912, when William Howard Taft was in the White House and World War I had not yet started, Edna moved with her family to a farm outside Dighton when she was about two years old. She was the fifth of seven children who rode a horse-and-buggy to school five miles every day. She milked cows before school and drove a cultivator hitched to four horses to tend her father’s cornfields. “My dad didn’t have a tractor ‘til way late,” she recalled. The dust storms that hit Kansas in the 1930s were another character builder. Airborne soil piled up like snow drifts in and around everything. “We didn’t have air conditioning. We didn’t have running water, except what came through the windmill. It (dust) came in the house through the windows. All you could do was take gunny sacks, get them wet and hang them in the windows.” Hall married in her twenties and moved onto a farm that had been in her husband’s family since the 1880s. An old tinted photograph of it hangs in her apartment in the Kansas Masonic Home today, showing a big white farmhouse and barn linked by a picket fence, standing astride a dirt road and green fields. Her husband, Freeman, farmed. They raised three See 107 years, page 3
Butler County: (316) 775-0500 or 1-800- 279-3655 Harvey County: (316) 284-6880 or 1-800-279-3655