Becky Elder

Photo courtesy of Becky Elder

This section highlights a local person of interest and admiration, a person whose achievements, manner, leadership, and/or character distinguish them.  If you know people we should include, please apprise us at editor@candor.news, and we will interview them for future issues of Candor. In your submission, include the person’s name, noteworthy traits and accomplishments, and their contact information.

In this issue, we are highlighting Becky Elder.

1. What established you in Wichita and now keeps you here?

How fun. I am all Wichita forever and ever. Great grandparents entrenched and the rest of us never left. We are Stickers.....what keeps me here now is the investment of ourselves in this place. History teaches that only very recently did people relocate as a preference. It was plague, famine and war that drove them out. Now, we just move around.

2. As you look back over the course of your life, highlight a couple of your most satisfying accomplishments -- and explain why they are highlights. 

Like Thomas Jefferson, put these on my gravestone: "She was privileged to marry a good man and, in unison with him, able to birth 7 children and adopt one, raising them all to be sensible, including the adults." Marriage is one of those commitments to a place and to the people in that place that must be seen as a benefit for everyone. You know the benefits of marriage, not just for two, but for all. It trickles down.  There is also an endless list of people who came along with our busy life from absolutely every direction. Building and nurturing the networks of friendship is a life well spent. I also have enjoyed being able to grow lots of what we eat. Not all of it, but a garden grows self-confidence not just food. Call me a black-belt gardener.

3. In this difficult year of international pandemic and inflamed national, election-year politics, what can you forecast as a "coming attraction," or an ameliorative of sorts?

 Disorientation of all sorts will require us to up our game of creativity and industriousness. We might even see an uptick in self-reliance, making Henry David Thoreau smile.

4. Life is full of lessons.  What is a valued lesson a parent or mentor instilled in you -- and to what effect? 

Oh my, for certain my father saying, "You can cut off your leg or believe me that it hurts to cut off your leg." And my mother saying, profound philos0pher she was, " Do you really think that is a good idea?" And my beloved literature professor in college saying, "All Shakespeare teaches us is the nature of God, man and appearance vs reality."

5. Do you have a piece of advice for the young?  And for the aging? 

For the young, "stay at it without expectation of any returns except the joy of your youth." For the oldsters, like myself, "Love more than you fear. It might help you keep your balance. And when you can't sleep because of your fears, sing." 

6. What will be a hopeful path to Wichita's future well-being? 

Make certain that we behave ourselves, remembering we are  just folks and don't try to find greener grass. Work where you are with what you have to the advantage of all. It can be done.