at Holy Trinity Church in Okarche. Within a year, Elizabeth gave birth to their first child and named him Franz, continuing the long Rother family tradition of naming their firstborn in honor of St. Francis. He would one day be Stanley’s father.
Stanley’s maternal ancestors — the Schmitts — also emigrated from Germany, leaving Trier in 1843 for Johnsburg, Illinois — what is now a village in northwest suburban Chicago. In thanksgiving for surviving the treacherous voyage across the Atlantic, Frederick Schmitt built a small white chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The building still stands today, alongside what is now Chapel Hill Road. It is maintained by descendants of the Schmitt family.
Frederick Schmitt (later anglicized as Smith) married Wisconsin-native Anna Ottis in October 1882. Around the same time, the Schmitts moved from Illinois to an all-German settlement in St. Bernard Township, Nebraska, about 80 miles northwest of Omaha.
Then, around 1902, the Schmitt family relocated to western Oklahoma. The second of their 10 children was John K. Schmitt (by then, Smith), who married Mary Werner on October 10, 1907. They were blessed with a dozen children, the fourth of whom was named Gertrude Katherine Smith (Stanley’s mother), born in 1913.
The Schmitts/Smiths, like the Rothers, were farmers — and devoted Catholics, active in the daily life of Holy Trinity Church in Okarche.
Becoming Oklahomans
On November 29, 1933, Franz A. Rother married Gertrude Katherine Smith, and she soon thereafter gave birth to Stanley Francis Rother — the first of five children.
The year Stanley was born, the Rother family farm was one of 213,325 working farms in the state of Oklahoma, historically the peak year for family and tenant farming. But it was a tough place and time to be a farmer. Not only was the country still recovering from the market crash and the Great Depression, but Oklahoma and the Great Plains had also been hit hard with terrible drought and horrendous dust storms, creating what became known as the Dust Bowl.
The town of Okarche, founded two years before Oklahoma became a state in 1907, now boasted a population that hovered around 450 people, most of them German by birth or descendants of German immigrants, like Stanley’s family.
In a 1995 interview with historian Father David Monahan, Franz Rother, Stanley’s father, remembered the division between English speakers and German speakers. In his family, Franz grew up speaking German, and he even took German his first four years at school at Holy Trinity. “If my dad would catch us kids talking English,” Franz noted, “he would say, ‘Don’t you kids know how to speak?!’ ”
For the Catholic community, bilingual services were the norm. Following the tradition of their pastor Monsignor Zenon Steber, when someone met a priest or a sister in Okarche, they would first salute them with the words, “Praised be Jesus Christ” (in German). Monsignor Steber’s homilies at Holy Trinity Church were in both German and English.
According to Franz, there was a big department store in town called “Hau-Eischen,” an L-shaped building that wrapped around the bank and fronted on Main Street. The department store stood at the site of what is now Eischen’s, the oldest bar in Oklahoma — and famous for its secret-recipe fried chicken. When Stanley was born, U.S. Route 81, a fully paved federal highway, ran through the township of Okarche. By the time he turned four, the Northwest Highway (OK-3), connecting Oklahoma City and Okarche, was opened as a gravel-surfaced road.
The Rother Family
Born on March 27, 1935, in the midst of a western Oklahoma dust storm, Stanley Francis Rother grew up instinctively connected to the land — and the land he belonged to was grand, made up of big, expansive skies, and miles and miles of rolling prairie visible in every direction.
Although Franz and Gertrude named him Stanley in honor of the many relatives in Gertrude’s lineage named Stanislaus, when it came time for his baptism two days after he was born, Monsignor Steber would not baptize the baby boy unless his first name was Francis, continuing the family tradition of naming their first boy after St. Francis of Assisi.
But in spite of his baptism record stating it otherwise, to his extensive family and other friends, he was always Stanley.
Franz and Gertrude’s family grew quickly. On May 24, 1936, 14 months after Stanley, Elizabeth Mary (Betty Mae, now Sister Marita) was born. A year later, James Henry (Jim) was born on July 13, 1937. The following year tragedy struck the family when a baby girl, Carolyn Ann, was born on November 10, 1938, and she unexpectedly died the next day. Two years later, on June 2, 1940, Thomas Joseph was born. With four children under the age of five, life in the Rother farmhouse must have been busy and full of life.
In 1933, shortly before he and Gertrude Smith were married, Franz Rother made his first payment on their house. Built in 1918, this house where the five Rother children were born and raised is now home to their son Tom and his wife, Marti, and their family. Until the 1950s, the house had no running water. A pump in the screened-in porch off the kitchen was their source of drinking water. A bucket of water with a dipper for all to use was on a kitchen cabinet. The cook stove burned coal and wood, which meant that in the winter the kitchen became the center of all family activity, including daily homework around the table.
“Of course we didn’t know these were inconveniences while we were growing up. It was the same for everyone else we knew,” reflected Sister Marita. “Most of the money that people had back then went into the farmland,” Tom added, smiling. “As long as doors shut and the windows opened, everything was okay.”
The Rother family never thought of themselves as being poor, except perhaps when the wheat crop was hailed out or, as Tom remembered, “the year the drought hit and we could cut wheat all day and we wouldn’t fill a truck.” But the number of good years in between kept farmers hopeful from year to year.
The large family garden could be watered from the tall windmill close to the barn, Sister Marita explained, and it provided much fresh produce for their meals in the summer months. Countless hours were spent canning enough vegetables, fruit, and meat to get them through the cold winter months. Raising chickens and milk cows provided the family with milk, cream, butter, eggs, and meat. Money from selling eggs and cream at the grocery store, recalled the Rother siblings, helped them to buy necessities like flour, sugar, rice, cocoa, and other condiments. With these they were able to have homemade bread, cinnamon rolls, pies, and cakes. “Our mother was the best cook and baker!” said Tom and Sister Marita.
According to Stanley’s first biographer, Father David Monahan,* a favorite memory of Gertrude about her oldest son took place on an ordinary afternoon as the family feasted on watermelon. After the group went back to work, discarding the watermelon rinds outside, Gertrude had a good laugh at the sight of a young Stan in the yard with a rind encircling his neck.
By the age of five, each of the Rother children joined in the work of the farm, with specific chores assigned to each one. The younger ones helped collect eggs and feed the chickens, and by age eight, everyone milked the cows. The family had five or six milk cows, and they had to be milked twice daily: at 6:30 in the morning and at 5:00 in the evening. This took 30 to 45 minutes, including separating the milk from the cream. On school days, this meant wearing old clothes for chores, then changing into overalls for the boys and a dress for Sister Marita before going to school.
Stanley began driving the family tractor when he was 10 years old, and it became obvious from the beginning that he excelled at learning and working with anything that required mechanical know-how. His father, Franz, liked to tell the story of how he “rigged up a safety belt” for Stanley when he began to drive the tractor, in order to keep him from falling off
