Maude Ellen Johnson Oakes in 1937

Longtime readers will recall our fondness for the television program Who Do You Think You Are? and our interest in learning more about our great-grandmother, Maude Ellen Johnson Oakes, who as a teenager in the 1890s traveled with her family in a covered wagon from Illinois to Oklahoma.

Maude lived to the ripe old age of 92, so she witnessed firsthand an astonishing amount of change in the world. As we wrote in our previous post about her, after coming to Oklahoma in a covered wagon, she lived long enough to see men on the moon, not to mention the advent of cars, radio, moving pictures and television, women being given the right to vote (she was nearly 40 at the time), the civil rights movement, and on and on.

She missed out on the internet by a good many years, though, and that’s a shame, in a way, because that’s how we continue to pick up more tidbits about her.

We already knew that, in 1920, Maude and her then-husband, Patterson Oakes, lived in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, about 60 miles south of Oklahoma City, with their three teenage sons. Patterson was a rural carrier (mailman? Not sure) and Maude was a salesclerk at a dry goods store.

But shortly thereafter, Patterson apparently did Maude wrong once too often and she divorced him (we have no idea what his offense was, but our grandfather never once spoke of him to his own children, much less us grandkids). The three sons graduated from Pauls Valley High and shortly thereafter Maude moved with the boys to Norman, Oklahoma, where Herbert, Cecil (our grandfather) and Elmer all attended the University of Oklahoma.

We knew that Maude was eventually employed by that same university, working in the women’s gymnasium (she continued working there into her 80s and protested loudly and long when they finally made her retire), but we hadn’t known what she did prior to that after gathering up her belongings and her boys and moving to Norman from Pauls Valley.

But we stumbled upon some new info recently, thanks to the Oklahoma Historical Society’s website. McCall’s was, it seems, a prominent Norman department store. It was in operation by 1909 (and quite possibly earlier), and its slogan that year was “McCall’s: The Daylight Store”; by 1922, the good folks at McCall’s were going with “Norman’s Greatest Store.”

From a 1922 McCall’s advertisement that appeared in a newspaper called The Norman Transcript (still in operation today), we learned that Maude was a department manager at McCall’s—Staple Cottons and Linens was the department she oversaw. And as you’ll see, the advertisement even included a photograph of our Maude.

And all this by typing a couple of key words into the search tool on the OHS website. We think Maude would be impressed!