Eldon Batson

Eldon Ray Batson was born on August 31, 1940 to Harry and Esther Batson. He was born at home in a Texaco Oil Lease Camp near Oilton, Oklahoma. He was the fourth of seven children, six of whom survived to adulthood. He was preceded in death by his parents, one brother, and two sisters. Eldon lived on that lease till he was in the ninth grade at which time the family moved to a lease near Pawhuska. After one year, Texaco moved his dad again, this time to Hominy.

While living in Hominy, he met Frances Pettit. They began dating in high school and dated through college. They married on August 25, 1961 just before their senior year of college. They celebrated their 58th anniversary six months before he passed away.

Eldon was always ambitious. He went to work part time for the Ford garage when he was in the tenth grade and started saving for college. While he was in college at Central State in Edmond, he worked weekends and summers for Sooner Pipe and Supply. His freshman year, he also worked at Thompson Pumps. Eldon graduated with a degree in business in May of 1962 with a MBA at Central Missouri University.

Eldon had been granted three deferments from military duty by the time he was a senior in college and knew he would need to do his military duty soon after college. He decided to join the Navy as his brother Birt whom he always admired had been in the Navy toward the end of World War II. Being ambitious, though, Eldon wanted to go to Officer Candidate School. He did well on all his tests and went to sign his final papers at which time the Navy took his blood pressure. It was too high. He was told they could maybe accept him as a regular enlistee though they weren't ure. Eldon did not want to be classified 4F so he went home to Hominy and joined the Oklahoma National Guard. He always joked that they would take anybody who could walk and had a trigger finger. Actually, they were glad to have him as he was a math minor. While doing his six months of active duty, he was taught how to figure the range settings for big artillery; and Hominy's unit was an artillery unit.

After his active military time, Eldon went to work for Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville. That would be near Hominy for his guard meetings. The only problem was that Phillips had a credit division in Kansas City, Missouri at the time and sent Eldon there. They located on the Kansas side of Kansas City though since his wife Frances had signed with a school district there.

While in the Kansas City area, Eldon transferred to an Army Reserve Unit in Lawrence, Kansas. One of his friends in that unit worked for a small regional utility company, and Eldon thought his friend's work sounded more interesting than the credit work he was doing. So Eldon applied to United Utilities and was hired. He worked for them 30 years, during which time that little company grew into Sprint. Sprint has had problems recently, but during the time Eldon worked for them, it was a great place to work. He held a number of different positions as he advanced over the years. Just a few were assistant district manager, traffic engineer, separations and settlements, head of the commercial and traffic departments in their Junction City office during which time he supervised the building of all the United Phone shops. Then he was moved to Minnesota as assistant vice president in their Minnesota and Iowa office. Eldon and his family which by this time included two sons, DeLos and Clark, loved living in Minnesota. They lived on the back waters of a creek and had a small lake and lots of parkland behind them. They all learned to ski and ice skate, and their sons both played youth hockey.

In 1985, Eldon was transferred back to the Kansas City area, where he again held various positions, mostly in real estate and budgeting at this time. He also designed a security system for one of their buildings and spent several months in Washington, D. C. overseeing the renovation of a building there

when Sprint was awarded a government contract. He also supervised the removal of asbestos for all the Sprint buildings throughout Kansas.

Eldon was a very fair person and a good supervisor. When he left Junction City, the head operator told Frances they would really miss him, that their working conditions and salaries had really improved while he was there. When his son Clark was in the accounting club at UMKC, one of the sponsors told him, he always liked doing projects for Eldon because he made sure special outside hires got paid right on time. DeLos's first job was in a call center for Eclipse, a small telephone company. The first week he was in training, the company's senior accountant came in and said they were having some problems and needed to see if some of the trainees could help them out. As he walked down the aisles talking to the trainees, he stopped at DeLos's desk, looked at his name, and asked, "Batson. Are you any kin to Eldon Batson? DeLos said that was his father to which the accountant said, "Come upstairs with me. If you're Eldon's son, you can do our work."

Eldon did not short change his family while he was working. He was a good husband and father. Frances said that when the boys were babies and toddlers, she always felt sorry for the women who were dragging crying tired children around the stores. She always did her shopping in the evenings or on weekends when Eldon was home because he was always glad to take care of the boys. He was just as good at changing diapers and giving baths as she was. Eldon seldom missed a school program or a ball game as the boys grew.

Shortly after Eldon retired, his father died; and Eldon decided to renovate his folks' house in Hominy. He spent years working on it. He crawled around under the house replacing rotten mud sills and crawled around the attic working on wiring. He took off all the old cracked plaster and replaced it with sheet rock. He stripped years of paint off the woodwork and restored it to a natural wood color. He sanded the floors on his hands and knees so he wouldn't harm the log cabin quilt design in which the wood had been laid. He tore off the front porch and rebuilt it. He ripped out the floor of what had been the back porch and turned it int9 a utility room and half bath. He rebuilt the kitchen cabinets to make room for a refrigerator. Eldon and Frances never moved into the house, though, because Eldon was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2003; and they stayed in Overland Park to be near doctors. KU Med Center had one of the top doctors in the field.

Anecdotes about Eldon. He was a good husband and respected women. I knew women whose husbands totally controlled finances and wouldn't let them have a credit card or write a check. Eldon always trusted me. I arranged to buy an RV once. I had talked to the dealer and to the credit union. When he came in from work one day, I handed him the papers and said if he signed them, we could go get the RV. He just asked ifl was sure we could afford it, I said "Yes." So he signed it. We had it for almost eight years. He also was willing to help around the house. Of course, I knew he would be like this. When we were in college and I was overloaded with assignments but needed to go wash, I told· Eldon he needed to take me to the laundromat instead of the library one night. He said OK but instead of parking beside the library after he picked me up, he pulled up in front and told me to go study, that he would do my laundry and come back to get me. When I took my laundry back to the dorm that night, I panicked. All my blouses were missing. I called Eldon and nervously told him I thought maybe he had left some of my clothes in the dryer. He said he had not. He had just kept my ironing and would bring it to me the next night. He did. It was the only time all through college I ever had ironed pillow cases. How could I not marry a man like that?

Eldon is survived wife Frances of the home, two children DeLos Batson of Overland Park, Kansas, Clark Batson of Hominy, Oklahoma; three siblings Birt Batson of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Don Batson of Fayetteville, Arkansas, Linda Wolfe of Lubbock, Texas. Preceded in death by his parents Harry and Esther Batson, one brother Harry Lester Batson, two sisters Dixie Abel and LaQuita Lomenick.

Services for Eldon will be Saturday, February 22, 2020 at 2:00pm at Chapman-Black Funeral Home and his interment will be at Dixie Bear Creek Cemetery. You may share a memory at www.chapman-black.com.

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