Verona Willard Banta

1887-1967

The birthday prompt points me to my great-grandmother, Verona (Willard) Banta.  She shared the same birthday with my father, exactly fifty years apart.  It was easy to remember her birthday and how old she was, as it was simple to add fifty to my father’s age.   I am fortunate to have several memories of her from my childhood. 

Verona acquired the nickname “Gee Gee” (hard G) from one of my cousins trying to say Grandma. As a result, all her great grandchildrens kids called her Gee Gee.  She was the first person I knew in a wheelchair, as she had been crippled by a broken hip after falling in the bathtub.   She had the first color TV in the family and I remember when we all went to her house to watch the Rose Parade on TV in color!  She was the first person I knew with a piano in the house.  It was fun to tap the keys trying to find a melody…. until the parents couldn’t take it anymore and had us play with something else. 

 She was also the oldest person I knew and although she was “big boned” Mom always told us to be careful around her as if she were fragile.  

Whenever we visited it was part of a large family gathering, so there was no time to have a conversation or listen to stories surrounded by so many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  She loved to play cards, and the adults would almost always be in the kitchen playing canasta.  All the children would be playing in the front yard or the living room.  It was not easy to get the whole family coordinated and our houses were not that big, so it was mainly Christmas and her birthday when we would visit. 

Verona Willard was born July 15, 1887, in Ford County, Kansas to Samuel Willard and Lenora Bryan.  The oldest of three children, she was raised on a farm in Bucklin, Kansas.  Her father was a successful farmer and served as a justice of the peace which allowed them to have a home in town in addition to the original farmhouse.  Her father was affectionately known as “Grandpa Willard” who loved family gatherings.  He was the patriarch and kept his family close. 

She married Theodore “TJ” Banta, at age 18.  They farmed land close by Grandpa Willard’s land, just a few parcels down the road, appearing on the same page of the Sodville, Kansas 1910 census.   Between 1907 and 1912 they had four children: Clarence, Marvin, Belle, and Vernon.  They moved to Lamar, Colorado sometime between 1915 and 1918.  Sadly, their eldest child, Clarence died at age eleven from Influenza during the great flu pandemic in 1918. In 1929, after the death of Grandma Willard, they moved back to Bucklin, to help care for Grandpa Willard who was 84 years old at that time.   They helped care for him for the next ten years, until his death in 1939.   

Verona and TJ moved to Hayward, California in the 1940’s to be closer to their sons Marvin, Vernon and their families.  TJ helped Marvin run the cabinet shop he owned on Alice Street.  TJ died August 14, 1951 in Hayward.  His remains went by train to Bucklin where he is buried in the family plot with Grandpa Willard and family.  Verona would live fifteen more years, and her sons were always close by, checking on her every day.  Thankfully this habit allowed her to be found timely when she broke her hip in the bathtub.  She died January 10, 1967 at age 79.  Her sons accompanied her remains on the train for burial with her family in Bucklin.  I will always remember Gee Gee smiling and surrounded by the family she dearly loved.