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"Mary Grace, what are you doing living out there in that big, old house by yourself?"

Shelley E. Huguley, Editor

November 1, 2019

6 Min Read
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Mary Grace Lebeda with her sidekick Stormy on the front porch of her farmhouse in rural Ponca City, Okla. Mary Grace has lived on her farm for 60 years.Shelley E. Huguley

In 2011, days away from retirement as an elementary school librarian, Mary Grace Lebeda, unexpectedly lost her husband Ervin after 55 years of marriage. Overnight she became the sole owner of their family farms in northwest Oklahoma and had a decision to make. Would she stay on the farm? Or would she go?

For 52 years, Mary Grace and Ervin had called their Ponca City farmhouse home. Together they raised two children, Marc and Lisa, and grew primarily wheat, soybeans, and milo in the fields nearby. On a Sunday evening in the 1960s, with their land covered in wheat and a week from harvest, the couple found themselves staring out their dining room window as a hail storm destroyed their crop.

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“We had just made the biggest contribution or pledge to the church that we’d ever made,” she says. “Anybody who tells you, you are too big to fail is wrong. They haven’t been slapped yet and the slap is there for everybody, whether it’s their kids, their crops or whatever. And that’s what makes you strong.”

The Lebeda’s had no harvest that year and therefore no income. But they did have a farm loan to repay, so Mary Grace went back to work.  

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For a year, the couple juggled her fulltime employment and the farm. Sometimes their young children would ride the tractor with Ervin while she was teaching home economics. Other times they stayed with friends. The school wanted Mary Grace to teach another year, but her family wanted otherwise. “Everybody was ready for mom to be home,” Mary Grace recalls.

Back on the farm fulltime, the family frequented Midwest Dairy and Creamery when they needed milk or ice cream. One day while Ervin was purchasing milk, the attendant announced it would be the last the creamery would sell milk. “We’re not making any money,” the attendant said. So, being the entrepreneur that Mary Grace says he was, Ervin asked, “How much would it take to keep you open?”

After counting the inventory, they sold the dairy and the store to Ervin for the price of the inventory and it became Lebeda’s Ice Creamery.

“He was a risk-taker,” Mary Grace says. “The biggest risk was going out every day and putting seed in the ground and seeing if it would come up. And if it did come up, are we selling futures? Are we selling contracts? Don't even talk to me about that stuff. If it comes up and it's harvested and it's at the elevator, I'm going to sell it the next day.”

By the 1980s, times were tough again on the Lebeda farm, as they were for so many farm families at that time. The farm wasn’t making money, so Mary Grace returned to Oklahoma State University to work on her third degree and become recertified to teach, receiving her master’s in music. The farmhouse became her studio where she taught private music lessons to local students: flute, piano, clarinet and saxophone. But she was unable to find a fulltime job. She says she was either overqualified for some teaching positions or under-qualified for others. So, she began to ask herself, “What is it the schools need?”

About that time school systems had begun to require a Master of Library Science for librarians, so Mary Grace headed back to OSU, this time in her 50s and to become a certified library media specialist while also earning her doctorate. Having completed her coursework and only lacking her dissertation, she was hired as the library media specialist at an elementary school in nearby Enid. And because a doctorate was only going to increase her salary by about $1,000 a year, she said, “Phooey on that. Good by doctorate. I’m perfectly happy without that piece of paper.”  In 2006, Mary Grace was named Teacher of the Year by her campus and today the bookshelves of her farmhouse are lined with novels and children’s collections, proof of her love for the written word.

But a time came when the Lebeda’s thought they might need to leave the farmhouse. Ervin had survived five-bypasses and the couple was contemplating whether to move closer to doctors. While working in the library one day, Mary Grace received a phone call from Ervin who was bidding on land at an auction in Garfield County. He was bidding but so were other hopefuls. When the bid was just under $200,000, Mary Grace told Ervin to bump it to $275,000 and give them a heck of a scare. And scare them he did. She says she turned around to a library full of kids and exclaimed, “We bought the farm!”

A couple of years passed and the Lebeda’s still had not left their Ponca City farmhouse. She recalls Ervin looking at her and saying, “If you make me move, it will kill me,” to which she replied, “Don’t worry. I figured out the same thing. I can’t move, either.” That was in 2008.

Fast forward to 2011, about six months after Ervin’s death. Mary Grace was retired and considering moving to Enid to be closer to her children and grandchildren when she says it hit her. “‘I don’t need to move to Enid. I’m fine right here.’

“People said, ‘Mary Grace, what are you doing living out there in that big, old house by yourself?’ I said well, what do you expect me to do? This is my house. This is what we built together. I’m not leaving.”

Since her decision to stay, Mary Grace has share-crop leased their farmland, so she can still be a part of the decision making. But she has also further developed a small area on an 80-acre tract of land into wildlife habitat. With the help of David Fink, owner of Plots Gone Wild and a lifelong friend and employee of the Lebeda’s, the two have transformed eight acres, an area too narrow for large farm equipment to fit, into a food plot for deer.

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David Fink, Plots Gone Wild, and Mary Grace Lebeda and her dog Stormy. Fink and Lebeda have worked together to create wildlife habitat for deer. 

 

“David is a keen observer of what nature does and what works and what doesn’t,” she says. “What he’s done is create a safe place for the deer. It has water, food, shelter and medicinal trees like cedar that they nibble on.”

While this area, adjacent to a pond, has become a feeding ground for bucks and does and a landing station for ducks and geese, it’s what Mary Grace sees out the north windows of her second-story sewing room that might be of the greatest value, in a house she almost left but decided to keep and enjoy the view.  

See, Difficult to access farmland is developed into wildlife habitat

About the Author(s)

Shelley E. Huguley

Editor, Southwest Farm Press

Shelley Huguley has been involved in agriculture for the last 25 years. She began her career in agricultural communications at the Texas Forest Service West Texas Nursery in Lubbock, where she developed and produced the Windbreak Quarterly, a newspaper about windbreak trees and their benefit to wildlife, production agriculture and livestock operations. While with the Forest Service she also served as an information officer and team leader on fires during the 1998 fire season and later produced the Firebrands newsletter that was distributed quarterly throughout Texas to Volunteer Fire Departments. Her most personal involvement in agriculture also came in 1998, when she married the love of her life and cotton farmer Preston Huguley of Olton, Texas. As a farmwife, she knows first-hand the ups and downs of farming, the endless decisions made each season based on “if” it rains, “if” the drought continues, “if” the market holds. She is the bookkeeper for their family farming operation and cherishes moments on the farm such as taking harvest meals to the field or starting a sprinkler in the summer with the whole family lending a hand. Shelley has also freelanced for agricultural companies such as Olton CO-OP Gin, producing the newsletter Cotton Connections while also designing marketing materials to promote the gin. She has published articles in agricultural publications such as Southwest Farm Press while also volunteering her marketing and writing skills to non-profit organizations such as Refuge Services, an equine-assisted therapy group in Lubbock. She and her husband reside in Olton with their three children Breely, Brennon and HalleeKate.

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