Lydia Parks: 98 years of Lovell area history and a life well lived

When Lydia Parks tells a story, her eyes twinkle. A spry, active lady, her mind is a treasure trove of Lovell area history, and during an hour spent in her immaculately kept apartment she delights a visitor with tales of early Lovell and of her own very interesting life.Lydia has a lot of history to tell. After all, she’s 98.Lydia came to Lovell in 1917 when her mother and father moved from Park City, Mont., to work in the sugar beet fields. She was around 3 years old.Her father, Christian Wagner, came to America in 1911, Lydia said, from Susannenthal in the Volga River area of Russia, where Germans had immigrated in the 18th century. With him was his oldest son, also named Christian, or Chris.His wife, Elizabeth Rembe Wagner, joined him later (1913), with six more children in tow. Lydia was the only child in the family born in the United States, born Oct. 8, 1914, in Park City.Lydia’s siblings were Christian, Alvina, John, Katie, Alex, Sophie and Fritz. Carl died at the age of 5 just before the family left Russia, and four others had died shortly after birth: Henry, Elizabeth, Amelia and William.With the construction of the Great Western Sugar Factory in 1916, many German families moved to the Lovell area, including the Wagners, who arrived in 1917.“They were all Lutherans just like we are here,” Lydia said. “They all spoke German.”Lydia spoke both English and German growing up, she said, adding, “I spoke German to my mother and father until they died. I can still understand and speak German.The Wagners moved to the Lovell area with families like the Doerrs, Winterhollers, Finks, Schneiders, Scheelers, Spomers, Lohrenzes, Korells and others, Lydia recalled.At that time, the growing population of Lutherans attended the church on Shoshone Avenue near the school, and later a new church building was constructed on Montana Avenue.Although she at times lived away from Lovell, Lydia always remained loyal to St. John’s Lutheran Church, though it is now hard to attend in person.“The pastor (Christopher Brandt) is so nice to me,” she said. “He comes and does things for me. He would loan his car to me if I needed it.”As the youngest child, Lydia worked with the older kids on the farm, and her mother kept the family together while allowing the kids to become their own persons.“My mother managed it very well,” she said. “We all grew up and did our own stuff so we had a life after we left home.”Lydia doesn’t recall having to do a lot of chores, but she did work in the beet fields.“Hebe (Heber) Tippetts said I’ll put Lydia up against any (worker in the field) and she’ll beat them,” she recalled with pride. “I could chop beets better than they could.”When they first moved to Wyoming,…“They cut it up from the Shoshone River and brought it up and put it in there and that ice stayed there almost all through the summer inside this insulated (icebox)…Then we had a pantry where we had our separator – a milk separator – for the cream. We had a big one in there to separate the milk from the cream. We had a big kitchen with a big stove that used wood and coal.”There were actually two houses at the farm, Lydia said, with her folks and the girls living in one house and the boys in the other.There was no indoor plumbing, and the kids bathed in a tub with water heated by the stove.“We had a hot water tank (part of the stove) that held four or five pails of water, and it would get warm when the stove was on,” she explained.…When Prohibition ended in 1933, Lydia saw Mr. Green pour a man the first drink for a customer.…Lydia and Irish married in 1940 in St. Louis, tying the knot when the couple went to visit Irish’s mother, Rose, who was sick and in a hospital. They were married by a Methodist minister, she said.In 1941, the newlyweds moved to Memphis, where Irish went to electronics school via a government program for the military. When the United States entered the war, Irish tried to enlist but could not qualify due to a medical condition. The couple moved to Baton Rouge, La., working for plants connected with the war effort, beginning Irish’s career as a journeyman electrician that would take him from place to place over the next 28 years.In 1943, Irish and Lydia moved back to Lovell and started their own business, opening the Burlington Café two doors to the east of the Shoshone. Named for the Burlington Railroad, the café drew many of the “railroaders” for meals, Lydia said. Their partner, initially, was Ole Olsen.After running the restaurant for 10 years, the Parks sold out to Dan and Julia Keleher, who moved the establishment and opened Dude’s Café.“We started it from nothing,” Lydia said. “It was a very good café. I got very close to the waitresses. The two Wilkerson girls (Helen and Lucy) were very nice girls. They were hard workers.”Lydia played a small part in one of Wyoming’s most famous ghost stories.…Read all of Lydia's story in our Historical Section. Go to Special Sections on this website or read it in your print or digital edition now.by David Peck