They wore clothes stitched of flour sacks and slept three to a bed, head-to-toe, and clambered out each morning to work their west Texas cotton farm, up in the high plains at a place called Shallowater.
“They were terribly poor,” said Kathy Tess, Lauretta’s daughter, “but they figured that’s the way the world was. They didn’t know anyone who wasn’t poor.”
Perhaps that’s why Lauretta, years later as an adult, so carefully scraped each butter wrap clean before throwing it away, why she carved the bruises out of far-gone fruit others would have tossed into the trash, why she washed and reused even the Styrofoam cups from the coffee shop.
“She was frugal,” Kathy said. “And she hated waste.”
She also hated litter, and a lie, and meanness, but she loved her walks and her books and her poems and her pranks and especially her family.
“The world isn’t the same without her,” said grandson Caleb Gaustad. “We miss her so much.”
Lauretta Virginia Sooter Baker died as she lived, peacefully and gently, at her Bozeman home on Aug. 17. She was happy, family said, and content with the journey that had brought her to Montana, to Missoula for 30 years, this last living survivor of the Shallowater Sooters.
“She didn’t have an easy childhood,” Kathy said. And that’s one powerful understatement.
Lauretta’s mother died when she was just 4 months old, of a heart too big, and they called it dropsy. Her father died when she was 5, beaten by leukemia.
So Lauretta was raised by her many older siblings through the Dust Bowl years, through the Great Depression, matching hard times with quick one-liners.
“Her wit was so sharp,” Kathy said. “She had a very quick and agile mind, and a tremendous sense of humor.”
Lauretta needed all that, of course, to chart a path through a very confusing childhood. So much of the world, back then, made no sense to her.
An example: Lauretta lived in segregated Texas, a place with one drinking fountain labeled “white,” and one labeled “colored.”
Being poor, of course, was a great equalizer, and so Lauretta made no racial distinctions. The “colored” fountain, she decided, must have colored water, and colored water was sure to be better, more flavorful.
And so that’s where the child drank, only to find there was, in fact, no difference at all.
“To the end,” said daughter Marcia Gaustad, “she treated everyone equally. She had no favorites.”
Lauretta Sooter bounced from home to home as a child, from sister to brothers and back again, graduating finally from a high school not far from Lubbock.
“They were a close family,” Marcia said. “They took care of each other.”
Somewhere along the way, a brother introduced her to Wiley Baker, another young west Texas farmer. They all went to a movie house, up in Muleshoe, and Wiley pestered her through the whole show, saying she should ride home with him because he might get a flat and need her help.
They were married on Feb. 1, 1947, built themselves a two-room house and started farming. They grew what they needed, canned 150 quarts of green beans each summer, froze great batches of corn and okra and black-eyed peas.
At one point, Wiley decided he would learn to fly, so Lauretta learned, too, just so she’d know what to do if something went wrong up there. She was only the third woman in the Lone Star state to earn a pilot’s license, Marcie said.
And then, after 20 years of cotton, “Dad got tired of farming,” Kathy said. “They started looking for a new place.”
Turns out, the place was Montana, up near Florence, where Wiley and Lauretta had an old friend from church. Wiley bought a ranch, bought some cows, and after a couple years “decided he really wasn’t much of a rancher.”
Which is how the family became one of the first to subdivide the Bitterroot.
“They moved up here in 1966,” Kathy said, “and by ’68 he was selling off the pieces.”
Wiley and Lauretta moved to town, up the Rattlesnake, and when asked, Lauretta would tell people her husband was “in the lumber business. He just lumbers around.”
In fact, Wiley was a pretty shrewd businessman, always buying low and selling high. He traded and swapped and bought and sold all manner of things - a Coast Guard boat, a diamond ring, a whole bunch of lettuce.
And all the while, “Mother was cooking and cleaning and gardening and cooking and cleaning and cooking and cleaning,” Kathy said. They had three kids - a boy and two girls - then started a sort of self-made ministry up at the house, and packed it with college kids every Sunday.
She’d feed everyone, then feed them again, famous for her fine food.
Her cakes and her pies and her fried chicken and especially her west Texas enchilladas.
“They were so spicy hot,” Marcia said, “that we ate with a box of Kleenex at the table.”
It was a table always full - full of Wiley’s pals, the kids and their friends, the ministry students, the two nephews Lauretta and Wiley raised after they lost their own mom.
“The door was always open to everyone,” Kathy said. “I don’t know how she did it. She worked like a Trojan every day of her life, but she never had a job outside the home.”
It was hard, but not as hard as Shallowater. Lauretta finally had time for a life of her own, a life filled with songs and games and practical jokes, with books and with poems.
“She was a true creative writer,” Kathy said. “For years, she composed the most beautiful Christmas letters, in poetry form. I keep finding little bits of poems that she’d started, just tucked away here and there.”
And “she loved to read. That was the one thing from her childhood that she talked about, how she was always trying to hide away with a book, and someone was always finding her and putting her to work.”
History and fiction and especially historical fiction. A reader, a writer, a quick one-liner. She’d wake early to pack you a lunch, and she’d put a rubber spider in your sandwich.
A listener, a watcher, a collector of details. A baker, a saver and never a complainer. A lover of nature and of family and of friends, “everybody was drawn to her,” Marcia said. “People loved being around her.”
But the hard times, it seems, were never quite behind her.
In 1992, she lost a much-loved son-in-law. Then, the next year, she nursed her own son for months before he, too, died.
“Mom was never quite the same after that,” Kathy said. She’d lost her parents, her siblings, now a child of her own - an only son, the one who’d inherited her fun-loving and witty sense of humor, her partner in pranks.
He was the one narrating “The Night Before Christmas,” while she sat in bed - in her kerchief, of course - banging a pot “to raise such a clatter.”
“They were very close,” Kathy said. “Mom was so hurt to lose him.”
So hurt, in fact, that she just couldn’t stand the house, the town, the whole Big Sky that had been her home for 30 years. And so, in 1994, Wiley and Lauretta up and moved.
“She just needed to go someplace different,” Kathy said. “They went to Tennessee, and that sure was different. It was typical of them - ‘Oh, this looks good, let’s try it there.’ ”
They spent a few years at Piney Flats, then gave up Tennessee to return, finally, to Shallowater. It was Wiley’s choice, and “she wanted to come home to Montana. It was too painful to stay, and even harder to leave.”
So they spent part of their time in Texas, and part in a Bozeman condo, so very, very far from a 1930s Shallowater cotton farm.
Lauretta lived down the street from a granddaughter, and a couple of great-granddaughters, and stayed married to Wiley nearly 60 years before he died in 2006.
“You could always count on her for a laugh,” Kathy said.
She collected jokes, and cut out cartoons, and saved humor columns, and always had the right one-liner at the right time.
A friend, mid-tale, would pause and say, “Well, to make a long story short,” and Lauretta would break in with “Oh, it’s far too late for that.”
To the end, she sang the old songs, and washed her plastic wrap for a second use, and the aluminum foil, too, and ate everything down to the bone.
Hardy, resourceful, resilient, joyous, mischievous. A dreamer, an adventurer, a walker. A natural cook, a diary writer who fed both the family and the birds, a reader who read with a dictionary in hand.
Lauretta remembered well the Dust Bowl, but when she talked about childhood it was about her first county fair, and the wondrous merry-go-round.
Three children, 14 grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren, countless adopted into her heart.
“She was absolutely the most loving person I ever knew,” said grandson Caleb. “She was a hopeless romantic, and she loved life, no matter what it brought. If she saw a person walking in a snowstorm, she’d stop and pick him up - that’s who she was.”
Then Caleb looked around the room, where family had gathered for the funeral.
“I can see bits and pieces of her in everybody here,” he said, “and it always brings a smile to my face when I do.”
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