When My Mother’s Generation Was Growing Up

Lottie Margaret Atkison was a twin, she and her brother Bill being products of Grandmother’s next to last pregnancy. She became the musician of the family, the only one to stick with the piano until she had mastered it and the one who would branch out to other instruments. “If it had strings, Lottie could play it,” her sisters said, but I somehow doubt that she ever tackled the banjo. She was also the math whiz who dedicated herself to coaching the sisters just older and just younger than she in arithmetic. She was later to attend Southeastern Normal School (now Southeastern State University) for two years and complete at twenty-one the “Academic Course,” which included a “Life Certificate to teach in the public schools of Oklahoma.”