Mrs. Carolyn Dianne "Pinkey" Garten

Carolyn Dianne (Strohmeier) Garten, known to all as Pinkey, was born in Cleveland, Ohio on June 16, 1930. She was the only child of Cleo (Wilson) Buell and Maurice Strohmeier. She grew up in the Cleveland area and spent many summers in Chautauqua, NY, where her maternal grandparents operated two boarding houses during the summer season of the Chautauqua Institution.
Pinkey graduated from Shaker Heights High School in 1948. On the recommendation of friends she met at Chautauqua, she enrolled in Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, then a two-year college for women. She graduated in 1950 with an Associate of Arts degree.
Among Pinkey’s activities at Stephens was singing in the school’s choir, which often performed at other colleges in the area. It was on a trip to the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy in Rolla (later the University of Missouri-Rolla, now the Missouri University of Science and Technology) for such a performance that she met Randal Lee Garten, a Navy veteran and civil engineering student from Piney View, West Virginia. Pinkey and Randy were married on August 26, 1950 and lived in Rolla while Randy completed his engineering degree. Pinkey worked for a time at nearby Fort Leonard Wood.
In August, 1952, Pinkey gave birth to their first child, Randal Lee II. In early 1953, the family moved to Monroe, Louisiana, where Randy began a job with the Missouri Pacific Railroad. In February, 1954, while living in Monroe, their second child, Harold Dean, was born.
After a brief assignment with the railroad in Osawatomie, Kansas, Randy took a job with a concrete company in Liberty, Missouri, and the family settled there in 1954. Pinkey and Randy rented houses on Leonard and Sunset streets before buying their first home, on Thornton Street, in 1956. Randy and Pinkey later owned homes on Arthur Street and Snowdrop Circle before moving to their home on Camelot Drive in 1992.
In the Presidential election year of 1960, Pinkey took a temporary job as an election clerk with the Clay County Election Board in Liberty, a step that required her to get a driver’s license for the first time. When a permanent full-time job became open the next year, she began a 32-year career with the Board, ultimately becoming the Republican chief clerk, one of the two head staff positions for the part-time, bipartisan Board. Her involvement in every national state, and county election over those years made her a familiar friendly face to many people all over Clay County.
Pinkey joined the First Presbyterian Church of Liberty, where she remained an active member for over 50 years, playing in the handbell choir and serving on several stewardship committees as well as visiting church members in need. She was also a member of the local chapter of the American Business and Professional Women’s Association and the Republican Women’s Club. In recent years she was an active participant in a local “Red Hat Society”. She was a dedicated volunteer at the Clay County Historical Society and the Martha Lafite Thompson Nature Sanctuary in Liberty. Pinkey loved animals and especially enjoyed watching the birds at the feeder just outside her window. She enjoyed crafts, decorating for the holidays, attending performances of local musical and theater groups, and collecting bits of wit and wisdom to share with her family and friends, often more than once.
Family was very important to Pinkey. Her own immediate family was not large—her mother had one sister, who married and also had one daughter—and Pinkey’s parents divorced and both remarried after she graduated from high school. These changes complicated her relationship with her father, but she maintained contact both with him, even as he spent time working in Germany, and with his extended family, most of whom remained in Northern Ohio. She also cultivated a long-distance friendship with John Strohmeier, the only child of her father’s second marriage who was about the age of her own younger son Dean, and attended his wedding in Chicago in the late 1980s.
Pinkey remained very close to her mother, Cleo Buell, who visited Liberty frequently and who moved there from the Cleveland area in her final years, with Pinkey serving as her caregiver before her death in 1988. Other maternal family members who were important in her life and her heart were her late grandparents, Dean Albert and Carrie (Neil) “Hoo-Hoo” Wilson, of Chautauqua, NY; her late aunt, Martha “Babe” (Wilson) Rafferty and her husband Dale, of Greenfield, IN; and her cousin, Patricia “Patsy” (Rafferty) Darling, of LaPorte, IN.
Her children sometimes wondered whether Pinkey was trying to compensate for her own small family through marriage, but in any case she married a man with 8 sisters and two brothers, and since he was the 8th of the 11, there were many members of the next generation as well at the time of her marriage. And although Ohio and West Virginia are adjacent on the map, her upbringing in the Cleveland area and experience at Shaker Heights High School was at least half a world away from that of Randy and his family in the coal country of southern West Virginia. That mattered not at all to Pinkey or to Randy’s family. She became a loving and beloved daughter-in-law to his parents, the late Regina Pearl (Lilly) and Roy Lee Garten, and a friend and frequent correspondent of her brothers and sisters-in-law and their spouses and children. She treasured her frequent visits there and to other places where members of his family had settled, as well as welcoming into her home her mother-in-law, siblings-in-law and their spouses, and many of Randy’s nieces and nephews over the years.
When their sons were in high school, Pinkey and Randy welcomed a foreign exchange student from Brazil, Ophir Toledo, into their home for a year. Ophir became very close to all the members of the family, using the Gartens as his “home away from home” later when studying for a year in Tulsa, and visiting when his career as an electronics engineer and business executive for

international companies brought him to the US. One Christmas just before Pinkey’s first grandchild was born, Ophir, his wife and their two young children spent the holidays with the Gartens. Ophir has called them every Christmas since from wherever in the world he happened to be, and when he called, he called them “Mom” and “Dad”.
Pinkey added a new family role when her first grandchild, James, was born to Randy II and his wife Mary Bessmer in February, 1985, in Boston. She first met James in person when his parents visited with him in July, and she lavished full grandmotherly attention on him until Michael was born to Dean and his wife Brenna (Croman) in January, 1987. Her only granddaughter, Dianna, came in July, 1989 to Randy II and Mary, and Dean and Brenna welcomed their second son Jeffrey barely two months later. Subsequent Christmases and many summer vacations were filled with grandchildren running around the house laughing and causing trouble, until they reached the ages where they stopped running and disappeared within the house for long periods. Even then, Pinkey continued to collect their pictures and observe their birthdays and other milestones, preserving her close relationships with them to their present adulthood.
Pinkey loved to travel, and the location of her family and Randy’s afforded many opportunities to do so. A typical Garten family summer vacation from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s entailed loading up the car, the boys with pillows in the back, and driving from Liberty to Greenfield, IN, sometimes with an overnight motel stop, to visit Pinkey’s aunt Babe, uncle Dale and cousin Patsy. After a day, it was on to Cleveland for a stay of several days with her mother. The earlier trips often involved her mother joining for a visit of one or two days to Chautauqua, where one time her children fell asleep at the opera. Then, back to Cleveland to drop off Cleo, and southward down Ohio to Huntington, WV before the most exciting part of the drive, through the mountains down the West Virginia Turnpike—including a long tunnel through a mountain!—to Beckley, the area where many of Randy’s family lived. After several days of visiting, eating (“beans”—garden fresh-picked green beans cooked with bacon—were required at least twice a day), meeting some of the continual new (by birth or marriage) members of the extended Garten family, and the boys exploring what seemed like a wilderness around their grandparents’ small farmstead, the family headed wearily back to Liberty, with stops only to eat or sleep.
When her children got older, Pinkey and Randy were able to travel to places that didn’t necessarily involve a family visit. They took vacations with the boys to Colorado (Mesa Verde National Park), Texas (the original Six Flags), and South Dakota (Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, dog racing). A trip to Washington, DC in 1969 included both Randy’s and Pinkey’s mothers.
Finally getting to travel without their sons, Randy and Pinkey visited her father’s sister and family in Las Vegas, travelled to Utah and took cruises to the Caribbean and Alaska. Their only European trip started with a visit to Liberty’s sister city in Luxembourg, after which they went to England to visit friends. Pinkey was also able to attend national conferences of an association of election officials in Arizona and California, the latter affording her an opportunity to visit Dean, Brenna and Michael, then 2 years old. Later, Pinkey was able to attend the high school graduations of her two oldest grandchildren, James in Lexington, MA in 2003 and Michael in Brea, CA in 2005.
A few unusual travel adventures ensued when Randy got his pilot’s license in the early 1980s and later became part owner of a small plane. They flew several times between Liberty and West Virginia, and in 1989 left West Virginia bound for Boston to visit their new baby granddaughter Dianna, but were forced to turn back because of high winds.
Pinkey was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2005, and its toll on her became increasingly apparent with time. However, she remained cheerful and friendly, and responded warmly to friends and family even in her last days. She passed away on July 27, 2011 with her husband at her side.
Pinkey is survived by Randy Garten, her husband of 60 years and devoted caregiver during her final years with Alzheimer’s disease; her two sons and their wives, Randy Garten II and Mary Bessmer of Arlington, MA, and Dean and Brenna (Croman) Garten of Waukegan, IL; four grandchildren, James Garten of Las Vegas, NV, Dianna Garten of New York, NY, Michael Garten of La Mirada, CA and Jeffrey Garten of Seattle, WA; a cousin, Patricia Darling of Rochester, IN; and a half-brother, John Strohmeier of Carol Stream, IL.