Wilma Ruby Lahr Kyle

Wilma Ruby Lahr Kyle was born in Hedley, March 28, 1926, the 2nd youngest of nine children to Chalmer and Lydia Isabel Kyle. Her parents came from Oklahoma in a covered wagon during the Dust Bowl times. They stopped in Hedley because it was raining. While there, her papa looked around and rented a farm, and did share cropping. As a young girl she picked cotton in the Texas fields with her family.

Wilma was born in a one room house, as the 8th child born. Her younger sister, Velma, also born in Hedley in 1928. She attended school in Clarendon, one room, called Bairfield School House. She was the only one in her grade, with only five children attending, two of them her sisters. The schoolhouse was relocated to Lubbock, Texas as a museum. Just before WWI, the family moved to Amarillo, about 1940. All four of her brothers went into the service.

They were only supposed to be gone a year, and she recalls a song, “I’ll be back in a year lil darling, don’t you worry, don’t you cry, I’ll be back in a year.” But of course, it was years before they all made it back. She graduated from Amarillo High School, in 1945, and later went to business school to be a secretary and learn shorthand. Her first job was at Kraft Cheese.

Wilma was raised as a God-fearing Baptist girl who continued to love God and family her entire life. She attended Buchanan Baptist Church of Amarillo, where she met and later married Robert John Lahr, an army medic veteran in WWII. They had four children together, the first three born in Amarillo and the last one in Los Angeles, Calif. They went back and forth from California to Texas until they finally settled in Calif. in 1955. Wilma lived in California until 1994 when she traveled back home to Texas with her daughter and be near her sister. They settled in Fort Worth, and remained there until the time of her death, January 22, 2023.

She was a homemaker for the first 25 years of her marriage raising her four children. She then worked as a secretary, bookkeeper until she retired in 1993.

She lived a fulfilled live, leaving a legacy with her four children, Timothy, Esther, Elizabeth & Dawn, and 32 grandchildren and great grandchildren. She continued to love God and family her whole life. She never missed a day reading her Bible or praying for her family.

She is survived by her younger sister, Velma Kyle Gilliam.

The memorial service will be graveside at Rowe Cemetery in Hedley. The cemetery was originally a garden in a rancher’s homestead. It was later donated and established in 1892. Her great grandmother Aldecka Bradley was buried there in 1929, and her older Sister Augusta Latimer in 1996. Hedley is where Wilma, “Grandma” as she was fondly called by everyone, wanted her final resting place. The family will meet there to celebrate her 97th birthday in March.