| Notes |
- Rosa was a child bride, met her husband Dan while he was staying in her mother's rooming house in Beaumont, (maybe Galveston) Texas. She married him and was then sent to Oklahoma alone, at the age of 14, on a train by her new husbnad, Dan Reynolds. She spoke only French and was taken care of for a time by her new sister-in-law, Bertha Reynolds, wife of Hugh Reynolds. While she was pregnant with Edna in a railroad camp near Mexia, Texas, she had to carry her son Prince on horseback to the doctor to have his thumb sewn back on after Prince's older brother, Andy, had, on a dare from Prince, chopped it mostly off with a hatchet. After her husband died, she was informed by the town's wealthiest man, "Doc" Grisso, that her husband had borrowed $10,000 from him and had not repaid it. Grisso had nothing in writing, but Rosa began paying it back from whatever she could make by selling milk and eggs. She was living in a two story 22 room rock house at Letha, Oklahoma on 40 acres of land. She sold 160 acres at Butner and the Broadway Garage and used all but $50 of the rent on the Corner Bar to pay off the debt over a number of years. Both the brick and stone houses burned shortly after Dan's death, and she and her five children lived in the 2 car brick garage for a couple of years until they could purchase a small frame house and have it moved onto the property. Gradually they patched together several shotgun shacks to make a larger home. During the last years she made her living from several rental "shotgun" houses she had moved onto another part of her land up nearer the highway. She married twice more, had one more child, Oscar Clifton, and died of heart failure brought on by diabetes. She had a near-death-experience after a severe stroke and for nearly a week experienced while awake an overlay of heaven-like meadows simultaneously with her perceptions of the hospital. She saw green rolling lawns with small groups of quite people strolling and conversing. She was unable to speak to them as they always seemed to be just a little too far away. She told Dan Gourley that her repeated phrase "I can't" during the stroke phase of was in reference both to her trouble trying to talk to the people and finding it impossible to describe what she was seeing to the people in the hospital. She described the whole experience as beautiful but frustrating. Rosa's last child, Oscar Clifton, suffered permanent and major brain damage at 7 years of age from a near drowning incident in a small pool behind their home. He currently lives in a state institution in Oklahoma. The pool was then filled with sand and was sued by later kids as a play area.
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1901 - 1961 (60 years)
