Opal Winkler 04/06/2012

Opal Winkler was born in 1919 in Durant, Oklahoma to Noah and Emma Troxell Owens. At a young age she headed West in a covered wagon with her family due to concerns with her father’s health. They stopped in Altus, then lived for a time in Elida, New Mexico. When she was starting high school they returned to Oklahoma, where they settled in Tipton. Opal recalls the number of businesses in downtown Tipton in the early thirties, and what Saturday evenings were like. During the Depression, her mother worked as a seamstress and her father tended to the Tipton Cemetery. Opal graduated from Tipton High School in 1936. She began working at Rural Electric Cooperative (REC) in 1945, where she worked for thirty-six years.