Miko Apela yvt kvnnia tuk o pi nukhaklo.

Opal HARKEY, lifelong McCurtain County community leader and great-great granddaughter of the first Choctaw Chief, Thomas LEFLORE, was found dead at her home Thursday about 7 p.m. Neighbors discovered Mrs. HARKEY lying in the back yard of her rural home in the Forest Grove Community. They said it appeared she had gone to fasten up her pet ducks for the night when she apparently died of a heart attack.

The lead in this story, written in the Choctaw languague says:

Miko Apela -- The chief's helper
kvnnia -- has left us by death
pi -- we all
nukhaklo -- are very sorrowful and will be missing her badly.

She was born to David and Emma FOWLER in Millerton, July 13, 1917. Attending Wheelock the first six years of her schooling, she went on to graduate from Valliant High School and then graduated from Southeastern Oklahoma State University. Last year she was the recipient of the McCurtain County Historical Society's Distinguished Service Award. One of her last community service events was the crowning of Katosha Belvin, Kiamichi Owa-Chito Princess, this past summer. She had directed the Owa-Chito Princess Pagent for several years. She spent 40 years in education, teaching in eight different McCurtain County schools. Among them were Forest Grove in 1942 when her career began, Pollard, Millerton, Clear Lake, Valliant, Glover, Thomas Chapel, Haworth and then retiring from Forest Grove where it all began, in 1979.

Married to Julius HARKEY, a Methodist minister living in Ft. Towson, in 1942, the HARKEYs both entered the teaching field and moved to Alaska in 1956 where they lived until Julius died in 1965 at Noatak, Alaska. "I brought him home and never went back," Mrs. HARKEY said about her tenure in Alaska. She retired to her 100-acre farm in the Forest Grove community and began then working with the alcoholic recovery center in Wheelock, serving as instructor for GED classes. She served as chairman of the McCurtain County Choctaw Tribal Council, Choctaw Election Board and was secretary of the Forest Grove Water District, having been a charter member. Funeral services are pending with Norwood Funeral Home in Idabel.

(Thanks to Betty JACOB, Broken Bow, for the translation.)

I never did get to meet my Great-Uncle Julius HARKEY. I was only 6 years old when he died of a heart attack in Alaska. My father flew to Seattle to meet Aunt Opal, to fly with her and Uncle Julius' body back to Oklahoma to be buried. But I did have the pleasure of meeting Aunt Opal. She was a wonderful, interesting woman. When we lived in Lewiston, Idaho, she would fly to visit us on a few occasions if she was flying to some other part of the world, and it was fun to hear her stories. I remember wondering how long her hair was because she always wore it on top of her head in a bun. On one of those times that she was visiting us, I saw her one morning with her hair down - it was very black and was down past her hips. When growing up, we would go to Oklahoma about every 4 years to visit relatives and it always meant going to visit Aunt Opal at her house in Forest Grove (near Idabel). And then I remember when I was older, and living/traveling on my own, that I was visiting one of my father's twin sisters in Oklahoma and Aunt Opal came by for a visit. We had ordered pizza for dinner and I couldn't believe she didn't know what it was -- for she had traveled to many places, one of them being Hong Kong. I have many items given to my father after she died that include: old 8mm movies Uncle Julius made while living in Alaska, manuscripts he wrote, lots of pictures of relatives, letters they wrote to my father while he went to college and while they lived in Alaska, lots and lots of slides, and newspaper articles written about Aunt Opal while she lived in Idabel. I believe the last time I saw her was when I told her what pizza was. I will miss her. She died on Thursday, February 15, 1990.

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