Age 88, died July 22, 2015; born March 17, 1927 in Heidenheimer, Texas to Albert and Bertha Tippit. Lora has been a resident of the Holt area for 35 years and an active member of Messiah Lutheran Church. She loved to golf and travel. She enjoyed doing sewing alterations for family and friends. Lora was a very social person and active in the Sam Corey Senior Center in Holt. Preceding her in death were her husband of 57 years, Robert, in 2002; sisters, Begonia Orlandi and LaVera Burtchell. Surviving to cherish her memory are her daughters, Renee (Michael) Arens, Betty (Robert) Strayer; grandchildren, Danny Arens, Jenny (Cory) Baker, Chalice (Curt) Baker, Robert (Rhiana) Strayer, II; great grandchildren, Felecia Baker, Noah Baker, Elijah Baker, Lily Strayer; brother, Carl (Liz) Tippit and several nieces and nephews. The funeral service will be held on Saturday, July 25, 2015 at 10:00 a.m. at Messiah Lutheran Church, 5740 Holt Rd., Holt, Michigan with Pastor James Keat officiating. Interment will be in Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens, Lansing, Michigan. Visitation will be on Friday, July 24, 2015 at the Gorsline Runciman Funeral Homes, 621 S. Jefferson, Mason, Michigan from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. and 1 hour prior to the service at the Church on Saturday. Memorial contributions in her memory may be made to the Messiah Lutheran Church or Alzheimer’s Association, 2111 University Park Dr., Suite 200, Okemos, MI 48864. On-line condolences may be shared at www.grbdmason.com
Eulogy
Lora L. Hitchcock
As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” Luke 10:38-42
The scene of the story quoted above is Bethany, a humble place in Judea on the hot, arid eastern slopes of the Mount of Olives. But I would take you to another humble place, on the hot, arid eastern slopes of the Texas foothills, Bell County. This is where Lora Laverne Tippit, our Lora Hitchcock, was born to Albert Tippit and Bertha Wascow in 1927. That’s Tippit, she would say, spelled the same backwards as forwards. She came from solid Irish and German stock, which explains both the bit of Leprechaun and the Merry Till Eulenspiegel in her character.
Her family worked hard to make do out of the tough Texas soil, and her childhood was the stuff of humble, simple, almost pioneer lore: tending the chickens in the yard, helping her mother in the kitchen, drawing water from a hand-pump well … wearing clothes made out of fabric from flour sacks, sleeping under quilts made out of saved scraps of cloth, picking cotton in the fields with her two sisters, Gonie and Tiny … walking miles to school through the meadows and cattle fields, where, by the way, she once outran an angry bull intent on finishing her off early. This, fortunately for us, was not to be.
Lora’s solid Christian faith was worked out in this country and in this family. It was a time and place of tent revivals and river baptisms, which she often attended in her youth. As little girls, Lora and her Gonie and Tiny would play at pretending to be pastors giving sermons, their sole congregant being their little brother Carl. Her father was a deacon at the Dyess Grove Baptist Church, and he was known to walk the streets of the towns he lived in and visited, evangelizing Christ to anyone he met.
Another example of family faith: Lora’s beloved uncle, Henry Wascow, had studied to be a minister before World War II took him away to Italy. There he became a decorated army captain; there he was tragically killed in action, and was eulogized by correspondent Ernie Pyle in his most famous wartime report, which later became the basis of the 1945 movie, “The Story of GI Joe”. From there, the story and the name entered into American legend. That is a true story: Lora’s uncle was the inspiration for GI Joe. That was the stuff her family was made of.
During the war she worked in the laundry room at a hospital in Temple, and it was there that she met Robert Hitchcock of Lansing. Bob was an MP at nearby Fort Hood, and his rounds included that hospital. Bob was an MP at nearby Fort Hood, and like a lot of Yankees there, he fell in love with this southern belle, and he took this Texan to be his bride. This was on August 5, 1945. Soon Bob moved her out of that cotton-pickin’, laundry-washin’, chicken-pluckin’ Texas life and brought her to Michigan. But you couldn’t take Texas out of the Texan. She loved being a Yankee Michigander, but she was most proud to be a Texan.
Lora and Bob made their first home on Clayton Street in Lansing. While Bob worked at Fisher Body, she worked in the infant’s department at Woolworths, a job she loved and excelled at. In Lansing they had their daughter Renee in 1953 and daughter Betty in 1957.
In 1963 they moved to Eugenia Drive in Mason. While Bob worked two and sometimes three jobs to build a good life for his family, Lora raised the children and made a home, with hot breakfasts every morning, fresh dinners and homemade pies. Lora would laugh with her girls as they told her about their days in school, sometimes laughing so hard that they cried. She grew a garden, canned her vegetables, and did seamstress work and alterations to help with the income. She and Bob loved their family get-togethers, with cards and board games running well into the night. Lora made sure to take Betty and Renee to church every Sunday morning.
She made numerous friends on Eugenia Drive, as she did everywhere she lived. She would invite neighbors over for coffee, bring things to them, really get things going. She really loved her neighbors there. When Bob retired they moved back down to Texas for a few years, to be closer to her relatives, and to reconnect. But when her first grandchild, Chalice Strayer, was born in 1979 they returned to Michigan. From that time she and Bob had many happy years of being with their family, and golfing and travelling all over the state.
And did she love golf! She played in three leagues for many years. Her tee shot was always right down the middle of the fairway, and her short game could kill you. But more than that, she was absolutely fun to be with on the course, and she could laugh with the best of them. How many grandma-isms do we remember from the golf course? Like, “Git along little doggies,” “That’s as fine as frog’s hair.”
But most important to her, close behind her husband, children and grandchildren, was her church family at Messiah Lutheran Church in Holt. She was born a Texas Baptist, but she became a Lutheran: Missouri Synod Lutheran, she would clarify; and she was a member at Messiah for 35 years. She loved her church family, and they loved her. She loved the contemporary worship service and music. She was extremely supportive of Messiah, and she brought a joy and a love for the Lord to the entire congregation. Nobody was more unreservedly supportive of Messiah’s pastors over the years than Lora. It brought her great joy when her husband Bob was baptized at Messiah in 1995. She had prayed for that to happen for 50 years. Her lesson to us here is, wives, do not give up on your husbands!
After Bob passed away in 2002, she certainly missed him; she continued to live her life with same vivacity, cheerfulness and thankfulness. In her later years the activities became simpler, filled with visits by her daughters Betty and Renee and her grandchildren, her church activities, holiday dinners, the UAW Local 602, the Sam Corey Senior Center in Holt, “Wheel of Fortune” and the Golf Channel, and card games. And those card games! How many laughs we had … how we all dutifully “hailed the queen” when she’d win at euchre or rummy, which she often did. Bible-believing Christians are not supposed to speak of luck, but Lora had really good luck!
She made friends wherever she went, and she was content and cheerful in whatever circumstances she found herself. Whether it was at her apartment in south Lansing or at Great Lakes Christian Home in Holt, she was known for her sweetness, her spunk, and her cheerfulness. This was true even during her most recent weeks at the Dobie Road Medical Care facility, when even in her occasional pain, she would always express her thanks to the staff.
And this is an important key to understanding Lora. She had a cheerful smile for everyone she met, with kind words and some brief expression of joy in her faith. She always gave thanks and appreciation to those around her who were there to help and to serve. She showed that tremendous power of simple faith, that true joy and cheerfulness, and genuine, unconditional love, reflecting that greatest commandment of the Lord.
She never needed more things or belongings in her life to be happy. She had no need for formalities or complications, for status or artificiality about her, no use for that sophistication or cleverness that might impress. Spiritually, she was too secure for any of those things. Everyone around her - her friends, relatives and neighbors, received that which was most important: her unconditional love, friendship and affection. She was unmatched as a loving grandmother, she dearly loved her family and her friends, and never failed to say so, and often.
This simple faith and joy, this pure love radiated out from her and touched us all. Who can forget that sweetness, that lovingkindness, and that cheeky smile. Even now, as her presence fades from our view, that smile seems to remain.
Her faith and joy stays alive and is made eternal for us here, if only we would do as she did … if only we would focus on those things that are most meaningful and enduring in life: that love of life, love of God, that unconditional love of others. And all we have to do is to simply pass them along. These are the important things that she taught, things her daughters, grandchildren, her family, her friends, and everyone around her learned from her. The tremendous outpouring of love and affection from her friends and relatives in the last few days is a reflection of those lessons. Hers was really a simple story and an uncomplicated life, but a most influential one, reflective in so many ways of a simple but powerful gospel story.
For, like Mary in Luke’s Chapter 10, Lora sat at her Lord’s feet. She was not distracted, she was not worried or upset or complaining about many things. She simply attended to the one thing that is needed - the Lord and his Kingdom of Heaven - that thing, as taught in scripture, which is better. And, as the Lord said, we can be assured that that thing was not taken from her, but it was opened wide to her. Her last hope and prayer would be, that it is opened wide to all of us who remain.
And, to all who might be inclined to say, “I love you Lora,” just remember what she so often said to us in response, exactly as the Lord God says to us: “I love you more.”
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