SOLON — May was Older American’s Month, and in recognition of Solon’s senior citizens the Solon Economist is proud to publish a series of interviews conducted by Solon High School senior William Wittich for his National Honor Society project. Wittich is a high school volunteer with Solon Senior Support, and with encouragement from Jill Weetman, he conducted interviews with over a dozen individuals.
This week we are featuring his interview with 2017 Solon Senior Citizen of the Year Phyllis Fiala. An interview with Larry Brecht was published on May 19, Sandy Hanson was featured last week, Marcele Kaduce will close out the series next week.
The full interview is available online at YouTube – Phyllis Fiala
How long have you lived in Solon?
“68 years, ever since we got married.
Tell me about your very first memory.
“I don’t know how old I was, but I was really small. My mom was a really wonderful seamstress and she made me a little cape and they got me a little bouquet of flowers. I think they just picked them out of the flowerbed, I don’t remember going to church, I don’t remember anything about it, but it was Easter and I just remember I was so proud of that cape.”
Tell me about school
“I went to a few schools. My parents rented farms, and I started first grade, I was five years old and it was in Morley (located in Jones County between Martelle and Olin). That was just a little town, a little bigger than Sutliff, and at that time they had a high school and everything. I went for first through third, I think, and I rode the bus. Then we moved to where there was a country school. You’ve heard this before, ‘I walked two miles,’ but I really did walk two miles to school, and it had all grades, and there was only one other person in my class, a boy. The teacher’s children all went to school there and it seemed to me like it must’ve been very awkward. Now with homeschooling I guess it wouldn’t be, but anyway her children had really behaved well, she was really on them.
When I was in seventh grade my parents moved to a farm in Mechanicsville (Cedar County) and I went seventh through graduation to Mechanicsville. I was 16 years old and the last semester I worked at a law office because we had that kind of training, and I did not go to college. One person in my whole graduating class went to college, and she wound up being a teacher. My job at the law office was really very educational and I learned an awful lot, but I only worked there a couple years before I got employed by Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids.”
How many people were in your class?
“21. However, three people didn’t get their diplomas signed. Three boys, and I think we knew that all along.”
What was your best subject?
“Science and math. And to this day I really like math. I always do things in my head. I check it with a calculator, but I like to keep my brain kind-of going.”
You said you lived on a farm. Did you like living on a farm?
“I did. The only bad part was you don’t have close playmates. We didn’t have ‘playdates’ and things you may have had growing up. But we kept busy. We had chores to do and I’m the second-oldest. I had six brothers, one older than me and five younger. So, I always had plenty to do. I ironed a lot of shirts and pants. We just made our own fun.”
Tell me more about your siblings
“My oldest brother and I were always very close, he’s passed away now. We were very close and he married a girl that I also went to school with. My five younger brothers were only two years apart, give or take, and to this day they call me if we have a big storm. They live out of state, and they’ll call me and see if I’m OK and I’m still their big sister. When I was 17 I had a sister. She was the youngest in the family and we were never like sisters because I was already graduated and out of the house. But now that we’re both older we’re better friends. But growing up, she was the baby in the family and probably a little bit spoiled.”
What is your favorite memory?
“Just my really close association with my brothers, they were really good kids, and we’re all older now. I can’t believe they’re older, I still think they’re kids.”
Who are your best friends?
“My best friends growing up were some first cousins. My dad is from a big family, ten children. He had three brothers but two of them got killed. One was 18, one was 21, and they were on a load of hay and came under a high line (powerline) and they got electrocuted. My dad’s surviving brother had six children, all the age of my older brother and I. We were either at their house or they were at our house, so much. We just had the best friendship.”
You said you didn’t go to college, how was that experience?
“I had lived with some teachers when I worked in a law office who were graduates of Mount Mercy, and they begged me to go to Mount Mercy. My family didn’t have the money for me to go to college, and they said ‘Oh, there’s a way to get money for college.’ I didn’t know about things like that, my world was kind-of small living on a farm and we didn’t go all over like we do now. But when I was 53 I went to Kirkwood to get my national certification as a pharmacy technician. And I was very proud of that. And I was the second-highest person in my class. And there’s a reason for that because I was working fulltime and going to school at night, and all the young people that were in my class, they would still party and so forth instead of studying. I worked in the pharmacy for many years.”
Is that where you worked most of your life?
“The first 25 years of our marriage we had a dairy farm and we milked 50 cows a year. And we also had an Angus beef herd, and on our 25th anniversary was the day we sold half-interest in the dairy herd. About three or four years later, the fellow that was milking the cows on the farm went out on his own and bought his own and bought the other half of our cows. So, then we sold that dairy farm, built a house across the road, and moved off the farm. We moved onto that farm the year after we got married. We were married 55 years then my husband passed away and I bought a house in town.”
Do you have any advice on choosing a career?
“Follow your heart. We all have to make a living so when I say, ‘follow your heart,’ I can’t advocate just sitting around doing nothing because there’s bills to pay. But I don’t think you should just look at money, I think you need to do something that you enjoy. When I worked at a pharmacy when we quit farming, I loved every day I went to work. And that’s the way it should be.”
Did you like living on the farm more or working at the pharmacy?
“Working in a pharmacy was a lot easier than the farm. I raised four daughters while still milking those cows, and I don’t regret it. It was a good place to raise a family but I wouldn’t want to do it over again. When I worked in a pharmacy, it was like a vacation compared to what we had to do on the farm.”
Tell me more about your children.
“I have four daughters, and three of them are close in age, and I had a fourth daughter ten years younger. We were living in a log cabin and we didn’t have room for another child. My husband was an only child and he always wanted four kids, and he got them, but he had to wait a little while for the fourth one. She (the youngest girl) has since passed away in 2016. She was a respiratory therapist and started not feeling well, and had pains in her back, and came to find out she had metastatic cancer, and she died.
My oldest daughter is in Kansas City. She now is employed by Hy-Vee and I don’t know what you call her position, but she checks expiration dates and she has a whole area in Kansas and Missouri. She’s lived down there for a long time, she has one daughter, 22. My second daughter works for a company out of New York and it started out in Iowa City. It was NCS, and Pearson’s, and Westinghouse, and she has no children, she’s not married. My next daughter works for the same (company). She has two adopted children and she’s married to a PA who works at the University Hospitals. Both of her children are out of college now, the youngest one just graduated mid-year, and her oldest is a civil engineer. My youngest daughter had two sons.”
Tell me about your parents
“My parents have been gone, my mom was 96 when she passed away, my dad died in his 60s. He had an off-the-farm job for many years, but he wanted to farm, but with a big family it just wasn’t enough income to support a big family. My mom never worked off the farm as long as us kids were growing up. With that many kids, she couldn’t. Before she had kids she worked in the Reliance Shirt Factory and she made these chamois shirts, and that’s partly how she became such a good seamstress. When the boys were little she would make all their shirts and jackets. She had a huge garden, and for many years she didn’t have a freezer, but she canned, and canned, and canned, and canned, and almost everything we ate came out of our basement. But it was good, we really liked it, she was a good cook and she always packed our lunches, and one day she baked bread. It took a lot of loaves of bread in our house, and another day she baked a cake or cookies so we’d have that for our lunches, and the next day it was bread again. Good bread. She raised chickens and dressed chickens, and actually canned chicken and then we could make chicken and noodles or different casseroles. We really ate well.”
What was your favorite memory of them?
“I think it was their work ethic, in fact they almost worked too much. But you know, they kind-of had to.”
What was the happiest moment in your life?
“The day my husband (boyfriend at the time) came home from overseas. That was a good day. Christmas, 1953. It was a really, really good day.”
Was he a soldier?
“Yes, he was in the military, and back then the only correspondence we had was letters. Now it’s not so bad being separated because you can facetime and cellphones and everything. He called me twice and the connection was so bad he should’ve saved his money, it was very expensive. The letter thing was very funny because I would get a letter from him, ‘What’s the matter? I haven’t heard from you for eight days, or ten days,’ and I wrote every single day while he was in the service. And then I’d get a letter saying, ‘I got 14 letters today and I had to line them up, otherwise they didn’t make any sense.’ We got married in April of ’54.”
What are you most proud of?
“My family.”
What is your favorite thing to do for fun?
“It used to be dancing but now its just mingling with the rest of the senior citizens around the area and I love, love, love volunteering with the senior citizens. That’s what I do for fun. And I bake a lot.”
How long did you dance for?
“Considering I graduated from high school when I was 16, I probably started when I was 12. The rest of the kids in class were older, and my one girlfriend had a much older brother that wasn’t married, and we couldn’t drive yet, so he’d take us to the dance halls. Most of them are gone now. There was the Hi-Way Gardens in Stanwood, there was the Armar Ballroom in Marion, it was a big and beautiful ball room, the higher-class place. And then in downtown Cedar Rapids was a place called Danceland on the second story of a big building. I didn’t go to Swisher very often, that was a little far for me. But wherever there was a dance, if I had a ride, I went.
Can you tell me about the history of Solon?
“It’s changed so much. I came here in ’54 and there was seven taverns, two churches, a grocery store, and where the bandstand is now there was a row of older buildings, but that all got torn down. Where the bank is, and where the BP station is, that was a hotel and stagecoach stop. Just a lot of old buildings, and you know, that’s progress, I guess. The only thing that is sort-of original is from El Sol down that whole block. Those buildings were all there. Where the Solon Economist office is, I saw it be a bank, a Post Office, and various offices I can’t remember. The grocery store was where Red Vespa is now.
I knew a lot of older people who have since passed, and we used to go to the Legion for dances, and that’s kind-of passed. Nothing’s the same anymore.”
Have there been any world events that have changed your life or Solon?
“I think there’s two of them, and one was the Korean Conflict that so many of my friends had to go to. My then-boyfriend (husband) was lucky and went to Germany, but he was still gone. And then the other was Covid. I think that changed everybody’s world.”
How would you like to be remembered?
“I hope people remember that I really like helping people, and I think I raised a pretty good family, and just in a kind way, if possible.”

Gallery • 1 Photos

Phyllis Fiala