Marjorie May (Stepp) Hubbs Obituary
Posting from the original to ensure I have a permanent copy.
Marjorie May (Stepp) Hubbs, the youngest of five children, was born on May 31, 1930, in Clyde, Kansas, to John G. and Ruth A. (Ratcliff) Stepp.
Growing up, the family moved to several cities in Kansas: Loring, Hays, and Dorrance. While attending Dorrance High School, class of 1948, she met Lloyd Hubbs, and they were married on September 5, 1948, at the Lutheran Church of Dorrance.
The couple moved from Dorrance to Falls City, NE, Beatrice, and Tecumseh, NE, and then to Collinsville, OK, following Lloyd’s career in public utilities. After retiring, Lloyd and Marge moved to Springdale, AR, to be close to family.
Marge and Lloyd were active members of the local Lutheran Church wherever they lived. Marge loved her family, and spending time with them whenever possible was important to her. Living near David, Shelli, Cody, Bailea, and Jacob brought her great happiness. Earlier in her marriage, she worked a few varied jobs but was mainly a housewife and mother to her four children.
Marge enjoyed many hobbies and activities throughout her life. She enjoyed roller skating while younger in school, and then after marriage, she bowled for several years in a league. Another pastime over the years that she enjoyed was crafting and painting. She collected old glass jars, McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, and anything related to the McDonald’s restaurant. She was an avid reader, with westerns and books about prairie life among her favorites. She enjoyed watching and feeding birds with her many backyard feeders and growing flowers. While she said she wasn’t a very good card and game player, she played a good hand of cards.
In the golden years of retirement, she enjoyed the YMCA, water aerobics, garage sales, and flea markets. The last five years of her life were spent at Azalea Commons Assisted Living Center in Springdale, where she enjoyed visiting with her friends and playing bingo.
Marge is survived by her daughters Lou and husband Bob Maxson of Kearney, NE, Joy Hubbs of Springfield, MO, son David and wife Shelli of Springdale, AR. and daughter-in-law Marj Hubbs of Richland Center, WI. 10 grandchildren: Tom, Bill, Dana, Chris, Ryan, Aaron, Andrew, Rebecca, Cody, and Bailea. 11 great-grandchildren: Laura, Anwyn, Katie, Alex, Makayla, Abigail, Isaiah, Avery, Henry, Amelia, and Noah.
She is preceded in death by her parents, all her siblings, husband Lloyd, son Don, and great-grandson Burke Grette.
Cremation has taken place, and graveside services will be at a later date in Wilson, KS, at the Stepp family plot.
Remembering Marjorie (Stepp) Hubbs, 1930 - 2024
Last Friday my last living grandparent passed away. Marge Hubbs, my paternal grandmother, was 94. She had been on a slow decline for a few years now, and finally succumbed to old age at a hospice house in Springdale, Arkansas.
Originally from Kansas, Marge married Lloyd Hubbs when they were both still teenagers, and raised four children: Don, Lou, Joy, and David. Over the years they moved from Kansas to Nebraska, then Oklahoma, and finally in retirement to Arkansas. Lloyd and Marge were married for 62 years until he passed away in 2011. She was also preceded in death by her oldest son, my father Don, and a great-grandchild, Burke Grette. I am waiting on my aunt to complete the official obituary, but by my unofficial count she is survived by three children, 10 grandchildren, and a dozen-ish great-grandchildren.
Sadly I was never particularly close to my grandparents or much of my extended family. When I was a kid we usually lived at some distance away from them, so visits were once or twice a year for a few days. She was small (and shorter as she got older and osteoporosis kicked in) but spunky, managing a mischievous husband and four opinionated kids with a sense of humor. I remember her visit to our home in Iowa 10 years ago when my kids taught her the game Apples to Apples and she proceeded to win her first time playing. Even after moving to assisted living she was actively leading exercise classes for her peers. As her body slowed her down, she stayed involved in game days, confiding to her family that she had to let the other senior center folks win at bingo from time to time so they didn’t get mad at her. 😂
The pictures here are from my grandparents' visit to our place in Iowa twenty years ago, a few months after the birth of our oldest daughter. This is how I like to remember them. Cheerful, kind old souls who, having been through a lot of life, still enjoyed a good joke, a game of cards, a new baby in the family. There is a legacy of faith, love, hard work, and cheerful service that I am sure I owe in no small part to them.
Rest in peace, Grandma.
Good to see the Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team finally get a little respect, ranked at #22 in this week’s AP poll. Without Caitlin Clark and Kate Martin they’re probably not a Final Four team again this year, but early on they look like they can still be B1G title contenders.
Look, Max and Red Bull Racing had a phenomenal year this year. But every article that trumpets him as a “four-time world champion” should have a giant asterisk next to it that says “Abu Dhabi 2021”. #F1
In the office this week for a couple of days before the Thanksgiving holiday. Have a feeling it’s gonna be really quiet in here. Time to get some work done!
2024 Reads: 2054 by Elliot Ackerman 📚
It wanted to be insightful and futurist, but ended up being thin and disappointing.
Installing OpenGarage
Last week on a whim I ordered a little OpenGarage unit. OpenGarage is an open-source hardware and software design that allows for remote monitoring and triggering of a garage door opener. My garage door opener is old and doesn’t have software built in, which is fine, but having the capability to remotely check and trigger the door would occasionally be nice to have. So, for $50 I figured it was worth a try.
The unit arrived earlier in the week. Minimally packaged in a small padded envelope, it’s smaller than a deck of cards, a small circuit board in a 3d-printed enclosure. The kit included a wire for connecting it to the garage door opener and a Micro-to-USB-A cable to provide power. It was a breeze to connect to my home wifi network, and easy to register for an online token so I can connect to it when I’m away from home. This morning I installed it - two screws hold it to the garage ceiling, the wires connect to the same opener terminals as the hard-wired control button, and voila!
It will take me a little time to figure out what automations I want to set up. OpenGarage supports IFTTT integrations, so I may experiment there with some time- and event-based notifications. For now, though, it looks like it was an inexpensive, easy way to get online monitoring and control capability I didn’t have before. Neat!
On Killing First and Loving Your Enemies
Last night I finished up reading Rise and Kill First, Ronen Bergman’s extensive history of Israel’s secret services. My friend Matt Burdette pointed me to the book and then gave me his copy to read. (Thanks, Matt!) It was enlightening for me, providing some adult perspective on events that linger vaguely in my childhood memories.
Matt’s comment when recommending the book was how careful the Israelis were about collateral damage. Indeed, Bergman’s sources recount many, many times when an attack on a target was either delayed or cancelled because the strike had the potential of killing wives, children, or bystanders. Regardless of where you fall on the morality of extrajudicial killing, this seems like a bare minimum of circumspection. Which makes Israel’s absolute destruction of Palestine this past year all the more striking in its wanton disregard. I’ll come back to that.
Israel’s history as a modern country is short and Bergman shows how intensely personal the mission of national protection and vengeance was to many early leaders of their security services. (One leader of the Mossad had on his office wall a picture of his grandfather, kneeling at gunpoint before Nazi soldiers, about to be shot. Imagine walking in to work every day and having that set the tone. Phew.) That fresh, personal link can make me sympathetic to the motivation for and justification of the long documented string of murders they committed. And yet I have some hesitancy.
To wade at all into the waters of discussion on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a cause for trepidation, but let me see if I can (carefully) arrange a few thoughts about this tragic past century.
First, the persecution and expulsion of Jews from many lands where they had lived for generations, finally culminating in the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust. Words fail to describe the horror. If any people could or should be forgiven for acts of vengeance, these people could and should.
Then the cycle of violent retribution begins. The Israelis begin their life as a country with the displacement of millions of Palestinians from their generational homes, sending them as refugees into unwelcoming neighboring countries and packing them into small enclaves. This causes Palestinian terror groups to strike back in truly horrible ways. Which in turn causes the Israelis to attack. And the cycle continues. At times over the past few decades it has seemed like peace had a chance to be established. Last year’s Hamas attack on Israel, though, followed by Israel’s unprecedented destruction of the Gaza Strip, leave even the most hopeful observers doubting that change can come.
I, of course, don’t have any good answers here. Both sides have been the victims of displacement and horrors; both sides have committed unspeakably violent acts. Whether one can try to put them in the balance to justify one side or the other is a question for ethicists and philosophers far wiser than me. Regardless, both sides are both victims and perpetrators. A century of an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth has left far too many toothless and blind. The leaders and fighters on both sides are shaped by generations of unresolved trauma. Things don’t look good.
At the risk of bringing the world’s third major religion into the discussion and making too pat an end to this post: this book and historical reflection make the revolutionary nature of Jesus' teaching to love your enemies stand out to me in sharp contrast to the natural, justifiable inclinations for revenge. The Christian church throughout history has systemically done a really lousy job of following that teaching. But as individuals of all faiths, it seems to me that the path away from universal toothlessness and blindness starts with being willing to give it a try.
2024 Reads: Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman 📚
A detailed, compelling history of the Israeli intelligence services. Lots to think about. Such a mess in so many ways. But a really good read.
My unsolicited opinion this morning on AI, speaking as a computer scientist who has spent the last year working on AI-based tools: there are some things that LLMs and neural networks are very useful for. The kind of things that companies are popularly promoting AI for are not those things.
A quick online interaction this morning reminded me of this Sony clock/radio I got as a kid probably in the late 80s. As far as I know it’s still kicking around our house somewhere and still works just fine.
Business trips seem like fun, but the days get long… left the hotel at 7:30 to head to the workshop. Workshop went until 5, then group dinner until 8:30, then drinks at the hotel with a smaller group. Not back to my room until 10:15pm. Need to be out for day 2 at 6:30 in the morning. Oof.
It’s Library Board meeting time! I’ve missed a few due to work travel… good to be back. Public libraries are special institutions that serve our communities with so much more than just books. They need our support.
John Gruber: How It Went
John Gruber wrote a really beautiful piece about his mother’s death, his father’s hope, and the election. As an author who writes mostly about tech, I can forget that John is, foremost, a great writer, not just a tech guy. I, too, lost a parent this year. I wish I could write as beautifully about my parents as John does here about his.
Well, it’s been a week. Haven’t said much here, mostly because I don’t really have my thoughts sorted yet. I am thankful to have a local faith community where I will be able to show up on Sunday and be built up. And then next week will be another week. Onward.
"Leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of His family..."
Chris Green writes about the communion of the saints and Jesus not just loving us but liking us. It’s all wonderful stuff and worth a read, but his last quote, from the late Russian human rights activist Alexei Navalny, is timely and worth quoting in full:
You lie in your bunk looking up at the one above and ask yourself whether you are a Christian in your heart of hearts. It is not essential for you to believe some old guys in the desert once lived to be eight hundred years old, or that the sea was literally parted in front of someone. But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about? Why, under your breath, would you mumble a hundred times something you read from a hefty tome you keep in your bedside table? Don’t worry about the morrow, because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself. My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.
Amen.
Small Wonders: The Pixies Are In the Attic
This short piece on Small Wonders by Azure Arther titled “The Pixies Are In the Attic” just made a real mess of me.
It’s short enough I don’t feel like I can meaningfully quote from it here without reproducing the whole thing, so I won’t. Just go click the link and read for a couple minutes. So many feelings about the challenges of raising children into wonderful, amazing adults brought about by so few words. Amazing.
Low key, work appropriate costume this year.
Tonight’s movie: Death on the Nile (1978). Peter Ustinov sounding a lot like Prince John from Disney’s Robin Hood. David Niven. Mia Farrow. Angela Lansbury hamming it up. Jane Birkin. Maggie Smith looking for all the world like Tilda Swinton. A classic Agatha Christie story. Good fun.
Life’s too short for uninteresting books
Nick Hornby, writing over at Lithub, says something that I am finding increasingly true: as you get older, life is too short to spend time on bad novels.
I try to find works of fiction, I promise, but it’s like pushing a wonky shopping trolley round a supermarket. I constantly veer off toward literary biographies, books about the Replacements, and so on, and only with a concerted effort can I push it toward the best our novelists have to offer. I suspect it’s to do with age and risk. A bad book about, say, the history of Indian railways will inevitably tell you something about railways, India, and history.
Reading a bad novel when you are approaching pensionable age, however, is like taking the time left available to you and setting it on fire.
It’s no secret that I read lots of books. For a long time my reading strategy has been one book at a time, in completionist fashion. Once I’ve put the effort in to give it a try, why not finish it so I can add it to my reading log? But more and more I pick up a book, almost always a novel, get a few chapters in, and decide I just can’t be arsed to finish it. So back it goes to the library. (Or, rarely, it gets resold to the used book store. Though I very rarely buy fiction any more when it can be borrowed instead.)
I’m at the point where my “to read” bookshelf has books that have been sitting there so long that I am no longer interested in the topics that were apparently interesting to me when I bought them. It feels like an entire next level of giving up to just throw those books in the resell pile, but, well, I’m getting older. Life’s too short to spend time in uninteresting books.