Eureka euphoria

EUREKA SPRINGS — SELF PORTRAIT Date and place of birth:

July 19, 1938, in Greenwood Hollow

Family:

Son David, two grandchildren

Notable for:

Writing several books on the history of Eureka Springs

When I read for fun

I’ve mostly read British mysteries of the older days, pre-World War II. I think I found and read every one of the Agatha Christie novels.

Receiving the Lifetime Spirit Award was

a lovely thing, a total surprise. It was very moving and humbling to me.

They presented it to me because I have a spirit of excitement, a spirit that I want to share with you, and [I believe] there’s no place in the world better than Eureka Springs to live or visit.

The reason I named my cat Topaz is

the eyes. I’ve had her a little over a year, and when I got her, there was something about the tone of the color of the eyes.

I thought, ‘This is Topaz.’

One thing I’ve always wanted to be better at is

singing, because I love to sing so much. One of my earliest memories is hearing people sing on the radio.

A word to sum me up:

Smiling

June Westphal misses her handwriting.

Westphal’s formal education began almost 70 years ago, at a tiny rural school where they taught her “the joys of beautiful penmanship.” Westphal learned how to expertly guide a pen, a talent she retained for decades until her deteriorating eyesight robbed her of it.

For almost 40 years, she wrote out manuscripts on a yellow pad, rather than starting on a typewriter or a computer. She’d still be doing that today, were it possible.

When she is doing a signing for her most recent book, Eureka Springs: City of Healing Waters, published in April, her co-author, Kate Cooper, will inscribe the dedication and leave a blank space for Westphal to sign her name. She can still do that well, even though she can’t see it clearly.

“She’s so positive,” says Cooper, of Eureka Springs. “She’s got such a great attitude, and she’s so sharp. She knows the history of this area so well, and she really enjoys the people and sharing her knowledge.”

A mysterious genetic condition, one that earlier robbed her two sisters of their vision, has taken away much of Westphal’s sight. She has no vision in her left eye, and near the end of 2011, her right eye began to deteriorate.

Westphal gave up driving in July 2011, ending a 57-year career as a motorist without an accident to her name.

“I parked my car and my son took it, and now the rest of the family uses it,” says Westphal, who just turned 74. “I just made the decision there was no way morally or ethically I could do it. ... It was no big deal. I just simply stopped the car one day in the middle of July and haven’t driven since.”

Surprisingly, Westphal says this not with apparent sadness, but with a smile. She’d love to still have her vision - at a minimum the kind she had until late December, which allowed her to plow through an enormous number of books and old newspaper clippings - but she’s not letting its loss consume her.

She’s too excited about her work to wallow in self-pity.

“She’s so passionate about history, and so meticulous in the record-keeping - and the majority of it done over her lifetime was free, on a volunteer basis for our community,” says Mike Bishop, the president and chief executive officer of the Eureka Springs Chamber of Commerce. “It would be impossible to try to count the thousands of volunteer hours she has dedicated to the process of [preserving the city’s history].”

When the chamber decided to give out its first Lifetime Spirit Award, Bishop says, there was really no question as to whom the recipient should be. It was Westphal, who has written several books on the history of Eureka Springs, helped found its historical museum, and has been involved with countless volunteer activities.

In December, 73 1/2 years after Westphal was born in a log cabin just a few miles outside the city limits, she was given the award.

“We had a 12-member board of community leaders,and we all felt like she had contributed so much for so long to our town, to preserving our heritage and promoting the city,” Bishop says. “She set the benchmark for people deserving it in the future.”

A CURIOUS GIRL

It was simple, and wonderful.

Westphal was born in a log house in Greenwood Hollow in 1938, the seventh of eight children of Glen and Lena Johnson. Her father and brothers had built the house a few years earlier, but it was “exactly like it would have been 100 years before,” she says.

The house didn’t have electricity until 1945, but nobody in the region had electricity until the mid-1940s, when rural electrification took place. The family relied on light from kerosene lamps, which June remembers her mother keeping spotless.

“There was no electricity in school when I started, either,” she says. “But I don’t remember it being a dark world at all. To me it was a bright and cheerful house.”

The former June Johnson was an exceptionally curious girl. When she was 5, she begged her father to let her go to school, even though the rural school her siblings attended did not have a kindergarten.

So she began first grade at 5. The next year, she started out as a second-grader and finished as a graduating third grader, which is why she ended up graduating from high school at 16.

“She was always a good student, and she liked all of her teachers,” says younger sister Wanda Tirey of Forum. “She was fascinated from an early age with family histories and connections, always wanting to talk to people and find out who married whom.”

When Westphal was 10, her rural school closed, and she and two other siblings were told to attend elementary school in Eureka Springs.There was no school bus, and her parents were unable to drive their three youngest children to Eureka Springs, so they moved inside in the city limits. The family moved to the only house ever built on Planter Hill on South Main Street. (Today, that same house, built in the 1890s, is Casa Colina, a popular Mexican restaurant.)

Westphal continued to excel at school after moving to Eureka Springs, graduating from high school as the valedictorian of the Class of 1955, but that marked the end of her formal education. Her family lacked the means to send to her college.

“Everything from then on was self-education,” she says. “Once you love to read and love literature and will read anything that lies down in front of you, there’s no way you cannot be educated. I don’t have that kind of focused education that more scholarly friends of mine do, but I’ve certainly enjoyed what I did.”

LEARNING AND HELPING

As it turned out, Westphal’s education was only beginning.

Although she didn’t knowit at the time, by the end of the summer of 1955, she had begun a career as a historian.

Westphal took a position with the Eureka Springs Chamber of Commerce, where she worked under a man named Sam Leath. Leath had come to Eureka Springs in its infancy, before the dawn of the 20th century, and had fallen in love with the area.

Using thumbtacks, Leath covered walls with pictures from throughout Eureka Springs’ history. Many dated back to well before Westphal’s birth.

Leath was a promotions man, and he promoted the heck out of Eureka Springs. He was constantly talking about how wonderful life was there, and how people needed to visit the place, or come back if they’d already been.

Promoting Eureka Springs was Leath’s job, Westphal recalls, but he also believed every glowing word he spoke. He truly loved the city, and that enthusiasm rubbed off on the teenage girl who was working for him.

“It proved to be totally the basis of my working with photographs and available information with newspapers and printed materials on the history of Eureka,” she says. “By the time I worked directly with him, he had put in decades of community service. Not only did he makeme enthusiastic about Eureka Springs; he gave me the kind of knowledge I needed.”

By the time she married Al Westphal in December 1961, June had taken an office position with Kraft Foods in nearby Berryville. She stayed there until 1969, when she had their son, David, ostensibly leaving to become a homemaker.

She has always remained active in the community. She is a member of the Eureka Springs Cemetery Commission, volunteered with the Eureka Springs Hospital Guild, and was the executive secretary when the city planned its centennial in 1979. A year before that, she was elected to a term on the City Council - Al, who passed away in 1999, served several terms on it - and sang in the choir of First United Methodist Church for decades.

She and Al became active members of the board of directors for the city’s annual Ozark Folk Festival in the 1960s. The festival was continually turning a profit, which the board was donating to area nonprofits.

Then the board decided to create something that would be a year-round attraction. So in 1971, it opened the Eureka Springs Historical Museum. June Westphal was active in its collection of artifacts and the planning of its opening exhibits, and she has beenconnected to the museum ever since. She was its director, and today holds the title of executive director for life.

While she is no longer involved with its day-to-day operations, Westphal is still often used as a consultant.

“She doesn’t want people to have bad information, so if she hears people repeating bad information, she’ll nicely say, ‘I’d like to correct what you’re saying,’” says Mary Jean Sell of Eureka Springs, who works with the museum. “She’s interested in the truth, and preserving the history of Eureka Springs is incredibly important to her.”

MORE TO RECORD

Sell is the co-author of Westphal’s next book, Eureka Springs: The Eras of Our Way.

They’ve been working on it for a year and a half, which means it overlapped with Westphal’s work on City of Healing Waters. Although Westphal’s eyesight has diminished greatly over this time, Sell says that without her, it would be impossible to write The Eras of Our Way.

When Westphal’s vision weakened, members of the community raised money to buy her a computer system that allows text to be projected onto a screen, making it possible for Westphal to read again. The computer system was stolen from Westphal’s house shortly after itwas bought, but the community quickly bought her a new one.

“When we started out, we met once a week,” Sell says. “She would talk to me and tell me stories about the early history [of Eureka Springs], and then as I went through different books and materials that were available, I would find things and then talk about them with her, what their effect might have been.

“Her memory is incredible. She is pretty much the recognized authority on the history of Eureka Springs.”

Through the course of Westphal’s lifetime, she has realized that the history of Eureka Springs is a series of ups and downs, taking place in roughly 15-year cycles. The new book is a contemporary history of Eureka Springs, from 1879 to the present, that explores these periods.

This means it is a sequel to the first book Westphal published on the town’s history.

In the mid-’60s, the Carnegie Public Library hired a new librarian by the name of Catherine Osterhage. Westphal and Osterhage quickly became friends, bonded by a common interest in the history of Eureka Springs, and they decided to write a book.

The result was 1970’s A Fame Not Easily Forgotten. (Osterhage died shortly before its publication.)

But while the first book was more of a series of facts,the next one will be a narrative.

“That book really served as a textbook,” Westphal says of A Fame Not Easily Forgotten. “We were able to provide information people needed, real factual information for tourism and promotion.”

As this is going on, Westphal is also nearing publication of a booklet. This one contains historical photos, and the first 50 of the “Memory Moments” she did on the radio.

She has been doing these “Memory Moments” three times a week on the radio since 2009. They’re stories about people, many of them long gone, who helped make Eureka Springs the place it is today.

The source of this information is Westphal’s sharp memory and her insatiable desire to know more about Eureka Springs - which remain as strong in 2012 as they were in 1955.

“This all just evolved because of her curiosity of everything and her love of Eureka Springs,” says Tirey, her sister. “She’s always loved Eureka Springs.

“History and genealogy has been her life for so long, and she’s always been so curious about it. She seems to be kind of the go-to person on it. I don’t think she will ever want to quit.”