Still seeking to serve

Salsman keeps giving throughout life well lived

To walk into the Springdale home of Leona Salsman is to walk into her history.

Smelling of fresh baked cookies, the modest one-story home is dotted with accents of a full life. Her entryway is decorated in angels, doilies are gently placed over the antique chairs in the front sitting room and butterflies, the great-grandmother's favorite, seem to float here and there on the walls of the entryway.

Nearly every inch of her home is covered in memories. On her dining room table lays a box of birthday cards received on her 88th birthday. Photos of her family are everywhere, reminding those who visit of the legacy she created. Gifts lovingly given by friends are proudly displayed for all to see.

The small, and somewhat frail, woman can usually be found in her easy chair in the living room watching her favorite baseball teams, the Cardinals or Orioles, on television.

But she's not just sitting. Salsman is a very busy woman.

Never content to simply be still, she is in a near-constant state of creating, using her trusty scissors to make craft projects for children, scrap books, fabric calendars and crocheted area rugs made from an unusual medium: plastic bags.

Brightly colored and ranging in size from a foot around to nearly 6 feet, the area rugs are made from plastic newspaper bags and shopping bags. She carefully stacks each type of bag in its own box, setting it next to her chair until she is ready to crochet. After choosing her color palette, she skillfully cuts each bag into a long strip and tying one strip to another and another, makes herself plastic yarn.

She starts to crochet, and the rug comes together and becomes a gift for anyone lucky enough to appreciate it.

But Leona Salsman is more than just an elder with cool rugs.

"I was kept pretty busy. I learned how to cook when I was young, and we had hogs and such. It was a farm life."

Salsman was born in Walnut Grove, Mo., in March 1926. The first-born daughter, she became an integral part of the family, helping to raise the younger children and cook and bake to help feed them.

"My mom did a lot of farm work, so at 10, 12 years old, I started doing the cooking," Salsman said. The family had little money, so any baked goods were made at home. Taught by her mother, Salsman would bake fresh biscuits and cornbread daily in the small kitchen of the two-room farmhouse.

"We didn't go to the store to buy these things," she said. "I baked them. I would fire up the wood stove and cook on that." The family had no electricity or indoor plumbing, and Salsman remembers the tricky method of bathing on the farm. The family had an indoor bathtub, she said, which needed to be filled with water from the wood stove. The first person to get a bath would have a very hot one, and as the water cooled, the baths got shorter, she said.

After baking and attending to her duties on the farm, Salsman would walk with her sisters and brothers to their one-room country schoolhouse two miles from their home. On cold days, the siblings would wear caps made from cloth bread covers collected by their mother and crocheted to fit each child.

As a teenager, Salsman suspended some of her duties on the farm to join the work force.

"I worked in a chicken factory dressing the chickens, or really, undressing them," she said. "And I candled eggs during the war. I would check them to make sure they were good and then send them to the girls in the other room (where the eggs would be broken and poured into a vat and preserved that way.) We'd put them in large crates and send them to the soldiers."

Although early life was often difficult for Salsman, she always found ways to have fun. Barring one unfortunate incident involving doughnuts and the hogs that wouldn't eat them, she would play on the farm and on weekends head to the local skating rink with friends.

And it was at one of these get-togethers that Salsman's life would change forever.

"I think I fell, and when I looked up, I saw him standing there."

Salsman was an avid skater.

"We had so much fun skating," she said of her family. "We would always go rollerskating, us kids, and my husband and I took the kids. I'd love to go skating again, but they won't let me."

Skating holds a particularly dear place in the great-grandmother's heart. In 1945, Salsman was attending a weekend skate party with her friends when she took a spill on the rink. Although this was nothing new for the 19-year-old, the person who would help her was.

"I loved to roller skate," she said. "And one night when I fell, here was this man come and picked me up. He's the man I married."

Leona married Dean Salsman soon after and, within a year, they welcomed their first child, Velma. The couple moved to Springfield, Mo., where they integrated their favorite pasttime into family life.

"We always continued to go skating," she said. "Later, when all my kids were growing up, we would take them with us. Our church had skating parties, and my husband would take me and the kids. We had so much fun. Dean would carry the children around while he skated all the time."

The couple would bring up four children. As she raised her family, Salsman continued to apply her strong work ethic by working directly with the community. She used the skills learned as a child as a school cook. She made, by all accounts, the best cinnamon rolls, sometimes making up to 24 dozen at a time.

Such a baker, she purchased flour in 100 pound bags and cinnamon in 20 pound bags. And although she worked during the day, her children said they could expect a home-baked treat every afternoon after school.

After 49 years of marriage, Dean passed away, leaving Leona Salsman on her own in western Kansas. The already aged Salsman would travel frequently to be with her children and grandchildren in Abilene, Texas. It was one of these trips that would bring Salsman into the center of a shocking court case.

In 1994, Salsman stopped at a shop off an Oklahoma highway for a simple cup of coffee, she said. As she returned to her car, she noticed a man approach an idling car across the street. It was then she witnessed him raise the gun and shoot the driver of the car. Thinking he got away with it, the man fled, and although she was in shock, Salsman reported the crime.

"I was so scared and shaking," she said. "I had to do the right thing." The "right thing" would later mean testifying in court, braving the reported murderer's cold stare as she retold her story.

"He got life without parole," she said. "He was a scary man. I hope he never gets out."

"I saw directions for the rugs in the church paper. So I just started making them."

After spending a few years alone in Kansas, Salsman made the tough decision to leave the home she had shared with her husband to be closer to her family and grandchildren in 1995.

It was in her new home in Abilene, Texas, that Salsman would come across a church bulletin that would give her a life-long hobby.

"Once a month, a church newspaper would come out," she said. "I saw the directions for these rugs and thought that I could make them. So I made one. I started out just making one. A plumber came to my house and said that his grandmother could make those, so I gave him the paper and the first one I made to show her. Never saw either one again."

Despite losing the instructions and the rug, Salsman created more from memory.

"I remembered how to start the mat, so I just went from there," she said. "I've been crocheting them ever since. I enjoy the paper every day, so I've made a lot of yellow rugs from the yellow newspaper covers."

Starting with wrinkled plastic bags, Salsman sorts them into boxes of like colors before craftily slicing each one into a long strip. She crochets these strips until the rug is big enough or she runs out of the color, she said. The result, a durable rug and a near-permanent black mark on the elderly woman's hand from the pressure of her crochet needle.

Salsman has made approximately 300 rugs in the last 20 years, giving them to family and friends. She guesses that she has nearly 200 "all over the place," from Georgia to Albuquerque, N.M.

"I just really like to do them," she said. "I do this crocheting and despite my health, I can just sit here and do these all day."

"She's always giving to others. Most of the time, she's giving to others more than to herself."

Leona Salsman's health isn't what it used to be.

Although she is a two-time cancer survivor, her heart and lungs have begun to show their age. Last year, she was fitted with a pacemaker and she spends most of her day attached to an oxygen machine. She can no longer mow and edge her large yard (something she stopped only recently), cannot drive and attends church at home.

"I would love to get out and go places," she said sadly. "I don't drive in case I have a spell. So my daughter picks me up and takes me shopping. I enjoy doing for other people. And now the kids are all doing for me. It bothers me because I am so used to taking care of them."

"It's our time to take care of her," said her daughter, Velma Shaffer. "She is just always thinking of doing for others. She probably neglected things that she wanted to do for herself. But she was a good mom -- a really down-to-earth woman."

Salsman continues to crochet rugs for her family, as well as producing hand-sewn calendars and afghans, Shaffer said. "She has eight grandkids, and each one has a large afghan. All of her great-grandchildren have small afghans that she's made for them, and everyone receives a calendar every year. She's never idle.

"She would love to go work at the church or do her lawn again, but it's really just too much for her," continued Shaffer. "So it's our turn to help her. And we really enjoy doing that."

As Salsman looks back on her full and productive life, she does so with peace and fulfillment. And although she is confined to working from home, she continues to inspire her family and community.

"She just always keeps a positive attitude," says Shaffer. "She's always had a great faith, and I know that has gotten her to where she is."

"I've had a really good time," Salsman said. "I've got some precious kids and a precious family. What more could I ask for?"

NAN Our Town on 07/24/2014

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