Malinda R. Regier

is honored with a Brick from Stan and Rosalind Scudder.

Malinda Rose Lingenfelder Regier Brown is my mother. I told her that we couldn't fit all her names on one brick so we chose the name I remember her most by, even though she most often used Linda. She used to tell me that my name, Rosalind, was a transposition of her name, "Linda Rose." I was fascinated by that switching of names and always felt that I was my mother's daughter, closer somehow because we shared names. Being a namesake was later passed on to one of my daughters, Melinda Suzanne. Suzanna was my mother's mother's name. In all these names, however, "Nana" is perhaps the favorite name for my mother. Even non-relatives call her Nana.

It's very difficult to capture this wonderful woman in mere words. People are charmed and amazed by her and her actions. She embodies a spirit of sharing and caring for others. She is the neighbor who is always ready with food and cards and kind words in times of celebration/sadness/"just thinking of you." I sometimes think that my mother knows every single person who lives in Newton, Kansas, and half the population of Wichita.

Her interests and contacts are wide-ranging and varied: from antiques to art and sculpture and sewing to reading and presenting programs on long-ago structures of importance in Newton's history. Her creative cooking has led to many family tales of the latest "Nana concoction" and the careful smelling before you taste!

Linda grew up in western Kansas on a farm, one of two daughters of Jake and Suzanna Lingenfelder. She attended Bethel College where she earned a teaching certificate, and she returned to Macksville, KS to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. A short time later, she married Max Regier, her forever-sweetheart, and together they made a home in Newton for their seven children. She was the old-time kind of mother, the Cub Scout and Girl Scout and Sunday School volunteer. It seemed as if there were always fresh-baked cookies and kind words when we arrived home after school. Even in my college days, the care packages of cookies arrived with comforting regularity. The Regier home was a gathering place for neighborhood kids, a comfortable place to be.

How to define the mother I love and respect so much? She's shaped me in so many ways, but usually without instruction or rules to live by. Rather, it has been through the observation of her actions. How loving and caring she can be, but also funny, and dancing like Betty Boop on her 80th birthday. The person who always wears a costume on HalIoween. The woman who still cares about her appearance, even to go to the grocery store. The mother who gathers around her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. The woman who remembers seemingly hundreds of birthdays.

My mother is the woman who said she didn't belong in the Plaza of Heroines, that she hadn't done anything special. That's one thing she's been wrong about. Every day is special when you are loved by Malinda Rose Lingenfelder Regier Brown.

And so, Mom, from my family and me: Stan, Mike and Georgia, Tim and Ali, Mindy, Roscoe the dog, and Max the cat, here’s to our heroine!

Submitted by Rosalind R. Scudder

August 31, 1998 (for Malinda R. Regier)