Harry Richardson
Harry Kenneth Richardson was born on 31 October 1920 at Henryetta, in Okmulgee County, Oklahoma. Henryetta was a coal and smelter town in the eastern half of the state, and most of his family's story for the next eighty years runs through it.
In the Second World War he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps as an airplane mechanic. The Army Air Corps was the Army's air arm, the forerunner of the U.S. Air Force, and its mechanics kept the planes flying.
On 25 September 1945 he married Ruby J. Jackson at Henryetta. She was a Henryetta girl too, the daughter of Tom Ellsworth Jackson and Myrta Bratcher, and the wedding fell on the day after her twenty-second birthday.
After the war the couple went west to the San Francisco Bay. Their daughter Linda was born at Richmond, in Contra Costa County, California, on 7 March 1948. In November 1952, when Ruby's father died at Dewar near Henryetta, his obituary listed her among the survivors as "Mrs. Harry Richardson, Pittsburg, California." Pittsburg is a mill and port town on the same county's waterfront, a few miles up the bay from Richmond. Ruby's brothers and sisters had gone the same way: in 1952 three of them were living at Hayward, Hanford, Alhambra and Sacramento.
Harry worked as an iron worker, the trade that raises the steel frames of buildings and bridges. The family later settled at Lawton, in Comanche County, in the southwest of Oklahoma. They had three children: two sons, Kenneth and James, and a daughter, Linda. Linda attended the Robert E. Greiner School for the Handicapped and lived at home with her parents all her life.
Ruby went back to school in middle age and became a registered nurse. She and Harry were members of University Church of Christ in Lawton. She died at home on 19 February 2007. Linda died that August, at fifty-nine.
Harry died at Lawton on Thursday, 6 March 2008, at the age of eighty-seven. His funeral was held at University Church of Christ, with Mike Bentley, the minister, officiating. He was taken back to Henryetta that afternoon and buried in Salt Creek Cemetery beside Ruby and Linda, under the direction of Becker Funeral Home. His obituary named his two sons, Kenneth and James, both still of the home; his one granddaughter, Teresa Busby, and her husband William; and two great-grandsons, all of Geronimo.
Sources
If Harry Richardson is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "Harry Richardson (1920-2008)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/harry-richardson-1920-2008-04f476.