December 12, 2002

OBITUARIES

Lila Templin
Lila Horton Templin, formerly of the Yellow Springs area, died Thursday, Dec. 5, in the Mennonite Memorial Home in Bluffton. She was 104 years of age.

Lila was born in Malone, a tiny village in Iowa, where her father was proprietor of the general store, postmaster, implement dealer and station master on the Chicago and Northwestern Railway. When she was 9 her family moved to a farm near Arkansas City, Kan., a half-mile from the Oklahoma border, where memories of the rush of land-hungry pioneers into the Cherokee Strip in Oklahoma 18 years earlier still lingered.

In 1920, Lila graduated from Southwestern College in Winfield, Kan., and married Ralph Templin, a fellow graduate and Methodist pastor. After four years in the Boston area the couple were called to the mission field in India.

In India over a period of 15 years, the Templins transformed a small middle school, which was about to be closed down, into the Clancy Memorial High School in the ancient Hindu city of Mathura. After acquiring an M.A. in education from the University of Michigan in 1934 while on furlough, Lila taught many classes of small boys to read English. She devised a method of her own using hand lettered story charts illustrated by an Indian friend who was headmaster of the school. She remembered one of the boys complaining to her that she made them actually read aloud, where before they had been able to get by with rote learning using inadequate textbooks.

Back in the United States, Lila taught homemaking skills for a number of years at The School of Living near Suffern, N.Y. While there she learned to weave and eventually acquired about a dozen looms.

In 1946, Ralph and Lila moved to Yellow Springs, where Ralph had been hired by Arthur Morgan to work part-time for Community Service, Inc.

For many years the Templins lived in a converted schoolhouse on a corner of what had once been the Whitelaw Reid estate near Cedarville, which is now the home of Senator Mike DeWine.

While Ralph Templin taught sociology at Central State University, Lila taught weaving there in a crafts workshop. She recalled that some of her male students objected to the idea of weaving until she reminded them that in many parts of the world it was the men who did the weaving.

She moved to Bluffton in 1987 to be near her son, Lawrence, and his family.

She was preceded in death by her husband, who died in May 1984.

She is survived by her son, Lawrence, and his wife, Orletta of Bluffton; three grandchildren, Sara Velasquez of Toledo, John Templin of Bluffton and Mary Templin of Toledo; four great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at a later date in Rockford Chapel. Lila and Ralph were members of the Friends Meeting in Yellow Springs.

Memorial service planned for Sue Good
A memorial service for Sue Good will be held on Saturday, Jan. 4, 7 p.m., at the First Presbyterian Church, 314 Xenia Avenue. Good died on Oct. 19, 2002.