Iolan Naomi Clounch was a young woman in an era many remember as divisive. As a black woman, she could have faced personal peril or societal prejudice. Instead, she remembers her youth fondly.
Born in Omaha, Clounch grew up in Iowa, first in Council Bluffs, then Crescent, a small town in a remote area 30 miles north.
All the while, her father worked for Swift Packing in Omaha, joining the family on weekends.
Clounch lived with her mother and siblings out in the country and was educated in a one-room school house that served grades one through eight.
“I was the only black student at that school,” she said. Aside from one incident, she doesn’t recall any mistreatment based on her race.
“Then I went to Missouri Valley, Iowa, to high school. I had to ride the bus,” Clounch said. To catch that bus, “I had to walk three miles into Crescent Town. I was the only black in that whole high school at that time,” she said.
The next nearest high school was Council Bluffs, 30 miles south. Without a car, that option was out.
Again, Clounch was accepted.
“I got along fine with everyone,” she said.
Only once did she hear a disparaging word, and it came from her best friend, Esta.
“I never got to go to the ball games because I lived out in the country,” Clounch said.
“We didn’t have a car and I had no way to get home afterwards.” But she liked hearing about them.
“I remember we took our sack lunches and were eating, and Esta told me, “Naomi, there was a cute nigger on the basketball team last night.” I told her, ”Esta, I’d rather you didn’t use that term.
She never did again.”
Clounch still remains in contact with her former classmates, attending the class reunions they have every five years. The last, held in 2007, celebrated the 55th reunion of the graduating class.
“People treat me like a queen,” she said of those events. “They’re happy to see me.”
Things could have been different.
Clounch stopped her schooling after high school. Career choices were limited.
“There was just domestic work,” Clounch said. “That’s all there was — domestic work.”
“I lived for a while with a family in Pleasanton,” she said. “I cleaned and watched their children and cooked for them. I stayed with them and worked for a while, then I met my boys’ father and we married.”
Clounch continued to do domestic work after her marriage. “I worked in different people’s homes,” she said. Even after having children of her own, she said, “I worked in the evenings cooking for families.”
Clounch moved to Fort Scott, where she continued in domestic work, plus worked at a local restaurant washing dishes.
“There were no machines,” she said, “you had to wash everything by hand.”
“That would have been in 1953 or ‘54,” she said.
Clounch reflected on the irony of working there. “At that time, (blacks) weren’t allowed to come into a restaurant to eat,” she said. “If you wanted a sandwich, you had to come to the back door and order it.”
Clounch didn’t know if patrons minded her working there. After all, she said, “They couldn’t see me there. I was in the back.”
“That is the reason I encouraged my children to go to college, so they could get better jobs,” Clounch said.
“But I really encouraged my daughters,” she said. “Because I really feel a woman needs to be able to take care of herself, whether she’s married or not.”
Three of her children graduated college, with her oldest daughter, Theresa, scheduled to receive her Ph.D. this spring.
Clounch was a single mother when she met her current husband, Eugene, in Fort Scott.
It was his only foray outside of Iola, where he had been born and raised.
The couple fell in love, and Clounch really had no choice, she said — she had to move to Iola if she wanted to be with Eugene.
She arrived in 1962. Not long after, they were married.
“We’ve been married 46 years,” Clounch said.
The couple bought their current home on the corner of Buckeye and Lincoln in 1964.
“You might say it was a fixer-upper,” Clounch said. Eugene worked on the house from April through August of that year, adding a bathroom and doing necessary repairs so the boys could start school at Lincoln School in the fall, Clounch said. In summers they’d play ball all day on the school’s playground. “You’d have to holler at them to come in and eat supper.”
It was her children, Clounch said, who saw more racial bias than she.
“My oldest son worked at the drive in. One night, someone asked the manager why are niggers working here?”
That was about the worst incident, though, Clounch said. More of the time, actions reflected changing times.
“In 1973, our oldest son was elected football king. He was called into the office and congratulated, and told he was deserving of that honor. But he was told that the parents of the queen candidates were all right with their daughters being queen. It wasn’t until later when he realized why he had been told that.”
“Back in those times, interracial dating was not prevalent like it is now,” Clounch said.
“A young lady asked my son to take her to the prom. Her father thought it was all right, but her mother thought it might cause problems, so she was not able to go with him.” Another girl, smitten with the same son, worried her parents with her interest.
“Her mother called and asked what we were going to do about her daughter and my son,” Clounch stated. “I told her we weren’t going to do anything, because my son was going off to college and I didn’t want him serious about any girl.”
“They really didn’t have problems with other kids,” Clounch said. It was the adults who had issues.
Iola had a larger black community in those days, Clounch said.
“There used to be 25 or 30 of us in the (African Methodist Episcopal Church) choir,” she said. The church itself had about 100 members. But “A lot of the young people moved on and became doctors and professional people,” Clounch said. The population dwindled. Now the church has only 14 active members, she said, all of them retired.
Clounch still sings at her church, though. She’ll be singing there tonight, at the Martin Luther King celebration. All are welcome, she said.
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