Patrick's People - Author of charity

Residents of Arma Care Center are getting a treat during morning activities when staff read stories to them from books donated to the center by local author Carl Otto.

On occasion they even get to see the author in person when Otto, a retired educator now living in Pittsburg, comes in to visit his niece Mary Ellen Otto, a center resident.

“The residents really enjoy this so much,” said Jan Mayfield, center activity director. “We’re reading a story now about a Gulf War veteran who comes home, finds that his wife has left him and he’s lost everything. He starts drinking, but a little dog befriends him. It’s just a very heartwarming story, and really resonates with residents.”
Otto said that most of his stories have something personal in them, even the fictional ones, and this particular story, titled “The Big Turnaround,” is no exception.

“I was driving in Joplin one time and there was a guy with a little dog and a sign saying ‘Will  Work for Food’,” Otto said. “I just couldn’t pass him up. I went back and gave him a $20 bill. That’s where I got the idea for this story.”

That warmth and generosity seems to run in the family, according to his niece, daughter of the late Wayne and Theresa Otto.

“My parents never had words except when he would stop to pick up a hitchhiker and put him  the back seat with my brother Tom and me,” Ms. Otto said. “Dad would give them money, then we’d go to the store and buy a loaf of bread and baloney because that was all we had enough money left to get.”

Her uncle recalled a day during the Great Depression when the family had just sat down at the table to eat.

“It was beans, because that’s about all we had,” he said. “There was a knock at the door and there stood one of the biggest men I’d ever seen. His clothes were just hanging on him and you could tell he’d lost a lot of weight. He wanted to know if we had something to eat.”

His parents sat the man, a total stranger, at the head of the table.
“When my mother put a bowl of  beans in front of him, he began to cry,” Otto said.

His niece said that her father finally stopped picking up hitchhikers when the book “In Cold Blood” came out with its true story of the murder of a Kansas farm family by two drifts.

“It said to him that Mom was right,” Ms. Otto said.

Her cousin, Bill Otto, a member of the Kansas Legislature, didn’t get that memo.

“My son Bill and I were driving and we stopped to pick up a guy who said his car had broken down and was being worked on,” Otto said. “Bill  said that he could drive his old Ford pick-up truck to Ark City, where he was wanting to go, and we never saw him or that truck again. It was an old truck but it still ran good.”

Both Ottos have strong ties to the Cherokee area, though both also lived in numerous other places during their lives. He calculated that he lived in five states and 21 houses while growing up because his mother loved variety, while her father had to travel for his job with Boeing.
She attended Southeast High School and was editor of the school newspaper until she wrote a humorous piece for Halloween about the supposed pranks of   the teachers. In particular, she described one male teacher as putting on a red dress and black stockings for Halloween and going out to tip  over outhouses.

That teacher was not amused and went to the school board to complain.

“They told me I could take drama or debate, but they didn’t want me involved with the school newspaper anymore,” Ms. Otto said.
Her first job was with the Cherokee elevator, and she later worked for Aquadyne and Oehme Brick.

“So many places I worked are now vacant lots,” she said.
Her uncle said that he was a high school drop-out. When he came home after serving in World War II, he went to college for one semester, but gave it up.

“I met this little red-headed girl and it was getting pretty serious, we started talking about getting married,” Otto said. “She said, ‘There’s one condition. If you go back to college and get your degree, we’ll get married’.”

He did, and they got married in the front room of the Cherokee farmhouse where she had been born. His education career included six years at Crest, 13 years at Elsmore and seven years as high school principal at Uniontown, as well as a stint as superintendent of schools in Anderson County.

Otto said that he started writing in high school, when a teacher assigned his class to write a short story.

“I wrote a story I called ‘The Big Fat Slob’ about a football player,” Otto said. “The head cheerleader wanted to date him for the prom, but he asked the homeliest girl in the school to the prom.”
The teacher singled his story out for praise.

“Miss Jones stopped me at the door when I went out and said that I had a way with words and should think about writing,” Otto said. “But I didn’t really start until my wife, Aletha Faye, died in 2001.”

Now he’s got eight books to his credit. His favorite is “Fuzzy and the Boys,” about some southeast Kansas boys and a runaway red-headed tomboy girl.

“She’s the physical likeness of my wife, but like me in personality,” Otto said.

Ms. Otto helped him with one book, proofreading and typing it for publication. She’s also been doing some writing of her own, in the form of letters to her aunt, Ellen Patton, who lives in Ohio.

“When I was born, they were expecting a boy and didn’t have a name for me,” Ms. Otto said. “My aunt said they could use hers.”

When she was a child, her aunt gave her a writing tablet, some crayons and three-cent stamps, and she’s been writing letters ever since. Her aunt still sends her stamps.

“I have one in the mail now,” Ms. Otto said. “I tell all in the letters. When I get hooked up on the Internet, we’ll put a closing on the book. The name of it will be ‘The Truth the Way I See It’.”

The way she and her uncle see the world is through humor.

“If you go through a day without a good belly laugh, you’ve lost that day,” Otto said.

“And if you can’t find anything else to laugh at, you can laugh at yourself,” Ms. Otto added.