Barbara Haws

Barbara Clare Haws, 96, died Tuesday, February 9, 2010, in Lincoln. Born April 8, 1913, on the Centennial Hill farm, west of Benedict, Nebraska, she was the eighth of nine children of Lela (Barber) and Harry M. Harrington. She grew up in Lushton, graduating from York High School in 1931. For the next three years she taught in a one-room school house in District 32 of York County. On July 15, 1934, she married her long-time sweetheart, J. Dexter “Mike” Haws. They moved to Henderson and then Polk where Dexter taught school. After completing his degree on “Ag” campus at the University of Nebraska (1940), they moved to Lyons followed by Beatrice (1951) and Hebron (1956). Dexter’s career in the Soil Conservation Service also took them to Madison, Wisconsin (1961), and Columbia, Missouri, before they settled in Lincoln in 1967. They were longtime members of the Methodist Church. In 1984 they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with immediate family at Fort Robinson. Barbara loved to travel and was an inveterate gardener and bird-watcher. In the 1980s she started Barcie Candles, a candle making business she ran out of her home on Cottonwood Drive.

The last of her generation, Barbara is survived by three sons and a daughter; Robert James and Penny Haws of Oxford, Mississippi; Richard Harrington and Rae Haws of Ames, Iowa; William Eugene and Amorette Haws of Columbia, Missouri; and Barbara Beth Haws and William Josephson of Brooklyn, New York; as well as seven grandchildren and five great grandchildren and countless nieces and nephews across the country.

Funeral services were on Saturday, February 20 at 11:00 a.m. in York, Nebraska, at Metz Mortuary, 109 S. Lincoln Avenue. Burial was in Greenwood Cemetery. According to her wishes, memorials may be made to the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum, P.O. Box 830715, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Nebraska 68583