Poet marks fifth Yuletide decade
By MIKE DOUGHERTY City editor

Poet Mary V.. Sponsler looks over latest Christmas effort.

"Eternal Symbol" marks the 30th year that Mary V. Sponsler has had her annual Christmas poem published.

She has written a holiday-based work for more than 40 consecutive Christmas seasons. The 2007 effort is printed at the end of this article.

For the past 20 years, she and her husband, Clifford, lived off U.S. 270 on Yeaman Lane in a house near Lake Ouachita, and her poem has been published in the Mount Ida newspaper. Sponsler, 88, worked in a nearby rock and crystal shop the past 18 years, and worked part-time at the Mount Ida Chamber of Commerce for the first four or five years they lived in the area.

She likes to tell people that she and her husband had decided to see the United States in a motor home when they retired from California and stopped to see relatives near Ouachita.

"We had been traveling about six weeks when we came through here," Mary said, "and [Clifford] caught a 40- pound striper at Ouachita. We bought the house near Mount Ida the next day."

Clifford Sponsler laughed and said, "You've told that story so long now that you believe it."

The couple moved to Benton in August to be near relatives.

Mary Sponsler was born March 14. 1919, in Scobey, Mont., near the Canadian border. Her father, John Floody, homesteaded to acquire the family's property there. Her mother, Minnie Coons Floody, was an artist. Sponsler still has six or seven oil paintings done by her mother, two of which are hanging on the wall of her Benton living room.

The family moved to Sioux Falls, S.D., when she was young. She started college at the University of South Dakota at Vermillion, she said, but got homesick and came home to Sioux Falls by Thanksgiving. She met her first husband, Roy May, whom she married in 1937. He was a radio entertainer and was working in Sioux Falls when she came home from college. She joined him in working at radio stations where she sang and performed in skits and plays as they moved from one radio station to another for 15 years or more.

May was from Delight, Ark., and a visit to his hometown in 1939 was her first taste of Arkansas, she said.

"The people in Delight would come by to say hello to Roy and they thought I was strange and talked funny," Sponsler said. "Of course, they seemed the same way to me, having grown up in Montana and South Dakota.

"Little did I know that I would wind up moving back here 50 years later."

She and May moved to California in 1953.

"We were looking for a place to live and saw a house that I loved but that we really couldn't afford, so I told him that I would get a job to help pay for it.

"I saw an ad in the newspaper where Transformer Engineers was looking for someone with an electronics background. I went in and applied, telling them that I had been working in radio, and I got the job.

"Eventually, I worked for General Dynamics. I did technical writing and eventually was on the floor as a testing inspector [of autopilot systems the company built for missile systems in the U.S. space program]. They used to ask me to write something when someone was retiring or having a birthday, and I would. That's probably where the Christmas poems started. The first one was printed in a company newsletter.

"I've always done writing of some kind, probably since I was about 7."

Some years, she said, the subject of the Christmas poem doesn't come easily to her. It may be secular in nature or it can be of a religious theme, and it occasionally mixes the two. One that she read to a reporter touched on the process of losing friends from one Christmas to the next.

She said she usually gives herself a deadline of early December for getting the annual Christmas poem finished so it can be included with the family's annual Christmas cards. That list is down to about 175 from a high of about 250, her husband estimated.

"Unfortunately, when you get to be my age," Mary Sponsler said, "you start losing some of your friends, so we don't send out as many as we used to."

Some of those friends have copies of all of her 40-plus Christmas poems, something she said she cannot claim, having misplaced copies of some of them over the years as she and her husband moved around.

She and Roy May had four children. Two of them, John of Florida and Rosemary of Minnesota, are still living.

Roy May died in 1961. Mary married Clifford Sponsler in 1964. He had a successful air conditioning business in California. They have four grandchildren between them.

Sponsler said they have enjoyed their years in Arkansas.

Friends who knew she had retired from General Dynamics figured that she must have been bored working at the crystal shop.

"No," she said, "it was pretty interesting working there. We had people stopping in from all over the world when they visited Lake Ouachita."

She told of a visit by a group of about 12 Japanese tourists when she and an older woman in the group began talking to each other - her in English and the woman in Japanese - using signs and gestures. One of the woman's younger male companions tried to tell the woman that Sponsler spoke no Japanese, but the woman motioned for him to go away and they continued communicating for several minutes.

After the group re-boarded the van in which they were traveling, the man came back to Sponsler and said, "She said you speak very good Japanese."