LITTLE ROCK — In the mid-1970s, Loree Olinghouse took in a young man from Taiwan who needed a place to stay while attending the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
“She didn’t charge him anything, just had him in her home so he could go to school and he wound up settling in Arkansas,” said her son, Phil Olinghouse Jr.
It’s one of many examples of how Olinghouse was always taking care of young people, her son said.
Loree Annie Tatum Olinghousedied Monday at Briarwood Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Little Rock from heart failure.
She was 89.
While growing up in Noble, La., Olinghouse learned generosity from her father, who gave food from his general store to starving people during the Great Depression even though it led to the store’s closing, her son said.
At 16, Olinghouse studied education for three years at what became Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, La.
In the early 1940s, she married Phil Olinghouse in San Diego before he was sent overseas to Okinawa, Japan, during the war.
“She worked in some war manufacturing plant,” her son said. “She thought that was her duty because he was going overseas.”
After the war, the couple moved to Little Rock, where Olinghouse raised her two children, stayed involved in community activities and worked for more than 15 years at the Arkansas State Board of Nursing.
In the late 1950s, Olinghouse joined the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools during the Little Rock school desegregation crisis when the schools were shut down.
“She didn’t get in the segregation or the integration business, she got in the school business,” PhilOlinghouse Jr. said. “She thought all children should have an education.”
Olinghouse always made sure her family had real-life educational experiences, like taking her son to meet President John F. Kennedy when he spoke at the dedication of Greers Ferry Dam on Oct. 3. 1963, a little more than a month before his assassination.
“President Kennedy came around and mother said, ‘You can shake hands and meet him,’” her son said, adding that he got in line twice. “My mother said, ‘You won’t meet many presidents, so it’s important you meet him and know what that’s like.’”
Olinghouse was affectionately known as “Mimi O” to her grandchildren and just “O” to her greatgrandchildren.
“O always had a piece of candy or a dollar bill for them,” her son said.
Phil Olinghouse Jr. said his mother had a “sense of candor.”
“Like, ‘Son, you’re getting fat.’ There wasn’t any ‘Don’t you think you ought to lose weight?” Phil Olinghouse Jr. said. “Sometimes it wasn’t the right thing to say, but she’d say it anyway.”
With criticism also came wisdom, said her grandson, Tate Olinghouse.
“She’d just say, ‘You can’t worry [about a problem] and fix it,’” Tate Olinghouse said. “‘You just have to turn it over to God.’”
She was an active, 50-year member of Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock, but it was the Christian love she extended outside the church doors that changed lives, her son said.
Once, when her son was in the sixth grade, she helped give a taste of royalty to a poor classmate who lived in one of the city’s housing projects.
“She was not the pretty girl, she was a little heavyset. My mother arranged that she would be the queen of the Valentine’s [Day party]. They got her a dress and got her dressed up,” Phil Olinghouse Jr. said. “She wanted her to know she was equally important.”
Arkansas, Pages 10 on 05/31/2012