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Viola May (Kliewer) Martens
© Fairview Funeral Home
Submitted by: Jo Aguirre

© Fairview Funeral Home
© Glenn


Viola May Martens
April 4, 1930 - December 22, 2022

Graveside Services for Viola (Kliewer) Martens, 92, of Fairview, will be 10:00 a.m., Wednesday, December 28, 2022 at the North Mennonite Brethren Cemetery with Memorial Service at 11:00 a.m. at the Fairview Mennonite Brethren Church. The Reverend Travis Schmidt will officiate. Arrangements are by the Fairview Funeral Home, Inc.

Visitation will be Tuesday the 27th from 5 to 8 p.m. at the Fairview Funeral Home Inc.

Viola Martens was born Viola May Kliewer, the second daughter of A.B. and Marie Kliewer, on April 4, 1930, at the family farm southeast of Fairview, Oklahoma. She attended Progressive Grade School and then went to Fairview High School for her freshman year in 1944, alternating years between there and Corn Bible Academy where she received her diploma in 1948. During her junior year, Viola met a young man named Harry Martens - known to nearly everyone by his nickname "Bud" - who had recently returned to Fairview from Civilian Public Service during World War II. They courted for two years and Bud proposed to Viola just after her 18th birthday in April 1948. Later that summer, on August 24, the couple was married at Fairview's South Mennonite Brethren Church.

Over the years, in addition to raising four children and helping Bud with a wide variety of farm chores, Viola was active as a homemaker and in community service. She worked on the Major County Election Board, belonged to the East Fairview Extension Homemakers (and was named Major County Homemaker of the Year) and volunteered at the Fairview Fellowship Home. Among many church-related activities, she taught Sunday School, sang in the ladies' chorus, helped serve meals and frequently played gracious hostess to visiting missionaries and musicians in her and Bud's home on North Main Street. Viola was also a talented needleworker: sewing and mending clothes, embroidering, and crocheting afghans.

With her husband and family, Viola enjoyed traveling to numerous places in her adult life, including visits to friends across the U.S. and sightseeing in several European countries. Of special importance was a vacation house in Flagstaff, Arizona, at which she and Bud spent many wonderful times with loved ones during early retirement years of the '80s and '90s. Later in life the couple enjoyed helping orchestrate annual events in Fairview as members of the Major County Historical Society and the Two-Cylinder Club, and they established themselves as local celebrities through Dutch oven cook-offs and historic chuckwagon cooking demonstrations. Since 2010, Viola had enjoyed living in the Fellowship Home Apartments among friends and neighbors for whom she cared very much.

Viola was preceded in death by her parents, older sister Leona Vogt, husband Harry Martens and daughter Dawnette Bell.

She is survived by her younger sister Clara Wichert; oldest son Mike Martens and his wife Ann of Fairview; daughter Arlene Gale and her husband Brent of Long Beach, California; youngest son Max Martens of Los Angeles; son-in-law Steve Bell of Frederick Colorado; six grandchildren; Aaron Bell, Andrew Martens, Carrie Christensen, Grant Bell, Kirk Gale, Katie Gale; and five great-grandchildren.

In Lue of Flowers, memorials can be made to Mennonite Brethren Missions with the funeral home acting as custodians of the funds.

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