October
Guthrie lost one of its most giving and thoughtful citizens on Sept. 29.
Karen Wallis was admired and appreciated for her volunteer work and her nonstop drive to help others, no matter what was happening in her life. Friends and family gathered at the Guthrie Church of the Nazarene on Oct. 4 to honor and remember her life, a tradition for years to come.
Wallis was born in Warrington, England, in December of 1952. Her path to Guthrie, Okla., was our gain. From the Red Cross to the International Bluegrass Festival to the Territorial Christmas, there were countless events and services that would not have been possible without her hard work.
After a devastating fire, Wallis was part of the team which started a long-term recovery group for its victims. This organization went on to help victims of other local fires and became nationally recognized as a model for other communities in times of crisis.
Stacey Frazier knew her for 15 years, starting when Frazier first became a volunteer for the Bluegrass Festival and was working with the Christmas committee. She described Wallis as a font of perseverance.
“Everything she did, from the Red Cross to Bluegrass to Christmas -- it didn’t matter what her health was doing, she was going to do it. She was going to take care of business in literally everything,” Frazier said.
“If someone needed help, she gave it unconditionally. It wasn’t dependent upon religion. It wasn’t dependent on politics. It wasn’t dependent upon location,” she added.
“What is it Mr. Rogers used to say? ‘When emergencies are happening, look for the helpers?’ Well, she was one of those helpers. Always,” Frazier said. “It didn’t matter. If you needed help, she was there. She made masks for the school during the pandemic -- kid’s size. She would leave masks on people’s porches. She just gave them away en masse.
“She is one of the few people on this planet that you could call ‘selfless.’ ... When it came to somebody needing help, it didn’t matter.
“Right up until, like, a week before she passed, she was still sending me text messages about volunteers saying ‘make sure so-and-so gets this’ and ‘so and so gets that.’ There was no ulterior motive in anything she did, and that is probably one of the rarest commodities in our society today.”
Another dear friend of Wallis, Lucy Swanson, described her as “a very loving and sweet kind of person.”
“She was a fierce fighter for anything she believed in,” Swanson said. “She had a backbone of steel.”
Swanson made a point of noting that during all of the years Wallis worked for the Red Cross, she did it as a volunteer. “Karen was always involved in awesome, wonderful things,” she said.
Wallis was a member of the Rockin’ M Cowboy Church in Perkins, Okla., and is survived by a large and loving family. She was laid to rest at Chapel Hill Cemetery in Oklahoma City.