An Oklahoma Tragedy

About the Book

This is a 1939 true story about a seventy-three-year-old Navina, Oklahoma, widowed farmer who was missing when his married daughter and her husband came to his house to fix Sunday dinner, as had been arranged the day before. The sheriff is called who starts questioning local neighbors about the missing farmer to find out when he was last seen or if anything suspicious had been seen in the area. The entire Navina farming community came together for two days to hunt for the farmer and to determine what had happened to him. The actual town of Navina’s business buildings no longer exist, which the book includes several pictures of those buildings during the time before the town of Navina became nonexistent in the 1940s.

About the Author

The author was raised in Guthrie, Oklahoma, by her parents, W. D. “Hoppy” Chandler and Lela Biggs Chandler, with her younger brother, David Chandler. Her father is a retired Guthrie police officer, serving twenty years, from 1951 to 1972. Her mother was a secretary, retiring from Oklahoma Department of Human Services. Shirley was a 1970 Guthrie High School graduate and Oklahoma State University graduate. She was employed at The Guthrie Daily Leader for two years, then for her first law firm employment at Guthrie’s Smith & Smith Law Firm. She is married to Lindsey Anderson who is a Vietnam Veteran, living on five acres near Jones, Oklahoma, not far from Guthrie. She has two adult sons, Curtis Kent Smith, age forty-two, Oklahoma City, and Cory Taylor, age thirty-six, an army MP. She lived in the Yukon area for thirty years, raising her sons in the Yukon schools. She has always involved in volunteering at her son’s schools, including being a PTA officer for Parkland Elementary School and homeroom mother several years. Also was a Cub Scout Den Mother for the troop at Yukon’s Trinity Baptist Church, Vacation Bible School Teacher, and Mission Chairman for several years of Trinity’s Women’s Mission Union. Also fundraised for animal rescues of horses and dogs. She retired from the State of Oklahoma, working in the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office, State Insurance Fund Legal Department, and Oklahoma Corporation Commission General Counsel’s Office, and then worked at several Oklahoma City law firms. Shirley had become interested in writing this book in approximately 1998 and started researching at the Oklahoma Historical Society and Logan County Courthouse. Her father was born in Navina, Oklahoma, and was only ten years old at the time of this book’s incident.