Page 7 - Amarillo Senior Link Magazine Fall 2019- Online Magazine
P. 7
CINDY GILBRETH
and Texas Panhandle
Quilts of Honor
by Jane Bromley
weapons tech and as the treasurer
for the local AFL/CIO. They
raised two children, John and
Shelly. Shelly was recently named
top Memory Care Specialist for
the state of Texas. John joined
the Marines, and Cindy’s nephew
Esau Gonzalez followed him into
the service of his country. After
serving four tours in the Middle
East, Esau was killed on foreign
hen some people think thrifty women used up scrap fabric soil at the age of 24. The traumatic
of quilters, they get a to make beautiful and practical loss was seared into the family’s
Wvisual image of a little bedcovers. Over the years, Cindy memory as he was laid to rest in
old lady with nothing but time on watched her grandmother and Panhandle. “His mother, my sister
her hands. Cindy Gilbreth shatters aunts load quilt after quilt onto a Sandy, and I made a quilt in honor
that stereotype. The passionate frame that was suspended from of him. As I worked on it, I could
grandmother makes a person tired the ceiling. They would hand-quilt hardly contain my own grief. I
just listening to her schedule. She’s them while they drank coffee and could only imagine how hard it
on a mission, and she will tell you visited, and their husbands played was on Sandy, Esau’s sister Sue
it’s God-given. marbles in the kitchen. Cindy Ann, and his young wife. I asked
and her cousins would often play God to help me get through it.”
Her story began in Panhandle, under the frame while the women
Texas where she and her five worked. Those happy times stirred “After another Panhandle boy was
siblings grew up. She learned up a lifelong love of sewing and killed, Sandy and I were asked
to sew with her grandma Alice, fabric. to quilt a red and white quilt top
a prolific seamstress who made that would be raffled off at his
countless shirts and dresses for her Cindy and husband Johnny moved university in Oklahoma. I did it,
grandchildren as well as scores of to Amarillo where he worked for but I still had to ask God to help
quilts. These warm blankets were Caterpillar for 47 years, and Cindy me get through the grief.” The
much more common back then as worked for Pantex for 30 years as a sisters discovered a group called
Amarillo Senior Link 7
