February 2024

LAWSUITS Freedom Mortgage Corporation vs. Isabel Garcia and Mario Garcia for $174,073.40 to pay a debt plus interest, costs and attorney fees and foreclosure of mortgage on Lots 9 and 10, Block 3, Jensen’s Addition, El Reno.

Damrosch Ladies Music Club will be performing Wednesday, Feb. 21 beginning at 10 a.m. at New Hope Baptist Church. All are invited to come enjoy an hour of local talent and stay for refreshments afterward.

By switching the state’s largest two classifications to district play for the 2023-24 basketball season, the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association eliminated traditional drama around the East/West split and final seeding rankings.

El Reno High School seniors Kaylee Davis and Hannah Koen punched return tickets to the 2024 Oklahoma Girls State High School Wrestling Championships, which start Thursday at the State Fair Arena.

Frances Kay Masters, 78, passed away Friday, Feb. 9, 2024, peacefully and surrounded by prayers and love after complications from surgery. Fran was born Nov. 23, 1945, to Perry and Marie Arnold in El Reno, where she also spent a very idyllic childhood.

Janis Marie Smith Black, age 81, was called home to Jesus on Feb. 10, 2024. She was preceded in death by her parents, Eldon and Dorothy Moreland Smith of Goodland, Kan., her son, Randy Black of Yukon, and her sister, Sue Liebl of Stratton, Colo.

A long abandoned and now dilapidated motel on Sunset Drive appears to be coming down after El Reno City Council voted to level the property. The unanimous vote to bring the property at 2408 Sunset Drive down was applauded by a representative from the nearby El Reno Bowl.

The stories are all different, unique in their own way. But there’s no mistaking the common denominator that brings all of them together for one special night - love.

Rose Witcher Learning Center resumed classes Feb. 13 at the school after being displaced for a week by a natural gas leak. The leak was discovered Jan. 30 when maintenance crews entered the boiler room to repair a water leak. That leak came from a pipe on one of the school’s drinking fountains.

El Reno was blanketed with another round of winter weather last week with snow forcing the cancellation of school throughout the county on Feb. 12. The wet snow was good for packing as snowmen, like this family of three on Choctaw Avenue, popped up all around the city.