Arleen Mary "Eli" Faulkner's Obituary
Arleen Faulkner was a very kind, gentle, thoughtful and loving person. She was loved by many, especially her family and friends. She has also been loved by many young people who graduated from Richardson High School. She has been very active with accordion music and has made many friends while following that passion. Arleen is survived by her husband Tom and their 3 children Alan and his wife Margaret, Becky and her husband Chris, and Katie and her partner Chrystal. She is also survived by grandchildren Addison, daughter of Chris and Becky, Jacob and Nick, children of Alan and Margaret. Arleen was born in August of 1948. It was probably a hot day. There wasn’t air conditioning in small rural towns in those days. She was the youngest of 3 children born to Frank and Pauline. Her father was a mechanic and was already in his middle 40s when Arleen was born. Her mother was busy at home raising the kids and at times taking work outside the house to help make ends meet. Her older sister Muriel was almost a teenager when Arleen was born. Her older brother Frank was in grade school. By all accounts, Arleen was a tomboy. She loved to go to her father’s auto repair garage with him. While there, she would play with tools and engine parts. As she grew older, she helped her father with some of the lighter work such as cleaning engine parts and keeping the tools organized and the shop clean. She loved to play outdoors. She loved to play the same games boys played, including football. She played at least until no longer was permitted due to gender differences. She had the scars to prove it. She had one serious scar on her left shin from a nasty gash made by bit of broken glass discarded by some careless individual and made worse by the shabby work of the physician who closed the wound. As an older child she loved to draw. She especially loved to draw cartoons such as were found in comic books and newspapers. She also continued to love automobiles, especially the hot rod variety. At one time, owned a 56 Chevy hot rod that had an engine with a racing cam, a floor mounted gear shift, and a rolled and pleated interior. She had to give it up because of cost but continued to dream of when she would have another. She loved music and learned to play the piano and clarinet. When she enrolled in the University of Nebraska but family finances forced her to seek employment after attending for a year and a half. While enrolled, she was a member of the card section and was trying to work her way into a spot in the Cornhusker marching band. When she left school to work, she first worked for a company making ordnance for the war in Vietnam. Among other things, her duties included mixing aluminum flake with molten explosive and pouring it into bomb casings. She had harrowing stories of working by flashlight during thunderstorms and tornado warnings because pouring bombs was one assembly line that couldn’t be stopped. She subsequently found work at the Nebraska Department of Roads making state and county highway and road maps. At that time, that was all hand drawn work done to engineering drawing precision required of the legal documents they were. Her skills from her love of drawing helped her become a top employee. Sadly, those days ladies weren’t paid commensurate with the work they did. She was actually paid less than a male trainee she trained. She met Tom Faulkner and they got married in 1970. They started their family. There was no such thing as maternity leave then, so with the arrival of Alan, she had to give up her job making maps. Becky arrived not long after Alan. When she decided to go back to work again, Arleen found employment with the State of Nebraska Conservation and Survey department as a cartographer. There, she worked with the department making new and innovative maps. All maps were done by hand to engineering and legal document precision. This work was also done before the advent of computer drafting. She had several maps entered into competition, including one the placed well at an international competition in Europe. In 78, Katie arrived. Again, Arleen had to give up her job. But this time, her husband Tom found work with Texas Instruments in Dallas. The family picked up and moved. When they arrived, Dallas was in the midst of the brutally hot summer of 78. Not the last hot summer either. The children were now starting school, and the family started doing as families do. Arleen found work with TJ production making, of all things, geologic maps. This time the maps were of subsurface features used in the exploration of oil and natural gas. They were also legal documents used to decide value of resources in the ground. And they were used to substantiate claims made in courts of law. Eventually, computer technology caught up with her skill and she was out of a job. Time flies awfully fast when the kids are going to school. While they were in school, Arleen helped them with their music lessons and home practiced. It was clear she was good at that naturally. But, very quickly, the kids grow up, go college and mom and pop are staring at each other wondering where “did the time go”. She loved polka music, something she inherited from Czech heritage and her Bohemian mother. She had shown a talent for music. So she took up learning to play the accordion. She became active in the National Accordion Association where she helped plan and put on the annual convention. She directed a small accordion band made up of folks like her that loved the music and loved to play the music. She has many dear friends amongst that group. Somewhere in there, Arleen took a job as a secretary in the Richardson Independent School District. Eventually, she landed at Richardson High School where she was working when she was called to a better place. It would be hard to say how many graduating seniors’ lives she touched. She will miss that tremendously. That was one of the things that kept her going. That was one of the reasons why she got up in the morning. Sprinkled in to fill the remaining gaps in her life, she loved going camping in the Rocky Mountains. Not the soft kind of camping, but the hard, sleep in a tent and cook over an open fire kind of camping. She loved the University of Nebraska and found time to travel to football games and avidly followed the volleyball and gymnastics teams. Arleen loved spending time with her grandchildren. She would sit in the 100 plus temps in Texas and watch Jacob play baseball. Addison knows her as Lala. She would play the accordion while Addison would dance to the beautiful music. It is all too shocking that she is gone. Her cardiologist had provided no clue how eminent her passing might be. The adage is right. Live each day like it might be your last. She died at work. She died trying to do one of the things she loved, helping good kids through the, for some, daunting task of graduating from high school. Arleen Faulkner was a very kind, gentle, thoughtful and loving person. She held no ill will for anyone. She knew how to move on. She is already grievously missed by her husband and her children. She is terribly missed by family and friends. We look forward to seeing her again in the next life. We aim to make her proud of us in this.
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