Knitter Caps Life of Service

Caryl Jobe was a fifth-grade teacher at Westwood Elementary, retiring in 1993 after 20 years in the classroom. Today, 91-year-old Caryl continues that sense of service to the children of Stillwater through her knitting. 

She is one of a handful of volunteers who knit tiny beanie caps for babies born at Stillwater Medical Center. Caryl estimates she can make one cap a week, with as many as three on a good week. She said she’s been doing it for years.

“I’m a tactile person,” she said, explaining her joy of knitting. “I like to touch and feel what I’m doing.”

As she spoke, Caryl took items from a sewing bag: pattern after pattern, skeins of yarn, a finished tiny cap in gray and confetti colors, and one white and blue model still in progress. There were needles with a red and white project in progress. 

She shared that her mother taught her to knit when she was 5. 

“I’m naturally left-handed, but she taught me to knit right-handed,” Caryl said. “I of course pointed that out and she said ‘I’m doing it this way so that when you need help, I can help you.’ So I knit right handed.”

This set young Caryl Albin on a lifetime of sewing and knitting.

Caryl married John Jobe and they began a family — six children, losing one son in infancy. They began teaching careers, enjoyed antique autos and made Stillwater their home. John ultimately became a full professor of mathematics at Oklahoma State University; Caryl was master of her fifth-grade classroom. Love of family and service to community were important to the couple.

Long before there were baby caps, Caryl made afghans and “before afghans, I knitted Christmas stockings for the family.”

Then came baby caps

Caryl traces her interest in the baby caps to a neighbor.

“A lady down the street named Mary was a member of the hospital auxiliary at Stillwater Medical Center,” Caryl said. “We were talking one time about knitting — I kept the family knitting going through the years. I was in the middle of a Christmas sock for somebody’s child or about to be (child).”

Neighbor Mary said, “Oh, have you ever thought about knitting baby caps for the hospital?”

“She was a knitter, and over the years there have been three or four of us who continually make caps,” Caryl said. 

She said the hospital auxiliary provides the yarn. 

“Someone that was in the program at some point, I don’t know when,  gave an amount (of money) to the auxiliary to keep it in yarn.”

She reckons one skein of yarn can make six medium size caps without pompoms. “Otherwise maybe five caps with the pompoms.

That one conversation with her neighbor got the ball rolling.

“That’s how I got started with the hospital,” Caryl said, adding that she is not a member of the hospital auxiliary.

Caryl said she’s been knitting baby caps since retiring in 1993 “or maybe a little longer.”

“During the summer what else do you have to do; you don’t have papers to grade, so I picked up on this," she said.

“Baby caps are easy to knit, they don’t take much time, and as far as a family is concerned, there’s no need to worry about the caps matching. 

A few years ago, the group was down to two or three of us,” Caryl said, adding that there was a meeting which attracted 10 knitters, and the group has kept going.

“That need for knitters is always there ’cause the babies keep coming.”

Caryl said the group of knitters make caps in three sizes.

“Preemie, regular and  … well small, medium and large I guess you’d call it,” she said. “I go to the medium. A knitter knows that to make the large cap you add stitches and to make one of a preemie, you’d use fewer stitches.” 

But the auxiliary’s work isn’t done when caps are turned in. 

“One person will gather all the newly made caps, and washes them in special soap, sizes them, adds a note about the auxiliary and packages them for the nursery,” Caryl said.

Knitting the caps is more than a way to fill time of a quiet evening, she said.

“It feels like I’m doing something for the community,” Caryl said. “It feels like I’m giving something back.”