Idabel Dare STENBERG (1939 - 2014) Parents
m.(1968) Archie Edward FARR (1940- )

"I knew my sister for almost 75 years. I remember when she came home from the hospital. She was born in Port of Spain, which is the port-city of the Island of Trinidad, British West Indies, just off the north coast of Venezuela. I don't remember our being in Port of Spain for several days with our friends the Edwards. I do remember when we came home to our Caribbean Training College apartment - I was just 2 years old. I can still picture the apartment lay-out of our bedroom, living room and kitchen; also the outside stairs that entered the kitchen. We lived on the 2nd floor of the boys' dormitory. When she cried at night I would stand up and tell her to "top-that" which alerted my Mother that I DID understand "Stop that"!

Before Idabel was a year old we had traveled to New York City by ship and to Colorado by car. Our parents had us fitted with a harness and a leash so that we could walk the decks without running off on our own - the edge of the deck had just 3 ropes. In New York we acquired a Studebaker and drove all the way to Colorado with the mantra from me in the rear seat asking "are we there yet?" We visited Niagara Falls which I do remember. I remember Idabel walking "toddling" around our Aunt Maudenne's home. On the return trip a year later Our Mother was sea-sick. Idabel and I would crawl on hands and knees with her on the cabin floor "just like Mom". We thought it was fun!

On our next trip back to the USA in 1944 during war time, we flew in a four engine sea plane. We entered the cabin through a door on top the fuselage, just forward of the rudder, and climbed down a ladder. As the plane taxied in the Port of Spain harbor for take-off, the water 'flowed' up over the windows (much as can be seen at the Disney Land submarine ride). Idabel in great distress said "why did we get on, WE ARE going down!" We went to school and through college together. Idabel started 1st grade in the Sligo Park Seventh Day Adventist church school in Takoma Park Maryland, just north of Washington D.C., and I was in 2nd grade. Our schooling was at Campion grade and high school in Colorado prior to going to California for college."

" I started a good job here last March. I'm doing data entry along with 36 others on my shift. I work from 3:30 p.m. until midnight for TRW on the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository Project.

I've become the pianist for the Salvation Army Chapel about three miles from home. I play three services and a rehearsal each Sunday. Their services are filled with people in their alcohol and drug-rehab programs plus community people and children that they bring in by bus."

April, 1998;

" My only set back this year has been that I sprained both ankles on February 15th. I feel very lucky that I could always walk after this happened (and drive and go to my job). Makes me very grateful for the little things I take for granted every day."

June 2006;

" I have been working several years for a CPA firm. I still play piano for the Salvation Army Chapel. Also I do some volunteer work with elderly people."

From an unpublished book by Idabel which she shared with Charles Young in 2012:

"CHILDHOOD - BEING POOR VERSUS POVERTY: In Loveland, Colorado in the 1940's, my brother Kent and I grew up without dimes or nickels in our pockets. We were quite aware of this but it didn't hurt our little kid's appreciation of life. I loved the way we grew up with chickens, ponies and a cow or two. We caught baby rabbits in the alfalfa field behind our house, turned them loose soon afterward and walked behind Mr. Ramsey's tractor and mower when he harvested the field three times a year. Sometimes he let me sit on the mower and watch the alfalfa as it fell.

My father had full-time employment and community prestige. We had a second house on our property that was always rented out. Kent remembers when electricity was installed in the big yellow house in 1940 when he was three years old. It was installed in the little green house in 1944 after my folks got back from the tropics, but we had no inside plumbing except for the water-pump in the kitchen of the yellow house. We used out-houses - one behind each house. Inside we used potties and each house had a cellar beside the back door. Warren reminds me now that our yellow house was heated by an oil-burning stove (this was after 1950). He understood how it operated.

From visiting our cousins in Crestone over a period of time, I became aware that there was always food on our table in Loveland and Kent and I always had shoes on our feet. My shoes sometimes had holes in them but I always knew when I would be able to get new shoes. We would go to Mock's Shoe Store in Loveland and look at our feet through the X-Ray machine. Compared to our cousins, our house and manner of living at Campion were quite luxurious. The fact that Kent and I were always in school and our cousins only had the possibility of sixth grade education was not a factor in my pre-adolescent understanding. It never occurred to me (or Kent either, I don't think) that private education was quite expensive for our parents. My brother and I always knew we had high school and college to look forward to.

WHAT WE LEARNED LATER: My brother, Kent Stenburg and I noted later that our folks never told us what it was like during the 1930's. However, when I was an adult mother let me know that my father always had work through the Adventist Church. She also told me that during the nine years they were missionaries in Trinidad, she worked right along with Daddy (he was principal after a year, and she taught Home Economics and other subjects), and the two of them received one salary. Although I note this now in terms of today's world, the fact is they always had an income during the depression. The economy never was that great in Colorado even after 1945. During the 1980's every time I would go home to visit, Martin Brown, my manager for mother's rentals, would say, "Colorado is still in recession." Then in 1992 suddenly houses were being built by the tens of thousands between Loveland and Denver, because 'THE ECONOMY IS UP'.

This is before something else I heard many times first-hand, talking to Colorado and Wyoming residents, about the U. S. paying land farmers huge amounts not to plant crops on certain years. Those later descendants of homesteaders made big at times being paid NOT to work. And how did this affect the economy?? Who put money in the bank and who didn't have jobs? Of course, the land owners didn't go broke, which they might have if too many people planted that year and the price of food stayed up, so who made more and more money and who paid higher prices??

My parents both worked very hard at all times. Before they went overseas Daddy taught at Campion, and mother did what she could, including giving piano lessons. Our neighbor, Violet Richey (Grace, Shirley and Nadine's mother), told me on the phone in 2003 that she ironed my father's shirts in exchange for my mother giving piano lessons to her girls. Violet was in her nineties when I had this conversation with her and I had seen her on the trips I took (1995 and 1997) when I visited Clarkston, Washington. Mother did tell me years later that times were so desperate during the depression that "nobody would make a baby." Our folks had lost their first child in 1929. Kent and I discussed many years later that there was no grief counseling, or a concept about a need for it, following our parents' devastating loss.

CHURCH SCHOOL (CAMPION'S GRADE-SCHOOL): My brother Kent had taken first grade in Campion's one-room school-house in 1944, then we were gone for a year to Washington D.C. When we came back in 1946, Kent was in third grade and I was in second. Three years later the building was re-built and now had two full-sized teaching rooms, with girls' and boy's bathrooms and two cloak-rooms in the new middle section. Before the school was remodeled we used an out-house in back. I. Q. tests had been taken under Mrs. Jones when I was in third grade, and I remember mother talked to me about them shortly after this. She knew the scores because the teacher had told her. Mother didn't tell me the numbers then, but she did tell me my best-friend Marjorie was the only one who had an I. Q. higher than mine. Sometime later she did tell me those two scores from this test. I remember them both. I felt exposed. I didn't feel it was right that Mother was told all this, as that meant that other mothers in the community knew my personal information too.

After our family returned to the States in the mid 1940's, our class-mates told us that our father had a nervous break-down. Their folks had told them. I denied this the first time I heard it. I couldn't believe this about my father. In fact, he had had the break-down in 1934 and couldn't work for six months (family letters confirm). Just a year and a half later he and mother started their assignment as Adventist missionaries. In Trinidad, British West Indies he worked even harder than he had at Campion before. Father had three illnesses while overseas and almost died each time. He had Rheumatic Fever in 1936 and Malaria in 1943.

OUR KID FOUGHT THEIR KID: There is a phenomenon among young boys that I witness over and over again, in that one always feels the necessity to exert his dominance. The public grade-school building was located just across the street from our house - my Aunt Maudine had taught there in earlier times. Our parents and others had told us specifically not to interact with students who attended that school, but there was a corner store three houses south of us (Keller's). Eventually our grade school bunch and the public-school students met up. This is actually my brother Kent's story. It didn't take long for the two groups to square off and determine that one person from each group was going to fight the other. Our man Kenneth Sack won, badly beating Jack Whitacker. Kent remembers how badly he felt, seeing Jack's head bounce up and down on the pavement like a pumpkin. Kent says he doesn't think Kenneth had the sense to stop hurting someone. This was when Kent was in sixth grade and Kenneth was an eighth grader. Kenneth was a handful for Opal Joseph who taught the upper-grade room that year (1949-1950). Opal was a very jewel of a teacher - the one compassionate one, a very supportive person in my life and a life-long friend. It was almost a given that the upper-grade's teacher had some difficult boys in the seventh and eighth grades. During my eighth grade year the difficult one was Gary Schade, who got expelled. I witnessed his antics before and during this - a thirteen-year-old boy the male teacher, Edwin Carter, just couldn't handle. Ed and his wife taught the two grade-school rooms that year - they were first-year teachers.

All during the 1930's back at Campion education was available and was the key-note. Every indication I've ever seen indicates the school was a great credit to the denomination during those years. My father had started teaching there in September of 1929. He worked for the Adventist Church continuously until May of 1953 - 23 ½ years. The school always had cash flow as it was supported by local people who contributed. Besides the local people, families from all over Colorado and Wyoming sent their children to live and board at the high-school. It is my opinion that the school was 'quite honorable' before 1950 from what mother told me several times and from indications Toy Wilson gave when I talked with him three times during the 1990's. His father, Charles Wilson, Sr., was Business Manager at Campion for several years during the 1930's and 1940's. When I was eight and nine I saw Senior many times as he was dating Marjorie Roman's Grandmother, Mrs. McGowan. He would stop and pick up her up when I was over playing with Marjorie. Senior died in 1950 and I attended his funeral in our chapel. At the cemetery later I was impressed at what an impressive (expensive) coffin he had. He is buried in the small cemetery three miles east of Berthoud where Aunt Ellen and Uncle Maurice were also buried many years later.

Campion was a private school, and tuition was always expensive. Besides that, tithes and donations were regularly and adamantly requested from the many believers. The school and church, one unit in FACT, were always priority to people who supported the school. From things mother told me later, the school's ethics didn't slip until either the late 1940's or early 1950's. At least six who were there during this period discussed what they observed with me later - in great detail. Mother told Kent and told me too, at different times, that the 1950's were the worst time in the history of the school. It was common knowledge in the community that Heinrich had been dismissed because of something considered to be serious mis-conduct. He was principal from September of 1950 until March of 1955. During the years following his administration the school was recovering financially and the new administration also had to get control of the student's wild behavior after March 10, 1955 - the date when we were told the principal was gone. Heinrich along with the girls' and boys' deans all left at the same time. Oliver Furman, my parents' life-long friend and my life-long friend too, told me in 2005 that the school never recovered the money Heinrich had taken. To the best of my knowledge (and Oliver's too) Campion has never documented any of the 1950's improprieties in their history.

Mother worked in the high-school cafeteria as assistant to Avis Furman (Oliver's wife) from September of 1953 through May of 1955. Her labor was paid by putting credit on the school's books for Kent's and my high-school costs. Our parents were having a very hard time financially then, but we didn't know this until many years later when Mother told us during the 1970's."

My brother Kent wrote; My Aunt Maudine was a first year student when Campion opened in 1907 on land that 'Dad Hankins' had donated for the school. I spent 11 of 12 years in the grade school and academy at Campion. We attended my 50th class reunion in Oct 2006. I spent two hours looking at graduation pictures and I personally know several people in every decade the school has been in operation. Ted (Wick), Jerry (Joseph) and I used to sled down the sugar beet dump (an elevated ramp to lift a truck above hopper cars on the rail siding). We stayed out until our toes and fingers were so cold we could no longer move them. We had spells of sub-zero weather in 1949. I saw -42 degrees one morning when I was out milking the cows.

The way we lived in Campion during the 1930's and 1940's would be viewed today as primitive, YET we didn't know that, it just was what it was. This was before the proliferation of radio, TV, automobiles, and airplanes. I didn't feel poor. Certainly others had far less, but I was aware we had very little money. We did have a house that my grandfather Wilbert built entirely by in 1911. Wilbert is our mother's father, Ada's husband. Our house was very nice for the times - lath and plaster walls that curved into 9' ceilings. Even today in greater Los Angeles, California there is a house that looks just like it that he built in 1905.

This was before sheet-rock. There was no insulation in the walls. I do not remember being cold having only a coal oil heater in the dining room. We dressed for the temperature. Indoor plumbing came after I moved away. Before we had the coal oil heater, we had a pot-bellied stove and burned coal in it. Many years later in the 1980's, I paid to have insulation put in the walls of the older two houses.

Only a few people had automobiles. We rode the bus to Loveland, Colorado, and we waved our arms while standing in the middle of the railroad track to flag down the train when we traveled to Boulder to see my Grandmother Ida. The train went right to downtown Boulder, past where the Police Station was and where City Hall is now - across the street from the Boulder Bandstand. Ida would pick us up in her 3-wheeled electric car. Did you think that electric cars are a NEW thing? Hitchhiking was common, people quickly gave you a ride. Today I do not give rides to any one I do not know.

We did not have running water. We had an old farm pump next to our kitchen sink that pumped water from a 1,000 gallon cistern under the back porch. The outhouse was behind the barn. In the fall our mother home canned fruit and veggies which were stored in a 'half below ground cellar'. The work of providing food was a huge job. We also had a large garden every year and a half acre of corn to sell. I really detested going out to hoe weeds before sunup, and daily chores left little time for other activities. My Aunt next door had kerosene lamps that were adjusted so they didn't smoke, or at least smoked less. Back then kerosene was called 'coal oil'. It is unrefined jet fuel. Our house did have electricity and you ALWAYS shut off a light as you left the room. We did not have a refrigerator, they were too expensive, but we did have a cow or two and sold the extra Guernsey milk which was richer than the cream in bottled milk. At my Grandmother's house, Ida's house in Boulder, Colorado, I enjoyed hearing the milk man delivery at 4AM with bottles going clink clank. You had to bring the milk inside before it froze and cracked the bottles.

Our acre was irrigated by flooding the lawn. This water seeped into the cellar giving it a musty smell. Salamanders lived in the water. My sister thought they were neat! During the off season we boarded pony ring Shetlands from Estes Park. They may be little horses but they are not gentle. One time my father hired four Campion students, using the school truck to get a load of hay from Fort Collins. They loaded the hay using pitchforks. The students would ride on top of the hay coming home. One of them was jumping up and down yelling “I'm a tough guy, when he got clothes lined by a power line - just like in the movies. He didn't get hurt (at least not badly). Amazing!

I make a point; never shy away from remembering my teenaged foolish actions - some had far more serious consequence than this."

Idabel wrote: "WHAT MY BROTHER AND I REMEMBER ABOUT MORTALITIES AND ACCIDENTS

In the generations before ours I know there were infinitely more deaths of young children and teenagers, also of women dying during child-birth. I haven't researched this to do a study, but my cousin Ardie's research of the 1890's in Carbon County, Wyoming shows that births and deaths weren't even recorded until children were at least five years old.

People in our community did farm work and had accidents. Toy Wilson lost a leg shortly after his marriage, when he was driving a thresher for his father. During the rest of his life he walked with a prosthesis. Toy was one year younger than my mother and the two had been playmates as children. In the early 1990's he told me many things about my grandparents, and mentioned my grandmother's horse, but couldn't remember the horse's name so many years later.

My parents lost their first child in 1929 when their seventeen-month-old son drowned in a small ditch behind the house they were renting. This was when they lived half a mile east of the big yellow house at 4025 South Garfield, where Kent and I grew up later.

There were accidents at the rail-road crossing in Campion and these sometimes resulted in deaths. In 1936 Ted Wick's father was hit by a train at the Campion crossing. Mr. Wick had just spoken in church on a Sabbath morning and was starting the drive to Loveland, Colorado to give their eleven o'clock service. He always had a hearing problem and didn't hear the train's whistle as it approached. He died about twelve hours later with his wife by his side.

The Wick's oldest daughter, Avis was thirteen then - the oldest of four children. The fifth child, Ted, was born seven months later in February of 1937. Afterward Mrs. Wick took in bed-patients in her home for income and did this for the rest of her life. I would visit her when I was in grade-school and see the patients in her front room. There were many more accidents, even before I start remembering the airplanes that crashed on Colorado's open plains. These were both small planes and commercial aircraft. People in the community people would drive out to see what had happened.

Jack Whitacker, Mrs. Whitacker's son who went to the public school, died on his motorcycle at age sixteen. This was about 1953 and Kent tells me a car made an unexpected right-turn in front of him. My brother knows exactly where this was, just about three-quarters of a mile north of our house. I didn't know Jack but went to this funeral and saw his class-mates in their grief.

Kent remembers his classmate from Campion Class of 1956, Joe Jackson, who was killed in a car accident about 1960. Another classmate, Cecil Herald, was killed a couple of years earlier, just four months after his marriage.

A classmate of mine from college, Harold Soper, was killed on a summer job in about 1960, when he was loading timber on a truck. Logs came off as he was loading and hit him. He died about three minutes later. Harold and I had shared a friend's car twice before this, driving back together to visit Colorado when we were at La Sierra. I got to listen to him expound in great detail on his 'present philosophy of life' while we traveled. The believers at Campion would have considered Harold very harshly in light of their belief system.

I've had a life-time to consider God's perfect plan—as I perceive it. Even at that time in my life I couldn't conceive that a life-giving God would judge this twenty-two year old so harshly. I have no doubt that his family suffered enormously from losing their son, plus he had a terrible death. As Kent had many things that sobered him after Joe Jackson's death, I had my own thoughts about Harold Soper.

Overall, the rural Colorado area was a pretty dangerous place. Even if there was no accident and an elderly person died, it was usually someone we had known for many years, and the Polio Epidemic was always in the news.

MY CLASSMATE, CAROLYN: In 1956 my seventeen-year-old classmate, Carolyn Patterson, was burned over forty percent of her body, and her face disfigured. This happened less than a quarter mile from our home while her mother was trying to clean clothes inside their home with gasoline. Carolyn's mother died. A year prior to that, one of the community women had told us, with very good intentions, that she was going to help two men who were in prison. After the two were released one of them had a baby with Carolyn. I was home in the summer of 1960 and saw Carolyn at church in Loveland. Our group just didn't know how to be supportive to her with her small child. Our community was unaccepting of a pregnancy outside of marriage, and this poor girl, having both a year-old baby (I think un-married), and being disfigured, was pretty much treated as an outcast.

CAMPION SCHOOL, NINE YEARS LATER: I came home for my father's funeral in December of 1969 and saw that a new church had been built at Campion. The entire campus had been remodeled and landscaped, and the 'new girls dorm' that was brand new in 1948 had been torn down. Other buildings that were functional in 1957 were gone. The farm buildings had been redone and they certainly needed to be. The music building was gone, as was the old broom ship, the power house, the water tower and the print shop where my father had spent five or six evenings a week for so many years. More than half of the buildings on campus in 1969 had been built since I was home in the summer of 1960. Campion was no longer a farm community school. I could understand the old annex building being gone. Until I started researching, I always thought my grandfather (Ada's husband, Wilbert) had helped build it back in 1906, but that's not true.

What I couldn't understand in 1969 was that the new 1948 girl's dorm had been taken down so soon. I had watched it being built when I was seven and eight, and it was a fine brick building. I had even lived in it during my first two years of high school - it was a modern building then. I even remember the prior girl's dorm that was on the same site, probably also built back in 1906. They started tearing it down sometime during 1946. The 1948 Girl's Dorm was still in use in 1960, the one summer when I had been home. In retrospect, the school probably re-did all its plumbing and water connection to the Loveland water source during this time also.

My parents were poor and had pumped money into Seventh Day Adventist schools while living in an unfinished house between 1957 and 1961 (the third house in back on our acre). I was aware that construction cost money, and that Campion had obviously used very major resources to beautify the campus and build new buildings between 1960 and 1969. I still had a long way to go in figuring out my issues in 1969, but I do remember thinking, 'That rich school!'

LIFE IS NOT PERFECT and a surprise greeted me - not a pleasant one. Honey had separated from Kent and taken their three children to San Diego. Being a good brother, he had brought her to visit me in November of 1959 just after they eloped - letting me know their good news. I was at La Sierra then. Now here was something undone that I hadn't anticipated. Kent was stressed. Mother was strong for both of us. The three of us drove to Boulder together, then back. The errand was probably to Boulder Hospital where Daddy had died. Our father's father had passed away in this same hospital in 1914. This was in the dead of winter and there was snow on the ground. We traveled the long way around on Colorado's roads (the diagonal was built about ten years later). On the way back Mother told both of us about Daddy's long history of illnesses that led up to his stroke on April 1st, 1962.

I was still nine years old in my head (or maybe only seven) at my father's funeral. I had grown some emotionally during my twenties but I was hard emotionally at that time, not realizing for many more years that my father's perceptions were quite different from what the church consistently presented. It is very regrettable to me now that I was so hard emotionally toward my father at the time of his death. He and mother had both sacrificed incredibly for years to pay the expensive tuition for Kent's and my education. My mother and brother were unaware of my feelings at that time. I've told Kent since, told him why, and told him how sorry I am now. After my father's service at the new Campion Church, my friend Mary Hedger came over to say hello. She has always been my friend. I grew up with her being little Mary Ellen Enoch and had attended her wedding nine years earlier on her eighteenth birthday, June 19, 1960. This was at the Loveland Church, the same summer and same place where I last saw Carolyn Patterson.

HOW MUCH HAD TIMES CHANGED IN TWO GENERATIONS? I'm only going by the way I remember it in retrospect, but I think social and financial conditions in our small Colorado community were much like they had been fifty years before. When Campion opened the school in 1907 the outlying areas now had a place to send their children for education. People built houses close by and moved into the immediate area. The school brought in boarding students for grades nine through twelve and brought in teachers and employees. In the 1950's when I was in high school, there were considerably more students. A large number of these were the children of those who had attended the school twenty and thirty years earlier. I have witnessed a great deal that shows that the school did 'incredibly wonderful work' for the Adventist Church right from the beginning. When I was a child I heard many people speak in highly glowing terms of how much Campion had meant to them when they attended during the 1920's and 1930's.

In the early 1940's, our family often flagged down the train when we visited my father's mother in Boulder. This was a common thing to do. After the war ended in 1945 some people had cars but a lot of them didn't. We certainly noticed the new cars that came out. Regarding the rural people; farmers sometimes had better equipment, but in the late 1940's I remember Arthur Enoch pulling his farm equipment with his two huge draft horses. An obvious difference during my time was that people who lived away from the school were now second and third generation homesteaders. These later generations still worked from dawn to dusk. They collected their income after selling their crops.

I think social standards were about the same in my time as they had been in 1907. Couples almost always got married immediately after graduating high-school, and started their families. In the 1920's, my parents had both gone to college before getting married, and this was unusual. My brother, Kent reminds me of something else that is quite significant; in the 1960's his own children's generation was the first in our family where one of the young children didn't die. Morals of the school were strictly upheld by the community. If girls became pregnant before being married they would leave the community for several months, then give their babies up to be adopted. Our community was extremely up-tight about this. During the 1960's I heard of one abortion. The girl's father who performed the procedure was a medical doctor, and he lost his Colorado License. Mother was the one who told me about this although she was not one to gossip. We both knew the girl.

Mother was never one to say a bad word about anyone. In 1978 she was with me in Westwood, California and we had to wait about forty minutes before I was to take her to the airport to go home. She started telling me one thing after another about the family and the community. One of things she told me was that there had been an inquest at Campion following Wilbert's father's death in 1905. I stood shocked, listening to her. She had been with me for six months and now she suddenly started telling me things about the family that I had never heard before."

Idabel wrote this about her Aunt Dorothy Stenberg Phipps. I am grateful to Idabel for also contributing much Stenberg family history that can be found on several other Stenberg pages. Idabel's brother Kent informed me of his sister's death:

"It is with regret that I send the information that my sister died on Wednesday May 7th 2014. Of all the things we do in life, the most difficult is saying the final “Goodbye” to those we Love. On Wednesday May 7th, 2014, my Sister's life stopped at 6:40 PM. Had Idabel been looking up the street her awareness would have been brief, only about 2 seconds. I think she had no realization; the impact was like turning off a switch, she did not suffer when their car was T-boned at an intersection on Charleston Blvd. in Las Vegas. You think of fender-benders in a 35 MPH area, but her car was hit with such force that it was knocked into a nearby building damaging the wall.

Barbara and I did not know about Idabel's death for over 20 hours because she had not yet been identified. George had seriously injuries: broken ribs and a collapsed lung along with flying debris injuries, and he was sedated. After the impact George just could not catch his breath, nor could he get the seat belt unbuckled. We did hear the terrible news from George. In his sedated state he had earlier attempted to leave a message which we didn't hear until later. We called the Coroner who took plenty of time discussing Idabel's condition. The cause of death was blunt-force trauma. I think her head injury was the most serious. An employee in the building that their car hit, broke through a wall and checked her pulse after George could not rouse her. He said he could not find a pulse. The Coroner called late Thursday evening and said they had identified Idabel by her finger prints.

We have been in Las Vegas five times during the first week. We picked up Idabel's personal effects on Monday, and George was released from the hospital on Tuesday. Our contact with the UMC Hospital, Coroner and Desert Memorial Cremation Society have all given us great consideration and time we needed to absorb the facts. On Thursday afternoon May 15th, 2014, George, Barbara, Idabel's friend and coworker Lt. Sheri Letter of the Salvation Army, and I spent a brief time with my Sister saying our goodbyes. At my Sister's request her ashes will be taken to the Columbine Cemetery in Boulder Colorado and placed next to Our Grand Mother, Ida Stenberg. Just 100 years ago in 1914 our Grand Father, Henry L. Stenberg was buried there. My father Clarence was 10 years old at the time. He died when he fell, hitting his head on rock curbing, while pulling a fire-wagon down the hill at Boulder Colorado Sanitarium in the area of the emergency entrance to what is now the Boulder Community Hospital. The Phipps Family's Grand Father is also buried in this Cemetery about 200 feet to the west of Our Stenberg Grand Parent's resting place. My Father's sister, Dorothy is the Mother of my Phipps cousins. We had a Memorial service for Idabel at the Salvation Army chapel, May 23 2014.

Idabel was a busy "Lady". For a decade we have been working on our Genealogy history. All of the family back to the early 1800's is accounted for except one cousin who we lost track of in 1950.

Idabel has been teaching young piano students and improving the process of how they learn to play the piano. She has also been doing accounting work, and for the last 17 years has been working with the Salvation Army and their music program. Saying in words that she will be and is missed just does not convey our loss. Goodbye “Babe”, you have enriched my life :^(
Lovingly, ~ ~ Your Brother and Friend ~ ~ "

To summarize this television report,

49 year old Edward Charles Barber was charged with failing to stop at the scene of an accident involving death or injury, driving without a license and driving without proof of insurance. The wreck happened at Charleston Boulevard and Arville Street in Las Vegas, Nevada where Barber exited his car and left the scene on foot. I wrote down some thoughts on drinking and driving after hearing of Idabel's death.