May 27, 1929 – April 19, 2011

We lost our mom, Florence Boner, unexpectedly April 19. She was 81, but still very active, volunteering all over town as usual. I had the job of emptying the house and going through all the papers that she and my dad collected for the last 50-some years.

Among the thousands of recipes, greeting cards, newspaper clippings and other papers that I discovered, I found much evidence of all my mom’s work in the community over the years. She was president of the Lincoln Parents Association in the 1960s. She earned her real estate license in the early 1970s, when that was rare for a woman. She spent untold weekends working with the volunteers at Clayville. She was a precinct committeeperson back when women committee people were rare. She spent thousands of hours walking her precinct – going to every house, registering every new resident, regardless of what party the residents belonged to. More recently she worked as a volunteer at the St. John’s Breadline, Dana-Thomas House and Lewis Memorial Christian Village. She quilted each week at her church. What we can’t figure out is how she had the time to do all these things. And she raised four kids while doing all this. She always found time to help anyone who needed help. Yet she was reluctant to let most people help her.

She had little notebooks where she wrote down jokes that she loved to tell people. She was almost booted off a church bus trip because the jokes were getting a bit too racy for that group. I have found many of those little books. She was known for trying to avoid tearing wrapping paper at Christmas and we teased her each year about that. This will be our first Christmas without her and none of us are looking forward to that.

–Sherri Boner, Springfield