This tribute was written June 26, 2015
My grandmother, Claudia Hoopes Roylance, was born June 25, 1916 in Star Valley, Wyoming, the second daughter and third child of six. Her older sister, Velda Grace, died at age two from measles before grandma was born, so even though she was really a middle child, she filled the role of the oldest sister. Yesterday she would have turned 99, if she was still living. Instead her time on earth ended after 81 years on July 9, 1997.
She was born to Clarence Hoopes and Ida Luella (Lell) Richardson Hoopes. Her older brother, LaVere was three years older. She had two younger brothers, Warren and Byron, and a younger sister, Lorna.
Her father, Clarence, worked hard. His family had moved often during his childhood from St. David, Arizona; to Montpelier, Idaho; to the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming; back down to Logan, Utah, then up to Canada, and from there to Star Valley for a short time; back down to Arizona ; to finally return and settle in Wyoming.
He believed in staying out of debt. In the year before Grandma was born he purchased a ranch west of Fairview in Star Valley. Here he raised his family and made a living by ranching and hauling freight from Montpelier, Idaho by four horse wagon or sleigh. Due to the narrow, poor roads, these trips often took three full days.
Her mother, Lell, loved her family. She grew up in Star Valley. Her parent had moved there as some of the first settlers in the valley soon after her birth. There isn't much recorded about her childhood or youth. Her courtship with Clarence was fairly long due to his determination to buy a their homes out right. People commented that she was a willing worker and had an optimistic nature.
Lell loved the gospel of Jesus Christ. She loved studying the scriptures and would stay up late reading them to her young children. She also found joy serving her neighbors and took her children along quite often when she did. And according to memories Grandma shared about her with her youngest sister, Lorna, she baked delicious bread and found great satisfaction in cleaning and polishing the old black stove, and when she got it, the new cream colored stove.
Reading the memories of my aunt, Joan, and her aunt, Lorna, I see similar loves passed down from mother to daughter. Aunt Joan remembers Grandma Claudia sitting on the couch in the afternoons reading the scriptures. My grandma also found joy in a clean home and cooking delicious, healthy, and simple food. Many grandchildren rave about her pink cookies, similar to a drop shortbread cookie or pecan sandie, with a couple of drops of red food coloring added for fun. I loved her date filled cookies and the cool rise round bread baked in a can and served with strawberry freezer jam. I also loved her lemon meringue pies.
Grandma and Grandpa grew a garden and often served creamed peas and new potatoes and steamed carrots from it along with trout caught by Grandpa to friends and family who came to visit. I steadfastly held out against the trout during one week long summer visit to stay with them. I know they felt that the trout was a treat, but I didn't like it. Too bony. I remember how happy and loved I felt when they gave up on sharing the good stuff with me and just cooked me a hamburger.
Most of my memories center around the years Grandma and Grandpa lived in Jackson, but I do have snippets of memory of the years just before in Billings, Montana. They lived at the house that Aunt Joan later lived in and then past on to my cousin, Anne Marie, on Parkhill Drive. I remember there were funny monkey pictures in the rec room in the basement, their bedroom was dark, and the room where they showered their love on Great Grandma Margaret Storey Roylance was sunshiny. That is the room I probably remember the best. It was full of hospital equipment, mostly white and a bed with a white haired grandma who didn't talk.
I don't remember much else other than you needed to play quietly outside that bedroom window when Great Grandma was sleeping, but I know from others how compassionately Grandpa and especially Grandma, since most of the daily care fell to her, took care of her mother in law after the strokes that took away her abilities to live alone.
After they moved I spent several weeks alone in Jackson with them during the summers when I was around eight years old. The first thing we always did was clean the house. Then we went on many outdoor adventures across Jenny Lake in Teton Park and up the trail to Hidden Falls and then beyond to Inspiration Point. We drove up Cache Creek and explored a beaver dam. Then stopped to dig up a sego lily and taste it on the way back down in Grandpa's old truck.
At least one summer they drove to Pinedale to take me for a couple weeks of vacation. My mom who had driven me to Pinedale, then returned to Rock Springs and the rest of my family. I remember riding between Grandma and Grandpa in the front seat back up to Jackson. Grandma had snacks and a blanket in the backseat just in case we got cold on the way. More than anything I remember stopping a million times along the way to collect wild flowers for a Relief Society craft project.
When we arrived at Grandma and Grandpa's apartment we spent much of the rest of the week carefully burying the flowers in sand, carefully unburying them, then arranging them in shadow box frames. Just a few weeks ago as I hiked through the Pioneer Mountains near Ketchum, Idaho surrounded by wildflowers, I remembered the joy and fun that Grandma and I found as we did that activity together.
Every day was busy. We went swimming at Astoria often with the Hughes family. Once we shopped all over town for an outfit that would keep me warm so that we could ride the tram to the top and walk around on the summit of Rendevous Mountain. We saw musicals at the Pink Garter Playhouse and watched the nightly Shootout. We wandered the tourist shops and climbed Snow King Hill. We baked pies for the church booth at the county fair, and we even tied quilts to send to the families digging out from the Teton Dam Disaster. and often others dropped by to visit.
Grandma was a quiet person. She didn't seem to seek or even really like attention. Even though she was good at hosting dinner parties and having friends over, she preferred to work in the back ground. But that doesn't mean that she didn't want to achieve a high level of achievement. When something was important to her, she did it well and expected all of her children and grandchildren to follow her in that regard. Because of this desire she always had a clean home and well behaved children who she strongly encouraged to excel.
Many people have told me that she was a fine woman who they looked to with admiration. I doubt she realized that they did, because she struggled with self esteem. She came out of a time, when no one thought much about the feelings of a child even if her mother became ill and, after what the obituary calls a lingering illness, passed away due to pneumonia in the hospital in Evanston, Wyoming.
Wyoming is a big state with lots of teeny little towns out in the middle of nowhere. It is easy to feel insignificant coming from some place that the whole world can't find on a map. And if you are coming in from the minuscule ranching area to the merely teeny town for school, it is that much easier to feel insecure. Especially if your mother is sick for all of your thirteenth year and dies a few months after you turn fourteen. And then your father shows up two years later, when you are just starting to feel settled again, with a new wife and three new silbings.
My Aunt Joan, Grandma's second daughter said of this time,
"Mom told me about some of the challenges of losing her mother. During that first winter after her mother died she would make bread dough before riding the bus to school, then came home to a cold house at night and tried to get the bread to rise in time for supper.
Mom and her siblings would spend time at the homes of some aunts who lived in the valley, but even though they were very kind, their family practices were different. One day she arrived at an aunt's home and saw bread cooling on the counter but she wasn't allowed to have any until it had cooled. Her mom had always let them break open a hot loaf to melt butter on it, and it was overwhelming to her to realize that she would never again have that experience of eating hot bread her mother made. My heart ached for her as she expressed that sorrow"
I too remember Grandma telling that story. As far as I know that was a close as she ever got to expressing her sadness and grief around her children and grandchildren. Probably because grief and sadness were to be gotten over quickly in that day. No one had time for wallowing when the cows needed milking and the horses feeding. Grief was a private thing that you buried with your dead. You certainly didn't bring it back out years later to air in front of your children.
And in some ways that desire to do things well came back to plague her family relationships too as she tried to influence children and grandchildren into achieving the goal that she believed to be important because the child she was trying to convince didn't always agree on its importance.
Those things made me sad for my grandma. I don't think she ever knew how absolutely amazing she was. I don't know if she really felt a fullness of joy in what she and her children/grandchildren accomplished in their lives on this earth. And I wonder if she really could feel the love others had for her.
Years after the summers in Jackson, my husband, Tad, and I drove up to Jackson to visit. We went with Grandma and Grandpa on their weekly assignment to serve in the Idaho Falls Temple. That day, they arranged to be part of the live endowment session that we attended. I remember the joy and happiness on their faces and we spent time there together.
Grandma loved others and spent much of her time serving them. She loved the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She worked her whole life to establish the Church in the places she lived.
Like everyone, my grandma wasn't perfect. She worried too much about what others thought. She never gave herself enough credit for what she did, but she knew about God. And she knew that she felt his love in the temple. And she labored to share that knowledge with others she met.
I know that Grandma loved me. I know despite the mistakes she sometimes made showing it, that she loved all of her posterity.
Over the last month, as I have thought about writing this tribute to her, many memories have flooded back. The final one I will share occurred while I attended Utah State University. Grandma and Grandpa were driving through Cache Valley and arranged to take me out to dinner. They chose to take me to the Bluebird, a restaurant that opened its doors in 1923 just before my grandpa attended USU.
I remember very little of the dinner. I am sure we visited about what I was doing at college and what Grandpa had done in college Maybe a little about my family, or cousins. The biggest thing I remember came at the end of the meal. Left from the meal was a small red delicious apple. I can't remember if it came on my plate or on Grandma's plate. It seems a strange thing to garnish any plate with, maybe it just came out of her purse from a meal they had earlier, but there it was. Grandma picked up that apple and pressed it into my hand. She told me to take it back and eat it later. It would be a nice treat.
Now I don't especially like red delicious apples, so at the time I was not all that excited by the present. But as the years pass, what I remember from that exchange was her eyes. Eyes filled with concern, compassion, and love. Grandma cared deeply about others and while her words didn't always convey that, her eyes did.
I know the my Grandma Claudia Hoopes Roylance loves me. I know that she is waiting for the day when she is able to wrap her arms around each of her children and grandchildren and tell them how very important and loved they are. She was truly a great woman and I love her.
