Esther Ella McCormick

OUR DEAR MOTHER Esther McCormick, our beloved mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, passed away on December 18, 2011, at her daughter’s home near Sandpoint, Idaho, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease and cancer. She is now with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Esther was born Feb. 17, 1923 in Seibert, Colorado, to George and Ruth (Stevens) Simon. She had many stories to tell about her childhood and youth while growing up in eastern Colorado during the depression and the dust bowl period. Esther and Cecil McCormick were married in her parent’s home on Dec. 25, 1945, after Cecil’s separation from service in the Army Air Corps during World War II. During a short residence in Denver, their oldest son Ron was born, and shortly thereafter they were awarded a homestead near Adrian, Oregon, under the Soldier/Sailor Act. They moved there in 1948, and while homesteading and developing a farm out of sagebrush, had a daughter Carol Ann and another son Brian. Their farm eventually consisted of irrigated cropland and adjoining range land of approximately 300 acres, as well as a dairy operation. Esther was a woman of many talents, especially skilled in the art of organizing – a necessity in the small house where she raised her family. Being very artistic, she invested time and skill in various projects for the little church they attended in Adrian. She was also an excellent cook, seamstress, and gardener, taking loving care of a large orchard and garden each year while raising their family, and often employed the children in that operation, much to their chagrin at the time. This later became a favorite labor and pastime for each of her children. Homesteading involved hard work and often little reward, but Esther utilized well the resources available, being creative and crafty, often employing innovation, and teaching the virtues of a positive work ethic. One day while Cecil was gone to a stock sale, being very handy with a hammer and saw and experiencing claustrophobia, Esther knocked the side out of their small home with the intent of making more room. This became a seven-year project, basically building a new house. Being resourceful, she utilized used lumber they purchased from a CCC camp that was dismantled in their neighboring town of Nyssa, Oregon. She picked rocks from a potato harvester so she could purchase a radial arm saw to help with the remodel. Esther was seasonally employed at American Fine Foods in Nyssa during the corn canning season for thirty-seven years, being in charge of product inventory, in the days when computer technology was not utilized. Of the many good times to remember, one was often packing a picnic lunch and taking the family on a good hike up the rugged rimrock formation bordering the farm on one side to view the beautiful Snake River bordering the adjacent side of the farm and catching a glimpse of the blue Owyhee range to the south. She, along with Dad, was very supportive of the many years of 4-H and FFA projects in which the family participated at Adrian and the county fairs in Ontario, Oregon. Esther enjoyed music, particularly the old-time gospel hymns, played piano, and often serenaded her children to sleep with an old pump organ given to her by a dear friend in the Adrian area. In 2000, due to health reasons, they sold their beloved farm and moved to Carol Ann’s familys timber ranch near Sandpoint, Idaho. There she attended church with her family and a community women’s Bible study where she made new friends, dear and precious. She will be greatly missed by those whose lives she impacted, both in the Oregon community as well as in the Sandpoint area. Esther was preceded in death by Cecil in 2005, and is survived by sons Ronald and wife Ellen of Redding, California, Brian and wife Marcia of Lebanon, Oregon, daughter Carol Ann and husband Chuck Barnhart of Sandpoint, Idaho, 12 grandchildren, 22 great-grandchildren and one on the way, and her brother George and wife Loraine Simon of Boulder, Colorado. Services will be held at Nyssa, Oregon at the Lienkaemper Chapel on December 30, 2011 at noon and at the Sandpoint Christian Center in Sandpoint, Idaho, on January 8, 2012, during the morning worship service.