Clair Vern Felker 1918-2006

FELKER, BEHNKE, BROWNELL

Posted By: CHERYL MOONEN (email)
Date: 6/20/2018 at 17:18:26

May 30, 1918 - October 17, 2006

Denver, Colorado and formerly of Wyoming,
Visitation: 4 to 8 p.m., Thursday, October 26, 2006 at Lahey Funeral Home, Wyoming
Funeral Service: 10:00 a.m., Friday, October 27, 2006 at First Presbyterian Church, Wyoming
Interment: , at Wyoming Cemetery, Wyoming
Clair was born on May 30, 1918 in Wyoming, Iowa. His parents were Glen A. Felker and Henrietta Behnke Felker. His Behnke grandparents had met and married in Rock Island, Illinois after emigrating from northern Germany. His paternal grandparents came to Illinois from Maryland and apparently were "Pennsylvania Dutch". He attended Wyoming schools and graduated in 1935. That class of 1935 remained among his closest and dearest friends for life. Clair spent one year at the University of Iowa, dropped out for a year, and went back to Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He graduated in June of 1940 with a Bachelor's degree. In January of 1940, during his last year at Coe, he married Eunice Brownell, the little sister of a high school classmate. They were married for more than 37 years before she died of a brain tumor in 1977. In the fall of 1940, they went to Pullman, Washington, to Washington State where Clair had a $50 a month scholarship to attend graduate school. In 1941, they moved on to Chicago where he took a job with Dunn and Bradstreet. That job led to a job at Standard Oil Company of Indiana where he stayed for 28 years. Those 28 years were interrupted only by the two years he spent in the Navy from 1944-1946. The Navy took him to Washington, DC, Boston, and the Mariana Islands in the Pacific, Guam and Tinian. He was a supply officer in the Pacific. His first week at Standard Oil in 1942 was also marked by the birth of his first daughter, Pat. He always said it took a whole week's salary to get her and Eunice out of the hospital. After the War and his return to Standard Oil, the family moved to their first house. It was in Lombard, Illinois, and that is where second daughter Susan was born in 1948. At this time, Clair also returned to graduate school at the University of Chicago evening program where he completed an MBA. By 1955, the family had outgrown that first house and they bought their second house in Glen Ellyn. Glen Ellyn and Lombard shared a high school and they promised Pat they would not move out of the high school district so she could still go to school with her friends. In 1966, while returning from one of the many week-end trips the family made back to see family and friends in Wyoming, Clair, Eunice and Susan followed up on an ad in the Chicago paper which had described a small country farm for sale outside of Savanna, Illinois, a town which sits on the banks of the Mississippi River. It was love at first sight for a man whose dream had always been to own some land. Needless to say, they bought that little farm with an old barn and the adjacent 124 acres. Clair always said that was the most satisfying investment he ever made. When he subsequently left Standard Oil, they sold the Glen Ellyn house and moved permanently to "The Farm". Clair and Eunice became involved in the township government; the big responsibility of the township was road maintenance, but they enjoyed the new friends they made both there and in the town of Savanna. In 1977, however, the dream was dashed when Eunice died of a brain tumor. He sold the farm and moved for a while to Denver, Colorado, where both Susan and Pat were now living. He spent time with them and their families. One day, he got word through friends that the mother of one of his best friends from the class of 1935 had fallen and broken a hip and was in a hospital in Minnesota. Although his friend had died when they were 19, he had always stayed in close touch with the parents. The mother's name was Inez and Inez had worked for many years for the Pappas family in Mantorville, Minnesota. Clair drove from Denver to Minnesota not knowing exactly where Inez was. But he knew that Irene Pappas would be able to tell him. Inez recovered and a new relationship had begun between Irene and Clair. She always liked to say that bells went off in her head when she saw him standing at her door the night he came in search of Inez. Clair and Irene were married in March of 1980 in Mantorville. In Mantorville, Clair threw himself into local life. He served as mayor and on the Chamber of Commerce. He was instrumental in establishing the Mantorville Senior Center. And he and Irene eventually turned her big old house into a successful bed-and-breakfast business. Being a small town and people oriented man, Clair thoroughly enjoyed the contact with the guests at the house. They continued that business until their health no longer allowed them to do the work associated with it. Irene suffered major health problems and Clair spent much of his time in recent years caring for her. On January 7 this year, he suffered a major heart attack. After much consideration, his daughters took him to Denver where they could oversee his care more closely. It meant separating him from Irene, but Susan and Pat felt they needed to be near him. They also felt that Irene's family would take good care of her in his absence. In spite of hard work in therapy in Colorado, Clair never regained enough strength to return to Minnesota. For the past nine months, he was surrounded by his daughters' families including grandchildren and great grandchildren on a daily basis. They celebrated birthdays and holidays with him but always with skilled nursing care nearby. His heart gave out on October 17.