Barbara Anne Knighton

BARBARA ANNE KNIGHTON (née BALDWIN) was born July 23, 1928ii Duval, Saskatchewan, Canada. Her parents, John Henry Baldwin and Sarah Jane Baldwin (née Davies), immigrants from Wales, brought her to the USA in January of 1929, to Keizer, Oregon. A year later, they moved to Aumsville to farm for four years. Barbara entered first grade in Aumsville Elementary in 1934. But then the Baldwin family inherited a farm in Keizer and returned once again to Keizer to live. Barbara always recalled that when she entered school there, she was the 99th student of the Keizer School. Since the Keizer School only taught to the 8th grade, she picked up her 9th grade year at Parish Junior High School, then moved on to Salem High School (known in later years as North Salem High). Of course, this was on top of the fruit-picking and farm-work that was the general tenor of life in Keizer.

Barbara entered Oregon State University in 1946; there she met several life-long friends, including Walt Parker, but she also met Robert Lindley Knighton, who became her fiancé. I think my father, Bob, added a dimension to her life, since he was a devoté of drinks and good food; she told me he would take her out to eat in places she would never have gone near otherwise! While his tastes in food were liberal, hers were rather circumspect: she always recalled how, after they were married, Bob took her out to enjoy some really nice Chinese food at a posh restaurant in San Francisco, but then - to his dismay - she insisted on ignoring the menu and ordering a hamburger instead.

After graduation, Barbara began teaching Home Economics, Physical Education, and Freshman English, being first employed in Gaston, Oregon in 1959. The following summer was her marriage to Bob, and a job opportunity for him took them to California. They eventually settled in Walnut Creek, California, in the East Bay, east of the Oakland hills, in 1952. Barbara continued in the school system there, teaching Home Economics and Physical Education, but she also supervised the creation of a school library and ran the school cafeteria at her school.

In 1955 their first son, John, was born, and in 1957 their second son, James. When Bob's job moved to San Francisco in 1954, the family moved west to Oakland to be closer, and in 1959 bought a home of their own in Piedmont, California. Over the years, while Bob took care of house maintenance and renovation, Barbara remained busy, running the Sunday School at St. Paul's Church in Oakland for some time and later becoming a real estate saleswoman; real estate remained her extra-domestic employment for 17 years. They lived in Piedmont for 24 years and made many more friends there, most notably Penny and Dean Robb, who were dear to her for the rest of their lives. In 1972 Bob and Barbara picked up a house in Gold Beach, Oregon, where the wry and humorous Walt Parker was both the pastor of St. Matthew's Mission and a fisher of steelhead on the Rogue River. Gold Beach and her folks' house in Keizer became the Knighton family's vacation getaways.

In 1975 Barbara's mother, Sarah Jane, died of cancer; seven years later her husband, Bob, just after retiring, suffered a severe stroke. Although he survived, he never recovered and remained bedridden and mentally compromised the rest of his life. In response to this, Barbara finished selling the Piedmont house and - with the help of a good friend who was an MD - moved Bob north, all the way from the Bay Area to a rest home in Keizer. In Keizer, Barbara took up residence with her father in her childhood home, helping him run the farm in its declining years. She spent the next twelve years working and attending to her invalid husband, but she also enjoyed the pleasure of reconnecting with a number of local friends in the Salem-Keizer area. Not only did she renew Oregon acquaintances when she returned to Keizer, but also returned more fully to the Church, a place where she had always had a second home, and made new friends there at Saint Timothy's in Salem.

After some time her father, J. H., passed away in 1987, leaving her the home. And finally in 1994, so did her husband, Bob. Barbara continued to stay busy, working locally as a before-school and after-school caregiver. Moreover, when her younger son Jim and his family moved to Oregon, Barbara spent many hours taking care of Jim's four children. Nor did she stay bottled up in the Willamette Valley only: she often drove herself to her property in Gold Beach, Oregon, or all the way to California to see her friends in Piedmont. And she traveled further afield, whether with her nephew Terry Baldwin's wonderful wife, Pam, or with her dear friend Penny. She saw various states across the USA and various nations in Europe, and enjoyed every trip, even her last one. When Penny was finally ill, just this year, Jim drove my mother down to Piedmont for Penny's funeral. Although Barbara was glad of the chance to be there, the travel itself was a nightmare for the two of them, especially the return trip: they were stuck, static in a car in freezing weather, for 24 hours on I-5 between Eugene and Corvallis before being allowed to proceed home to Salem.

In 2016 her only sibling, George Baldwin, died. Barbara was 88 then, and she herself, that limber, active farm-reared woman whom her friends at church called "The Energizer Bunny", continued living her independent life on the family farm for another nine years. In the end she was only felled this year by the double onslaught of two separate kinds of cancer.

Barbara is survived by her sister-in-law, Violet Baldwin, and all her family; by her son John, and his family; by her son Jim, and all his family, including Barbara's grandchildren.

Plainly, as we can all attest, she is missed. She was a woman of a bright and blithe spirit, friendly and helpful to a fault, always giving of her time and attention. To her dying day, she always protested that she had lived not only a long life, but a happy life, and that she felt blessed therefor.

~ written by her son, John Knighton