Boneta Mae O'Connor

1928 - 2022

Boneta Mae O'Connor passed in her sleep on Sept. 12. Born in Pea Ridge, Arkansas, the summer of 1928, a year prior to the Black Tuesday stock market crash generally recognized as the start of the world wide Great Depression and reaching adulthood through the rationing of World War II, her thriftiness in taking care of her home and family were forever shaped by her childhood years. Boneta's earliest memories are of her family living in a dry shack on a sharecropper farm quite a distance from town. She was impressed by her father's construction of a pulley system that led from the back porch, down the hill to a stream at the bottom to tip a bucket to fill with water for the household. A great deal of heave ho pulling brought the bucket of water to the back porch instead of trudging up a hill carrying it. The pulley water system was considered to be a great advance. The family ate primarily off of their garden of tomatoes and vegetables and sacks of rice. Her mother canned everything possible during their summer seasons to carry them through the winters.

When Boneta was 7, drought and the continuing effects of the Great Depression saw her family selling off all the possessions they could not fit into the back of an old, stake bed truck covered with a canvas canopy. The family of four children, their parents, an aunt, and five young men who paid a penny a mile each for the ride, piled themselves around their earthly belongings in the back of the truck and followed the crops north. (12 people!) Boneta remembers her mother and aunt cooking evening meals of biscuits and flour gravy in a giant sized cast iron skillet over camp fires as the group of migrant workers followed the crops north and then west. Stopping their journey wherever they could find work, the truck eventually delivered the family to Oregon. The aunt and extra young male workers had dropped off at various stops along their route across the nation.

In Oregon, the family of six lived in a house with no running water across the street from a farm where Boneta talked herself into being hired as a field worker and crop picker when she was about 10. Shepherded by her three-years-older big sister, Boneta earned money to buy her own clothes for school. She became particularly skilled at training hop vines. Lying flat on a high platform mounted on a wooden cart pulled by a horse through the rows of plants, her fingers coaxed the vines into climbing the trellis and strings overhead.

Boneta met her husband while working in the fields. They married a few weeks after Boneta graduated from high school and moved into a converted storage building behind her in-law's home. Within two years the couple had produced their first daughter and built a new home. A second daughter was born shortly after settling into their new home, A year and a half later the couple sold that brand new home, consolidated all their possessions into a two wheel drive pickup truck pulling a sixteen foot camper trailer and headed north to Alaska. The family of four left Oregon in April, following the spring weather north. At the age of 22, Boneta arrived in Fairbanks with one year old and two year old daughters in a driving sideways snowstorm on May 10, 1952. By the winter of 52 they had built a wanigan up against the side of the travel trailer with sawdust insulation around the lower edges of the trailer to seal out the cold. Water was hauled into the kitchen in buckets to fill a barrel on the kitchen counter. The couple would live in the travel trailer/wanigan home for two winters before finishing construction on a two bedroom house. The house was too small before they moved in because they had also produced a third daughter.

Boneta was a skilled homemaker. One of the precious possessions hauled over the Alcan Highway was a Singer Featherlight sewing machine. She sewed most of the clothing her three daughters wore. Parkas were cut out of scratchy wool blankets from army surplus complete with fur ruffs, sturdy metal zippers, and miles of rick-rack trim. Boneta kept stitching as her girls grew from pint size parkas up through velvet prom dresses to satin and lace wedding gowns, She learned to sew skins, producing mukluks and mittens as well as parka ruffs. She learned to knit sweaters and jackets for her family. Boneta and her husband enjoyed square dancing and folk dancing. She stitched yards of swirling petticoats and ruffled dresses for herself, with matching shirts for Francis.

When deciding what was essential to pack into the truck and trailer traveling across Canada to Alaska, a pressure cooker was at the top of the list. She had been raised on food preserved from a family garden and she continued that in Alaska. A garden area was fenced in and soon producing most of the vegetables the family ate in a year. She planted raspberry canes enough to feed the family and all the neighbors who were willing to brave the thorny spines to pick. Wheel barrow loads of zucchini were placed out by the road to share with the community. There were lots of flowers around the edges of the garden, fences loaded with sweet peas, stakes holding up delphinium towering more than head high, and gladiola spikes.

A small woman, she was fiercely competitive in bowling and baseball. Angered at speeding cars she felt endangered her children she once pitched a rock at one and was relieved when it bounced off the column between two open windows. She earned her private pilot's license and was a supporter in the local experimental aircraft association along with her husband.

With her husband frequently working out of town, Boneta followed him to live in camp work sites and villages until her girls reached high school age. Then she stayed in town with the girls, volunteering many hours with their school activities. After her girls married and left home Boneta again followed her husband to remote work sites as needed. She was an election worker for many, many years, served as a juror on multiple trials, and was active in the Pioneers of Alaska.

At 93, she is predeceased by both parents and all her three siblings. Her first born grandson, Adrian Francis Carr, also predeceased her. Boneta is survived by three daughters, Diana Carr (Bruce), and Sandra and Susan O'Connor. She has seven grandchildren: Francis (Jenn) Carr, George Carr, Kenneth (Tina) Carr, Erin Rae Tilly, Adrianne (Jared) Haines, Natasha and Nickoli O'Connor. She has five great grandchildren, Elida and Zachary Carr, Finnegan and Oliver Carr, and Grayson Haines.

The staff of the Pioneer Home are to be particularly commended for their eight years of increasingly more challenging care as Mom receded inexorably further into the brain deterioration of Alzheimer's. Added to her illness, staff successfully managed the trials of three years of Covid among a large community of elderly and infirm. The staff are truly appreciated for their care of our mom.