Obituary of Alice Marie Turner

Alice Marie Turner Mom was born on May 8, 1915 in Loup City, Nebraska, to Alfred and Jenny Minshull and named Alice but was called Marie all her life. When she was 4 years old her family moved to Alberta, Canada to homestead. She went to a one-room schoolhouse by horseback and was the only student in her grade: the first. Homesteading not working out the family moved to Calgary, Canada. From there they moved to Idaho. Finally the family moved to Olympia, Washington where Mom attended Roosevelt grade school and a year and a half at Olympia High School. She dropped out of high school during her second year to care for her younger brother, Art, as her mom, Jenny, was ill after having given birth to her 9th child: Dick. The family then moved to Seattle where Mom finished high school and that is where she met my Dad: James E. Turner. After graduation she stayed in Seattle to work while her family moved back to Olympia. Jim Turner had traveled to the Philippines to take over the family business when his father became ill. While in the Philippines he proposed to Mom. They were married in Olympia in 1937 and moved to the Philippines. Her first child, James Jr., was born in the Philippines in 1940. In 1941 the Japanese attacked the Philippines and Mom, Dad and little Jimmy were interned in a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines where they languished until the Philippines was liberated in 1945. After the war Mom had three more boys, me, Arthur and Kenneth. (Arthur died of Polio in 1954.) In 1956 the family, Mom, Dad, Ken, and me moved to Olympia and lived in the log cabin her parents built in South Bay. In 1957 they built the house you all know. That house with its “baseball field” was the scene of many family reunions and 4th of July get togethers. I remember many summers where various cousins, ranging from Seattle to California, stayed with us, sometimes for the summer. Her house was always open to family. In 1965 Mom adopted Linda. Linda was one of the foster kids mom took care of. The family moved back to the Philippines in 1965. In 1975 they came back to the house in South Bay. Her husband died in 1988 and she lived alone in that South Bay house until her death. She died peacefully in her own bed on June 27, 2009. She is survived by her sons, James Jr., George, and Ken and her daughter Linda. She has five grandchildren and seven great grand children. Mom was an independent and no nonsense woman who plucked and cleaned her own chickens, tiled her own bathroom and had a big garden and canned most of it and wasn’t adverse to taking a broom to one of her kids that acted up. Most of all she loved her children with all her heart. Her loving son, George