Mary Esther Tompkins Wilson, who died Oct. 27 at age 88 in Durango, traded life as a sometime beauty-pageant contestant to become a rancher’s wife on an isolated Cortez homestead innocent of indoor plumbing and electricity.
The daughter of chicken farmers in the Imperial Valley, she had a permanent tan that helped make her a natural candidate for Miss Southern California.
At age 14, she met her future husband. Glenn Edwin Wilson, delivering feed to the Tompkins farm, hollered “Look out, you little fool!” after she ran in front of his truck. She graduated a year early from Fontana High School in order to marry Wilson and accompany him when he left California to take over his family’s ranch in Cortez.
Instead of indoor plumbing, an outhouse served the newlyweds’ mud-and-brick home. A ditch nearby provided untreated water.
Cracks split the wood floor, laid when the planks were green. A stove heated the home with coal that Wilson and her husband mined from deposits on their property.
She delivered her prematurely born daughter in that house, fashioning an incubator by wrapping the infant in quilt batting, laying her in a shoebox and setting the box by the stove’s open door.
Later, the Wilsons built a larger home from adobe bricks that the children helped mix. Mary Wilson remained there until 2000, when she moved into daughter Ann Brown’s home in Cortez.
By nature and necessity, Mary Wilson seemed eternally busy. She belonged to the local grange, led 4-H clubs, served on the county fair board and learned emergency medicine.
When the Wilsons’ puppy tried to jump through a barbed-wire fence, severing the arteries in its front legs, Mary Wilson sewed the blood vessels and muscles together again with a needle and silk thread.
Since her home lacked a refrigerator for years, she spent days canning hundreds of jars of preserves and vegetables, along with chicken, beef and venison.
Her pickled beets won the grand-champion award for eight years running at the county fair until Wilson finally recused herself from competition. The yellow delicious apples she chose from her orchard won the grand-champion ribbon at the 1952 Colorado State Fair.
Her daughter’s 4-H square-dancing team won the state championship in 1955 and 1956. Piggly-Wiggly, a runt rescued from a litter accidentally smothered by a sow, went on to be a state-fair grand champion and served as a local stud before eventually becoming pork chops.
In 1980, at the annual homemakers’ conference in Grand Junction, Wilson won the Colorado Extension Service’s Blue Star award, the conference’s most prestigious honor.
Survivors include daughters Sue Hassell of Arvada and Ann Brown of Cortez; son Glenn “Kelly” Wilson of Cortez; 18 grandchildren; 36 great-grandchildren; and two great-great-grandchildren. Her husband and a son preceded her in death.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
