In her 81 years, Mary Corinne Kirk Wadsworth, who died Nov. 16, bore witness to the etymological evolution that took her from being a colored girl in Mississippi, to a Negro beauty-pageant contestant and back to a woman of color at her mixed-race Catholic church.
“I told you so,” she said smugly to her children, who chided her for refusing to identify herself as Afro-American, black or African-American.
The only child of Elizabeth and John Raymond Kirk, she attended what she called “a colored school” in Mississippi until the Kirks moved to Denver. Colorado then enforced sundown laws – laws requiring blacks to be off the streets after sundown – and other forms of racism. The Ku Klux Klan paraded down Larimer Street, Wads worth discovered, less than 10 years before the Kirks moved to Denver.
But it offered more business opportunities for non-whites. Her aunt and uncle ran the Ritz Café and Ritz Cab companies in Five Points. During her student days at Manual High School, Wads worth worked part time at the cafe, where she met touring musicians excluded from Denver’s white-run restaurants.
At age 15, she entered the 1939 Beauty and Popularity Pageant, part of the East Denver Day festivities sponsored by what was then known as Denver’s Negro District. She entered as Miss Ritz Cab.
The Blair-Caldwell African-American Research Library and the Deep Rock Water building both feature the photograph of the contestants in that pageant. Long-legged and light complected, she stands in the middle of the lineup.
After attending a year of college, she married Oscar Banks Jr. When he died, she married Floyd L. Cole, who owned the landmark Petal Shop, a prestigious Five Points floral service near her aunt’s cafe.
She spent 25 years working as a secretary for the Air Force, taking notes in shorthand and writing letters in her elegant copperplate script.
Following her marriage to Cole, she went through a time she described as “a setback for me in my middle age.” A third marriage, to Willard Wadsworth, ended in divorce.
In 1987, following her daughter’s example, she converted from the Baptist denomination in which she was baptized to become a Roman Catholic. She regularly attended services at St. Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuit church where her funeral took place Saturday.
She found enormous comfort in her faith, and in knitting, baking, walking and creating an annual Christmas village display. She took pride in skillfully executing the Electric Slide dance.
She remained a handsome woman throughout her senior years, with a nearly unlined face, a tidy catlike smile and clear eyes that maintained their penetrating gaze even after she began wearing glasses.
Survivors include daughter Gayle Hamlett of Denver; son Christopher Cole of Denver; three grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com
