At age 13, as she gathered pine cones to make Christmas decorations, Roena Bunch Hayes encountered her mother lying dead on the grounds of their Idaho ranch.
Five years later, she returned from her first date to discover the house empty – deserted by her father and eight younger siblings.
Her first husband – the same boy who took her on that fateful first date – proved an abusive alcoholic.
In circumstances bleak enough to provide Ingmar Bergman with enough fodder for several dour films, Hayes persisted in seeing a generous world brimming with opportunity.
“Her theme song would be ‘Look on the Bright Side of Life,”‘ son Del “Buck” Bunch said at her funeral earlier this month. Hayes was 86 when she died Dec. 4 at her Westminster home.
The song, from Monty Python’s droll “Life of Brian,” advises, “If life seems jolly rotten/ There’s something you’ve forgotten/ And that’s to laugh and smile and dance and sing.”
Hayes was born in 1919, a slim, auburn-haired girl, the second of 10 children born to a lawyer turned rancher and an herbalist.
Her mother’s abrupt death shocked neighbors. Some volunteered to take one or two of the children.
Because her father was unwilling to break up his family despite the severe economic pinch of the Great Depression, Hayes became her siblings’ de facto mother.
She herded her younger brothers and sisters to school and to odd jobs picking apples and other crops to supplement the family’s meager income.
Hayes became an excellent storyteller, dappling her anecdotes with surprising details, and a superlative baker. Her delectable cookies, breads and pies stood in dramatic contrast to her lackluster cooking.
“She was a bad cook, because she got interested in other things and didn’t pay attention,” said son Michael Bunch.
Inattentiveness would be the most charitable explanation for the way Hayes learned that her father felt she was old enough to live independently.
Previously strict about refusing permission for her to date, her father reversed himself when, after Hayes’ graduation from high school, neighbor Delbert Bunch offered to take her to the county fair.
Hayes said her father told her that night that she was old enough to be on her own. She assumed he meant to go on a date. Her father meant permanently, as she learned upon returning from the fair, and finding the house deserted and her savings gone.
In less than a year, she married Delbert Bunch, a musician and an entrepreneur who ran a taxi service, worked as a shipbuilder and dabbled in other enterprises. He also tended to drink excessively, a habit that elicited a vicious temper, remembers son Michael Bunch.
After 12 years, Hayes left with the couple’s four children. She married Bob Hayes, an acquaintance who sometimes drove race cars sponsored by Delbert Bunch’s taxi service. They had one daughter. They were just short of their 50th wedding anniversary when Roena Hayes died.
Invariably preoccupied with chores and avocations – not necessarily in that order – she never hesitated to take charge of an activity or a trip.
Hayes shepherded her children to a clamming trip on the Oregon and Washington beaches, collecting enough razor clams to turn into chowder that the family canned at a local public canning factory.
In part because of her vivid memories of being propelled from the family nest, Hayes schooled her own children to be independent. She taught them to keep track of the money they earned harvesting apples, pears, huckleberries, blackberries and other fruit. When she sat down to a Scrabble or Yahtzee game, she took no prisoners.
“Mom was a very good Scrabble player,” Michael Bunch recollected.
“She knew all the obscure words, and I’m not entirely sure she always played fair, either. I remember telling my wife, before she first met my mom, to be careful if we played Scrabble. I told her that Mom knew all the words, along with some words that might not really be words, because she liked to win so much.”
Until the end, Roena Hayes maintained a philosophy straddling doughty optimism with fatalism. When her grandson’s wife was injured in a car accident, Hayes treated her with sympathetic dispatch.
“Roena was in the car behind ours and saw us roll,” said Elisa Cohen, the accident victim.
“She was picking glass out of my hair, and she was just calm. Like, it was a bad thing, but, you know, oh, well, let’s just move on.”
Survivors include her husband, Bob Hayes; sons Del Bunch of Las Vegas, Michael Bunch of Astoria, Ore., and Peter Bunch of Portland, Ore.; daughters Carole Hayes Hardan of Westminster and Judy Bunch Walker of Priest River, Idaho; 14 grandchildren; and 19 great- grandchildren.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
