Mary Belle Hamm made friends everywhere – and kept them forever.
So it wasn’t unusual that she planned to eat on that January day with “The Lunch Bunch,” which regularly got together.
But the day ended in tragedy, and Hamm lost one of her best friends, Shir ley Maris.
Hamm, who had outlived many of her friends, died Sunday at a Denver hospice after a short illness. She was 81. Diagnosed only a short time ago with lung cancer, she told her family she didn’t want to go through treatments. “I’m not very good at suffering,” she said.
Her service will be at 11 a.m. today at Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, 1980 Dahlia St.
Maris, a longtime neighbor of Hamm’s, was driving the car the day of the lunch at Yia Yia’s Euro Cafe in the Denver Tech Center. She found what she thought was a parking place adjacent to the regular lot, but snow had covered a thin sheet of ice over a 9-foot-deep pond. The car immediately began sinking. Hamm’s son, Greg Hamm of Dallas, said a waiter, a man in an office building and other onlookers raced to the car and knocked out a back window. Hamm crawled out.
But Maris, 77, was trapped and didn’t make it out.
Hamm suffered hypothermia and was hospitalized for a short time.
“It was very traumatic,” said Jimmie Lou Cory, a “Lunch Bunch” member who was already at the restaurant.
Hamm never talked much about the accident, Cory said, “and we didn’t go near that restaurant again for a long time.”
Hamm, who graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder, was a social worker in Denver elementary schools.
Family and friends were her life.
“She made friends everywhere,” said her daughter-in-law, Christine Hamm. Everyone she knew got a birthday or anniversary card each year.
“She was the kind you always wanted to be your friend,” said Marge Armitage of Denver, a friend from college. “She was always loyal and always steady.”
“She was one of those special people – quiet, unassuming and faithful,” Cory said.
Her interests included the opera and the Civil and Revolutionary wars. But she never pursued horseback riding, which Armitage introduced her to while in college. “She doesn’t look too happy in the picture I have of her on a horse,” Armitage said.
“The Lunch Bunch” has been meeting for more than 40 years, but Hamm had friends from further back, regularly seeing ones she made in the sixth grade, her son said.
Mary Belle Post was born in St. Charles, Ill., on Dec. 1, 1924. She married Belden Hamm on Sept. 2, 1950. He died in 1996.
In addition to her son and daughter-in-law, Hamm is survived by her brother, Roger Post of Mesa, Ariz.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at 303-820-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com.
