Evelyn Roberts could lay tile, upholster furniture, strip wallpaper and make hats.
And she also reared three children (sometimes six, if the stepchildren were around) and held down two jobs.
Roberts, who died at 85, trained her children in manners, getting good grades and making sure they didn’t do anything “they didn’t want printed on the front of the newspaper the next day,” said her son, John Reynolds of Steamboat Springs.
“She flattened herself on the ground for us,” said one daughter, Candy Hoff of Carlisle, Pa. “She was like the steel rod of the family.”
Roberts’ children can rarely remember their mother relaxing, except to read a mystery novel. Roberts often said, “There’s no such thing as being bored – there are just boring people,” recalled her other daughter, Jacquie Farrell of Richland Center, Wis.
They said life wasn’t easy for Roberts, who had two bad marriages and essentially reared all three kids by herself.
“I never had steak, sodas or potato chips or ate in a restaurant until I was grown,” Farrell said.
If there had been economic yardsticks in Roberts’ day, “I’m sure we’d have been below the poverty level, but we didn’t know it,” Reynolds said.
Roberts never worried about the hand dealt to her, he said.
Roberts usually had secretarial jobs and often a night job selling clothes at a department store.
Hoff said her mother would leave one job, get a cup of coffee and go to the next, sometimes not remembering the drive in between.
Roberts found time to garden, make her own clothes and those of her children (even Easter bonnets for the girls), create curtains, repair donated furniture, garden and “serve us something from each food group every night,” Farrell said.
Roberts gave her children small change for doing Saturday chores and treated them to popcorn and root beer on Friday evenings.
For years Roberts volunteered at the Denver Public Library in Montbello.
“She was a gracious lady,” said longtime friend Ann Kranz, who was a library clerk at the same time. Roberts was so dedicated to her work that she was considered part of the staff, Kranz said. “She was an ordinary person who lived a remarkable life.”
Evelyn Ruth Straus was born April 11, 1921, in Madison, Wis.
She graduated from Madison East High School and later took legal-secretary and technical-school classes.
For several years in Denver she worked for Snowblast, which made truck-mounted snowblowers often used at airports.
Her first two marriages ended in divorce. She and her third husband, Phillip Roberts, whom she married in 1969, were devoted to each other, her children said. They moved to Denver in 1967. They moved to Richland Center, Wis., a few years ago to be near daughter Jacquie.
In addition to her husband and children, she is survived by six grandchildren; 13 great-grandchildren; four great-great-grandchildren; and two sisters, Joyce Woodrow of New London, Wis., and Kaye Kraft of Skokie, Ill.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com.
