When it came to quilts, Arlene Arnold made them by hand and handed them out — to everyone.
Arnold, who died in Aurora on April 16 at age 84, gave the covers to friends, family, pregnant women at supermarkets and her Mormon bishop.
Scores of people who received gifts from Arnold brought their quilts, all about 4 feet by 5 feet, to her funeral April 21.
Some held their quilts during the service, and speakers took the quilts to the pulpit with them. One quilt covered Arnold’s casket.
“We will never know how many quilts she made,” said Arnold’s daughter Carol Bain of Evergreen.
Arnold struck up conversations with people wherever she went, Bain said. “She brought a lot of people into our church because she was so friendly.”
When Arnold’s great-grandson, Jordan Gutierrez of Denver’s Green Valley Ranch neighborhood, was collecting goods for the needy in Mexico, Arnold organized a quilting bee.
The women in the group made a receiving blanket for each of the 70 newborn kits that Gutierrez took to Mexico last month, said Arlene Gutierrez, his mother.
Arnold made 24 of the blankets.
Arnold’s handiwork started years ago when she and her late husband, James Alan Arnold, owned Stockman Signs near the National Western Complex.
They did good business during stock shows, painting signs for ranchers and farmers.
They also painted signs on commercial trucks — especially for Kuner’s food products.
James Arnold did the lettering on the outline of the cans painted on the sides of the trucks, and his wife spray-painted the images of fruits and vegetables and ketchup on the cans.
Mabel Arlene Coontz was born in Deer Trail on Dec. 4, 1923, and moved to Denver with her family when she was a teenager.
After graduating from William Smith High School in Aurora, she received a scholarship to the University of Colorado at Boulder.
She attended only a semester because she met James Arnold at the Fitzsimons Army Hospital, where he was being treated for tuberculosis.
She was working as a babysitter for an Army officer on the base. Coontz and Arnold met at a USO dance on the base.
In addition to her daughter, granddaughter and great-grandson, Arnold is survived by two other daughters: Faye Arnold of Granby and Joyce Beckett of Craig; 10 other grandchildren, 18 other great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
