Edna Branstine never listened when someone said, “You’re whipped before you start.”
In fact Branstine, who died at her home in Wetmore on May 28 at 100, ignored that warning when she wanted to go into the insurance business in the 1950s.
Although it was a predominantly male industry, she made a success of it. She was named Distinguished Agent in 1958 and Agent of the Year in 1959.
“If you told her she couldn’t do something, she would die trying,” said her granddaughter Twyla Petersen of Wetmore.
She was widowed in 1953, when her husband, William Branstine, was killed in an accident at the Colorado Fuel and Iron plant in Pueblo. She had an eighth-grade education and a daughter. She needed a job.
She and her daughter, Luella Brown, picked insurance and asked an agent in Denver about getting into the insurance business. They were told, “Ladies, you’re whipped before you start. You can’t do it.”
Branstine returned to the insurance company a second time, and they both took the test and finally were given a Pueblo office of Preferred Risk Mutual Insurance Co. Branstine was there until 1975.
In later years, she fixed up old houses, doing the roofing, insulating, painting and carpeting.
Edna Esther Cooper was born in Harper County, Okla., on Jan. 22, 1910.
The family — her parents, George and Estella Cooper, and nine other children — moved to Colorado for her father’s health, traveling in a covered wagon. They settled in Baca County, in southeastern Colorado.
They bought relinquished land, said Petersen. Branstine helped her dad round up cattle.
She met William Branstine, but his grin at their introduction didn’t impress her. “She said if she could have reached him, she would have slapped him,” Petersen said.
However, the relationship warmed, and they married three years later on Jan. 22, 1931.
They moved to Pueblo in 1941.
Edna Branstine bought her home in Wetmore, 30 miles outside Pueblo, in 1964 and for 20 years was a caretaker for the elderly.
In addition to her granddaughter, she is survived by three other grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Her husband, her siblings and her daughter preceded her in death.
Inside.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
