If one saying could represent the 94 years of Edwina “Eddie” Ellis Eastman’s life, it would have to be, “Give it your best.”
The privileged Stanford University graduate turned small-town farmer asked her family members, friends, fellow artists, community and country to do their best. When her admonishment didn’t bring results, she followed up with, “You can do better than that.”
Eastman, who died Jan. 3 in Paonia, truly had given her best, according to family and friends.
“She was quite a role model, but that doesn’t seem good enough to say about her,” said longtime friend Connie Williams of Cedaredge. “It’s hard to express what she meant to Delta County and especially to the women here. The trail she blazed through Delta County was like an explosion coming through.”
An elegant explosion. Friends and family said she was always elegant and poised, even when digging in the dirt of her garden or of the political world.
Eastman, born into Southern-belle affluence in Birmingham, Ala., in 1917, graduated from her mother’s alma mater in 1939. She tried to bring her maid to the campus with her, but the university forced her to send the maid home. She told friends later that it was the best thing that ever happened to her. She learned to be self-reliant and independent, traits that would last a lifetime.
The year she graduated, she married another Stanford grad, 1932 Olympic silver-medalist runner Ben C. Eastman. They lived in New York, Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area while raising three sons, Ben, Gary and Pete.
Then the Eastmans, upset by rampant growth in the Bay Area, made a drastic move: They bought an apple orchard near Hotchkiss and in 1959 put a two-story Sears mail-order home on it. They became small-town farmers.
While her husband ran the orchard, Edwina raised a legendary flower garden. She loved the beauty of living blooms. She also incorporated dried flowers into her watercolor artworks.
She became active in school-betterment efforts, library improvements, fine-arts associations and political groups.
She butted heads over development with her male counterparts on the Delta County Planning and Zoning Board. At the end of her life, she was livid about plans to drill gas wells around the North Fork Valley.
Her youngest son, Pete, remembers his mother as direct, unafraid to speak her mind, extremely independent and ferociously stoic.
Eastman’s husband died in 2002, and she lived on alone in the mail-order house, tending her flowers and working in her art studio. Eventually, arthritis bent her hands too much for painting, and illness forced her into a Paonia retirement home.
She began giving away flowers in those last years, so the garden she left behind is pocked with holes. But her flowers brighten yards and public spaces all over the North Fork Valley.
Her sons will scatter her ashes in her favorite meadow on Grand Mesa when it is “a riot of wildflowers.” Her husband’s ashes are already there.
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com
Other Deaths
Florence Green, 110, never saw the front line. Her war was spent serving food, not dodging bullets. But Green, who died Saturday in King’s Lynn, England, was the last known surviving veteran of World War I. She was serving with the Women’s Royal Air Force as a waitress at an air base in England when the guns fell silent Nov. 11, 1918. It was not until 2010 that she was officially recognized as a veteran after a researcher found her service record in Britain’s National Archives.
Sam Coppola, 79, the character actor who gave John Travolta sage but salty advice in “Saturday Night Fever,” died Sunday in Leonia, N.J. He was a cop in “Serpico” (1973) and a detective in “Fatal Attraction” (1987). His many TV credits include “The Good Wife,” “Law & Order,” “The Sopranos” and “Ryan’s Hope.” But to many, he is forever Dan Fusco, owner of the hardware store where Tony Manero (Travolta) worked by day and dreamed of Saturday night, when he ruled the dance floor.
Denver Post wire services
