‘Good, Loving Lady’ Killed In Kitchen Fire
Edna Bedient didn’t get to eat her last meal.
The 95-year-old woman who raised three generations of her family and cooked food for hundreds of Valleyford schoolchildren died over the weekend in a small kitchen fire.
Either Bedient’s nylon nightgown or something she held caught fire on a stove burner as she cooked oatmeal, probably Sunday night.
“She was just really a good, loving lady,” Robin Prideaux, her great-grandson, said Monday. “She had a life of service to people.”
The Valleyford house sustained little damage, only burns and smoke damage to a small area of the kitchen floor and the cupboards under the kitchen sink. An open container of Quaker Oats sat on the counter, and a burned pot of oatmeal rested near the front left burner of the electric stove.
Bedient’s health aide found her body about 9 a.m. Monday.
“She either died of smoke inhalation or from a heart attack from the pain of being on fire,” said Dan Blystone, fire marshal for Fire District 8.
Bedient lived in her green-shingled home - next door to the town’s post office and general store - for more than 40 years.
Postmaster Rick Straub met Bedient when he started his job six years ago. At first, she leaned on her walker and hobbled over to pick up her mail every morning. For the past couple of years, Straub delivered her mail himself.
“She always made me rice pudding,” Straub said. “She was the type of person who you’d do one thing for her, and she’d repay you a dozen times. She really hated to have people go out of their way for her, but she’d go out of her way for anyone.”
Bedient raised two children, a boy and a girl, who died Sept. 30, 1945, in a one-car wreck near Pines Road and Trent as they tried to return to a dance in Trentwood. The car wrapped around a pole. Clarence Bedient was 20; his sister, Agnes Prideaux, was 24. She left a 3-year-old son behind.
Edna Bedient raised her grandson. Then, she took in her grandson’s son, Robin Prideaux, when he was 15.
“It’s something to have a 76-, 75-year-old woman want to take on that challenge and frustration, and she did,” said Robin Prideaux, now 34.
Prideaux, his wife and their three children live about three blocks from Bedient’s home. The family visited Bedient three or four times a week and talked to her daily.
Bedient’s home is a shrine to her family. Pictures of Prideaux’s children sit on a shelf under the television set, and photographs of different decades of everyone hang on walls.
A basket of cloth yellow tulips, an Easter gift from Prideaux’s wife, sits next to the television.
“She’d swear to God they’d open and close every night,” Prideaux said.
In Valleyford, about 20 miles south of Spokane, residents will remember Bedient for her cooking. She cooked at Valleyford Elementary School before it closed, baking bread from scratch every day for the children.
She loved to bake peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies, and she tested new recipes in her home. Her door was always open.
“She’d always have a cookie jar full of cookies,” Prideaux said.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo