Cheney residents’ ashes to find home

Five former Cheney residents are finally coming home to rest.

On Friday at 4:30 p.m., the Cheney Cemetery Association will hold a ceremony to remember Florrie Christine Elrod, a former teacher at Eastern Washington State College who died in 1972; Clarence Parmalee, 57, a shoemaker who died in 1946; George E. Craig, 80, an EWSC educator who passed away in 1949; and his wife, Mary Craig, 78, who died in 1947.

The four have been waiting to be claimed since they were cremated at Jerue Funeral Home. Ball and Dodd Funeral Home took over the files when Jerue closed, and recently contacted the Cheney Cemetery Association to turn over the ashes.

“They’ve been cared for very appropriately,” said Rollin Hoyle, funeral director and manager of Ball and Dodd.

Hoyle said that times have changed in the last several decades in regard to how funeral homes handle ashes. Today, when a family approaches him to have a family member cremated, arrangements are made right away for the ashes. But in the past, many families took ashes home to be displayed in an urn on the mantel, or the family may have assumed the ashes had been disposed of by the funeral home. People moved away, and it was hard to get in touch with them. Today, families may choose to scatter the ashes of a loved one or place them permanently in cemeteries.

Hoyle also said that when the Cheney Cemetery Association was contacted by Ball and Dodd, the association began researching the history of the people right away.

“They were really good about saying, ‘They are still our people,’ ” Hoyle said.

Chuck Kriege, president of the association, said he was surprised to find out about these Cheney residents. He and board members vice president Barbara Curtis, historian Helen Boots, sexton John Boots, treasurer Tom Mustard and secretary Kathy Babb started to find out more about the residents.

“Some of them Helen knew by name,” Kriege said.

Boots said she remembered “Miss Elrod” for the elaborate plays she would stage.

“Those costumes were out of this world,” Boots said.

“She was a very elegant-looking lady,” Curtis said.

Parmalee was a shoemaker in Cheney who also worked at Galena Airfield.

“Oh, he made the best felt hats,” Boots said of Parmalee.

Boots said that Mary Craig was a great friend of her grandmother.

“You can’t have Christmas without Mary Craig’s fruitcake,” she said.

There was a fifth person who was going to be memorialized on Friday, but Curtis researched his family and found his great-grandson at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

William Cooil, 91, died in 1933. He worked a homestead near Tacoma and once left for the gold rush in Alaska.

Bruce Cooil, a professor in the business school at Vanderbilt, said he had never met his great-grandfather but knew that his own father spent time with him.

When William Cooil left for the gold rush, family lore has it that he took his son to Alaska with him. The son, C.J., spent a lot of time running behind the dog sled. That running led C.J. to the Olympic Trials.

The Cheney Cemetery Association and the Cheney Funeral Home are planning to ship William Cooil’s ashes to his great-grandson.

Bruce Cooil said his family will hold a private ceremony for him.

“I was very impressed that they would do so much research to find me,” the professor said.

The four remaining Cheney pioneers will be buried during the ceremony on Friday in a plot donated by the family of another Cheney resident, William Parker.