Judy Boyer was always busy and always supporting and encouraging her children – and always with a smile on her face.
“She had this great, contagious laugh, and she used it a lot,” said her daughter, Deborah Johnson, 67, of Lake of the Ozarks. “She and my dad were so in love; we never heard them argue or raise their voices. The four of us did everything together.
“My brother and I thought everyone had a family like ours. But we realize now how lucky we were.”
Mrs. Boyer died Dec. 18 at age 84 of complications from colon cancer.
She grew up in a big family in Paducah, Ky.
“She never really lost that Kentucky twang,” Debbie said with a laugh.
As a teenager, she moved in with her older brother, Chuck, in St. Louis and went to work at a Scruggs department store, modeling clothing.
“My dad was a friend of Chuck’s,” Debbie said. “That’s how they met. They were married in 1950 and I was born in 1951.”
The Boyers spent their first few years in St. Louis, where George drove a delivery truck and eventually got a job with Anheuser-Busch.
“I’ll bet we lived in five different apartments on Meramec Street,” Debbie said. “My mom said, ‘Your father just wasn’t happy; we kept moving until we found one we liked.”
Mrs. Boyer was a stay-at-home mother while Debbie and her brother, Rick, born in 1959, were young.
In 1961 they moved to Arnold, but were displaced when I-55 was being built. They settled in a different Arnold neighborhood, where they stayed for nearly 30 years.
The family did a lot of entertaining.
“Everybody came to our house for every holiday,” Debbie said. “She cooked everything; nobody ever brought a thing.”
Later Mrs. Boyer would parlay those cooking skills into jobs in the Fox and Hillsboro school district cafeterias.
Growing up, the Boyer children watched their mother lead a busy, productive life.
“She was a fabulous ice skater. She taught me to roller skate when I was maybe 5,” Debbie said. “My brother was about 7 when he got his first dirt bike and started racing. We played softball and baseball. I did baton, and my brother took drum lessons. They were always there for us, supporting us.”
Mrs. Boyer stayed busy in other ways, too.
“She did so many crafts,” her daughter said. “She made jewelry, crocheted scarves, made Indian dolls. For a while, she was into macrame, and she made these crazy big, long planters. She was a good seamstress, and made a lot of my dresses.
“She ironed everything – even my dad’s boxer shorts and the pillowcases on the bed.”
In the 1970s, Mrs. Boyer got involved with the Eagles Club in Arnold, eventually becoming president.
“She had a beautiful singing voice,” Debbie said. “The ladies at the Eagles said she knew all the rituals by heart, and she would recite them in this great voice. They said she put a lot of drama into it.”
The Boyers were avid league bowlers, and enjoyed traveling to tournaments.
Mrs. Boyer also taught herself to play the organ.
“She played strictly by ear; she couldn’t read a note,” Debbie said. “But it was amazing how good she got in a short time.”
With their children grown, the Boyers moved to Festus in the early 1990s. They enjoyed traveling together.
“We took vacations in Florida every year, starting in 1964,” Debbie said. “We went every May for a week. Later on, the two of them would go down and stay from January to March. They liked to go gambling on the boat there.”
In 2000, Debbie and her brother surprised their parents with a 50th anniversary party, during which the couple renewed their wedding vows.
Mrs. Boyer drew her grandchildren into her whirlwind life as they came along.
“She loved to play bingo, and she sometimes took the grandkids with her,” Debbie said. “She was a good tennis player. She even played racquetball with my brother – and she got a black eye. She just laughed.”
That spirit carried Mrs. Boyer through the death of her beloved husband in 2014, and her 2015 diagnosis of colon cancer.
“She did chemo every other week for two years,” Debbie said. “She stayed active and did her crosswords every morning.”
In the last few months of 2018, Mrs. Boyer started feeling sick and began having balance problems.
Mrs. Boyer’s granddaughter and family had moved in with her while their new home was being built, but the family began to be nervous about her being alone.
“She was determined to stay in her home,” Debbie said. “But, all of a sudden, when I said I wanted her to move down to the lake with me, she said yes.”
Mrs. Boyer enjoyed living at Laurie Care Center, telling a granddaughter, “I should have done this a long time ago!”
Debbie said she is grateful her parents both enjoyed good health and mobility until nearly the end of their lives. She also is thankful for their example of a loving relationship.
“We have found all these letters and poems they wrote each other,” Debbie said. “Not for any special occasion; he’d write her a note as he was leaving for work just telling her how beautiful she was and how much he loved her. She wrote poems for him – I had no idea she was so talented.
“He was her first love and her last; they were married 64 years when he passed. They just had a great life together.”
“Life Story,” posted Saturdays on Leader Publications’ website, focuses on one individual’s impact on his or her community.