Mary Ann Drury packed an array of appealing qualities – service to others, generosity, sweetness and affability – into a very small package.
“She was only 4 feet, 11 inches,” said her oldest son, Delray Drury, 67, of Herculaneum. “My favorite picture of her with my sons shows her standing between them. They’re 6-2 and 6-3, and she doesn’t even come up to their armpits.”
He says she often threatened her four rowdy sons and a daughter with the phrase, “If I have to tell your father…!” But they knew the real story.
“She was the real threat,” Delray said with a laugh. “If we made her mad, Dad would not be happy, and it wouldn’t be too good for us, either.”
Mrs. Drury died on Easter Sunday at age 87 after a brief time in hospice.
She grew up one of 10 children on a farm in Ozora, an area in northern Ste. Genevieve County largely settled by German immigrants.
“They spoke a lot of German with the other people in the area,” her son said. “They were farmers, and kept cattle, pigs, chickens. I remember riding on the back of the big plow horses.”
Young Mary Ann, like her siblings, helped out on the farm and went to Catholic school through the eighth grade.
“When she was about 17 or 18, she went to work at a garment factory in Ste. Genevieve,” Delray said.
Meanwhile, Burton Drury was growing up on a farm outside Bloomsdale, the son of the county sheriff. He went into the military at the start of World War II and received a near-mortal wound at the Battle of the Bulge just after his 21st birthday.
“He spent 27 months in hospitals,” Delray said. “When he got home, somebody introduced him to my mother and they dated. They were married in November 1947.”
Mr. Drury’s injuries had a profound impact on the life of his whole family.
“My mother was kind of the hero, because she took care of him,” their son said. “I remember when I was 9 or 10, going with her when she took him to the VA hospital at Jefferson Barracks. It was a really severe injury he had; for years, he still had shrapnel coming out of his hip. It was very painful, and he’d have to stay in bed till the pieces worked their way out. He limped for 60-something years.”
The family lived in Ste. Genevieve briefly, then moved to Festus.
“We grew up on Huber Street,” Delray said. “It was like a storybook, really. All the dads worked at PPG (including his dad) and all the moms were stay-at-home mothers. They all looked out for all of us.”
When the kids came from all over to sled down Huber on the hoods taken from junkyard cars, Mrs. Drury was there with snow ice cream or hot chocolate. In the summers, when the Drury boys and their friends were goofing around on the basketball court their dad built in the back yard, she was there with cold lemonade or Kool-Aid and plenty of food.
Every evening, the family sat down together for a hearty, usually German-inspired meal.
“She was an excellent cook,” Delray said. “Her mother taught her, and my dad’s mother too, a lot of German dishes. We had these little dough balls, you’d pour syrup over them for dinner on Fridays during Lent. Other times, you’d have beef hearts and gravy on them.
“She made great fried chicken; she made sweet cinnamon rolls from scratch. She’d make homemade noodles, roll them out and sliced thin for Stroganoff or whatever.
“And, until the Army ruined liver for me, hers was just the best.”
Mrs. Drury was a member of Sacred Heart Church in Crystal City.
“She went there for almost 62 years,” her son said. “She loved her church.”
Mrs. Drury continued to care for her husband, whose old war wounds flared up from time to time, until his death in 2008.
“She’d help him get shoes on when he was too stiff to bend his leg,” Delray said.
The couple moved to a home in the R-7 area south of Festus in 1963, and enjoyed fishing at the nearby Conservation Club lake. They also traveled around the region, fishing in places like Bull Shoals Lake by themselves or with Mr. Drury’s brothers.
As a widow, Mrs. Drury lived alone for about five years, but suffered from increasing mental confusion.
“She had lost her sense of direction,” her son said. “She went to church one morning and ended up in Bonne Terre. That’s when we had to take the keys.”
She spent 31 months at Crystal Oaks assisted living facility, then just three days on hospice before she died surrounded by family members.
“There was a gigantic turnout for her funeral,” Delray said. “Everybody just liked her. She was tiny, pretty, very intelligent. She wasn’t real opinionated; she listened real well. “But she just liked people; she always thought the best of everyone.
“If you go out and talk to the girls who took care of her at Crystal Oaks, they say she never complained. She was the sweetest thing.”
“Life Story,” posted each Saturday on Leader Publications’ website, focuses on one individual’s impact on his or her community.