Mary Elliott’s family members say she was fiercely independent and self-reliant. She held down a variety of jobs, ran a business, raised a family – all using self-taught skills.
“When she started out, there weren’t all these training programs like what they have available now,” said her daughter, Ramona “Mona” Robinson, 57, of Richwoods. “She trained herself.”
Mrs. Elliott died April 30 at age 81 of complications following back surgery.
She grew up in the Kimmswick area, one of six children, and only attended school through eighth grade.
“She left to help at home, like a lot of girls did back then,” Mona said. “She got her GED in 1978, but she never had any formal education beyond grade school.”
She met Ernest Elliott on a blind date arranged by mutual friends. She was a teenager; he was a 27-year-old military veteran, a divorcee with a young daughter.
“She married my dad in 1953 at age 16,” Mona said. “His daughter, Bev, was 5 when they got married, and my mom raised her as her own.”
The young bride was no stranger to caring for small children.
“She helped my aunts take care of their kids,” Mona said. “She loved babies, and she was always taking care of somebody’s kids.”
The Elliotts settled in the Jefferson R-7 community; Mrs. Elliott was a full-time homemaker and her husband was a mail carrier for the Festus Post Office. They were active with VFW Post 3777 in Crystal City.
“When my youngest brother started school in 1968 or so, my mother went back to work,” Mona said.
Mrs. Elliott got a job as an assembler with Beltex, a Barnhart company that made sanitary supplies.
“She was a union rep there, too,” Mona said. “She worked there until it closed down in the late 70s or early 80s.”
For the next few years, Mrs. Elliott worked in several restaurants as a cook.
“She worked at Petit Paree in Festus, the Blue Owl in Kimmswick,” Mona said. “She worked in the restaurant they opened up on the lower level at the VFW.”
After the death of her husband in 1992, Mrs. Elliott decided to go into business for herself. She reopened the former longtime Flamingo restaurant south of Festus as “Mary’s Home Cooking.”
“She ran it and she cooked,” Mona said. “My daughter worked for her; one of her nephews worked there. She was open about three years or so.”
After that, Mrs. Elliott spent several years working a variety of temporary services jobs, and eventually went to work for the Chrysler plant in Fenton, retiring in 2005.
In her later years, Mrs. Elliott kept busy babysitting her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
She enjoyed cooking for family gatherings, and was renowned for her red beans and rice and her potato salad with bacon.
Mrs. Elliott sold her Festus-area home and bought a home in Richwoods, where she maintained a large garden until just recently. True to her personality, she taught herself how to can food.
“She learned from the Ball canning jar book,” Mona said.
Mrs. Elliott also loved houseplants and enjoyed spending time in the sunroom she had built a few years ago.
“Outside are roses, peonies, wisteria vines,” Mona said. “She had all kinds of lilies, irises, butterfly bushes, lilac bushes. She had to have a mimosa tree, even though they’re messy.”
She embraced technology, playing mah-jongg online and connecting with friends and family on Facebook.
“She was a real technical granny,” Mona said with a laugh. “I have had a heck of a time figuring out her finances, because she did online banking, and all her statements and bills and everything were paperless.”
Mrs. Elliott also liked collecting antiques.
“She didn’t buy and resell; she just went ‘junking’ for things she wanted or to give to other people,” Mona said. “She spent more time looking than she did actually buying stuff.”
Mrs. Elliott enjoyed relatively good health until recently. She had been diagnosed with lung cancer in late 2017 and underwent radiation therapy.
“She also had COPD, but nothing really slowed her down until last fall,” Mona said. “She was having pain in her hips and her back, and the doctors decided she needed spinal fusion surgery.”
The plan was for Mrs. Elliott to have her surgery, recover in the hospital, then go to rehab before her next cancer screen.
“After the surgery, she was sitting up talking to us, and she was using a walker to go from chair to bed to bathroom,” Mona said. “She said she was tired, so we went home. I got the call later that night that she was in ICU.”
Mrs. Elliott had a reaction to medication, and her condition worsened with time.
“Her system couldn’t handle the morphine,” Mona said. “It was the snowball effect; anything that could go wrong, did go wrong. On the day she was supposed to go to rehab, her colon ruptured and she had to have another surgery.
“It was one thing after another.”
Mrs. Elliott came home on hospice and died six days later. Her daughter says she will be remembered for her service to others.
“She was always there for whoever needed her,” Mona said. “Her last wishes were to be cremated and her ashes sprinkled on her rosebushes to help them grow.”
“Life Story,” posted Saturdays on Leader Publications’ website, focuses on one individual’s impact on his or her community.