Maryflo Schunks was known for her pleasant and gracious demeanor. But inside was a core of solid, stubborn iron, her family says.
“The worst thing you could do was to tell her ‘no,’” said her son, Dan Schunks, 65, of Farmington. “Several years ago, she broke a hip. Then when she recovered, she ended up breaking the other one, too. The doctors said she would probably need a wheelchair. But she was having none of that.
“She called one day and said, ‘Come up here; I have something for you to see.’ When I got there, she walked from the living room to the kitchen sink with her walker, and then shot me this look. She just had to prove them wrong.”
Mrs. Schunks died March 8 at age 98. She was a longtime secretary with the Crystal City School District and a well-known local church musician.
She grew up in Crystal City.
“My grandfather worked for the Frisco Railroad,” Dan said. “He was the station agent and telegrapher.”
Young Maryflo graduated in 1938 and did a year at Miss Hickey’s Business School before taking a secretarial job at the Crystal City State Bank.
During World War II, she went dancing with some friends and met Joe Schunks, a young soldier from Texas stationed at Jefferson Barracks. They were married in 1944, and lived in Texas and then in Germany after Joe was assigned there as an MP.
“They came back when he was supposed to get discharged, but he ended up going back in,” Dan said. “They bounced around – Fort Sill, Fort Hood – and eventually ended up at Fort Crowder in Neosho, and that’s where I came along in October 1953.”
When her husband was sent to Korea in 1959, Mrs. Schunks moved back to Crystal City and went to work for Fults Florist. She took a job at Crystal City Elementary in 1964, shortly after her husband retired from the military.
A tragedy sent Mrs. Schunks to the job she would hold for the remainder of her career.
“When Harriet Vinyard, the high school secretary, and her family were killed in a plane crash in 1971, mom went to fill her place,” Dan said. “She retired in 1988.”
Mrs. Schunks was always active musically, taking piano lessons from a young age.
“She started playing at the Lutheran church at 13,” Dan said. “They lost their organist and my grandfather said, ‘Oh, my daughter plays.’ I guess he figured playing was playing; if he was paying 25 cents a week for lessons, he ought to get something out of it.”
When she returned to the area in 1959, Mrs. Schunks resumed playing, and started a church choir.
“Within a few years she had a pretty nice choir,” Dan said. “She always conducted from behind the organ, and she played every week until she was well into her 80s.
“She had a natural ear that allowed her to understand and appreciate good music.”
Dan, a longtime high school band director, said his mother never missed a performance at the annual music contest at Jefferson College.
“Some years, the only people in the audience were the judges, my wife, and my mom and grandmother,” he said. “One time the bands were warming up onstage, behind the curtain, and she heard a band playing a warm-up – the same one we played – but playing it pretty badly. Mom leaned over to my wife and said ‘Well. That’s not OUR band.’”
Mrs. Schunks loved to read, and she enjoyed traveling.
“She was active in ladies church groups,” Dan said. “And up until 1995, she kept an eye on my grandmother, who lived right across the alley.”
In 2006, a phone call brought a healing revelation to the family. Mrs. Schunks was reconnected with Anne Blanton, the daughter she and her future husband had been forced to put up for adoption in 1944.
“Anne had done the work to find her birth parents,” Dan said. “She hired a lawyer who was able to open some of what were typically in those days locked doors.”
Mother and daughter formed a close bond, and Anne provided a dimension to his mother’s life that, Dan said, had been missing without anyone knowing.
“It was something of an out-of-body experience when my mother told me,” he said with a laugh. “It was a little disconcerting, because I always thought of myself as an only child.
But once I met Anne, I was glad.”
Dan said the only sad note is the fact that his father, who died in 1985, never got to meet the daughter he didn’t want to give up.
Apart from COPD from secondhand smoke, Mrs. Schunks was in generally good health until the last couple of years.
“It was an accumulation of 98 years worth of small ailments,” Dan said. “It was just a wearing down.”
In December, her sister, Esther, died suddenly, and Mrs. Schunks seemed to lose all steam.
“Mom began saying how much she missed her sister, and we started to pick up the feeling that things were unraveling,” Dan said.
She was in and out of the hospital; then, she came home on hospice March 4 and died March 8.
“The decline was dramatic,” Dan said.
He said his mother will be remembered for her graciousness.
“I’ve heard that from a lot of people,” he said. “They say, ‘Your mother was just so pleasant to everyone.’”
Patty Denton of Crystal City, who succeeded Mrs. Schunks at Crystal City School District, characterized her as a “real mentor.”
“She was so good to me,” Denton said. “Anything I needed to know or have explained, she was always right there to help, and she was always just so nice about it.”
“Life Story,” posted Saturdays on Leader Publications’ website, focuses on one individual’s impact on his or her community.