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From the Valdo James Smith Research document, The Sudburys of Virginia and Tennessee.
WILLIAM YATES STEVENSON ("Bill"), was born on November 13, 1907, in
Okmulgee, Oklahoma, almost eight months after his father's death from
pneumonia in March of the same year. He spent his childhood and adolescent
years in Olunulgee and Kansas City, Missouri.
It was in Kansas City that he met his future bride, FLORICE MAE BROWN,
who had been born July 10, 1904, in Homestead, Oklahoma. Florice and Bill
were married in Kansas City on April 5, 1927. At the time of their marriage, Bill
held a job with Western Union.
Sometime between December 1931, when their second child, Shirley, was born,
and the birth of their third child, Richard, in May 1933, Bill and Florice left
Kansas City and moved to a farm at Merriam, Kansas. They remained there for
about two years before relocating to Bethel, Alaska, probably in the spring of
1935. In Bethel, Bill took a job working in the gold mines and saw mill with
Florice's father and two brothers. Bill's daughter, Shirley, tells about an incident
at the saw mill that almost cost Bill his life:
Just before my sister Dorothy was born [in August 1935], my father was
pulling some logs with a Caterpillar tractor. The logs hit a snag and pulled
the tractor over on him, breaking his leg and almost crushing in one side of
his head. By the grace of God, he survived with no brain damage.
Unfortunately, however, his injured leg required amputation. Following his ac
-cident, Bill and his family remained in Alaska another three years. In 1938, they
returned to Arkansas and filed a claim on 120 acres of virgin forest land near the
town of Rudy. There they cleared a building site and constructed a house with
logs from the trees they had cut down.
Bill and his family moved to Des Moines, Iowa, in the fall of 1942, where a
relative had offered Bill a job making artificial limbs. According to his daughter,
Shirley, Bill became very good at his new occupation "and was soon one of the
top men with this type of expertise in the Midwest", working up to manager of
his shop. About 1956, Bill (as Shirley puts it) "got the wanderlust again", quit
his job, and moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he opened a pet shop.
Bill and Florice lived in Minneapolis for over fifteen years. In the early 1970s,
however, Florice began to suffer from Alzheimer's disease, and Bill moved back
to Des Moines to obtain some assistance in caring for her. On July 14, 1975, he
died, in his sleep, of a heart attack. Florice, despite the burden of Alzheimer's,
survived Bill by sixteen years. She died of breast cancer on November 2, 1991.
Bill and Florice are both buried in Chapel Hill Gardens Cemetery in Des Moines.
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1907 - 1975 (68 years)
