IDAHO FALLS, Ida.-After 93 years, our angel Edna Kerr Bailey Arbon went home to her Heavenly Father. She left us Sunday, August 6, 2000, in the Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center in Idaho Falls of natural causes. She has served God and her family, and deserves finally to be free from her earthly disability.
Edna was born September 7, 1906, in Samaria, Idaho, the 10th and last surviving child of Annie Kerr and James Richard Bailey. She lived on a farm in Arbon Valley, Idaho, and learned at a young age the value and blessings of hard work. Church and education were top priorities in her life. Music lessons were a luxury, but Edna picked berries and did other chores to pay for 14 lessons that allowed her to serve as organist in the LDS Church for many years.
She taught first through eighth grades in a two-room school house in Arbon Valley. One student wrote that Edna was a “friend, nurse, disciplinarian and janitor. She came early to start the fire so the school was warm when the students arrived. To this day, I love and admire her much more than she knows.”
She and Joseph George Arbon married in Salt Lake City December 26, 1929, and are parents to Ronald (Mary Ellen) Arbon, Robert (Lillie) Arbon, and Joann (Mike) Swendsen. She is grandmother to 12, great-grandmother to 16, and great-great-grandmother to one.
Many have admired Edna’s beautiful quilts, needlepoint pictures, lovely flower gardens, and have enjoyed her good cooking. She loved being busy.
Besides her family, she is survived by many devoted friends. Edna’s life has been a great example of faith, courage, compassion, enduring patience and love.
Waiting to welcome Edna are her husband, parents, five brothers, seven sisters and two grandchildren.
Services to honor Edna will be held at 2 p.m. Friday, August 11, 2000 at Colonial Funeral Home, 2005 S. Fourth Ave., Pocatello. Family and friends may visit at the funeral home two hours prior to the services. Interment will be at Pocatello’s Mountainview Cemetery.