Cora Judd Obituary (2002) - Augusta, Maine

LEWISTON ? Cora Judd, who lived in Wayne for 32 years, died at the Montello Manor Nursing Home in Lewiston, May 11, 2002. Cora Judd was born Cora Elizabeth Harris on the Harris family farm on Walnut Creek, three miles outside of Great Bend, Kan., in 1912. Great Bend is one of the fort towns built along the Arkansas River to protect the great wagon train migration. The Santa Fe Trail ran right through the Harris farm. Her grandparents were the first settlers in Great Bend and their two-room stone house is now part of the Great Bend Historial Museum. Cora was one of five children. All the Harris kids were bright, but she was especially smart, getting all A's in the little one-room schoolhouse. She was also high strung and spent a couple of years with her grandmother, Elizabeth Dodge, who had raised eight kids by herself and built herself a big white house in Great Bend with tall columns in front. Her grandmother's independence and determination had a great influence on Cora. Cora was a beauty with clear blue eyes and a steady gaze. One evening when she was 18, a bunch of kids from Great Bend went by bus to nearby Larned, Kan., where the preacher's son, Clarence Judd had organized a St. Patrick's Day dance. Clarence had worked as an intern for a senator in Washington, D.C. and was the editor of the Larned Eagle Optic Newspaper. Cora had a date from Great Bend, but Clarence took every dance on her card. And when she came home, she told her little sister, Vivian, and her big sister, Margaret, that she had met the man she was going to marry. And so they did in July. In later years, the anniversary they always celebrated was St. Patrick's Day. Clarence took a job with the Louisville Journal and their first son, William, was born in 1934. Five years later, while Bobby Feller was pitching for the Cleveland Indians and Clarence was a star reporter for the Cleveland Press, her second son, Bob, was born, and Clarence bought a fine burgundy 1938 Buick. Their house in Chesterland, just outside of Cleveland, sat behind an acre of field. Juddy and Cora planted corn, tomatoes, sunflowers, beans and cabbage, and there was still a half-acre left, which they planted with acorn squash. 'I thought there might be two or three or even four dozen of the darned things,' she wrote in an article for Better Homes and Gardens. 'Dear heaven, there were bushels and bushels and bushels. It got so our nearest and dearest refused to come near us for fear we'd make them eat some.' Cora learned 50 ways to cook acorn squash. In 1942, they moved to a little brick house in Lynbrook, Long Island. Juddy was working for United Press and they took in soldiers as lodgers because the army bases were full. In 1946, the Judds moved to Chappaqua, 30 miles north of New York City in Westchester County. There were three acres of lawns and gardens, a fine stone barn and a house that began life as a sheep barn, converted into a house in 1909 and completely rebuilt with an ultra-modern wing in 1939. Juddy by this time was an editor at Business Week, and Cora had plenty to to with the two boys, the terraced gardens, a vegetable garden and remodeling the house. After the kitchen was the most up-to-date kitchen in Westchester County in 1948, she looked around for something to do. There really wasn't much for a woman to do in the suburbs in those days, so she did what a great many suburban women did in Chappaqua ? joined the Congregational Church woman's club. Cora was a little in awe of the Wellesley, Holyoke and Skidmore College graduates. But it didn't take them long to see a woman of rare intelligence and the political skill to run an organization of 15 committees and 123 women. Running IBM, by comparison, was relatively easy and probably far freer from intrigue. After being re-electd a couple of times, she had enough and went for the relative peace and quiet of the minister's office as the church secretary. Her sons grew up and moved away and she took a job as a medical secretary for the Mount Kisco Medical Group and later, when she and Juddy moved to New York, for a plastic surgeon. They lived in a two-floor apartment in Park Slope in Brooklyn for 14 years. On their roof garden (they always had a garden), Juddy liked to joke, 'hurry up and eat your soup before it gets dirty.' They rented Ken Nye's cabin on Androscoggin for two weeks of nonstop rain in 1952 and in 1953 bought their own cabin. Never really at home in the city, they bought a large farmhouse in Wayne on Morrison Heights in 1970. But it was too big and too much, so they sold that house and moved into the Wayne village. Naturally, the first thing Cora did when they moved in was paint everything and redecorate. She had lovely taste and their home, with a view out the picture window of Pocasset, was their home until Juddy died in February 1998, and she moved to Montello Manor in September. She had a special gift and love for children. She taught Sunday School on Tuesday afternoon at her home in Wayne. And once her little band of grade-schoolers put on a play in Augusta to some critical acclaim. She is survived by her two sons, William and Robert; her granddaughters, Cathrine, Elizabeth and Katie; and by a flock of great-grandchildren. Her headstone will read, 'She could see 53 shades of blue, straight through you, and into the heart of every child.'