Alice Cecelia Johnson Derry

February 20, 1893—April 11, 1977

Alice Cecelia Johnson was born in 1892, in a sod house on the White River where her grandfather was a cowboy, on the Churn Ranch in Cherry County, Nebraska. Apparently no official record was made of her birth at the time, and it was not until around 1948 that she went to the courthouse in Wayne, Nebraska to get it registered, with her father's two bibles and a sworn affidavit from her mother's sister, Nettie Poland, who was present at her birth.

Her parents were Ida Isadore Hook and John Harris Johnson. They were living in Cherry County, Nebraska, as of the 1900 federal census, when Alice was 8. They moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, for her father's health; he died there of tuberculosis when she was fourteen years old.

Below, on the left (click on the thumbnail picture for a larger image), is a picture of her at age two, next to the house in which she was born.

She quit school after ninth grade to help her mother with work that had become too heavy for her as postmistress in Cody, Nebraska. The picture above on the right shows her in the post office where she worked as a young woman. Alice then became a schoolteacher and taught two semesters in a country school near Cody at the age of sixteen.

Alice married George W. Derry on October 15, 1913. They lived on the Derry Ranch (owned by her husband's parents, Arthur and Melvina Black Derry), west of Nenzel, Nebraska, for the first few years of their marriage. Their oldest daughter, Doyle, was born while they lived there, on January 27, 1915.

After George's sister Zaida's marriage to William May, they moved off the ranch and homesteaded, while the ranch was turned over to Zaida & Bill. Their daughter Ardis was born on the homestead in 1918. They moved to Eli where George took over the management of the bank. The bank was in the front of the building and they lived in the back of the building. Their son Duke (George William Derry, Jr.) was born in Eli in 1923. Their youngest child, Janis Diane, was born in Wayne, Nebraska in 1933.

She was known as "Mrs. Derry" even to her friends. Two years after the birth of her youngest child, she pricked her thumb with a sandbur; the resulting infection reawakened her rheumatoid arthritis, which had been in remission. In spite of her great pain and difficulties in movement, she was not a complainer. By force of will, she was able to continue to be a good mother.

The family left Nebraska and moved to Texas in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

Alice's husband, George, developed emphysema in his eighties, as the result of years of smoking hand-rolled cigarettes of Bull Durham tobacco. It seemed that he survived longer than expected because he wanted to be there to take care of his wife. She died of a heart attack just six weeks after he finally succumbed to the emphysema. At the time of their deaths, they had been married 63¼ years.