- Date Of Birth: March 11, 1919
- Date Of Death: January 6, 2017
- State: Arizona
Emma Jean Bader, the oldest member of the Babbitt family, passed away peacefully on Friday, January 6, 2017, at the age of 97 with family by her side. She lived a long, wonderfully productive life and left a beautiful legacy.
She was born on March 11, 1919, in Mesa, Arizona to Joseph Robert and Phoebe Viola (Passey) Babbitt. Emma Jean was the first grandchild of David Babbitt, the eldest of the five Babbitt brothers. She was named after her grandmother Emma Catherine (Verkamp) Babbitt.
Emma Jean was raised in Flagstaff, AZ on the Colorado Plateau at the base of the San Francisco Peaks with her five siblings. In an oral interview with the Cline Library at NAU, Emma Jean recalled playing upstairs in the old Babbitt building in Downtown Flagstaff and taking trips with her father to outlying Babbitt’s Trading Posts on the Navajo Reservation as a child. Emma Jean attended Saint Anthony’s grade school with the Sisters of Loretto, she spent two years at Flagstaff High School, then transferred to Immaculate Heart High School in Hollywood, CA where she graduated in 1936. She attended the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she met her future husband, John Robert Nelson of Winslow. Emma Jean graduated with honors, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Arizona in 1941, with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry. Following her graduation from the university, Emma Jean moved back to California to do laboratory work in the hospitals of Los Angeles County for a year. In 1942 she returned to Flagstaff to marry John Nelson before John was shipped off to the South Pacific with the Marines during World War II. The couple resided in Winslow, where their children were born. They had three daughters, Jean Elizabeth (Nelson) Hansen, Mary Phyllis (Nelson) Simpson, and Claire Jane (Nelson) West. In Winslow, John continued working for the Babbitt Brothers Trading Company, as his father had before him. In the early 1950s, Emma Jean and John purchased the Thunderbird Lodge and Trading Post in Chinle, Arizona at Canyon de Chelly and moved there to run the business.
After John’s passing in 1958, Emma Jean sold the trading post and moved to Milwaukee to complete her training as a laboratory technician. She returned to Flagstaff and worked in the Coconino County Health department lab, and shortly thereafter the lab at Flagstaff Hospital and Medical Center.
In 1965, she married Louis Robert Bader. They built several homes together and lived in Baderville north of Flagstaff until his death in 2008.
Her love of reading, learning, and teaching was paramount in her life and touched everything she did. If she wasn’t out hiking and taking pictures with her old Kodak Brownie camera, she would be found next to the fire reading books of all kinds, magazines, or anything else she could get her hands on. After retirement from Flagstaff Medical Center in 1982, she was able to expand upon her hobbies in nature photography, ornithology, pressing flowers, and hiking the Grand Canyon with her daughters. She took two Babbitt family rafting trips on the Colorado River, completed the Master Gardner program, spent time in her greenhouse gardening, and enjoyed cooking and baking lessons with her grandchildren.
Emma Jean supported her church community, San Francisco de Asís Parish, as a religious education teacher at Guadalupe School and St Mary’s school. With her daughter Mary Phyl, she volunteered with Literacy Volunteers of Coconino County. After Lou passed in 2008, Emma Jean lived with and was cared for by her daughter Mary Phyl and her son-in-law Robert Simpson, later she lived with and was cared for by her daughter Claire and granddaughter Melanie Dorn. Her final year was spent in the fine care of the memory unit at Brookdale in Flagstaff, with extra care from her granddaughter Melanie as well.
Emma Jean was predeceased by her father Joseph Robert Babbitt, mother Phoebe Viola (Passey) Babbitt, sisters Mary Eleanore (Babbitt) Bilby and Theresa “Tess” Joanne (Babbitt) Reddoch, her brother Joseph Robert Babbitt Jr., her three daughters Jean Elizabeth (Nelson) Hansen, Mary Phyllis (Nelson) Simpson and Clair Jane (Nelson) West, and her step-daughter Antoinette (Bader) Taillac. She is survived by her sisters Rayma Lucille (Babbitt) Sharber and Elizabeth “Betty Jo” Viola (Babbitt) D’Mura, her sons-in-law Robert Grady Simpson and Robert “Bob” Leonard Hansen, fifteen grandchildren, and thirty-six great-grandchildren.
