- Date Of Birth: January 8, 1924
- Date Of Death: April 13, 2021
- State: Iowa
Eunice Arlene (Landwer) Craft, 97, passed in her sleep Tuesday, April 13. She was born January 8, 1924, to George and Ida Landwer, in Barrington, Illinois a thriving community about an hour’s drive west of Chicago. Her mother was a homemaker who did a lot of volunteer work through the family’s church. Her father was a carpenter, bricklayer, electrician and plumber who worked numerous construction jobs both in Chicago (including skyscrapers) and the Barrington area, where he built homes, schools, garages and all types of furniture.
After graduating from high school, Eunice got a clerking job at an insurance company in Chicago. She quickly realized her math skills, energy and attention to detail were better suited to the nation’s war effort, so she went to work for Douglas Aircraft Corporation at the site that is now O’Hare International Airport. The Douglas plant manufactured the C-54 Sky master — a four-engine transport aircraft used by the United States Army Air Forces in World War II and the Korean War. Eunice was part of the plant’s quality control team that ensured the correct smaller parts were delivered promptly to workers assembling the larger components such as wings and fuselages during the aircraft’s construction phase.
After the war, Eunice moved to Des Moines and attended Drake University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in theater. It was at Drake she met her future husband, Everett Craft, who had served 38 months with the U.S. Army Medical Corps during the war, mostly in France and Belgium. They married in 1949 and would remain devoted to each other for 65 years, until Everett’s passing in 2014.
Eunice became a loving and supportive full-time mom and homemaker in the 1950’s with the births of her two sons (David in 1952 and Doug in 1955). She returned to the workforce in the early 1960’s when she got a job with the Iowa Department of Revenue, a position she held for some 25 years before retiring. After a few years of car-pooling to work each day, Eunice took a driver’s education course, obtained her license at age 40, and bought her own car. In addition to sharing driving duties on Craft family vacations in the 1960’s, throughout the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s Eunice and Everett traveled overseas numerous times to serve as counselors/chaperones to Des Moines high school students on cultural and educational trips to Europe.
Eunice was a lifelong baseball fan. Her loyalties, at least in her younger days, were to the Chicago Cubs, but after the team’s once-promising 1969 season ended badly, she told anyone who would listen “I’m fed up!” and slowly started rooting for the Cubs’ longtime rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals — not coincidentally her husband’s favorite team. After Everett’s passing, though, Eunice reverted to being a Cubs fan — just in time to witness their World Series Championship in 2016. (Note: Everett would have pulled for the Cubs that year too.)
Before her eyesight declined, Eunice read as many as 90 books a year — mostly fiction but also biographies and books on current events and travel. She was for many years a practitioner of yoga. She was an avid viewer of Sunday Night Football telecasts, 60 Minutes, vintage movies on TCM, and Jeopardy! episodes twice daily.
Like her husband, Eunice rarely drank, but, also like her husband, she enjoyed a martini before dinner and a glass of wine with dinner on their date nights. By far, though, her favorite beverage was strong, black coffee, and the placemat on her kitchen table said it all: It shows a woman with a slightly forced smile holding up a steaming cup of roasted goodness and saying, “I haven’t had my morning coffee yet. Don’t make me kill you.”
By her own admission she was not a great cook early on, but her drive to become a first-rate chef and baker
paid off. One of her specialties was authentic spaghetti and meatballs, a dish she learned to prepare after being taught by a dear friend of hers — “an Italian lady who knew what she was doing” as Eunice once put it. Eunice also enjoyed making countless varieties of cookies, breads and pastries. At Christmastime she spent half a day making a chocolate steam pudding topped with a rich vanilla sauce, a recipe given to her by her mother-in-law.
Eunice is survived by her two sons, David (Karen) and Doug. She was preceded in death by her parents, husband Everett and her brother, George “Bud” Landwer, who died in World War II.
