- Date Of Birth: October 14, 1916
- Date Of Death: February 13, 2016
- State: Illinois
Mary Frances Bays, 99, of Jacksonville, died Sat., Feb. 13, 2016, at Heritage Health in Jacksonville.
Mary Frances Berry was born to Mason Berry and Mabel Ellis Berry on October 14, 1916, at Maple Hill Farm near Pompey, New York. She was the third of four Berry children. As a child, she survived whooping cough, pneumonia, and tuberculosis that destroyed the family dairy herd and infected her brother John Alson Berry. Mary Frances went to Collegiate Center in Syracuse, New York for two years, where she studied English and US Economic History. Mary Frances graduated from Temple University with a degree in History in 1940.
In 1942, Temple University contacted Mary Frances and asked her to join the US Army Signal Corps, where she learned how to operate a lathe, do acetylene welding, and how read blueprints. The Signal Corps sent Mary Frances to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania for three months of training in radio engineering. When she finished that training, she was dispatched to a radio assembly plant in Bloomington, Indiana.
After the war, she returned to Philadelphia and graduated from Drexel University in 1946 with a degree in Library Science and went on to work in New York City libraries. She married Edwin Arnold on June 13, 1953. Her son Edwin Alexander was born in 1959. She divorced Edwin in 1962 and married Glen Bays in 1966. She lived with Glen in Fabius, New York until he died in 1985. In 2006, she moved to Jacksonville with the assistance of her nephew Charley Frank.
She is survived by her sister Sylvia Shoebridge, her son Alex, two grandchildren, and several great-grandchildren.
