- Date Of Birth: February 27, 1946
- Date Of Death: December 5, 2011
- State: New Mexico
OGDEN, Toy Jean (nee Flores), 64, of Deming died suddenly and unexpectedly of an aneurism or massive heart attack at her home on December 5, 2011.
Toy was born in Phoenix, AZ and raised in East Los Angeles, graduating with honors from Roosevelt High School where she had been a very popular student appreciated for her sincere, universal kindness and generosity.
She grew up poor, but not lacking in love and family. As a younger child she was sometimes taunted by neighborhood children for her mixed Chinese and Mexican heritage. Despite this, Toy grew into a graceful and striking beauty with a keen mind and forgiving disposition. Toy had a driving curiosity about the world around her and the people in it. She was blessed with a resilient spirit that allowed her to forget and forgive, and instead to look forward to what was beautiful and true.
Although kindness came to her by nature, her mother and grandmother’s loving
parenting taught Toy Jean the values upon which she made her own philosophy raising her own children.
In 1967 she met Kyle “Carlos” Ogden and from that day forward the couple were never apart. In 1967 Toy and Carlos were married out of doors in the same city park in East L.A. they had saved together in a grassroots political campaign.
Toy moved her mother and grandmother into a house directly across from her new
home, a New England style house in L.A.‘s bucolic Elysian Park, allowing Toy to twatch over the two women she so dearly loved.
In 1976 Toy and Carlos moved with their children Anita and Carlos, Jr from Ogden, Utah to Columbus, NM, where in 1981 Toy gave birth to Adela Elena Ogden. When her husband’s beloved 87-year-old grandmother suffered a debilitating stroke in California,Toy moved her to Columbus and became her constant caregiver for nine months.
Years later, when her husband’s mother Ellen Ogden could no longer cope with her advancing Parkinson’s disease, Toy again stepped in and gave Ellen every ease and comfort she could in her home in Columbus, New Mexico — even sleeping next to the dying woman in the hospital for many nights.
Toy brought her own 80-year-old mother, Maria del Refugio Flores, “Cuca”, to Deming from Los Angeles in 2005, sharing her love of life and helping once again to ease the old age of yet another beloved family member.
Toy’s generous, open personality and loving smile won her new friends she usually kept for life.
For six years in Columbus Toy organized and ran “Los Amiguitos,” a non-profit preschool for children where she helped hundreds who never forgot the learning experience or the love and acceptance Toy gave them. Children who had been only five years old at Los Amiguitos showed up for years afterward to find the gentle lady who had first taught them their numbers in English, or colors or how to use scissors. It was through the little pre-school, a small clapboard house next door to the Ogden’s Columbus home, that Toy Jean blossomed.
Toy Jean was survived by her three children, six grandchildren, her husband Carlos Ogden, and her mother Ruth.
