Frances Myrtle Carlquist Wrathall

After 101 eventful years Frances Carlquist Wrathall concluded her mortal service on September, 8 2008. She was conceived in a silver mining camp in eastern Nevada, possibly on New Years Eve, 1907, where her father, Ernest, was a mining assayer. Her 17 year old mother, Elizabeth, traveled back to Salt Lake City by stage coach to deliver her on September 22, 1907. She spent her early years with her parents in mining camps in Arizona and elsewhere in the Intermountain West.
Her love of books was monumental. Once, while setting the table for dinner she dropped a large stack of plates. Her Scotch grandmother, Jesse, cried out "The cheeld will be daaft if she doesn't stop that daamned rrrrreading!"
As a high school senior she read in the University of Utah catalog that she only needed 16½ credits to matriculate but needed 17 credits to graduate from high school. She went to see the registrar who admitted her on the spot. She enrolled in secretarial training never graduating from high school.
She became active in the Outdoors Club where she met her future husband, Leishman, while hiking and skiing in the mountains of the Wasatch front before the invention of release bindings. She worked in the University Library. Lish persuaded her to graduate rather than become a secretary, so she got a degree in library science. She was one of the first on both sides of her family to ever get a college degree. In turn Frances persuaded him to apply for employment at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Manhattan where he was hired in 1929, sight unseen, thus removing him from the pool of high school physics teachers in Utah.
She joined him a year later in New York and they were married in August of 1930 in the Little Church Around the Corner on 5th Avenue. Using her secretarial skills, she worked as a typist in an insurance office through the depression. When the Bell Labs moved to New Jersey, they also moved. By then they had a son, Richard, born in Manhattan in 1935. Robert was born in 1940 in New Jersey followed by Rosemary in 1942. They all moved to a house in Summit early in 1943.
Frances remained captivated by books. One of Robert's early memories is of her sitting in the warm sunlight in front of a window on a cold winter day with a book. She was a subscriber to the Book of the Month Club. She volunteered to be the part time librarian at the local elementary school where her children attended. She taught cultural refinement in her church with an emphasis on literature. In 1954, she saw an help wanted advertisement for a head librarian for a new library forming in a small town where many of the engineers working at Bell Labs lived. She was accepted and spent more than ten wonderful years there. The Berkeley Heights Public Library was voted the best small library in the state one year. She also won a scholarship for a master's degree in library science at Rutgers University.
Upon her husband's retirement in 1967 they quit New Jersey and moved back to their roots in Salt Lake City for two years. During a road trip Rosemary discovered Santa Cruz, California, and all three moved there in 1969 where they lived among the redwoods on Bonny Doon Mountain. Rosemary soon met Michael Grimbilas who has remained with Frances as a faithful family member after Rosemary's passing in 1991. Leishman passed away in 1977. (Her son and his late spouse, Robert and Janice, moved to Scotts Valley in 1991 as a result of this fateful decision.)
She joined the Ladies of Bonny Doon club, the University Women Club, the Shakespeare Club, the Bonny Doon Residents Association where she served a term as president, and the San Lorenzo senior center where she was elected twice as its president. She was a founding member of the Mountain Book Club, which recently became the only book club ever shot at with a shot gun because of their love of books (see themountainbookclub.blogspot.com). In addition she was a committed member of the Ben Lomond Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints where she held many positions, notably as a teacher of cultural enrichment and a councilor in the Relief Society. In the end, it was impossible for her to read, which caused her untold sorrow. She outlived most of her family and friends. She is survived by her son and his wife, Robert and Claudia, her adopted son and his wife, Michael Grimbilas and Judy Crowe, eight grand children and soon-to-be 13 great grand children, and many people who have been blessed by her association.
A graveside service will be held in the Salt Lake City Cemetery on September, 19 at 10:00 am where she will be buried next to her Scottish grandmother, her parents and much loved husband.