Opal Easter Owens

at the age of 106 years and eight months.

Opal Owens was born Opal Easter Mobley near Batesville in Independence County, Arkansas, on Easter Sunday, March 23, 1913. Her parents were Jacob and Martha Anna Catherine (Ross) Mobley, nicknamed Jake and Mattie. She was the sixth of ten children: Elbert Ross, Alvis Lafayette, Lucinda (Lou) Jane, Ruth Estelle, Lorene, Opal Easter, Jessie Mary, Mildred Lee, Annie May, and Horace Vernon. Her father worked as a mechanic in the marble quarry at Phiffer, Arkansas. Her Mobley family history can be traced back to America’s colonial period to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1658.

When she was about five years old, her family moved to Delta County, Texas, to work in the rich cotton fields of northeast Texas. There the family were sharecroppers planting, hoeing, and picking cotton and where her father worked as a mechanic keeping the local cotton gins operating. They lived in the small townships of Klondike and Brushy Mound, Texas, where Opal and her brothers and sisters went to a one-room elementary school. She graduated from Cooper High School in 1932, the only high school in Delta County where her future first husband also attended elementary and high school. She learned to drive at an early age in her father’s Model T Ford because her older sister was afraid to back up the car and Opal was adept at driving backwards.

Opal married Morris Hilton Mitchell on September 4, 1935, during the middle of the depression years. A year later her first son, Dwight Glendel, was born, and 15 months later her second son, Jeffery Lynn, was born. From 1935 until 1942, Opal and Morris and the two boys lived on a cotton and cattle farm where Morris worked as a cotton sharecropper and a ranch hand. Things were tough in those days where Morris made 50 cents a day working from sunup to sunset. They lived in a three-room sharecropper’s house with a tin roof, no electricity, water from a cistern well, outdoor toilet, and wood burning stove.

Opal could remember making the family’s clothes with a push-peddle sewing machine, growing a vegetable garden, making her own soap, canning fruits and vegetables, washing clothes in a tin tub and scrub board.

There was a storm cellar for protection against tornadoes. Those were tough times, but the family was not alone as everyone else in the area were experiencing the same conditions.

In 1942 Opal’s sister Mildred who had earlier moved to California wrote and told of a job opening for Morris as a ranch foreman for an orange and lemon grove north of Glendora at the Brown School for Girls. Within a week the Mitchells were on a Grayhound bus headed to California. Opal said it was like going to heaven when they moved into the ranch foreman’s seven-room house with electricity, hot and cold running water, an indoor toilet, and a gas burning stove.

For the next four years Opal worked in the private school’s dining room, dormitories, and as a receptionist/PBX telephone operator. Morris and Opal then bought and operated a horse-riding rental business for the next three years. A third son was born, Michael Stephen, in 1947. All three of her children went to Glendora Elementary and Citrus/Glendora High Schools. Opal continued to work as a seamstress, and for the last

20 years of her working career, she was a drawings and records clerk at Phillips Real Estate Development Company which planned, developed, and built the city of Havasu, AZ.

After her youngest son Michael graduated from High School and joined the Navy, life became difficult for Opal and Morris, and they divorced in 1968. And in 1973 their son Jeffery Lynn died in an auto accident.

Life became very happy again for Opal in 1970 when she met and married Ernest “Ernie” Owens and moved to Hemet, California, moving into the Golden Coach Manor Mobile Home Park on South Lyon Street. She and Ernie had a happy and fun life with traveling, shuffle boarding, square dancing, and attending family functions.

She was a very competitive shuffle board player and team member, playing for many years representing Golden Coach Manor Mobile Home Park in Hemet City leagues and Hemet in California State Tournaments. She was a member of the California Shuffleboard Hall of Fame and has won numerous shuffle boarding awards. She was active at the clubhouse playing various card games in the afternoon and bingo in the evenings. She had always been a prolific crocheter, crocheting clothes, bedspreads, table coverings, dollies, and scarves for all of her family members. One of her favorite things to was traveling to Cooper, Texas, each year to attend the Mobley Family reunion and visiting with her brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews.

After Ernie died in 1984, Opal continued to live at the Golden Coach Manor in Hemet. In 2016, when she was 103 years old, she moved into the Yorkshire Village for fragile elders where she lived until her death on December 6, 2019.

Throughout her time in Hemet, Opal attended church on Sundays and Bible Studies on Wednesdays at the Baptist Church in Hemet where she was a member. It is now the Cornerstone Church of Hemet. She continued to receive cards, letters, and church visitors at Yorkshire Village to pray and read the Bible with her.

She was preceded in death by her parents, her nine brothers and sisters, her two husbands, and one of her sons. She leaves living her two sons, eight grandchildren, fourteen great-grandchildren, two great-great grandchildren, and numerous nieces and nephews.

The family would like to thank Cornerstone Baptist Church for the many years of spiritual care and to Yorkshire Village for the excellent care given to Opal Owens during her final three years, with a special thank you to her long time caregiver and friend, Rebekah Ackley.