Gladys Mary Addison

Gladys Mary Niles Addison passed on from this life to the next on Tuesday, July 31st, 2018 at 11:30 PM and heaven gained an angel. She was 95 years old. She was married with children for 68 of those years. Like often happens with the finest of mothers and wives that God ever created, ours lived a life of service, mostly in support of the dreams and endeavors of her husband and her children. We, her family, are lucky beyond measure that being the one to care for us was how she chose to fulfill the dreams of her own. Having a mother like ours surely is as much proof of the existence of God as any rational man or woman needs.

Our mom began her life as an Iowa farm girl. She was born to Albert Franklin Niles and Allie Smith Niles in December of 1921 in the tiny rural town of Pisgah, Iowa, so named by its Mormon founders after the biblical highland from which Moses first surveyed the Promised Land. Out of five brothers and sisters who survived infancy our mom was the youngest and the baby of the family. Some would say that this is the spot in the birth order reserved for the brightest, most attractive child and I, myself, and I think my cousin Lori too, find that theory to be on sound footing. They bought her a used piano when she was in the 9th grade and thus she began a lifelong affair with the instrument. That piano is still in the family, its keys and pedals worn through from endless hours under our mother's hands and feet as she taught herself how to play it.

As a young woman, our mother was poised, graceful and singularly beautiful, as pictures of her affirm. She left Pisgah for a job with the Addressograph-Multigraph Corporation who sent her out to Arizona where she met our dad. Soon after she found herself the wife of an Air Force Officer, a role whose challenges, hardships and rewards can only be fully appreciated by the wives of other military officers of the era.

From duty station to duty station across the globe she followed our father, giving birth to two daughters, Cynthia Lorriaine and Julie Ann, in Hawaii, another daughter, Carol Jo-An in San Antonio, and finally book-ending the set with a son, Hoyt Jr., in the Philippines. From the early 1950’s to the late 1960’s it was rental houses and base officers quarters for our mom and her children, a constant swirl of household relocations, new schools, diapers and sack lunches, of dad's frequent TDY’s which were often long, secret and presumably fraught with peril, all borne with the stoicism expected of an officer’s wife. Our dad called it “maintaining an even strain”.

After dad retired from the Air Force our mother finally got a place to call her own and although it was dad who built the house on our land on Poverty Creek Road, it was mom who made it a home. She furnished and decorated and kept it clean. She cooked our meals and bought or even made our clothes. She worked tirelessly in the garden as was evidenced by a pantry stacked floor to ceiling with Mason fruit jars full of produce that she planted, grew, picked and canned.

And all the while she filled our house with music. She had a beautiful touch on the piano and played often. She taught all us kids a song or two, gave lessons to others, played in church and wherever else there was a need. She had a soft spot for Vladimir Horowitz and Floyd Cramer. Some of my fondest memories of childhood were of sitting beside her on the bench of her old Sohmer upright in the living room listening to her play and watching her fingers with amazement. My personal favorites were Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” and Beethoven’s “Piano Sonata #14 in C-Sharp Minor” commonly known as the Moonlight Sonata which is probably where my life-long fascination with that particular celestial body came from.

Our mother gave us the moon…..and all the love that her heart could hold which filled each of our own hearts to overflowing.

She is preceded in death by her husband of 68 years, Hoyt E. Addison, Sr. and she is survived by four children: Cynthia Lorraine Johnson-Hall and her husband Dennis Hall, Julie Ann Bragg and her husband James Bragg, Carol Jo-An Williams and her husband James Dean Williams, and Hoyt E. Addison, Jr.; six grandchildren: Jared Bragg and his wife Karen, Amanda Graham and her husband Bryan, Kacy Diane Williams, Justin Bragg and his wife Brittany, Jake Johnson and his wife Crystal, and Cooper Johnson; and six great-grandchildren: Hayden Graham, Bryce Graham, Carter Bragg, Nolan Bragg, Lilly Johnson and Briar Johnson and a host of other loving friends and relatives.

Arrangements are forthcoming.