Carroll Danine Kramer Jaycox was born in 1929 in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, and moved to Florida when she was in her early 20s to live with her sister in Daytona Beach. She met Ted Jaycox in Ocala at The Little Theatre where they fell madly in love and got married about 3 months later. They had three children, Gina, Ted and Kelly. Carroll, with two Rs and two Ls, is how she always introduced herself. You didn’t want to spell her name wrong!
She loved being a homemaker and mother, was very active in her community and her church, and she went back to school in her 30s and became a Registered Nurse. She worked for most of her life as a nurse in pediatrics, surgery, intensive care, and hospice. She and Ted moved to Highlands, NC, after the kids got out of high school and there they designed and built beautiful custom homes, with Carroll designing the interiors. While in Highlands, Carroll attended the School of Theology and completed the Education for Ministry program. She was very active at Grace Church in Ocala, Grace Church in Port Orange and St. Peter the Fisherman Church in New Smyrna Beach, as a Lay Eucharistic Minister and in the Episcopal Healing Ministry. Carroll loved to travel. She and Ted were privileged to visit the Galapagos Islands, they were missionaries in Africa, they sailed the Mediterranean, went to the Taj Mahal, and Carroll was able to realize her lifelong dream of walking in the footsteps of Jesus when she went to The Holy Land. She and Ted also spent almost 2 decades traveling in their motorhome across North America. They would spend winters on the Sea of Cortez in Mexico and summers on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska.
She furnished their homes with beautiful textiles, pottery, rugs and furniture from their travels and loved to cook international cuisine and try out new recipes on her unsuspecting family. Carroll loved classical music and Spanish guitar and instilled a love of music in her children. She loved gardening and caring for her house plants and was still starting new ones from cuttings at 93! And then there were the animals…many beloved cats and dogs who filled her life and were waiting for her at The Rainbow Bridge.
Carroll’s zodiac sign was Gemini, the Twins. So true. She had two personalities. She was a mother and homemaker, and all those things that went along with being a mom, all of which she loved so much…but those things tied her down to an ordinary life, and Carroll always felt like she was born to live an extraordinary life, maybe never realizing that she did! Still, she yearned to travel and learn and rub shoulders with the rich and famous in glamorous faraway places. She did that too!
She passed away after a short illness and is preceded in death by her husband of 64 years, Theodore Amos Jaycox, and her daughter, Kelly Manette Klein of Islamorada, Florida She is survived by her daughter Gina (Tom) Holt of Edgewater, Florida, and her son, Ted (Shoni) Jaycox of Williston, Florida.
We are celebrating this amazing woman on July 23, 2022, at 11:00 a.m. at Grace Episcopal Church in Port Orange, Florida.
In lieu of flowers, you may make a donation in her memory to YOUR favorite charity
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