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Obituary. Arizona Republic.
Marjorie Sweet Woodruff Carr passed away on August 13, 2002. She was born in Moline, Illinois on May 15, 1921, and moved to Arizona with her parents, Ira and Martha Sweet in 1925.
They built the first house in the tubercular camp that was Sunnyslope. The nearest other building was the mortuary on Dunlap Road, one mile away.
The house had no electricity and no gas. Water was hauled from downtown Phoenix and stored in a hand-built stone water tank. Thus they had running water, heated by an early solar water heater: painted black glass panels on the roof.
Everyone slept outside in summer, and it was important to check under the cot in the morning to be sure no rattlesnakes had taken up residence beneath. With no air conditioning and no swimming pools, Marji and her sister, Marion, and their buddies kept cool swimming in the Arizona Canal. When they got tired of swimming, they would hook their plywood "surfboard" to someone's car and be towed behind as the car raced along the canal bank.
Marji graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in education. She was proud of her student assigned reputation as 'the toughest teacher in school".
She is survived by her daughters, Marjorie "Slim" Woodruff and Suzan Dwight Woodruff, and one grandson, Robert Dwight Woodruff Houston.
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I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving
hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been time
out of mind
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the dust with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew
A formula, a phrase remains, -- but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laugher, the love, --
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses
Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom, I know.
But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down, into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind.
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Edna St. Vincent Millay,
"Dirge without music".
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