Carolyn Sue Lamb was born at home on September 04, 1933, Labor Day, in Hillsboro, Indiana to Charles Kenneth Goodwin and Flossie Elva (Brown) Lamb. Because it was a holiday, the doctor was not able to record the birth until the following day, so most of her legal records state she was born on the 5th. She was the second of three children, her older brother Ben by two years and her sister Sharon Marie, who was three years younger.
Her mother, Flossie Lamb, wrote the following about her daughter: “My beautiful blue eyed baby girl, with her soft, petal white skin and her beautiful disposition. I always had to go to her basket to see if she was awake, as she would just open her eyes and look around but never cry.” She goes on to recall that she felt very lucky and happy the year that Carolyn was born: Carolyn’s father, a farm hand, “was working for $5.00 a week and that summer we bought a used car, a new rug for my living room and had our dear baby girl. She loved the street movies in Kingman. We would take our chairs and I would hold her all through “Rin Tin Tin.” She would watch in wonder and then fall asleep on my numb lap and arm.” When Carolyn was ten years old, she began taking piano lessons, and she and her sister enjoyed Girl Scouts with their mom as their scout leader. Flossie wrote that the sisters “loved to play “Ship” on the front porch and the porch swing was their ‘ship’.” And, of course, all moms remember the inevitable childhood accidents and illnesses, and Carolyn had her fair share. When she was a toddler she had a tapeworm, and as a senior in high school she came down with mononucleosis. Carolyn’s doctors suggested she should be in a warmer climate while she recovered, so her parents sent her to stay in Louisiana with her aunt and uncle on their farm, a summer she remembered as a wonderful time, even though it resulted in rumors back home that she had been whisked away due to a secret pregnancy. Flossie also wrote about the time when Carolyn was little and, wanting to help out with laundry, ended up running her hand through the automatic wringer in the washer. Her mother said “It was flat and white and then it swelled up a lot but no bones broken.”
Growing up in Indiana was idyllic for Carolyn. Carolyn’s parents took her and her siblings on picnics, swimming, fishing, blackberry picking and mushroom hunting, and often went for long drives through the countryside, usually finishing their trips with a stop for ice cream. As an adult, Carolyn continued her love of long drives to visit faraway places all over the United States, Mexico, and Canada, to view wildflowers and enjoy the scenery, and, happily, she never lost her passion for ice cream.
Carolyn spent most of her childhood in Crawfordsville, Indiana. The Lamb family was large, and held frequent family reunions and gatherings, so she was fortunate to get to know and love all her relatives. The Lamb family was one of the only families in the 1940s to have five brothers, Carolyn’s uncles, representing all five of the branches of the military. Carolyn was very creative, and although she admitted she was extremely shy and had deep feelings of inferiority in junior high and high school, she wrote poetry and articles for the school paper. She was a very attractive teenage girl, in fact, stunningly beautiful, and despite her lack of self-esteem, she dated often, although she mostly went out with college boys instead of the boys she went to school with. She even caught the attention of a professional photographer and posed as a model. After college, she moved to Indianapolis, rented her first apartment which she furnished and decorated, and found a job as a stenographer. A salesman where she worked sang in a barbershop quartet with Gordon Crawford, who was married but separated and had a son, and the salesman introduced the two of them. They started dating. Gordon wanted to move to Tucson, and Carolyn was willing to go with him. She bought a wedding dress and traveled to Arizona shortly after Gordon had left Indiana for Tucson. She wrote that when she arrived she felt “rather like a displaced person with no home anywhere,” and about Tucson she wrote, “The dry heat was so new to me. It felt as though the oxygen was gone – just heat.” I think we all can relate to that. They rented an apartment, and waited for Gordon’s divorce to be finalized, then got married with no family present, only the minister and two witnesses. They then proceeded to move Gordon’s mother from Indiana to Tucson, where Carolyn proudly cared for her for many years until Vivian passed away.
Carolyn and Gordon went on to start their family, and had three sons, Gordon “Chip” Benton, Geoffrey Brandon, and Grady Brian. Carolyn was a wonderful, loving, attentive and truly hands-on mom, even as she worked, first as a bookkeeper, and later as a draftsman for a mining company. She drafted from home, drawing and hand coloring huge maps used by the mining company, but she still found time to raise her boys, serving as a cub scout den mother, baking and cooking, and sewing clothing for herself and her family. She took her family camping nearly every weekend, all over Arizona, and there were numerous long vacations into Mexico, most notably Kino Bay and Rocky Point. She loved the outdoors, and she loved adventure, and as a result created many wonderful experiences and fond memories for her children. One story she loved to tell was the time in Kino Bay when she showed her boys how to catch crabs, and then, after catching a bunch of them, went back to the trailer to cook them. She asked a local fisherman what was the best way to cook them, and he told her to just boil them, so she placed them in a huge pot of water and turned on the burner. As the water began to heat up, the crabs started scrambling to climb out of the pot. She wrote that she started crying and “hurriedly put a skillet on the pan as a lid and as they started pushing the skillet off, I weighed it down with a toy truck” until they eventually stopped clawing at the sides of the pot. Later, she described to the fisherman what had happened, and he laughed and explained that she was supposed to boil the water first and then drop the crabs in, and although she was peeved at him for failing to provide that crucial bit of information, she was also a little furious with herself.
Carolyn was instrumental in several lifesaving decisions, too. She rescued her youngest son Grady when, as a baby, he had fallen into the swimming pool. Carolyn jumped in fully clothed and pulled his lifeless body from the water. She performed mouth to mouth resuscitation, got him to the hospital, and saved him from drowning. In Kino Bay, she once drove her sons to a remote estuary, and waded to a sandbar with them to dig for clams. After a while she suddenly realized that the tide had come in and walking back to shore was no longer an option. She hid her panic and, appearing calm on the outside so as not to scare her sons, swam alongside all three children back to the beach, terrified every inch of the way.
Rearing three children in Tucson was an adventure in itself. Carolyn went through a lot of babysitters, because as she put it, some “were only with us for a short time” because her boys were so rowdy. One sitter called her at work nearly hysterical and threatening to quit, because her sons had placed a snake in the toybox, were climbing in and out of windows, and jumping off the roof.
Carolyn loved to design floorplans for homes she wanted to build and live in. She moved her family from Baker Place to Bellevue, and it was there she designed and began building the family’s final home in the Catalina Mountain foothills in Tucson. Alas, she and Gordon divorced, and she never did get to live there. But Gordon and the three boys did – family counselors convinced Carolyn that her sons should stay with their father, who would be better equipped to raise three boys. So, she relented, leaving her sons to live with Gordon, a decision she felt she was railroaded into and one she regretted every single day for the rest of her life. To make matters worse, tragedy occurred shortly after the divorce, when Gordon and her sons were involved in a crash in Mexico that killed her ten-year-old son, Grady, and disfigured her twelve-year-old son, Brandon.
Carolyn met and started working with Gary Schroder, a soon to be divorced father of three kids. The two instantly connected and began dating. Gary wound up to be her soulmate. He was a patient, quiet but imposing man of profound integrity and wisdom. They moved to Avra Valley, outside of Marana, Arizona, and together, they built a ranch in the Tucson Mountains. Carolyn lived in a mobile home, and Gary stayed in a separate trailer on the property. Carolyn wrote that “the land sloped slightly so I had mountains on three sides of me and the desert across Marana as far as the eye could see. The night sky was incredible. Sometimes we would sit on the back porch and watch falling stars for hours.” They had horses – Carolyn’s owned an appaloosa named “Miss Kaiawa Red,” or “Missy” for short – as well as pigs, chickens, calves, dogs, and a goat. Carolyn and Gary were married on July 03, 1976, in a church in Marana. According to her. they were too poor to afford a honeymoon or even wedding rings, but they were happy. That September, they sold the ranch, and moved to Pinetop-Lakeside, Arizona, in the White Mountains. Brandon came to live with them.
Carolyn worked at several places during the years that followed; as a secretary, a realtor, a bookkeeper, a state employee, and even at the sawmill in McNary. She, Gary, and Brandon moved into a mobile home in Porter Creek Estates, and built a master bedroom onto the mobile, and a corral and barn for their horses. They ordered a Franklin stove from the Sears catalogue for their living room and were excited when it arrived. Carolyn’s love of the outdoors often led to her and Gary venturing into the woods in the early morning, armed with a thermos of coffee, to sit on their truck’s tailgate, watch the sunrise, enjoy the quiet sounds of the forest, and gaze at the wildlife. She would say in her later years that she had met no other man quite like Gary. Their chemistry and companionship were on another level than any relationship she had ever encountered. The fact that they could sit together for hours on those chilly mornings, no words spoken between them, yet connecting emotionally every minute and in every way, were cherished memories for her. They hunted and fished and enjoyed a serene and marvelous life together until Gary was diagnosed with lymphoma cancer. He passed away in 1980, sitting in his chair with Carolyn beside him.
Life changed for Carolyn dramatically after Gary died. Carolyn was a passenger in a traffic accident and suffered a traumatic brain injury. She joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. She left Pinetop-Lakeside in a little RV and began traveling all over the country with her dog Jody, eventually visiting every state except Maine, Hawaii and Alaska. She filled scrapbooks with photographs and stories of the things she saw and the people she met and filmed lots of videos. In 1984, she was a housemother for Delta Zeta dormitory at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where the girls adored her and called her “Mom.” Later she lived in Manti, Utah in a house she rented from her friend Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. During that time, she was involved in another accident, when her RV came out of park on a mountainside highway after she stopped to take pictures. She tried to engage the parking break as the vehicle was rolling away, but was unsuccessful and was dragged along the road, eventually driving over her own leg. Yes, she ran over herself. To add insult to injury, she inadvertently released the sewage holding tank all over her. For months Carolyn was in pain and unable to walk, but the friends, neighbors, and church members she had met during her time in Manti took excellent care of her until she recovered.
Carolyn left Manti and returned to Pinetop-Lakeside. She bought property there and lived in a manufactured home nestled among soaring pine trees. She meticulously and beautifully decorated the home and surrounded herself with the works of art she had created throughout the years – gorgeous, incredible hand-stitched quilts, comforters, and wall-hangings, amazing oil paintings, and even dishes and platters she wove using pine needles she had obtained in Florida. You might wonder why, if she lived in a forest where there was an abundance of pine needles, she sought pine needles from across the continent, it was because the pine needles from Florida were longer than the pine needles in Pinetop-Lakeside. As much as she loved living on the ranch in the desert, or in the hills of Utah, Carolyn relished the woods and forests of the White Mountains. She never grew tired of looking out her window at the trees during the daytime, and the star-filled heavens at night. She even made acquaintances with a friendly squirrel that lived in the evergreen tree that grew up through her front porch. That squirrel visited her every day for years, and although it was probably actually a generation of several squirrels, she lightheartedly convinced herself it was the same squirrel all those years.
Eventually, Carolyn’s COPD became severe enough that she could no longer live alone, so she moved down to Mesa and into the home of her oldest son, Chip, and his family. She spent the last decade of her life there, securing her legacy as the matriarch of her beautiful family. She gained a passion for genealogical research and for years completed and documented family history. She read her scriptures for hours every single day, and she welcomed any and all who wanted to drop in and sit a spell to talk or just watch “The Andy Griffith Show” or “The Golden Girls” with her. Her room was filled with her artwork, photos, scrapbooks, and her gentle spirit. It literally was her home and not just a room. It felt like an oasis away from the rest of the house, and everyone who entered and sat down to spend time with her can attest that it was like leaving your house to go visit Carolyn in hers. She was a friend and mentor to her two sons and their wives, and her thirteen grandchildren. Even after all the adversity in her life, and throughout her many years after Gary’s death without a companion, Carolyn remained fiercely independent, strong and cheerful. One of the last things she said to her two sons was “I have had a beautiful life.” We will never forget her sparkling blue eyes, her elegant long silver hair, her big engaging smile, and her infectious and heartfelt laughter. Carolyn is deeply imbedded in who we are and who we want to be. She is a part of us, and we will miss her dearly.
Carolyn S. Schroder (08/08/23)
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Carolyn Sue Lamb was born at home on September 04, 1933, Labor Day, in Hillsboro, Indiana to Charles Kenneth Goodwin and Flossie Elva (Brown) Lamb. Because it was a holiday, the doctor was not able to record the birth until the following day, so most of her legal records state she was born on the 5th. She was the second of three children, her older brother Ben by two years and her sister Sharon Marie, who was three years younger.
Her mother, Flossie Lamb, wrote the following about her daughter: “My beautiful blue eyed baby girl, with her soft, petal white skin and her beautiful disposition. I always had to go to her basket to see if she was awake, as she would just open her eyes and look around but never cry.” She goes on to recall that she felt very lucky and happy the year that Carolyn was born: Carolyn’s father, a farm hand, “was working for $5.00 a week and that summer we bought a used car, a new rug for my living room and had our dear baby girl. She loved the street movies in Kingman. We would take our chairs and I would hold her all through “Rin Tin Tin.” She would watch in wonder and then fall asleep on my numb lap and arm.” When Carolyn was ten years old, she began taking piano lessons, and she and her sister enjoyed Girl Scouts with their mom as their scout leader. Flossie wrote that the sisters “loved to play “Ship” on the front porch and the porch swing was their ‘ship’.” And, of course, all moms remember the inevitable childhood accidents and illnesses, and Carolyn had her fair share. When she was a toddler she had a tapeworm, and as a senior in high school she came down with mononucleosis. Carolyn’s doctors suggested she should be in a warmer climate while she recovered, so her parents sent her to stay in Louisiana with her aunt and uncle on their farm, a summer she remembered as a wonderful time, even though it resulted in rumors back home that she had been whisked away due to a secret pregnancy. Flossie also wrote about the time when Carolyn was little and, wanting to help out with laundry, ended up running her hand through the automatic wringer in the washer. Her mother said “It was flat and white and then it swelled up a lot but no bones broken.”
Growing up in Indiana was idyllic for Carolyn. Carolyn’s parents took her and her siblings on picnics, swimming, fishing, blackberry picking and mushroom hunting, and often went for long drives through the countryside, usually finishing their trips with a stop for ice cream. As an adult, Carolyn continued her love of long drives to visit faraway places all over the United States, Mexico, and Canada, to view wildflowers and enjoy the scenery, and, happily, she never lost her passion for ice cream.
Carolyn spent most of her childhood in Crawfordsville, Indiana. The Lamb family was large, and held frequent family reunions and gatherings, so she was fortunate to get to know and love all her relatives. The Lamb family was one of the only families in the 1940s to have five brothers, Carolyn’s uncles, representing all five of the branches of the military. Carolyn was very creative, and although she admitted she was extremely shy and had deep feelings of inferiority in junior high and high school, she wrote poetry and articles for the school paper. She was a very attractive teenage girl, in fact, stunningly beautiful, and despite her lack of self-esteem, she dated often, although she mostly went out with college boys instead of the boys she went to school with. She even caught the attention of a professional photographer and posed as a model. After college, she moved to Indianapolis, rented her first apartment which she furnished and decorated, and found a job as a stenographer. A salesman where she worked sang in a barbershop quartet with Gordon Crawford, who was married but separated and had a son, and the salesman introduced the two of them. They started dating. Gordon wanted to move to Tucson, and Carolyn was willing to go with him. She bought a wedding dress and traveled to Arizona shortly after Gordon had left Indiana for Tucson. She wrote that when she arrived she felt “rather like a displaced person with no home anywhere,” and about Tucson she wrote, “The dry heat was so new to me. It felt as though the oxygen was gone – just heat.” I think we all can relate to that. They rented an apartment, and waited for Gordon’s divorce to be finalized, then got married with no family present, only the minister and two witnesses. They then proceeded to move Gordon’s mother from Indiana to Tucson, where Carolyn proudly cared for her for many years until Vivian passed away.
Carolyn and Gordon went on to start their family, and had three sons, Gordon “Chip” Benton, Geoffrey Brandon, and Grady Brian. Carolyn was a wonderful, loving, attentive and truly hands-on mom, even as she worked, first as a bookkeeper, and later as a draftsman for a mining company. She drafted from home, drawing and hand coloring huge maps used by the mining company, but she still found time to raise her boys, serving as a cub scout den mother, baking and cooking, and sewing clothing for herself and her family. She took her family camping nearly every weekend, all over Arizona, and there were numerous long vacations into Mexico, most notably Kino Bay and Rocky Point. She loved the outdoors, and she loved adventure, and as a result created many wonderful experiences and fond memories for her children. One story she loved to tell was the time in Kino Bay when she showed her boys how to catch crabs, and then, after catching a bunch of them, went back to the trailer to cook them. She asked a local fisherman what was the best way to cook them, and he told her to just boil them, so she placed them in a huge pot of water and turned on the burner. As the water began to heat up, the crabs started scrambling to climb out of the pot. She wrote that she started crying and “hurriedly put a skillet on the pan as a lid and as they started pushing the skillet off, I weighed it down with a toy truck” until they eventually stopped clawing at the sides of the pot. Later, she described to the fisherman what had happened, and he laughed and explained that she was supposed to boil the water first and then drop the crabs in, and although she was peeved at him for failing to provide that crucial bit of information, she was also a little furious with herself.
Carolyn was instrumental in several lifesaving decisions, too. She rescued her youngest son Grady when, as a baby, he had fallen into the swimming pool. Carolyn jumped in fully clothed and pulled his lifeless body from the water. She performed mouth to mouth resuscitation, got him to the hospital, and saved him from drowning. In Kino Bay, she once drove her sons to a remote estuary, and waded to a sandbar with them to dig for clams. After a while she suddenly realized that the tide had come in and walking back to shore was no longer an option. She hid her panic and, appearing calm on the outside so as not to scare her sons, swam alongside all three children back to the beach, terrified every inch of the way.
Rearing three children in Tucson was an adventure in itself. Carolyn went through a lot of babysitters, because as she put it, some “were only with us for a short time” because her boys were so rowdy. One sitter called her at work nearly hysterical and threatening to quit, because her sons had placed a snake in the toybox, were climbing in and out of windows, and jumping off the roof.
Carolyn loved to design floorplans for homes she wanted to build and live in. She moved her family from Baker Place to Bellevue, and it was there she designed and began building the family’s final home in the Catalina Mountain foothills in Tucson. Alas, she and Gordon divorced, and she never did get to live there. But Gordon and the three boys did – family counselors convinced Carolyn that her sons should stay with their father, who would be better equipped to raise three boys. So, she relented, leaving her sons to live with Gordon, a decision she felt she was railroaded into and one she regretted every single day for the rest of her life. To make matters worse, tragedy occurred shortly after the divorce, when Gordon and her sons were involved in a crash in Mexico that killed her ten-year-old son, Grady, and disfigured her twelve-year-old son, Brandon.
Carolyn met and started working with Gary Schroder, a soon to be divorced father of three kids. The two instantly connected and began dating. Gary wound up to be her soulmate. He was a patient, quiet but imposing man of profound integrity and wisdom. They moved to Avra Valley, outside of Marana, Arizona, and together, they built a ranch in the Tucson Mountains. Carolyn lived in a mobile home, and Gary stayed in a separate trailer on the property. Carolyn wrote that “the land sloped slightly so I had mountains on three sides of me and the desert across Marana as far as the eye could see. The night sky was incredible. Sometimes we would sit on the back porch and watch falling stars for hours.” They had horses – Carolyn’s owned an appaloosa named “Miss Kaiawa Red,” or “Missy” for short – as well as pigs, chickens, calves, dogs, and a goat. Carolyn and Gary were married on July 03, 1976, in a church in Marana. According to her. they were too poor to afford a honeymoon or even wedding rings, but they were happy. That September, they sold the ranch, and moved to Pinetop-Lakeside, Arizona, in the White Mountains. Brandon came to live with them.
Carolyn worked at several places during the years that followed; as a secretary, a realtor, a bookkeeper, a state employee, and even at the sawmill in McNary. She, Gary, and Brandon moved into a mobile home in Porter Creek Estates, and built a master bedroom onto the mobile, and a corral and barn for their horses. They ordered a Franklin stove from the Sears catalogue for their living room and were excited when it arrived. Carolyn’s love of the outdoors often led to her and Gary venturing into the woods in the early morning, armed with a thermos of coffee, to sit on their truck’s tailgate, watch the sunrise, enjoy the quiet sounds of the forest, and gaze at the wildlife. She would say in her later years that she had met no other man quite like Gary. Their chemistry and companionship were on another level than any relationship she had ever encountered. The fact that they could sit together for hours on those chilly mornings, no words spoken between them, yet connecting emotionally every minute and in every way, were cherished memories for her. They hunted and fished and enjoyed a serene and marvelous life together until Gary was diagnosed with lymphoma cancer. He passed away in 1980, sitting in his chair with Carolyn beside him.
Life changed for Carolyn dramatically after Gary died. Carolyn was a passenger in a traffic accident and suffered a traumatic brain injury. She joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. She left Pinetop-Lakeside in a little RV and began traveling all over the country with her dog Jody, eventually visiting every state except Maine, Hawaii and Alaska. She filled scrapbooks with photographs and stories of the things she saw and the people she met and filmed lots of videos. In 1984, she was a housemother for Delta Zeta dormitory at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where the girls adored her and called her “Mom.” Later she lived in Manti, Utah in a house she rented from her friend Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. During that time, she was involved in another accident, when her RV came out of park on a mountainside highway after she stopped to take pictures. She tried to engage the parking break as the vehicle was rolling away, but was unsuccessful and was dragged along the road, eventually driving over her own leg. Yes, she ran over herself. To add insult to injury, she inadvertently released the sewage holding tank all over her. For months Carolyn was in pain and unable to walk, but the friends, neighbors, and church members she had met during her time in Manti took excellent care of her until she recovered.
Carolyn left Manti and returned to Pinetop-Lakeside. She bought property there and lived in a manufactured home nestled among soaring pine trees. She meticulously and beautifully decorated the home and surrounded herself with the works of art she had created throughout the years – gorgeous, incredible hand-stitched quilts, comforters, and wall-hangings, amazing oil paintings, and even dishes and platters she wove using pine needles she had obtained in Florida. You might wonder why, if she lived in a forest where there was an abundance of pine needles, she sought pine needles from across the continent, it was because the pine needles from Florida were longer than the pine needles in Pinetop-Lakeside. As much as she loved living on the ranch in the desert, or in the hills of Utah, Carolyn relished the woods and forests of the White Mountains. She never grew tired of looking out her window at the trees during the daytime, and the star-filled heavens at night. She even made acquaintances with a friendly squirrel that lived in the evergreen tree that grew up through her front porch. That squirrel visited her every day for years, and although it was probably actually a generation of several squirrels, she lightheartedly convinced herself it was the same squirrel all those years.
Eventually, Carolyn’s COPD became severe enough that she could no longer live alone, so she moved down to Mesa and into the home of her oldest son, Chip, and his family. She spent the last decade of her life there, securing her legacy as the matriarch of her beautiful family. She gained a passion for genealogical research and for years completed and documented family history. She read her scriptures for hours every single day, and she welcomed any and all who wanted to drop in and sit a spell to talk or just watch “The Andy Griffith Show” or “The Golden Girls” with her. Her room was filled with her artwork, photos, scrapbooks, and her gentle spirit. It literally was her home and not just a room. It felt like an oasis away from the rest of the house, and everyone who entered and sat down to spend time with her can attest that it was like leaving your house to go visit Carolyn in hers. She was a friend and mentor to her two sons and their wives, and her thirteen grandchildren. Even after all the adversity in her life, and throughout her many years after Gary’s death without a companion, Carolyn remained fiercely independent, strong and cheerful. One of the last things she said to her two sons was “I have had a beautiful life.” We will never forget her sparkling blue eyes, her elegant long silver hair, her big engaging smile, and her infectious and heartfelt laughter. Carolyn is deeply imbedded in who we are and who we want to be. She is a part of us, and we will miss her dearly.
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