♂Bernice A. Koons

Bernice A. Koons (15 December 1918 – 29 December 2011) was an Oklahoma-born Army veteran of the Second World War who spent thirty-three years at Keystone Steel & Wire, near Peoria, Illinois. He was a first cousin of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), the son of her mother’s younger brother Clarence Edward Koons (1893–1975).

Early life

Bernice was born on 15 December 1918 at Okeene, Oklahoma (his obituary spells it “O’Keene”), a son of Clarence Edward Koons and Lenora May Tate, who had married in 1915. He was the third of their nine children and the second son: his elder sister Sylvia had been born at Flora, Illinois, in 1915 and his elder brother Earl in Oklahoma in 1917. The family was still in Oklahoma until at least 1925, as his sister Anna Louise, his brother Leslie and his sister Opal were born there, and by 1927 it had returned to Flora, in Clay County, Illinois, where his brother Fred was born that July.

War, work and marriage

His obituary records that he served in the United States Army during the Second World War. He then worked for thirty-three years at Keystone Steel & Wire, retiring in 1979. In 1952 he married Janet Dowler at Flora; she died in 1985.

Death

Bernice A. Koons died on 29 December 2011 at Rineyville, Kentucky, at the age of ninety-three. He was buried with military honors at Glendale Memorial Gardens, Pekin, Illinois. His obituary names a son and three daughters among his survivors, with his brothers Bob and Leslie; Leslie, the last of the nine children, died at Flora in 2021.