Kula Anita (Swanner) Fosnight |
| Posted 2011-08-07 by Sharla |
| Greer’s Mortuary of Sedona, Sedona, Arizona Kula Anita Fosnight July 23, 2011 Kula Anita Swanner Fosnight, November 10, 1917 ~ July 23, 2011 Died peacefully in her sleep at the home of her son Verryl V. Fosnight Jr. where she and her husband Verryl Sr. lived since December 20, 2006. Verryl Sr. passed December 24, 2008 at 93. She was born in Las Animas County, Colorado and he in Baca County, Colorado, where both their parents homesteaded in 1915 each arriving by horse and wagon. Married to Verryl in January, 1934 in the height of the dust bowl, they tried to grow pinto beans on rented land, but not a drop of rain fell all spring and summer. Forced to leave southeast Colorado, they went to work the fruit harvests in Grand Junction with a man who had lost his wife to the dust and who had a teenage boy and girl Kula and Verryl's age. The man had a pickup in which he had built two beds, one for the girls and one for the boys, and Kula and Verryl with the $12 they had saved from odd jobs paid for the gas and license plate of the truck when they got to the first town about 90 miles away. That started their odyssey of living on the road and working at odd jobs until 1942 when they landed in Cheyenne, Wyoming to work on the Frontier Refinery being built as an isolated source of aviation fuel for the war effort. In those 8 years they picked and packed peaches, topped beets, panned for gold, worked as carpenter, hair dresser, maid, plumber, coal miner, truck driver, and finally as a pipe fitter in Cheyenne. In Cheyenne they built and remodeled houses as side jobs, and opened up the west side of town with brother-in-law Joe Combs in 1952 who had just sold his lumber mill on the Rogue River in Oregon. They bought and sold houses and apartment houses in Cheyenne, usually holding them to rent. Their first multiunit building was a triplex in Cheyenne that they dug a basement under by hand, jacked it up, poured a foundation under it, set it down on the new basement walls, and built two units in the basement. All this while the 3 units upstairs were rented and occupied! In 1956 they moved to Long Beach, California and Kula continued her real estate investing financed by Verryl's pipefitter journeyman and superintendent wages. In 1964 she graduated from California State University at Long Beach with a BA in psychology, the same week as her son graduated from Stanford with a BS in physics. That same year of 1964 they started their second building boom with the teardown of two California Cottages in Belmont Heights in Long Beach and the erection of a 16 unit apartment house with underground parking. This was the first modern apartment building in the area, and from that time forward there were many newer multiunit buildings replacing the older single houses. She is survived by Verryl Fosnight Jr. and Sharon Cook and 3 grandsons, David Bohannan of Sedona, Robert Bohannan of Wildomar, California and Robb Fosnight of Long Beach. See Also: Verryl (Husband) |
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