BRYANT, Ethel

The Wickenburg Sun, Wickenburg, AZ January 27, 1966 Mrs Bryant, Library Founder, Summoned This community mourns the passing of Mrs Ethel Bryant, a resident here for more than 31 years and who, during 20 of those years, as founder and president of the Wickenburg Public Library, made a substantial and continuing contribution to the cultural life of the town and its environs. Mrs. Bryant, who had not been in too good health recently, passed away Saturday evening in Community Hospital where she had been admitted the same day. Funeral services were held at 11 o’clock Tuesday morning at the Wickenburg Funeral Home, conducted by the Rev. Scott Siegle and burial followed in the Wickenburg Cemetery. Coming to Wickenburg in 1934 from Kansas, Mrs Bryant and her husband Ralph K. Bryant established Bryant’s Variety Store which they owned and operated until 1953 when they sold that store and retired from active business life. Bryant’s Variety was first located in the storeroom on Frontier Street now housing the offices of the Ben Pollman Agency; it was later moved to the nearby corner building presently the home of the Valley National Bank’s Wickenburg office and then, a few years later, the Bryants bought land on North Tegner Street and erected their own building which is now the location of the Double B. Photo. Back in 1942 Mrs Bryant, who was then president of the local PTA, was joined by the late Mrs Mary Paige and several other women no longer living here, in the organization of the Wickenburg Public Library. Its first quarters were small indeed, it shelves scantily lined with books and its cardholders a mere handful of adults and children. But the library filled a definite need in the small but growing town; citizens, winter residents and visitors rallied to it support, the Rotary Club contributed to its treasury and under Mrs Bryant’s guidance the institution grew and prospered. When she retired as president in 1963 after a score of years of faithful and devoted service she could look upon a library such as few towns this size can boast, housed it in its own quarters with a paid librarian, financially supported by the town’s taxpayers through the town government and, best of all, widely patronized by an ever increasing group of appreciative men, women and children of this and nearby communities. The Wickenburg Public Library stands as a perpetual monument to Mrs Ralph K. Bryant. She was born December 28, 1888, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. When just a child her entire family, father, mother, sister and brother all passed away within a period of one year and she was raised in the home of her grandmother in Tarboro, in the same state. She attended school in Tarboro and later in Greensboro and upon graduation taught in a private school in the latter city. She later enrolled in Columbia University in New York City and was a student there when World War I broke out. To aid in the war effort, she went to Washington, D.C., where she found employment with the U.S. Army’s Quartermaster Corps. Following the war she taught in a school for disabled war veterans in Waynesville, North Carolina, and in 1922 she and Mr Bryant were married in that city. Soon after their marriage they drove – an adventure of magnitude in those days – to Kansas and to Mr Bryant’s old home where he taught school for seven years until his health failed in 1934 and the family moved to Wickenburg. Mrs Bryant is survived by her husband; a daughter Jean Bryant, head librarian in the Sunnyslope, Ariz., High School and two sons, Byron, now in London, England, on sabbatical leave from his professorship at the Christian Brothers’ College in California and Lloyd, head of the Tucson office of State Examiner Dan Garvey.