Mary Dollie Peters-Smith

is honored with a Brick from Marilyn Mork, Anthony Smith, Becky Shirley, and Joe Smith

On behalf of her children, Marilyn Mork, Becky Shirley, Joe Smith, and Anthony Smith, we are honoring our mother, Mary Victoria (Dollie) Peters-Smith, for her courage, strength and fierce independence during the years we spent with her.

The youngest of seven children of Corneilius (Neil) and Clara (Bachman) Peters, she was born Mary Victoria Peters, March 3, 1920. Nicknamed Dollie as a baby, she was born and reared on a dairy farm on East Central. The house in which she was born has been moved to Cowtown for use in the DeVore Farmstead Exhibit. She attended St. Anthony grade school and St. Mary High School. She trained for a nursing career in Denver, Colorado.

In 1945 she married Edgar J. Smith and moved to a small farm a few miles west of Arkansas City, Kansas. She exchanged her nursing career for a partnership in marriage and business. They began with an old, dilapidated farmstead and gradually built a very successful, state-of-the-art operation with all new buildings and equipment. Our mother's happiest day came ten years after the dairy farm was acquired, when she moved into her newly constructed house.

Her husband Edgar died of cancer in 1968. With two children in college and one still in high school, Dollie began a new career as an office manager in Arkansas City. In 1983 she officially retired and moved to Bella Vista, Arkansas. While living there she learned to golf and thoroughly enjoyed a well-earned retirement. Her health failed in 1996, forcing her return to Arkansas City, where she died of cancer on August 23, 1997. Friends and family remember her wonderful laugh and warm, caring nature.

Her understanding of business, independent nature and ability to adapt and thrive with change surely had an effect on all of us in becoming successful as adults. Three of us have gone on to be successful entrepreneurs owning our own businesses, and the youngest daughter broke the glass ceiling and became a Vice President for a Fortune 500 company.

September 16, 1998