Ruth Anne (Curry) Yonkey, longtime resident of St. Francis, Kan., age 82, died Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025, at the Cheyenne County Hospital, where she spent her final days in acute treatment and eventually comfort care. Since fall 2019, she was a resident of the Good Samaritan Center in Atwood for much of a year, then Cheyenne County Village, St. Francis, for her final four years.

Funeral services will be on Tuesday, Feb. 4 at 10:30 a.m. at Peace Lutheran Church, 202 N. College, St. Francis, Kan., with Pastor Luke Emerson officiating. Peace Lutheran Church will live stream on Facebook, YouTube and other social media. Knodel Funeral Home, St. Francis, is handling arrangements.

Family visitation time will be from 5-7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 3, at the church. A flower service is scheduled at the church for 10 a.m. Feb. 4.  Private family inurnment will follow this spring at Lawn Ridge Cemetery in rural Cheyenne County.

Ruth Anne was born in St. Francis to Harold and Aleene Curry on Oct. 16, 1942. The Curry family also included her older sister, Eleanor. The farm family resided on the C.E. and Florence Curry Homestead along Cheyenne County Road E, approximately 1.5 miles west of K-27. The Curry girls attended the Lawn Ridge Methodist Church, Lawn Ridge 4-H Club, and country school. Ruth Anne lived with boarding families during high school through her 1960 graduation from St. Francis Community High School.  She graduated from Brown Mackie Business College, Salina, and attended Kansas Wesleyan University, Salina, for a couple semesters. She lived in Larned and then Hays where she married a Hays banker, Merlyn Yonkey, also from St. Francis. They married June 12, 1965, at the E.U.B. (now United Methodist) Church in St. Francis. The couple welcomed one child, Eric. The family moved to Atwood for about three years, then returned to St. Francis, where Merlyn worked a number of occupations unrelated to banking, most notably as operator and eventually foreman of the St. Francis Municipal Power Plant.

The couple were members of Peace Lutheran Church, and were involved in Eric's Cub Scout, 4-H, and school activities over the years. Ruth Anne worked for several years as a vacation relief secretary/office assistant for Peace Lutheran Church and the City office. She provided child-sitting services on a part-time basis and was a farmland owner. In the late 1970s and much of the 1980s, the Yonkeys lived on the Curry farm.  During the 1990s the couple served as co-owners with Eric of The Syracuse Journal. After Eric married Roxie Lockwood in 1994, the family owned The Sherman County Star. For the Star's six-year duration, the couple and their cocker spaniel, Bouncer, traveled weekly to Goodland and then Burlington, Colo., to get the newspaper printed, labeled and mailed from Goodland.

Over the years, the family traveled to several states, most often to Oregon to visit Merlyn's sister. When Walt Disney World was only a year old, the couple took Eric to visit it and Kennedy Space Center for his sixth birthday.  Later trips were to New England for "Leaf Peeping" and British Columbia to visit a cousin.

Ruth Anne enjoyed cooking and preserving Merlyn's vegetable garden produce. She made hundreds of yarn hangers, volunteered at church, and at both the St. Francis and Goodland nursing homes. She enjoyed constructing homemade cards, letter writing and writing a little "personal note" poetry.

Survivors include her husband of the home, her son Eric (Roxie) Yonkey of Goodland, sister Eleanor Avery of St. Francis, brother-in-law Gary (Miriam) Yonkey of Wheeler, nephews Gail and Kale Yonkey of Wheeler, nieces Linda (Robby) Davisson of Akron, Colo.; Tonya Yonkey of Colby; Kimberly Psaltis of Chapel Hill, N.C.; and Heidi Yonkey of Imperial, Neb.; grand-nieces and -nephews and friends.

She was preceded in death by her brother-in-law Norman Avery, her brother- and sister-in-law Royce and Claudia Yonkey, her sister- and brother-in-law Eloyce (Yonkey) and Rick Pettijohn, brother-in-law Eric Osterholme; a nephew Greg Ellis, and great-nephew Dalton Ellis.

Memorials in honor of Ruth Anne may be made to Peace Lutheran Church, or to Switch Youth & Family Center, and may be left at the church.