Kaye Frances Hard

Palmer resident Kaye Frances Hard, 75, died Dec. 19, 2010, after a years-long battle against non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

She was born Aug. 26, 1935, in Hopkinton, Iowa, to Raymond and Hope Marolf. She attended school first in a one-room schoolhouse and graduated at age 16 from high school in Monticello, Iowa.

She left home to become a telephone operator in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. At age 18, she enlisted in the U.S. Navy, and after boot camp was assigned to six months’ training in electronics communications. Her next duty station in the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) was at a remote naval radio station on Oahu, Hawaii, in 1954. She met her future husband, John Hard, there. They married Aug. 10, 1955, at Wahiawa, Hawaii, and then moved to a remote naval radio station near Winter Harbor, Maine.

During the next six years, four of Kaye’s children were born: Jeffrey in Bangor, Maine; and Amanda, Joel and Jonathan in Syracuse, N.Y., where her husband completed degrees in forestry and forest entomology. Their fifth child, Amy, was born at Juneau, where Kaye’s husband was stationed and she worked for the Juneau Public Schools.

In 1976, her husband was reassigned to Davis, Calif., and then again to Missoula, Mont., where Kaye worked at the U.S. Forest Service’s Smokejumper Base. In 1980, Kaye’s husband was reassigned to Fairbanks, where Kaye worked as a secretary for the director of the state Department of Transportation.

Her husband was reassigned to Anchorage in 1986, where Kaye worked for the Division of Child Support Enforcement. She and her husband retired in 1990 and returned to Montana. They returned to Alaska in 1993.

Kaye was preceded in death by her parents and brother, Ralph, of Farley, Iowa.

She is survived by her husband, her five children and 13 grandchildren and step-grandchildren.

She has requested there be no formal funeral ceremony. In lieu of cards or flowers, Kaye’s family asks friends to consider supporting hospice care so others can leave the world with dignity and grace.