Norma Powers

FUNERAL SERVICE LIVESTREAM LINK https://vimeo.com/495274194 On December 20, 2020, Norma Jorgensen Powers, 95, returned to her Heavenly Father and a joyful reunion with the many loved ones waiting to welcome her home. Norma was born September 28, 1925 in Logan, Utah to Ernest Floyd and Inez Isabell McNeil Jorgensen. Floyd bought the family sheep farm outside Castle Dale, Utah, and the family moved into the one-room cabin on the farm. Norma was the oldest of six children, two of whom died shortly after birth of pneumonia. The family lived in a cabin on the farm during the spring and fall months, Norma and her brothers rode horses seven miles into town to attend school. In winter months they lived in a small house they built themselves on the hill overlooking Castle Date. Every summer Floyd moved his sheep herd from the desert to the mountains. Inez packed her children, tent, and cooking gear onto mules and went with her husband to the mountain meadows until fall. Norma always said those summer days on the mountain were some of the happiest days of her life. The family survived the hard times of the Great Depression of the 1930s by growing their own food and making their own clothes. Inez, being a strong believer in education, taught school to send all her children including Norma to college. In March 1947, while attending Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, Norma married her high school sweetheart, Leonard H. Wallace, in the Sale Lake City LDS Temple. They moved to Price, Utah, where Leonard worked as a police office. They had two daughters, Kathleen and Connie. Leonard became suddenly ill with pneumonia and died from complications of rheumatic fever in June 1952. Norma left her two young daughters with her parents in Castle Dale and returned to BYU to get her teaching degree. After graduation she married Monte C. Cox in 1953 and they had a son, Richard. That marriage ended in divorce the following year. Norma took her children and moved to Vernal, Utah, where she began her first teaching job. In 1956 Norma married Lavern (Vern) M. Powers. For the next few years, the family moved between Vernal, Rifle and Meeker, Colorado, following the oilfield. They added three more children: Holly, Robert (Bob) and Dawn to their family. In 1962 they built a home and settled permanently in the Maeser area of Vernal. Norma was a hard worker. Beginning at 5 a.m. she would get her six children up and dressed, feed them breakfast, clean up the kitchen, and get everyone out the door to school or the babysitters in time to be in her second-grade classroom at Ashley Elementary School by 8 a.m. Every Saturday she did laundry, cleaned the house, and made ten loaves of bread. When school was out in the summer she gardened, weeded, bottled produce, painted, and enjoyed whatever activities were happening with the family horses. Norma taught second grade at Ashley Elementary School until her retirement. She was well remembered and loved by many of her students for years afterward. Norma and Vern spent many enjoyable years together visiting all their grandchildren and enjoying their horses. After Vern Passed away, Norma sold her Maeser home and horses and moved into the small home in Vernal where she remained until her death. Norma is survived by a brother William (May) Jorgensen; sister-in-law Valynn Jorgensen; her five children: Kathleen Wallace (Randall) Christensen, Richard E. (Olivia) Wallace, Holly Jean Powers (Stuart) Wilkins, Robert Mark (Alecia) Powers, and Laura Dawn Powers (Flynn) Searle. She has 21 grandchildren, and numerous great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren. She is preceded in death by husbands Leonard Wallace and Lavern Powers; her daughter Connie Moore; her parents Ernest Floyd and Inez Isabell Jorgensen, twin sister and brother, Beverly and Berkley Jorgensen; brothers Jim Jorgensen and Phil Jorgensen and sister-in-law Bonnie Jorgensen; a grandson Richard (Ricky) Moore; and 2 great-grandsons and a great- granddaughter. Funeral services will be held Tuesday, December 29, 2020 at 1:00p.m. at the Phillips Ashley Valley Funeral Home. A viewing for friends and family will be held Tuesday from 11:00 AM to 12:45 PM at the mortuary. Interment will be in the Maeser Fairview Cemetery. Services will be livestreamed at https://vimeo.com/495274194. Visitation Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 11:00 am - 12:45 pmAshley Valley Funeral Home

410 North 800 West Vernal, UT 84078

View Map Service Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 1:00 pmAshley Valley Funeral Home

410 North 800 West Vernal, UT 84078

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