Miss Hazel Boyd, Woman of Substance

WILLIAM COOPER > AMOS COOPER > WILLIAM LLOYD COOPER > ELIZABETH BEAMS COOPER m Franklin Boyd > HAZEL UNA BOYD

Young Hazel

Hazel Una Boyd was born 13 years after her next oldest brother, Roy. She was born in Plainfield, Bremer County, Iowa on 17 Dec 1888 to Elizabeth Beams Cooper and Franklin Boyd. She was musical and bright. While she didn't feel the call of the mercantile life, she did help her father in his store as she grew up. But, after graduating from Plainfield High School, she felt the call of music and graduated from the Music Department at Iowa State Normal School in Cedar Falls. She taught private lessons to students in Floyd, Bremer, and Chickasaw counties, making her rounds by the Illinois Central and Rock Island railroads. She studied further at the Cosmopolitan Convservatory in Chicago and had further piano training under Victor Heinze. Heinze students have appeared in many of the great orchestras of the day in both Europe and the United States.

She took a job heading the music department at Nora Springs Seminary. She picked up a couple hobbies while there working in art and china painting, which she then also taught in private lessons when she returned to Plainfield.

Older Hazel Boyd

For a dozen years or so, she was Director of Christian Education for the American Baptist Publication Society.She worked primarily with children's programs and worked in Des Moines and later at the District headquarters in Chicago. She then worked out of the National office in Philadelphia, going wherever they sent her, mostly directing Bible Schools in cities across the country. She was working in Centralia, Illinois in 1934 when she got word of her brother Roy's death.

She eventually came back to Plainfield and taught music and worked as superintendent of the Sunday School and Young People's Work, along with providing leadership training education at the Plainfield Baptist Church. She wintered in California and Florida and taught music in the summer months.

My uncle Harold Ripley recalls Miss Boyd very well. As a teenager, he mowed her lawn. She was frequently traveling, he recalls. In the early 1950s, Hazel lived in Minneapolis, but returned home again. She died at the Salsbury Baptist Home in Charles City on 05 Apr 1976 at the age of 87.