Carolyn Ricker Bergeson

Carolyn Imogene Ricker Bergeson, was born October 11th, 1921 in San Benito, Texas, and died December 2nd, 2011 in Logan, Utah of complications of a stroke two days earlier. At the time of her death, she was 90 years old, and a resident of Legacy House of Logan, having moved there 1 ½ years ago when her health started to decline. From 2002 to 2010, Carolyn resided at Pioneer Valley Lodge in North Logan, but had annual sojourns with her only daughter, Linda, at her subtropical homes in Queensland, Australia. Carolyn was a frequent world traveler all of her adult life, living and traveling throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and South America with her husband, Harold Max Bergeson, until his death in 2002. For one whose girlhood was spent on the dusty streets and fields of Lozano, Texas during the bleak days of the Great Depression, she grew up to be a sophisticated, vivacious, and adventurous woman. Carolyn was as comfortable cruising the waters of the Yangtze River of China as visiting the great cathedrals of Europe. She was as adept at oil painting rural scenes of post-WW II Japan as crawling through overgrown graveyards and dusty archives of Revolutionary America to root out information about her ancestors. And, she was as fascinated watching open-air funeral pyres along the Ganges River in India as walking in the Incan ruins of the high Andes of South America. During her young adulthood, Carolyn moved residence more than twenty times over as many years, all while rearing her four children, and in support of her husband's military career as an Air Force pilot. During the last five years of her life with Max, they lived in the Cliffside area of Logan. Her eldest son, Allen Max Bergeson, was her favorite, but his life was cut short by cancer, diagnosed at age 49 while working as a public heath doctor at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. He spent his final few months after diagnosis in Cache Valley, which allowed Carolyn to rekindle the close relationship they had had during his early years. Max and Carolyn moved back to Cache Valley to be closer to family and to their religious heritage. Max grew up in Cornish, and Carolyn lived there episodically as a young mother of two young boys, while Max spent the final years of World War II in Europe, and later in Korea. Carolyn was an avid member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, having converted during her teen years with her
physician/engineer/farmer father, Charles Craver Ricker, her school teacher mother, Emma Electa Golder Ricker, and three brothers, Melbourne, Franklin and Robert. She met her husband, Max, a Mormon boy from Utah, while he was flight instructor in San Antonio, Texas, and she was in college. She is survived by two sons and a daughter, Lars Bergeson of Cache Valley, Wayne Jay Bergeson of Richfield, Utah, and Linda Kay Bergeson Skinner of Bribie Island, Queensland, Australia. She is also survived by her brother, Robert Ricker, of Texas, and by ten grandchildren, and by nine great-grandchildren. There will be a memorial service at Nelson's Mortuary in Logan on Tuesday, December 6th, 2011, at 2pm, preceded by a family visitation at 1pm, followed by interment at Lewiston Cemetery, and a dinner and gathering at the home of Lars and Janet Bergeson.