5 thoughts on ““I Take Up My Pen”: Snowflake Stake Presidency, 1950”

1. Some familiar names!

2. Aha! That’s an interesting typeface! And, as Amy says, some familiar names–one in particular stands out for me.

3. Ok, I’m having a wait-a-minute, what? moment here. I had to go look stuff up in my grandpa’s autobiography and in Family Search.

   I thought Marshall & Melinda Flake were part of the retro-plant back to south-eastern Iowa in the early 1950s. My grandparents (whose conversion was initiated during WWII in Snowflake and culimnated after Laura Flake made a timely offer in Yuma) rented a home from Marshall and Melinda Flake in Bonaparte, Iowa in 1953. When I was a little kid in the 1960s, the tiny branch at Keosauqua Iowa was populated by Snowflake transplants including members of the Flake family.

4. Connections!

5. It appears that Marshall Flake was my grandfather’s counselor during the entire time he was president of the stake. Flake’s obituary says that he was in the presidency for 11 years, which matches the 1939–1950 dates in my records.

   But the obituary also says that he was a lifelong resident of Snowflake, although it refers to several missions, including one in Holland, military service during World War I, including 19 months in France, and several years of service at the Arizona Temple. And, he died in Phoenix.

   So it’s clear that “lifelong” doesn’t mean he never left the place, and some of those departures might have been for quite a while.

   He was a son of Charles Love Flake, Sr., a deputy sheriff who died in a shootout with a “desperado” a year after Marshall was born. One of his brothers was Charles Love Flake, Jr., who died in far eastern Siberia in 1919–a fact that only a few people (including careful readers of Keepa) know.

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