Pendell Family Page 2
Ivan, Mary, Elaine, and Paul Pendell
circa 1935
Mary Pendell graduated from East High School in Wichita, Kansas, in 1937, then went one year at Wichita State University. She married Glenn DeShurley in 1938, who was just home from the Navy. He had served four years aboard the battleship Oklahoma that was sunk at Pearl Harbor in the December 7, 1941 attack. Mary was the mother of one daughter and four sons. She passed away in December 1999 in California.
Paul Pendell graduated from East High School in 1938. He attended Friends University for one year, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for one year, then spent two years at Wheaton College (west of Chicago). He was at Wheaton while Billy Graham was the “Big Man on Campus.” Paul went to medical school in Pennsylvania, became an M.D., and later trained as a surgeon. He married Jane Elliot, R.N., and with adopted daughter, traveled to Cameroon, Africa as medical missionaries. Derby Presbyterian Church kept close tabs on them. They returned to the U.S. in the late 1960s and Paul was an Air Force surgeon for five years. Later, he was a staff physician at Foxwood Springs Senior Living in Raymore, Missouri. At 75, he began showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and passed away in December 2002 at age 82.
Ivan Pendell graduated from East High School in 1945, having spent his sophomore and junior years in Los Angeles, California. He entered the Army Infantry just after graduating from high school. World War II ended while he was in boot camp in Mineral Wells, Texas. While in Wichita on furlough in December 1945, he married Bobbie Greenfeather whom he met at church in 1944. They had 36 hours before he left for Fort Riley, then on to France. He took M.P. training in Romilly, France, then nine more months of duty in Paris. He was sent home and discharged in Chicago, arriving in Wichita, Kansas, on December 24, 1946. Within about four days, he went to work for Don Schmid Motors. After recovering at home following a bad fall at work, he and Bobbie went to California where Ivan took his old job at a Texaco station. Three months later, they returned to Wichita where he took a job with Butler Paper Company. In the summer of 1947, Ivan joined Rock Island Railroad and was there for six years, followed by eight years as a Prudential insurance agent. For the next 11 years, Ivan was the District Manager for Glenn Mitchell Manuals, covering Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. After that, he was a field representative for eight years in the U.S. and Canada for World Literature Crusade (a Christian printer of tracts). Bobbie also worked for World Literature after they moved from Derby in early 1973 to Glendale, California. They had built a house in Derby on the old Charles Goeldner place and had lived there five years. In early 1980, Bobbie went to work for UCLA and Ivan for Johnstone Supply, a wholesale store for the HVAC industry. Ivan and a friend bought the store in 1981, later opening two more stores from scratch. Bobbie worked at the stores from 1986 on, then they sold in 1997 and returned to Wichita where they still reside in late 2022. Ivan and Bobbie had one son, and a daughter who was a 1971 graduate of Derby Senior High.
Elaine Pendell went with her mother, Esther, to Los Angeles, California, in February 1942 while Elaine was in junior high. She graduated from high school in Los Angeles then graduated from UCLA. She married her high school sweetheart in 1951. They had one son. Elaine taught school, then moved to Seattle, Washington, where she was a Boeing engineer. Forced by cancer to leave Boeing, she moved to Phoenix, Arizona to be near Mayo Clinic where her cancer was successfully treated. She passed away in Sun City West, Arizona at age 88 in 2017.
Information on the Pendell siblings was given by Ivan Pendell on September 21, 2022.