Bettie Sincox

Bettie L. Sincox died Monday, July 27, at Centerpointe Hospital in Independence, Missouri. Her 80 years began only a few miles away at 10224 East 11th Street in Maywood. Born December 19, 1928 only months before “the crash”, she grew up as the baby in a family of six children. As it should be, she buried all of them, her father and mother, Thomas and Alice Bonville, her two sisters, Josephine Hubbard and Frances Taylor, and her three brothers, Rudy Bonville, Tom Bonville and Harold Bonville, who died in action in World War II.
Her father worked for the railroad and her mother taught among the American Indians. The railroad job proved to be depression-proof, so she enjoyed relative “luxury” throughout her early years. She attended grade school at Mount Washington Grade School in Fairmount, and then graduated from Kansas City’s Northeast High School in 1946. At Northeast, she met John W. Sincox, another Independence boy from only a few blocks from her home. Though they weren’t high school sweethearts, the love of a lifetime would bloom a few years later.
1946 was momentous for Bettie. She contracted tuberculosis moments before the miracle drug, streptomycin, became widely available. On July 4, 1946, she began arduous and draconian treatments at Mt. Vernon, Missouri’s TB hospital. It took three years, the loss of six ribs and one lung, but it saved her life.
She re-met John Sincox in the summer of ’48 when she came home from the hospital for five months, only to relapse with TB. She returned to Mt. Vernon, where for months, John Sincox would ride his motorcycle to visit the beautiful girl he would marry on December 2, 1949.
Though the TB’s ravages would trouble her in her later years, her youth and vitality enabled her to create a “Leave it to Beaver” life for her husband and two children.
Her daughter, Fran Flowers Haegele, was born in 1953, and her son Jim Sincox in 1959. Her intelligence, love, humor and strong will shaped her children until the day she died.
Bettie was not a world traveler or a titan of business. She made her mark on the world through friendship, homemaking as “art”, writing and welcoming all to her home and table.
In the mid ‘50’s, she joined a Jackson County Extension Club named “The Learn-a-Little” club. The members of this club would become her lifelong friends. Joan Elliot, Billy Powers, Annie Beem and Colleen Davis still meet every month even now.
Maywood Mercy Hospital Club was Bettie’s charity cause. She baked to raise money for the benefit of Children’s Mercy all these many years. In keeping with her wishes, the family suggests contributions to Maywood Mercy Hospital Club..
She is survived by her husband, John Sincox; her daughter, Fran Flowers Haegele and her husband, Bill Haegele; her son, Jim Sincox and his wife
Kim; and many nieces and nephews.
The celebration of her life will begin with a visitation at Carson-Speaks Funeral Home, 1501 West Lexington, Independence, Missouri 64052 on Thursday evening, July 30 from 6 to 8 p. m. Services will begin at 2 p. m. on Friday at Carson-Speaks, followed by burial at Mt. Washington Cemetery.