Who knew that spawning the most depraved child molester would leave you feeling abandoned and lonely at the end of your life?

Dr. Mary June Adams Hamblin 1927 - 2024

Link to her Obituary

Dr. Mary June Adams Hamblin was born on December 19th, 1927 and passed away on July 17th, 2024 at the age of 96

1927-2024 Provo, Utah - 

Our bright and dynamic mother, Mary June Adams Hamblin, passed away the evening of July 17, 2024. She was 96 years old. June was born December 19th, 1927 to Samuel Conrad Adams and Delilah Mariah Booth Adams in Provo, Utah. 

She grew up the fourth of five sisters--Elsie Dee, Connie, Florence and Ruthie. Her oldest sister Elsie Dee said, “We were always running! We ran the five blocks down to school on Center street in Provo, then back for an hour for lunch at home, then back to school and then back home.” June’s family was hardworking and innovative, always being thrifty and doing things like raising rabbits to supplement their food during the Great Depression. 

June spent many hours picking strawberries and cherries “in the hot, hot sun!” she would say in a lively way. Her childhood was filled with family, visiting family in Bunkerville, NV where Conrad grew up, and spending summers in Provo Canyon. 

June was also lucky to live around the corner from her nine beloved Brockbank cousins. Imagine 14 girl cousins running back and forth from the houses of two sisters! June’s cousin her age was Carol, who was her best friend. Most of all, June learned to love the gospel of Jesus Christ as she watched her mother rejoice in gospel truths as a daughter of a Utah pioneer. Delilah contributed to the building of the Provo Fourth Ward Building and participated in many Relief Society callings. June wrote in her mother’s history: "Also because of my mother’s strength of going to church, and being good in the church, always paying her tithing and doing things she should do, made it so I have a testimony and I am grateful for that. 

When our mama found something wonderful for her apartments she would say, ‘Thank goodness I just paid my tithing!’" June continues: "I felt all of the windows of heaven do open when tithing is paid so it has been easy for me to pay my tithing because so many wonderful things would follow and they always have, and it’s because mother made it sound so fun and necessary and wonderful. 

Mother helped so many people also. She helped missionaries [pay for their missions] no one ever knew she helped. She helped more people than anyone ever knew and she was always so helpful to us girls. Everything we needed to have for anything she’d help us get or do or fix." Such a wonderful and generous example from her mother! 

June also loved her dad, Conrad. She loved roaming Provo Canyon with him, in his job as a Provo City utility worker charged with walking the big water pipe in Provo Canyon and looking for leaks and maintaining it. Conrad made little wooden crutches for June and her cousins, to garner sympathy, so they could stand by the side of the road and ask for rides up the canyon. There were many cars who stopped to help these poor little lame girls on the side of the road. 

June, her sisters and cousins would swim in the canal at the mouth of Provo Canyon and Conrad would retrieve them off the grate that covered the river going into the city. Conrad learned to cook one day a week growing up on his family's ranch, and cooked many meals while they stayed at Nunns Park in Provo Canyon, during the summer months. 

This love of Provo Canyon never left June. She loved it her whole life. When she was there she was home. June went to BYU in 1946, fulfilling her mother’s wishes of earning a college degree. When school was out for the summer she would work at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. June spoke of those summers of waiting tables and putting on plays and entertainment for each other after hours. It sounded wonderful. 

The pictures were amazing. Ruthie, her youngest sister said that during this time, one summer month "Junie sewed one dress a day!” Ruthie was asked if it was because they were coming out of the Great Depression and money was short and she said, “No! Junie was tall so store bought dresses were sometimes too short, and she loved being creative.” This is one of her many strengths. June loved making something beautiful with limited resources. 

June joined a social club called Val Norn and loved the college life. She was a Cougarette and told her children “we just marched in lines–we weren’t as fancy as they are now!” At BYU she met Robert (Bob) Lee Hamblin and they were sealed in the Manti Temple on July 20, 1950. One famous family story is that while still in the sealing room, Delilah looked at Bob after the marriage and with a glint in her eye said, “Remember, you can’t bring her back!” 

After leaving BYU, they moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan for Bob to get his masters, then Ames, Iowa where Bob earned his doctorate and June earned her masters degree in Education with an emphasis on reading. Bob then got a position working as a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and June earned her doctorate in 1968 in Child Psychology from St. Louis University. 

In their years living in the Midwest, June also worked in many callings of the church, driving the 45 minutes each way for many meetings, –two on Sunday, one afternoon for Primary and one for Relief Society. Bob served in the St. Louis Stake Presidency and together they helped build a new church building there raising money and working many hours on the building site. In these years June and Bob had five children – Mary Carol, David, Steve, Suki and Kristin. 

June was a master storyteller and she loved teaching her children how to be. June’s storytelling could be likened to a farmer who is irrigating a field and uses his skill with a hoe to direct the water which way to go. We would lie on her bed, or sit around the dinner table, and June’s stories would flow over us to show us how to live and be. 

Her stories taught us about the gospel, friendship, and what qualities to look for in a spouse, among other things. She would wave her long arms in energetically to make her points and to keep us engaged. During the St. Louis years June created two beautiful homes. She would recall her frugal childhood and started hunting for antiques and restoring them as a way to get furniture at a lower cost. She would come home with a terrible looking piece of furniture and say, “It has good bones!” 

She would then spend hours stripping the paint off, sand it and finally seal it with her special concoction of turpentine and linseed oil. The transformed masterpiece would glow in one of the rooms of our home. These forays to faraway farms yielded many projects for June. She would knock on a farmer's door and charmingly ask to look in barns and on front porches for forgotten, discarded furniture. 

She would return in triumph to tell the tale and eventually, all of us children were the recipients of these lovingly restored treasures. June and Bob bought a cabin in Wildwood, Provo Canyon in 1965, where many of June’s Brockbank cousins also owned cabins. The family spent many summers there jumping on Aunt Carol’s trampoline, or floating tubes in the Paxman’s dammed pond, or swinging on Aunt Eleanor’s swing that went high across the creek.

June loved gathering and entertaining. She loved having a yearly Christmas “Tea” for mothers and daughters. She had faculty parties and dinners. One summer day she and her cousins decided to have a special lunch just for them. A "Ladies Lunch" with special food! One of the husbands, Uncle Pax protested by having all the children help him paint signs and they marched in protest of the lunch. “Feed the Children!” and “Stop Prejudice Against Men!” It was a memorable day for the children and they were finally fed.

June sewed Raggedy Ann dolls for many of the children of her cousins. Each had an embroidered face with a different fabric dress and apron. Under the clothes was a little embroidered heart that read, “I love_____”. It was an ambitious project that showed the depth of June’s love for her family.

June had such a spark when she came into a room, and she would choose to sit by someone who was sitting by themselves, or tell the latest funny thing that happened to her, or why she was having a bad day and by the end of the story you would be moaning with her. She loved having the spotlight and always delivered. Sometimes after a party she would say, “Oh, I talked too much!” and then regretfully opine one of her famous sayings…”You can always tell a caged woman!’ June was a good listener. Her eyes would light up, she would gasp at the exciting parts and collapse at the conclusion of a story, her energy spent with all of the emotion she felt.

Sometimes she would angle her face, purse her lips and move her shoulders back and forth to emphasize a point. This enduring, charming trait is currently seen in many of her children and grandchildren. June carried this tradition of her parents and would call someone being silly as having a case of “the cutes”. When you are the only one laughing at your jokes, even crying because you think you are so funny, you have a very, very severe case of “the cutes”.

The Bizarre Obituary of Mary June Adams

A last move for the family was in 1970, when they came to Tucson. Bob and June both worked at the University of Arizona. It was a new climate and a new life. In the 1980’s June taught at BYU visiting for a few years and developed a preschool program. One of her BYU student daughters remembered her saying, “Life is going to be hard. Enjoy college!” and paradoxically “‘A’ Students go to class!” June also developed a reading program with phonetic symbols that made learning to read very easy. “Dr. June” as she liked to be called, started three “Academic Preschools” in Tucson to teach hundreds of young children to read for many years there.

Many of her own descendants have learned to read this way. In 1992 Bob and June divorced.

This was a hard time for June. She retreated and became isolated. She stopped being a professor but still had the preschools running. In 1997 June moved back to Provo to live closer to her sisters. She loved looking after the real estate she owned. She still suffered and felt disappointed about the way her life was. She was hard to be around and lived alone with very few visitors.

In 2013 she had a stroke that left her cognitively and physically disabled. Incredibly, with the stroke, her bitterness left (because her memory was gone) and her joy and wanting to connect returned. She still was speaking a little after her stroke, but that would diminish as time went on.

A granddaughter picked her up one day to bring her home from Jamestown Senior Care for dinner. It was a windy day and they both came in looking windblown and harassed. June, wide-eyed blurted out, “We came though a lot of pillowcases to get here!” Despite the stroke she still showed her flair for dynamic storytelling.

After that she spoke less and less but still her strong spirit still showed up in many ways. We are so grateful to her many caretakers the last eleven years, notably Marreh Grayy for nine years, Jackie Bautista, and Legacy Village where she passed.

We now imagine June being free from her ailing body and mind after so many years of not being able to speak and walk. Now she can wave her long arms again as she tells her stories.

June is the last member of her immediate family and is survived by her children, Carol, (Clyde), David, Steven(Jeannie), Suki/Susan(Craig) and Maareh Grayye, plus 31 grandchildren and 43 great-grandchildren.

There will be a viewing on Saturday, July 27th from 9:30 to 11:00 am at Nelson Family Mortuary, 4780 N. University Avenue, Provo and a graveside service will follow at Provo City Cemetery, 610 South State Street, Provo, Utah, 84606 at 11:30 am.

In the spirit of Mary June's love for stories and shared experiences, we encourage you to leave memories and upload photos to her memorial page.

This digital gathering place serves not only as a place of mourning, but also as a space to celebrate the remarkable life of Mary June Adams Hamblin.