Shirley LeCroy

One Friday evening, ABC’s World News Tonight honored a waitress as their “Person of the Week.” Her claim to fame was single-handedly building a house for herself and her teenage daughter. My immediate reaction was, “Isn’t that what moms do?” After all, I had watched my mother do the same thing as I was growing up. You’ll probably never hear her story in the news, but I want to honor my mother, Shirley Elaine Le Croy, in the Walk of Heroines so that you may be inspired by her example of independence, initiative, and perseverance in the face of major challenges.

Shirley Elaine LeCroy was born on December 11, 1927 in Chicago, Illinois and grew up living all over the country as the daughter of a steel worker on public works projects. Attending as many as six schools in one year, she learned how to make friends quickly. She graduated from high school at age sixteen and was disappointed when she learned she was too young to enroll in nurse’s training to help the war effort. She took a job on what was simply called “The Project” in a mysterious government factory in Oakridge, Tennessee. Shirley only learned after reading in a newspaper of the bombing of Hiroshima that she had been working on the now-famous Manhattan Project.

During the uncertain times at the close of World War II, Shirley met a young coal miner, James Andrew Cox, at a skating rink. She found herself married at seventeen, pregnant with son James Joseph at nineteen, and pregnant with daughter Peggy Ann just eleven months later. Unsatisfied with life in a single-room log cabin with no indoor plumbing and only a single light socket, Shirley packed up the babies and their diapers in 1948 and took a train to Portland where her parents had a small business sewing leather gloves for steel workers. She told her husband he could come if he wanted, which he eventually decided to do. By age twenty-two, Shirley had another daughter, Nancy Elaine, and she and James had bought a single-bedroom house for $2,000 at an auction. Before long, her husband began exhibiting erratic behavior and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia which required full-time hospitalization.

Shirley’s spare time as a working mother was devoted to driving the children to the state mental hospital in Salem to visit their father who was undergoing electroshock therapy. Meanwhile, the children were outgrowing the converted closet that the three of them had been sharing as a bedroom, and Shirley knew something had to be done. With no money or resources other than her own intelligence, ingenuity, and courage, Shirley decided to build a house for her family. She started by going to the Multnomah County library and reading how to layout and dig a foundation. She built the forms, rented a concrete mixer, and poured the foundation for two new bedrooms. She continued reading, learning, and then building the sub-flooring, framing, wiring, sheet-rocking, roofing, and siding. Somehow, in-between the cooking, sewing, laundry, and being the Cub Scout den mother, Shirley built a total of three additions to her home with her own hands. She always found time to take the kids on a vacation, volunteer for school activities, and sew virtually all of the family’s clothes.

By 1960, her husband’s doctors told Shirley that there was no chance he would improve. After an episode where he fired a shotgun inside the house while on release from the hospital, Shirley recognized the trauma the children were going through, and she filed for divorce. That marked the beginning of many wonderful things that happened to Shirley. She met and married K. Ray LeCroy in 1963 and became stepmother to Ronnie Sue, Gail Ray, and Kevin Todd LeCroy. Shirley worked as a bookkeeper for various employers including the David Douglas School District. She earned her real estate license before moving to Yuma, Arizona where she and Ray bought the May Avenue Park in 1978. When Shirley and Ray decided to expand their mobile home park, she found herself pouring concrete once again, but this time alongside a loving husband and workmate, Ray.

In her retirement, Shirley enjoyed working with computers, traveling to many countries, off-roading, and visiting her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She greeted each day with enthusiasm until December 19, 2005, when she was critically injured in an off-roading accident in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in California. She died two weeks later on January 3, 2006, leaving behind a legacy of indomitable courage, independence, curiosity, and enthusiasm for a challenge.

Written by Peggy Lumpkin, her daughter