Jessie May Snider

Funeral service for Chelsea resident Jessie May Snider will be held on Thursday, July 19, at 2 pm at the Chelsea Funeral Home Chapel. Visitation will be Wednesday, July 18, from 1-8 pm. Burial will be 11 am on Friday, July 20, at Blackwell Cemetery in Blackwell, Oklahoma.

Jessie passed from this life at her home in Chelsea on Monday, July 16, 2018. She was 86 years old.

Jessie was born to Cecil Bert and Blanche Haley Hayes on October 28, 1931, in
Rogers, Arkansas. At a young age, her mother passed away, and so most of her growing up years were spent with her grandparents and uncles. She enjoyed going to Lake Atlanta Park to skate with her friends as a young girl. She graduated from Rogers High School in 1949, the first of her immediate family to do so.

Jessie never minded hard work, choosing to work various jobs outside the home from the age of 12. She worked at a grocery store during the rationing years of WWII, and even at a photography studio during high school. After graduation, she eventually began working as a telephone operator, a career that she continued off and on even through the years of raising her family. She retired from the telephone business on March 19, 1994.

While working for the telephone company in Wichita, Kansas, Jessie met the brother of a coworker in an elevator. He was a newspaper pressman named Billie Owen Snider. Their first date was on July 5, 1960, and a very short time later, they were married on August 14, in Miami, Oklahoma. The newlyweds made their home in Ottawa, Kansas for a time, before different jobs took them to Rantoul and Urbana, Illinois, and finally to Tulsa, Oklahoma. They were living in Tulsa when Billie died of a heart attack while visiting his mother in Blackwell, Oklahoma.

The intrepid young widow remained in Tulsa and finished raising her three children alone. Everyone told her that she did a good job. She eventually moved to Chouteau, Oklahoma to live with her daughter, Lori, then moved with Lori and her family to Chelsea, and this has been home since.

When time allowed, Jessie enjoyed sitting on the porch, caring for her guineas and chickens, collecting recipes, and cooking big meals for her family. She especially cherished her grandchildren, and loved to cook for the whole family on holidays. She also enjoyed researching genealogy, and even wrote a detailed account of her own life.

Jessie was preceded in death by her parents, Cecil and Blanche Hayes, grandparents, Robert and Susan Hayes, and her husband, Billie Snider.

Her survivors include her children, William Robert Snider, Lori Ann West and husband Paul West, Sr., and Cecil Ray Snider and wife April; her grandchildren, Heather D. Statser, Paul M. West, Jr., Joshua Snider, Tyler B. West, Brandon Lee Snider, and Emily Alyssa Hope Snider; great-grandchildren, Kinley R. Statser, Eva Kay Statser, and Everlyn R. West; and first cousin Sandy Chalmers.