Hazel Hope (Downs) Vetter, 100, formerly of the Grassy Butte area, died Thursday, November 13, 2014 at Hagerstown, Md. Funeral services for Hazel will be at 11 a.m., Sunday, November 23, 2014 at the Grassy Butte Seventh Day Adventist Church. Visitation will be one hour prior to services at the church. Interment will follow at the church cemetery.
Hazel Hope was born to William Butler Downs and Anna Laura Russell Downs on November 21, 1913 in Forest Grove, Oregon.
She was the 7th of 10 children. Hazel graduated from Walla Walla College in 1936 with a degree in Elementary Education. She taught for 2 year before marrying James Charles Vetter on August 15, 1938. They spent several years teaching before going as missionaries to Gold Coast (now Ghana) West Africa with their son, James (Jim), where Joyce (Joy) was born. Upon returning to the States after 8 years of mission service, Hazel worked in the bindery of the Southern Publishing Association, and then continued teaching in small multi-grade Adventist elementary schools connected to churches where her husband was pastoring. She taught in Hendersonville, KY, and then in Evansville, Terre Haute, Bloomington and Shelbyville, Indiana before retiring in 1978.
After retirement, Hazel and her husband volunteered at various schools and churches, before settling on Sand Mountain in Alabama for a few years. Then they moved to North Dakota to help their daughter and son-in-law in the Adventist Book Center. After the death of her husband in 2001 she moved to Dickinson, ND to be near a grandson, Kent. Then she spent the next 5 years in Canada with her daughter. She moved to Hagerstown in 2007, when her daughter and son-in-law were employed by the Review and Herald.
Hazel Vetter said she was “The Last Leaf on the Tree”, because she was preceded in death by her four brothers and five sisters: Alvah William Downs, John Melvin Downs, Wendell Lawrence Downs, and Raymond Ira Downs, Evelyn Margaret Downs, Laura Ellen Harding, Martha Helen Downs, Louise Anna Mosser and Geneva Gertrude Downs, in addition to her husband of 63 years, James Charles Vetter.
She leaves behind: her son, James (Jim) Arthur Vetter of Weston, Florida and daughter, Joyce (Joy) Annette Thomas of Hagerstown, Maryland. She also leaves 4 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren, as well as a sister-in-law in San Diego, California, nieces, nephews and many friends, who affectionately called her “Grandma”. She will be laid to rest beside her husband in the little cemetery behind the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Grassy Butte, ND. She will be greatly missed.
