Martha V. Ekroth Dies in Ventura

Martha V. Ekroth, Loren’s mother, died on Sunday, June 12, 1988, in a Ventura, California hospital after a brief illness. She was eighty-seven years old. The obituary in the Ventura County Star, published June 14, is the single richest source for the Ekroth family structure yet discovered.

Martha was born on December 31, 1900, in Nattraby, a village in Blekinge County in southern Sweden. She emigrated to the United States during or shortly after World War I — Loren later recalled in a radio interview that his mother “came to the U.S. at 13 during WWI,” which would place her arrival around 1913–1914. She settled in Superior, Wisconsin, where she met and married Elton Ekroth, the future sheriff of Douglas County.

Martha was a teacher for twenty years, teaching elementary school in Superior and in the Duluth Unified School District. She retired in 1969 and was honored as the outstanding teacher of the year in Duluth. After retiring, she moved to Ventura, California — a fifteen-year resident of Ventura County at the time of her death — presumably to be near her daughter Cynthia, who lived there with her husband Tom Hashbarger.

She was a past member of the Swedish Covenant Church of Superior — the same church where young Lauren and Cynthia Ekroth recited at Christmas programs in 1938 and 1943 — and later a member of Community Presbyterian Church of Ventura and its Harmony Circle.

The obituary names all four Ekroth children for the first time: daughters Cynthia Hashbarger (Tom Hashbarger, Ventura) and Marlene Board (Jack Board, Tustin, California); sons David Ekroth (College Station, Texas) and Dr. Loren Ekroth (Honolulu, Hawaii). Eight grandchildren survived her. Her husband Elton had predeceased her by thirty-one years, dying in 1957.

Cremation was handled by Ted Mayr Funeral Home in Ventura, with inurnment at Park Hill Cemetery in Duluth, Minnesota — a return, in death, to the city where she had spent her teaching career.