June D. Good

June Delilia (Sherfy) Good passed away peacefully in her home in Nampa, Idaho on April 27, 2022 after a brief illness. She celebrated her 93rd birthday a month earlier.

June was born to Minnie Kessler Sherfy and Kenneth Sherfy on March 23, 1929 in Lebanon, Oregon.  In her early childhood, June lived in a house without running water or electricity. She enjoyed milking cows by hand, helping to put up hay, vegetable gardening, and many other outside chores. She also enjoyed learning to cook and sew, and playing in the creek and woods behind the farming land.

She had many fond memories of her growing up years which she wrote for her children in 1998 when recovering from hip surgery. Her children are grateful for her memories.

June loved flowers since childhood. She remembers when her mother bought a rose bush and told her she could plant it wherever she wanted. There were only 2 lilac bushes and one peony bush in the yard, but June thought the best spot for the rose bush was where the peony bush was so she dug up the peony bush, planted the rose bush there, and replanted the peony bush.

When June was older her father taught her how to plow with a tractor. He told her it would be safer to stop the tractor at the end of the row before reaching back to trip the plow. After her dad was comfortable that she could do this he left.  He warned her “do not get the tractor tangled in the fence and whatever you do, do not fall off the tractor in reaching back to trip the plow. “ June wanted to be like her dad so she tried tripping the plow with the tractor still running. She fell off. She said “ I jumped up faster than I fell down, pulled the lever to stop the tractor and made it. After that I took things more carefully and learned to accomplish a smooth operation,” which was apparent in her later years when she plowed for the Nampa farming business. Her father also taught her to drive a caterpillar to work land and she used it to help a neighbor harvest cucumbers.

June had many fond memories of her many friends from grade school and her church, Fairview Mennonite in Albany, Oregon. One of her church friends, Ruth Birky, went to Nampa, Idaho to work in a small children’s orphanage. At age 18, June, and her older sister Doris, 19, decided to go by bus one winter to visit their friend. While visiting Ruth Birky they attended youth activities of Nampa Mennonite Church where June met her husband- to- be, James Good.

June and Doris returned to Nampa the next fall to work.  June worked for the family of Laverne and Bertha Miller who were members of Nampa Mennonite Church.  James asked June to marry him before he left late fall to go to Akron, Pennsylvania to attend a Mennonite Central Committee orientation for two years of service, building houses for WWII refugees in Germany.

While James was in Europe for two years June went on her own adventures. She and her friend, Ruth Birky, took the train to the east coast to attend high school at Eastern Mennonite School in Virginia for a year (their formal education having ended with 8th grade in Albany, Oregon). In the second year, June worked at Mennonite Central Committee’s archives at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana, and Mennonite Central Committee’s office in Akron, Pennsylvania.

After James returned from Europe, he and June were married March 27, 1951 at Fairview Mennonite Church in Albany, Oregon. They began their home and farming life on West Greenhurst Road in Nampa, near where James had grown up, and a few years later moved to another farm on West Greenhurst Road, where they remained the rest of their lives. She helped with all aspects of farming, including driving beet truck which brought to light her dad’s competitive spirit when it came to horses and automobiles. June always looked for the shortest line at the beet dump and raced back to the harvester to get ahead of “Uncle Ernie” Garber who also drove a beet truck.

June became a member of Nampa Mennonite Church and enjoyed participating in many activities, including “sewing circle” and serving as librarian for many years.

June and James raised 4 children. When her children were in grade school and high school June studied for and passed the GED (high school equivalency test) because she wanted to take English and psychology classes at Northwest Nazarene College in Nampa. She did that and then decided to, as she said in her memories, “get her priorities in line and put my family first, and not have to study so hard.” Her favorite book that she read while attending NNU was Henry David Thoreau’s “At Walden Pond.” She really liked reading about the author’s love of nature.

June enjoyed many hobbies, including oil painting, sewing, and quilting, but her favorite hobbies were traveling to visit family and to see new places; landscaping, planting trees, shrubs, and flowers, hoeing weeds, and watching birds. She and James both enjoyed their gardens and the birds that came to them.  She continued to hoe weeds in the last summer of her life, leaning on her walker with one hand and using the other hand to hoe with a small hoe. In the last weeks of her life she enjoyed spring flowers on her deck and the many birds which came to the birdbath. James and June also enjoyed camping and fishing in the mountains of Idaho with their children when the children still lived at home.

June loved her family and friends. She took an active interest in whatever her children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and other relatives and friends were doing. In her later years, when she could not talk on the phone because of her hearing loss, she enjoyed communicating with family and friends via her tablet. She also wrote many letters and cards to family and friends.

June was preceded in death by her husband, parents, son-in-law Ron Moyer, and a grandson, Gentry Good. She is survived by her sister Doris Gerig and brother-in- law Clarence, her brother Bruce Sherfy and sister-in-law Erma, all of Albany, OR, and a sister-in-law, Betty Good of Murphy, ID;  her four children: Kathleen  Moyer of Nampa, ID, Ken (Rachel) Good of Joseph, OR, Helen (Phil) Wenger, of Versailles, MO, and Brian Good of Melba, ID. She is also survived by 5 grandchildren: David (Starla) Moyer of Grande Prairie, Alberta; Kami Good of Joseph, OR; Jeremy (Katie Marie) Wenger of Barnett, MO; Zachary (Lindsey) Wenger of Versailles, M0; and Aaron (Katie Lee) Wenger of Florence, MO; by 15  great grandchildren, and many nieces and nephews.

Private services will be held at Hillcrest Memorial Gardens and Nampa Funeral Home on May 14. The 1 pm memorial service will be live streamed and the link is: https://my.gather.app/remember/june-d-good

Contributions in June’s memory may be made to Mennonite Central Committee which, in the name of Christ, contributes to suffering people around the world and works to make their living conditions better. MCC, P0 Box 500, Akron, PA 17501 or www.mcc.org.

To send flowers to the family or plant a tree in memory of June D. Good, please visit our floral store.