1 Source: The Kentucky Post,
Publication date: 05 Feb 2005
Thelma M. Kees Bramlage didn't sew until she retired in 1982. Then she didn't stop. The Latonia resident, who died Thursday at 84, made her first sewing project -- a Raggedy Ann doll -- for one of her grandchildren, said her daughter, Beverly Wedding of Edgewood. She kept right on making Raggedy Anns and Raggedy Andys -- for her grandchildren, for a woman who sold them in a shop on Main Street, for local charities to raffle in fund-raisers. "She had to have made hundreds of them," Wedding said. "They're all over the place." Mrs. Bramlage also made stuffed bears, using the furry linings in winter coats, after she found a bear pattern. Raised on a farm in Kenton County, she didn't graduate from high school, but worked as a sales clerk for the J.H. Shillito Co. in Cincinnati. After 25 years there, she became one of the original sales clerks for Value City in Latonia. For a time, she and her husband, Raymond Bramlage, who died in 1999, ran a grocery at 221 W. 33rd St. in Covington. She minded the store while her husband worked at the Newport steel mill. Wedding didn't think the store even had a name. A member of the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption parish, Mrs. Bramlage was active in the ladies society and the garden guild. Her home on Beech Street in Latonia was a backyard showplace, her daughter said, with every kind of flower imaginable and a beautiful mimosa tree. "Oh God, did she have a green thumb," she said. "All she had to do was look at it and make it grow." Her parents loved to sit on the front porch and wait for the neighbors to go by, even when they were young, she said. They were confirmed homebodies and a little dull, she said. Dull, maybe, but not stupid. Mrs. Bramlage in particular was very smart, her daughter said. "Before there was spell-check on computers, we always called mom," she said. "She was our spell-check." She loved to work crossword puzzles, especially the New York Times daily puzzle. "She was a fiend on news," her daughter said. "People loved to sit and talk to her, because she knew everything that was going on." Other survivors include a son, Eugene Williams of Taylor Mill; a second daughter, Shirley Wesselman of Florence; a brother, Charles Fessler of Latonia; sisters, Joyce Fitzpatrick of Cincinnati and Wilma Endress of Latonia; five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Mass of Christian burial will be at 10 a.m. Monday at Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption, Covington. Visitation will begin there at 9 a.m. Monday. Burial will be in Mother of God Cemetery, Fort Wright. Allison & Rose Funeral Home, Covington, is handling the arrangements.
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