Lloyd Mayhew Bassett descends from William Bassett of Plymouth, Massachusetts as follows:
William Bassett and wife Elizabeth
William Bassett (b. 1624) and wife Mary Raynesford
Nathan Bassett (b. 1667) and wife Mary Huckens
William Bassett (b. 1702) and wife Ann Mayhew
Nathan Bassett (b. 1751) and wife Martha Bassett
Ira Bryant Bassett (b. 1788) and wife Louisa Cleveland
Samuel Mayhew Bassett (b. 1839) and wife Sarah Jane Young
Charles Cornelius Bassett (b. 1885) and wife Elizbeth Mary Campbell
Lloyd Mayhew Bassett (b. 1915) and wife Thelma Estelle Robertson
Thelma Bassett is a Bassett by marriage.
Deming Headlight, January 15, 2010
Thelma Bassett
Thelma Bassett, a resident of Los Lunas, N.M., from 2006 until November, 2009, passed away swiftly and peacefully at The Cottages in Albuquerque just days into the New Year. She was 92. Thelma was born in 1917, in Arizona frontier country, but grew up in California, where her father was a charter fishing boat owner and captain.
Thelma was a published author by age 6 and a paid contributor to a national children’s journal by age 10. By 12, she was designing clothes, and her surviving sketches show remarkable talent. She was a performing concert pianist by the age of 15. She graduated from high school in 1934 as co-valedictorian in a class of 600 students. She was news editor of her high school paper.
In 1940, Thelma married Army Air Corpsman Louis Blackwell, who later became a decorated World War II hero. The couple was living near Hickam Airfield in Hawaii in Dec. 1941, when Thelma looked up on her way to church to see Japanese planes flying in to bomb Pearl Harbor. During the subsequent evacuation of civilians from the Islands, she concealed the fact of her advanced pregnancy so that she would be allowed to return to California in a military-escorted convoy.
By the mid-1940s, Thelma, now a single mom, was a railroad clerk in a tiny town near the Oregon border. In 1950, she moved to El Paso, where she met and, in 1952, married a young railroad engineer from Deming, N.M., named Lloyd Bassett. She retired from the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1986, with 38 years of service.
Travel and family were Thelma’s greatest joys. She and Lloyd crisscrossed the U.S. and Canada by car. After his death in 1980, she toured Australia and Scotland alone. She was notorious for driving hundreds of miles to drink coffee with a relative, only to be off again within the hour.
An avid reader, Thelma loved mystery novels. In the 1960s she learned to knit in order to make blankets for orphanages. Well into her eighties, she taught piano and played for Sunday services at the El Paso Relief Mission. She had been a member of the First Christian Church of El Paso since 1952 and of a Masonic widows’ group since 1980. She lived alone until 2006, when she broke her arm while on a trip and had to move to Los Lunas to be near family.
After a family graveside service in Deming on Jan. 11, Thelma was laid to rest beside Lloyd Bassett, her husband of 28 years. She is survived by her son, Louis Blackwell, and wife, Shirley, of Los Lunas, N.M.; grandson Ken Blackwell and wife, Melanie, of Cocoa, Fla.; granddaughter Rebecca Blackwell and husband, Glen Carlberg and step-great grandsons Kyler and Arden Carlberg of Ponderosa, N.M.; and nieces Sharon Reekers, of Vista, Calif., and Donna and husband Doug Harris of Abilene, Texas.
Her family thanks her home care aide and companion Nita Crawley, of Los Lunas, Beehive Assisted Living in Los Lunas, and The Cottages for their compassionate caregiving. During karaoke at The Cottages the day before she died, she is reported to have danced with joy to the Troggs’ 1966 hit “Wild Thing.” The family requests that any memorial gifts go to the Fisher Center for Alzheimer’s Research Foundation, on the Web or at 1-800-259-4636.
Entrusted to the care of Baca’s Funeral Chapels 811 S. Gold Ave., Deming, N.M. 88030, (575) 546-9671.