Maude Coles, 98, nurse in S. Jersey

Maude Freeman Coles and seven of her girlfriends began their monthly get-togethers when they were teenagers at Palmyra High School.

They played bridge, four players at each of two tables, and rotated as hosts from house to house.

When ill health subtracted two of them, they became six at one table, playing a card game now lost to memory.

"They called themselves the Sixers," Mrs. Coles' daughter, Carol Graf, said.

When Mrs. Coles was 92, the card games ended, but she and five friends still got together once a year for lunch at her home. They called it a day when she was 94.

On Saturday, May 2, Mrs. Coles, 98, of Mount Laurel, a former registered nurse, died at home. She would have celebrated her 99th birthday this Saturday, which is now the date of her life celebration and memorial service.

She and Leon Coles married in 1937 and 30 years later, moved to Verrieres-le-Buisson, a southern suburb of Paris, on a two-year assignment for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Graf said her father was a USDA research entomologist, and at the agency's Moorestown office worked in biological insect controls.

"At that time," she said, "he was working on alfalfa weevil control for the Midwest, to protect the grain crops from the cereal leaf beetle."

For much of 1967, 1968, and 1969, "he did work in Sweden and also in Italy, and [Mrs. Coles] traveled with him, collecting the bugs that he needed," to be shipped back to the States.

"They were traveling a good part of that time," Graf said. "A wonderful experience, something they never imagined they would do."

Born in Philadelphia, Mrs. Coles graduated from Palmyra High in 1934 and from the Cooper Nursing School in 1937. "She later took courses in nursing at Rutgers-Camden," Graf said, because "she thought about becoming a school nurse."

Mrs. Coles was a nurse at Cooper Hospital in the 1940s, at the former Zurbrugg Memorial Hospital in Riverside in the 1950s, and at the former Cinnaminson Manor nursing home in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Between those duties, her daughter said, Mrs. Coles was one of two nurses who worked for the Tri-Boro Visiting Nurses Association, when the Moorestown Visiting Nurse Association expanded its coverage to Cinnaminson, Palmyra, and Riverton.

Mrs. Coles was a member of Central Baptist Church in Palmyra and later the Palmyra Moravian Church in Cinnaminson. She was a member of the Riverton Country Club.

"The Riverton golf course used to be my grandfather's farm," she said, where David Coles tended his fruit trees.

Mrs. Coles' husband "played a lot of golf and planned to retire to be on that golf course," and when he retired in the mid-1970s the family moved to a home neighboring the old farm.

Besides her daughter, Mrs. Coles is survived by son Noel, daughter Bonnie Lee Sheridan, a brother, three grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 1992. An infant daughter, Judith Ann, died in 1939.

A visitation was set from 11 a.m. Saturday, May 9, at the Snover Givnish Funeral Home, 1200 Route 130 N., Cinnaminson, before a 1 p.m. memorial service there, with burial in Lakeview Memorial Park, Cinnaminson.

Donations may be sent to Samaritan HealthCare & Hospice, 5 Eves Dr., Marlton, N.J. 08053.

Condolences may be offered to the family at www.snovergivnish.com.