JOYCE BRAMMER, A TEACHER, ARTIST, and longtime resident of Kendrick, who inspired a love of learning in generations of students and was renowned for her prize-winning paintings, her landscaped gardens and her flower arrangements, died in her sleep on Oct. 16 at home in Pullman. She was 98.

Articulate and thoughtful, Joyce possessed an artistic nature and quiet demeanor that belied her steely determination and ambition. She revered books and believed deeply in the transformative power of education.

As a young woman graduating from Lewiston High School in 1933 during the depths of the Great Depression, she struggled to gain a first-rate college education. She studied first at Lewiston State Normal School, mentored by the famed drama teacher, Carolyn Silverthorne, and graduated in 1935 with a teaching certificate that she put promptly to use.

Her first job was as the sole instructor in a one-room schoolhouse amid wheat fields on American Ridge, near Kendrick, where she taught the first grade, the eighth grade, and all six grades in between. She walked to school, arriving early winter mornings to stoke the wood stove. She encouraged farm children to bring a vegetable to toss into a steaming pot for the communal soup they shared for lunch.

It was while teaching there, boarding with a local farm couple, that she met her future husband—a fast-talking, quick-witted farm boy named Werner Brammer who, as he later told the story, was smitten at first blush, not only with Joyce's beauty and smarts, but by the fact "she was making $90 a month teaching school and I was going broke farming."

But the part of the story Werner always left out was how long he had to wait. Joyce, determined to press ahead with her studies, left him and Idaho, boarding a train for Iowa City to study literature and drama at the prestigious University of Iowa.

But wait Werner did.

And when Joyce returned from Iowa in 1940, her newly-minted B.A. in hand, their courtship flourished with renewed vigor. In August 1941, four months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Werner and Joyce married in the garden of her father's home in Lewiston.

It was a marriage of two verbal people with agile minds and sharply divergent temperaments—a marriage that at times crackled with tension—but one that proved deeply affectionate and enormously durable, a bond that lasted 68 years until Werner's death in 2010 at 93.

Indeed, it was a marriage that gave credence to the old cliché that opposites attract.

A lifelong farmer, Werner was an outspoken charmer and dogged crusader who fired off innumerable letters to the editor and who could be relentless in pressing his views on politicians and neighbors alike.

In contrast, Joyce was a quiet observer, an astute listener and a savvy judge of what made people tick. She was someone who could as easily inspire and encourage the student who struggled as she could stimulate and challenge the brightest child in the class. If Werner was often the life of the party, it was Joyce to whom friends and neighbors turned for her sage counsel and sympathetic ear.

Despite divergent styles, Joyce and Werner built a life together with an astonishing singleness of purpose. Both were frugal and worked hard. Her teaching salary was key in helping Werner make a go of the farm. "Often before I got my pay check home," Joyce recalled, "he had it spent on a cow."

Though the more reserved of the two, Joyce was as strong-willed as her more voluble counterpart, a fact Werner may have obliquely acknowledged in his 80's and 90's when asked the secret to their long marriage.

"Well, it's like this," he'd reply. "The man makes all the BIG decisions and the woman makes all the little ones."

"Really?" His listeners always asked. "And that works?"

"Oh yes," Werner would insist, nodding solemnly. "Sixty years so far and not one big decision."

Joyce Walthall was born Feb. 16, 1915, the oldest of three children and the only daughter of Raymond and Vera Smith Walthall, in Spokane, Wash. Joyce's mother was a milliner and her father was a grocery wholesaler.

Joyce's artistic bent bloomed early. Teachers noted her deft sketches of classmates in grade school and encouraged her to take art classes. Her carefree childhood, however, ended when she was 13 and her mother died, leaving Joyce to shoulder much of the responsibility for raising her two younger brothers, Douglas, 11, and Keith, 5.

Subsequently, the family moved to Lewiston, where her father worked as branch manager of Mason-Ehrman Co.

After their marriage, Joyce and Werner made their home at Southwick, where he farmed and she taught high school. When Southwick High was consolidated with Kendrick High, Joyce was hired there to teach English and art and to direct the school plays, events soon eagerly anticipated by students and the community alike.

The couple moved to Kendrick, where they lived for the next 50 years, raising two daughters, Rhonda Brammer, of Kendrick and New York City, and Denise Brammer Blacker, of Pullman.

Even in retirement, Joyce taught adult art classes and later kindergarten, charmed to be teaching children of the children she'd taught decades before.

Joyce was a lifelong member of the Christian Science Church. She was a founding member of the Kendrick Garden Club and belonged to the Valley Art Center and the National Chrysanthemum Society.

She and Werner delighted in lunching with friends and neighbors at the Kendrick Senior Citizens Center and late in life, they took up square-dancing and made dozens of friends through the Twin City Twirlers.

Joyce is survived by her two daughters; her son-in-law, Keith Blacker, and her cousin and beloved friend, Marilynn Albro, of Marysville, Wash. Joyce was preceded in death by her parents, her brothers and her husband.

A celebration of Joyce's life is planned for November.

Gifts in her memory can be made to the Kendrick Senior Citizens Center or the Moscow Christian Science Church.