A memorial service is planned for Madie E. Stroud on Saturday, Nov. 12, at 11 a.m. at Webster United Methodist, 600 N. Bompart Ave., Webster Groves, Mo. Mrs. Stroud died on Friday, Oct. 28. She was 88.

Madie Evans came into the world on January 6, 1928, in a town that’s now at the bottom of Lake Georgia Pacific in southeast Arkansas. She grew up during the Depression on a farm near Fountain Hill, Ark.

Her parents were both school teachers, but they farmed to support themselves in a time when food you could grow was food that didn’t have to be purchased. Madie learned to cure, can, and freeze food from the farm and to make do with what was at hand.

After graduating from high school in a class of 12, she first went to what is now a state college in Monticello, Ark. After two years, she transferred to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., living with her aunt and uncle in Bethesda and riding the streetcar to classes. She graduated with a degree in home economics in 1949.

She returned to Arkansas, where she got a job with the Arkansas Extension Service as a home demonstration agent after working as an assistant in her home Ashley County. She taught home-making skills to families in rural areas.

When she moved to a new position in Helena, Ark., in July 1950, the local newspaper sent George Stroud to interview her. A week later, he asked her to go to a talent show he had to cover. They married two days after Christmas the same year.

A little over a year later, her first daughter, Jerri, was born, on January 8, George’s birthday. A year later, another daughter was born, but she only lived seven weeks and never came home from the hospital.

They then moved to Little Rock, Ark., for George Stroud’s new job at the Arkansas Gazette, and Penny Stroud arrived on April 23, 1954.

When the girls were old enough to go to school, Madie Stroud earned a teaching certificate and began teaching science in Little Rock.

When the family moved to Webster Groves, Mo., in 1963, she worked as a substitute teacher for several years. During this time, she also began teaching cooking in adult evening schools and then began testing recipes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She also worked for a time as a USDA food inspector.

Her friendship with Food Editor Barbara Gibbs Ostmann led to an invitation to go to China on a food editors’ tour in 1974, soon after that nation opened its doors to the West. She was fascinated with the culture and the food, which bore little resemblance to what she’d eaten in Chinese restaurants in St. Louis.

In the 1970s, she began working for J&R Custom Foods on Produce Row, running a test kitchen and assisting in sales. The job got her into the kitchens of some of the finest restaurants in St. Louis.

She retired in the mid-1980s after she began having serious back problems due to scoliosis and rheumatoid arthritis. She had several operations to fuse vertebrae to relieve her pain, but the pain did not keep them from being active grandparents and living an active life until the last few years.

In lieu of flowers, memorials may be directed to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation or Webster United Methodist.