Norma Dale Diede

Norma Dale Diede was born on November 18, 1930 in Rapid City, SD the daughter of Everett E. and Mathilde (Stenger) Dale. She passed away peacefully on Monday, February 7, 2022 at the Valley Inn Nursing Home in Mancos, CO at the age of 91.

Norma was raised on a ranch near Rushville, NE where her dad was a rancher/farmer on their land and a banker in Rushville. She was the youngest of five children including two brothers, Marshall and Norton, and two sisters, Marion and Barbara, who are now all deceased.

Norma graduated from Central High School in Rapid City, SD in 1948 and met her husband, Ernest Frank Diede when he was a student and WWII veteran on the GI Bill at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City. Norma went on to earn her Bachelor’s Degree from Lewis & Clark College in Montana where she completed her major in mathematics in 1952 after the first two years at SDSM&T.

Norma and Ernie were married in Rapid City, SD on June 6, 1950, after he graduated and took his first job with the Bonneville Dam Power Administration in Oregon. After a brief wet sojourn in Portland, Oregon they moved to the dry desert at China Lake, Ridgecrest, California somewhere in the years 1952-1954 where Ernie gained employment at the then Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS). After the birth of her two children, Dale on June 25, 1956 and Scott on August 20, 1958, Norma became more involved with the children of the two sister communities. She became a study hall volunteer and assistant at Murray Jr. High School in China Lake and helped her good friend Carol Porter with her gymnastics program for the community children and at the same time Norma was an instructor in private art lessons to many other children.

Norma was also an accomplished potter, making all of her family's dishware and also incorporating those skills for her student’s lessons. Ernie bought Norma a large electric kiln for their garage and they also built a small art studio in the backyard of their home at China Lake. Ernie converted, for Norma, an old foot-pedal sewing machine into a powered potter's wheel with a big electric motor that he wired into the foot pedal for a speed control.

Norma and her family spent many good and happy years from c. 1954 to 1980 when Ernie retired, and he and Norma moved back to the Sturgis, South Dakota area where they built their dream home at Eastridge Acres from a Lindel Cedar home prefab kit. A few years after Ernie's passing in 1990, Norma and Dale agreed on a less severe climate for the both of them and that she needed to "downsize" a bit. They both agreed that they liked the Cortez area in Colorado and in 2016 she and Scott bought one of the first new homes in the South Pointe subdivision and Dale joined them 2019 after the house right next door to them came up for sale.

Surviving Norma are her children, Dale Diede of Cortez, CO, and Scott W. Diede of Cortez, CO. Norma was preceded in death by her parents; her loving husband, Ernest Frank Diede; and her siblings, Marshall, Marion, Barbara, and Norton.