Grace Faye Wampole

On February 27, 2025, Grace Faye Wampole died at home in Cape Girardeau. She was 97. Born in Cape Girardeau on June 16, 1927, into a Cherokee-descended household that treated work as a language. Young, she understood that quiet competence outlasts loud plans. She assembled frames that would hold other people's years. A frame assembler glue brush hung stayed clean enough to trust. Colleagues still mention a frame assembler glue brush hung. She married Lester in 1949. They kept a house that stayed modest when the neighborhood did not. They raised two sons through public schools and ordinary weather. After Lester died in 2018, she kept the routines that still made sense: the walk, the garden, the Sunday call. Neighbors remember someone who swept the sidewalk past the property line when weather had been unfair. She liked early mornings before the heat or the noise. She died in Cape Girardeau, among streets she never needed to explain. The chair by the window still holds the shape of a habit.