Virginia Kathryn “Ginni” Brown Coyle

Oct 3, 1918 - Sep 26, 2013

Virginia (Ginni) Kathryn Coyle died on September 26th, 2013, at age 94 in Killeen, Texas.

She is survived by seven of her eight children, Patrick and Michael Coyle, Mary Pierce, Therese Trieloff, Amanda and Jacqueline and Jon Coyle; and numerous grandchildren; great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.

She is preceded by a daughter, Sharon Mullarkey; and her husband of 50 years.

For the last 4 1/2 years, as her health was failing, she lived with her daughter Therese Trieloff and son-in-law James Michael Trieloff.
Ginni was born in Kokomo, Indiana, October 3rd, 1918. She was the oldest and last surviving of the five children of Nellie Carlier and Darvel Brown. She was a bootlegger's daughter. She told stories of how she and her brother Buddy sold the dregs of the alcohol and pieces of coal found on the railroad tracks for movie money.

She loved to roller skate as a youngster and dance when she was a teenager. Dancing is how she met her husband, Hubert (Ike) Coyle. They were married June 19th, 1937, and moved to South Bend, Indiana, where they had a pig and truck farm and their first five children were born. Later the family moved to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to work a dairy farm where they also had their last three children. With raising eight children, milking cows, putting up hay and oats, and activities with the Farm Bureau and 4-H, she still managed to have beautiful gardens. She used the rocks that were taken from the fields to build raised and terraced flower beds. When her older children moved away from home, the dairy farm was sold and she moved her family to Oregon, Wisconsin, and returned to college to become a nurse.

Ginni was rarely idle. She was a "rock hound" and a history buff. She made jewelry, ceramics, and stained glass and crocheted afghans when she wasn't gardening. She knew "everything." You always wanted her on your side when playing Trivial Pursuit. In her 70s, she got interested in computers. She started with a Commodore and Apple II. All of her life, she was a bookworm. Her husband's worst criticism was that she always had her nose in a book. When macular degeneration took her sight she listened to recorded books. As a young woman she read Zane Grey novels and yearned to be in the desert that he wrote about. When she retired from nursing, she moved to Mesa, Arizona, to be in the desert that was the home of her heart.
Although she could barely see, she continued to garden. She pulled weeds by feel and only a few times pulled up a flower plant by mistake. She also was a writer. She wrote a weekly article, "Over the Garden Fence," for the local newspaper, and she also wrote some prose.

Ginni loved to travel and was always open to adventures. She traveled across the country to visit her children, who are spread out from Michigan and Illinois to Texas, California to South Dakota and Minnesota and back to Wisconsin to visit friends. At age 79 she went hang gliding at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Her 80th birthday was celebrated in the Florida Keys and her 83rd in Hawaii. On her 92nd birthday she got back on a motorcycle for the first time since her brother Buddy was killed in a motorcycle accident over 70 years earlier.

Her ashes will be scattered in the Superstition Mountains where she will forever be able to look upon the desert she loved.

Sources: Ancestry.com and FindAGrave.com

02/13/2026 EJS

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/130242876/virginia_kathryn-coyle