Eleanor Butte – Life after being a Gypsy Coed

Eleanor Butte, 1955

After her 1937 trip, Eleanor went back to her parents farm. With the exception of a year when El lived in Peoria and worked as a domestic at the St. Joseph Home, she lived with her parents, first on the farm, then when her parents retired from the farm and moved to South Peoria Street in Bradford she lived with them there. When they moved to town, El got a job working at the Kroger store in Bradford. As a youth, she was a very good ice skater. She loved to draw, paint & repair old items. “She sculped a new hand for a Blessed Virgin Mary statue she bought at a yard sale and made it look like new.” according to her niece Cathy Moe. “She completely repainted the statue.” Her love for painting and fixing things took her into repairing and refinishing antique furniture, and for a number of years she and her sister Wilma ran an Antique Shop in Bradford, “The Green Gables”. She never married. In the mid 1950’s she would be diagnosed with breast cancer. She died in 1957, 20 years after her last trip in the Silver Streak.