Emma Mae Tresser's Obituary
Emma Mae Wilson was born September 10, 1924 in North Platte, Nebraska to Claude Ola Wilson and Irene Clarinda (Van Cleave) Wilson. She was only a baby when the family moved to Omaha, Nebraska. She had two older brothers, Phillip Tuttle Wilson and Donald Claude Wilson and a younger sister Helen Irene Wilson. She was proud to be her daddy’s dizzy blonde. They would walk around the block and she would tell her dad all the names of all the neighbors and their children. Her dad used to say there were three methods of communication, telegraph, telephone and “tell Emmy.” She attended the First Christian Church in Omaha and was always active in Sunday School, Young People’s and other church activities. She attended several semesters at Baker University in Baldwin, Kansas and was a member of the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority there. She decided to move out to San Diego, California to stay with her aunt and uncle in 1946. She worked at Balboa Laundry & Dry Cleaning. That is where she met Kenny Tresser because his father was the sales manager there. They dated for a short while and were married on April 12, 1947 back in Omaha, Nebraska with all of Emmy’s family and friends. They lived there only a short while but moved back to San Diego because Kenny’s dad needed his sons to come and help work in his grocery store. They bought a house in Spring Valley in 1949 and there they had their four sons, Gregory William, Stephen Kenneth, Timothy Claude and Douglas Phillip. All four boys were born in 5 years from 1948 to 1953. That’s enough to drive a mom crazy and the boys swear that sometimes it did. Emmy was a homemaker for most of her life, but did work briefly managing a yardage store because she loved to sew. She sewed a lot of the family’s clothes and various craft projects. She loved to shop and always had jewelry, purse and shoes to match every outfit. She also worked a few Christmases at a toy store and probably never brought home a pay check because she just bought toys for the boys for Christmas. She was also a nanny for Carol and Eldon Andersen’s girls Megan & Katie and Rob and Roxanne Epstein’s children Elizabeth, Olivia and Joseph. She loved to bake cookies and would carefully count each one and then hide them in the cedar chest so the boys wouldn’t eat them all the same day. She was a very active and loud supporter of the boys at their Little League baseball games and they could hear her yelling for them in the stands at all of their games. In 1966 she and Kenny began to attend Skyline Wesleyan Church and there they found the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal savior. She and Kenny were involved as chaperones in the youth group there. She loved to go to church and she and Kenny also attended Faith Chapel for many, many years. They loved all the activities and the friends they made at the 55+ senior group there. Emmy loved music and songs and poetry. She could sing all the words to all the songs of the big band era and was always singing little songs and quoting poems she knew from her father. We still sing some of these songs to this day to her great grandchildren. When Emmy had three major falls in one year the doctors at the hospital told us that it was no longer safe to care for her any longer at home. She came to live at Mt. Miguel Covenant Village in January of 2010. She did not want to be there, but it was God’s gift to her and Kenny. She had so many loving, caring, Christian staff members that became like family to her. She made so many special friends here and everyone loved on her and took such good care of her here in her final community. She went to church here on Sunday the last full day of her life here on earth, went to bed that night and peacefully went to be with the Lord in her sleep around 5:30 a.m. on Monday, March 11, 2013. She was the last child of the Wilson family, having survived all of her siblings. She leave behind Kenny, her husband of 65 years, her four sons, three daughters-in-law, nine grandchildren and eleven great grandchildren.
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