Obituaries : * Ferne Burnes; Former Braille Typist

Ferne Burnes, a Santa Paula resident, mother, retired secretary and former Braille typist, died Wednesday after a 10-year bout with Alzheimer’s disease. She was 88.

Burnes was born Nov. 25, 1907, in St. Paul, Minn., the daughter of a construction contractor and a homemaker. She met and married her husband, Peter Burnes, in Minnesota, where he was a bridge construction superintendent and she a secretary in the state highway department.

The couple moved to Iowa in 1935 and lived there until 1972, when they retired to San Diego to be nearer their two adult children, Judy and Pete. While the children were still in college, Burnes spent long hours at a specialized typewriter translating books into Braille for blind readers, her husband recalled.

“Ferne was a perfectionist and if she made one mistake, there was no erasing that Braille,” her husband said of the raised dots on pages that the blind read with their fingers. “She’d go into the room and shut the door, and God help you if anybody bothered her.”

But Burnes was also an expert gardener and often planted flowers wherever she lived, her husband said. “You name them, she grew them. If they didn’t produce, out they came, and she’d go get another one,” he said. “I called her Flower all our married life. She had a garden any place we were that was the best in the area.”

Her daughter, Judy Munro, recalled, “She was the most moral person, I mean, she was just so good. And spunky, oh my Lord, if she didn’t like somebody, there was no doubt in anybody’s mind.”

About 10 years ago, Burnes began to show the first signs of Alzheimer’s, her family said. For three years, her husband cared for her as best he could, then she moved to a nursing home as the incurable degenerative nerve disorder took away her memory and finally her ability to speak. She slipped into a coma Monday and died Wednesday morning.

In addition to her husband, son and daughter, she is survived by three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Her body is to be donated to the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at USC. There will be no funeral or memorial services.

The family asks that donations, in lieu of flowers, be given to the Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders Assn. of Ventura County.