Cora Cheney Partridge; Writer of Children’s Novels, Minister

Cora Cheney Partridge, feminist who wrote children’s novels and was one of the oldest women to be ordained an Episcopal priest, has died. She was 82.

Partridge, who wrote more than 20 books of fiction, history and folklore under her maiden name, died Feb. 21 of complications from a stroke in her Tacoma Park, Md., home.

Her first and most memorable book was “Skeleton Cave,” which she wrote in 1954 describing a boy who finds American Indian relics near his home.

As matriarch of an itinerant Navy family, Partridge took her four children to postings of her husband, Benjamin W. Partridge Jr., in the Philippines, Iceland and across the United States. The locales found their way into many of her 15 children’s novels, such as “The Pegged Leg Pirate of Sulu,” ’The Girl at Jungle’s Edge,” “Tales from a Taiwan Kitchen” and “The Case of the Iceland Dogs.”

Her 1977 history book (revised in 1981), “Vermont, the State with the Storybook Past,” is still in use there as a school textbook. Partridge combined history and folklore in her 1980 book “Alaska: Indians, Eskimos, Russians and the Rest.”

After her husband retired and their children were on their own, Partridge mentioned her interest in becoming an Episcopalian priest. With the encouragement of her husband, she was ordained at age 65, one of the oldest American women to do so.

Her husband followed her to assignments in Vermont, Delaware and Florida, where she helped establish rural church missions. She worked with shut-ins and the elderly, often using a portable altar a son had made from an ironing board.

In 1989, Partridge helped organize an abortion rights march of “the matriarchs,” a group of women in their 60s and 70s, in Tallahassee, Fla.

“We have lived long enough to know that women have to have the choice,” Partridge told the St. Petersburg Times. “It’s a gut thing, not something that is political, social or economical.”

Partridge was active at St. John’s Church in Tallahassee and founded St. Mark’s Episcopal Mission in that area.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by two sons and two daughters, B. Waring, Alan, Marika and Denny Partridge; two sisters and nine grandchildren.