“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” Matthew 25: 31-40
On a pleasant July Thursday in Bardstown, Kentucky a light came into the world. Born to Ben and Cleo (Ritchie) Wheatley on this day was a small girl child who would be named Elizabeth Joyce Marks. The year was 1942. The United States had entered World War Two in December of the previous year and her parents must have felt the stress and uncertainty that gripped everyone at the time. There can be no doubt though, that this small bright light brought warmth and hope to the couple. The first of six children, she would grow to bring warmth and hope to so many others throughout her life.
On January 18, 2025, that light passed from this world. Tears fell at her passing but as she had spent most of her 82 years on this earth lighting candles in others, there was no place left for shadows in the hearts and minds of those who knew and loved her. For 14 days preceding her passing, her hand was held at all times by members of her family and by friends. They sat at her bedside, there within the light between two worlds, talking to her, singing a song or two perhaps, telling stories or sharing recollections.
Though she could not speak, she would squeeze the hand that held hers. She felt the love that covered and surrounded her as she passed peacefully from this world, leaving it a better place for her presence here.
Those are the bookends of a life well spent; a life of love, generosity, and service. As is often the case, it was the life lived between those two bookends that tell the remarkable story of a remarkable woman.
Joyce Marks was raised with deep faith and a strong work ethic. Those two things would be her guiding light throughout her life of service. She would attend and graduate from Business School in Louisville and meet and marry Melvin Marks, with whom she would travel to Jackson County and with whom she would raise nine children.
In 1964, Melvin, then a student at the University of Kentucky, would read of a job opening in a church bulletin and make plans to interview with Father Ralph Beiting who had only recently established the Christian Appalachian Project to serve the people of Appalachia. The couple were expecting their first child and the due date was quickly approaching when Melvin accepted the job and the two (soon to be three) made plans to move to Jackson County.
Melvin’s degree was in agriculture, but he soon expanded his knowledge and used his expertise to encourage Beiting to purchase a sawmill to provide jobs in the area. His pay was $50 per week, and he was provided a house with running water. Joyce kept the books for the sawmill, did the billing, and performed other administrative duties for the logging operation.
“It was common that he might have one job one day and another job another,” Joyce recalled in an interview with Tina Bryson. “He was made a supervisor, and since he had a degree in agriculture and grew up on a farm, he was put over the tobacco, about five acres.”
CAP purchased a dairy farm in 1963 and also grew tobacco. George Purcell and Melvin were among CAP’s first paid employees. They worked together to make these projects successful in the creation of jobs in Jackson County, which was economically depressed.
After forming Cliffview Lodge to serve children in Jackson County, Beiting realized that the parents in the area also needed assistance. They wanted jobs “to earn their own living so that they didn’t have to be on welfare,” said Beiting in an interview with the University of Kentucky Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History in 1992.
“One of the things that I felt was essential was that we should utilize the resources of the area in the creation of jobs,” Beiting said. “The poorest of the four counties that I had was Jackson County and so my concentration went there.” (A Legacy of Service - Tina Bryson)
Joyce and Melvin would become an integral part of the Jackson County Community as they brought hope and dignity back to many. Their pay would be raised from 50.00 a week to 100.00 a week in the ensuing years and the couple would add 8 more children to the population of the county, each raised with the same sense of dignity, love and service that their parents taught them through example.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy Joyce Marks helped bring to Jackson County was the Jackson County Food Bank. Allison Marks recalls the family story, saying, “Alongside being one of the first volunteers with the Christian Appalachian Project, Joyce has been the volunteer director of the Jackson County Food Bank since its inception in 1986.
Countless people have been the beneficiary of her unending selflessness and acts of service. When donations to the food bank became few and far between, Joyce and Melvin would use what little they had in their savings to make sure locals were fed. Joyce was the volunteer director of the food bank for 40 years until her passing in January, 2025, and did not accept a single penny for her tireless work. In addition to the food bank, Joyce was an active member of Saint Paul Catholic Church, and has served in every capacity. Her faith guided all of her acts of service.”
One does not have to look far to find the stories of those whose lives were touched and changed by Joyce’s grace, unflagging energy and capacity for giving. By all accounts, she never turned away a hungry person in all her 40 years at the Food Bank, even rising in the middle of the night to carry a food box to someone in need; a box that, for all its simplicity, would fill not only a hungry belly but a hungry heart as this gesture of kindness might have been one of the few received. Adults remember her as the reason they and their children didn’t go hungry and the children remember her as well, with deep love and gratitude.
“I truly love Joyce,” said one of those children now grown with children of her own. “ She made sure I didn’t go hungry many times when I was a child.”
That story is repeated over and over again by those she served. That story is the resounding legacy of a woman whose faith and resilience guided her to always seek out ways to serve those who otherwise might receive no help at all.
At her funeral mass, held at her beloved St. Paul Catholic Church in McKee, there was no shortage of praise for this true pillar of the community.
During the mass Father Frank Brauner exhorted her family and friends to do as she did, saying that we are“to imitate Joyce as she did imitate Jesus, as we were told to do.” “Joyce treated all with dignity and respect,” he continued. “Inmates would often come to help unload food trailers and she spoke to each one with the dignity and respect deserved by all of God’s children.”
In this way, Joyce Marks brought grace into the lives of those who knew her. To her way of thinking, one should treat others with the same grace they themselves have received, not judgment. And as she believed, so she behaved.
As she was a true inspiration to many, it is hoped that the lesson of her life has been and will be well learned by her family, friends, and community and that they will carry on the mission of service her legacy reflects. In this way, Elizabeth Joyce Marks will remain with her community bringing hope, love, and a call to service to each and every one who knew her.
Joyce’s obituary appears elsewhere in this edition and gives all the particulars of who her children and grandchildren are, each of whom will carry with them always some part of her in the stories she told, in the work ethic she instilled in them, and in the love for all. She lived that love on a daily basis.
Members of her community will also carry those lessons into their days and into their actions. Perhaps Joyce Marks didn’t change the world in a grand fashion that will echo through the ages, but she changed the lives of many with her giving heart and that changed their world forever. In her humble opinion, the only way to change the world in a grand fashion is to change to lives of each individual we encounter by making true the words “even as you do to the least of these, you do also unto me.”
On the card handed out at her visitation and funeral, there appeared her perpetually smiling face along with a quote from the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. Sharing that prayer in its entirety seems the best way to sum up the legacy of service lived by Elizabeth Joyce Marks.
“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that
I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
Rest in Peace, dear Joyce, you will not be forgotten for your love abides here always. One could fill many pages with the stories of all you gave to your community. One hopes that these short lines bear out the good reflection your life has cast into the hearts of all who knew you.
Note: In honor of all Joyce has given to the people of Jackson County a Memorial Fundraiser has been established through Go Fund Me. All proceeds go to the Jackson County Food Bank where she spent many hours and days since 1986.
Scan this QR code with your phone to be taken directly to the Fund Raiser site. Donations can also be mailed to Jackson County Food Bank - 1257 McCammon Ridge Rd. McKee, KY 40447.
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