Florence passed away on July 20, 2025 of natural causes at the age of 98 in Payson, Utah. Florence was born on February 15, 1927 to Adam Duncan and Addie Crothers Duncan in Pasadena, California. She had two older brothers, Adam and Clarence, and a younger sister, Viola. All three passed away before her. She did not like having no one left of her family and missed them dearly.
She married Leon Gilbert Halter, who passed away in 1994. She is survived by her three sons: James, Richard and Peter. She had 4 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.
Florence grew up in Eagle Rock, California, living with her family and grandparents. At the age of 16 she dropped out of High school to take care of her mother who was dying of cancer. Her mother passed away when she was 17. She returned to High School as an adult and graduated in 1970.
Her father was an LA Police Sergeant and the only stable worker in her extended family during the depression. She remembers how they would feed everyone on Sundays. They raised chickens and rabbits and had a very large garden. She loved her mother and thought she could do anything. Addie, her mother, would organize the kids and have an assembly line for canning all the garden produce. She made the kids’ clothes including a blue velvet coat that Flo wore to school in the winter. It was the middle of the depression and Flo felt that the other kids thought she was showing off, but it was just that her mother was a very good seamstress. Her cousin, Jim Hill, lived with their family after his mother died and his father had to be an itinerant barber moving around to find work and people to cut their hair.
She spoke many times about a family auto trip across the USA in 1936. She met her grandfather and great-grandfather, who told her a story about seeing Abraham Lincoln and carved her a wooden squirrel. This grandfather died the next year and she was so glad that she had met him.
At the end of WWII, she met a recently discharged Marine, Leon, who went by the name of Pete. They eloped and were married on July 22, 1946 in Yuma, Arizona. They first lived in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania where Pete was raised, but after 2 years returned to California. She lived in North Hollywood, Encino, and Canoga Park; that is now called West Hills. She moved to Magalia, California in 2000, then to Live Oak, California in 2006. At the age of 91, she moved in with her son, Richard, in Payson, Utah.
Florence worked as a care giver and homemaker. She cared for several families’ children as a nanny. She also cared for her granddaughter, Erica, while her parents worked and after school as Erica got older. Erica and Flo had a very special bond. Unfortunately, Erica died in a horrific automobile accident on December 10, 2014. Flo said that Erica visited her after she died and told her she was doing great in heaven with her grandparents.
After Flo graduated from High School, she stared taking community college courses. She took classes that interested her not to get a specific degree. It wasn’t long before she reached the number of credits for an AA without getting a degree. She complained about having to pay extra for classes. By 1975, Flo had taken all the art and music classes offered by the college. Learning was a big priority for Flo.
She was an accomplished oil painter. When she moved to Utah in 2018, she had 173 paintings that had to be boxed up and then hung in her new home. She was a copy artist. When she saw a painting she liked, she would get a copy or take a picture and recreate them, always with her own signature and a statement that it was a copy. Often, she personalized her paintings for the person she was going to give it to. She added the Dr. Who Tardus in a granddaughter’s painting. She changed the faces of the characters to look like family members. She also painted scenes that she would pull together from pictures. Once, she wanted a seascape so she got a picture of a sea cliff and another of driftwood on the beach. She wanted it to be stormy so she found a picture of storm clouds. Then she put them all together in to one lovely painting. Another time, her granddaughter wanted a picture of a garden. She gave Flo a picture from a calendar. Flo thought it was boring, so she added a young lady in Victorian clothing tending to the garden and birds on the walkway and more flowers. She painted two copies of the paintings, one for herself and one for her granddaughter. Several times Flo painted two copies of a painting so that she could give one away and keep the other. She painted pictures on boxes, baskets and even a stool all to decorate her home.
Flo loved the piano but had trouble playing with two hands. She knew the keyboard backwards and forwards. She understood a lot of music theory and how to change keys. She knew cords, flats and sharps and all their names and types. So she started taking organ lessons so that she could “fake” her way though music. That means that she played the melody with her right hand and then just cords with her left hand. She wrote a college workbook about sight reading and understanding the keyboard. It took her five years and she kept tweaking it clear up to her death.
Lately, Florence loved making monthly trips to Dairy Queen for a Blizzard, watching TV, and playing the piano. Kind, loving, and with a heart full of charity, Flo never had a cross word, except for that old devil who kept torturing her with old age. She said that when she dies she is going to go sock him in the mouth. She was funny and gregarious. She loved people, and would meet all the older ladies in her neighborhood. She befriended the Sikh ladies in her neighborhood in Live Oak. They would go walking down the street talking away and neither knew the other’s language. She’d give them a hug and kiss them on the cheek. She loved everyone. We will miss her.
A gravesite memorial will be held at the Riverside National Cemetery in California, where she will be interned with her husband.
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