Ann Cecile Benz Scheib

Ann Cecile Benz Scheib last received regular mail in the Lone Star State as a teenager in the early 1960s. Yet despite going to college and grad school in Kansas, living in Florida for forty years, and then another decade more in Georgia, she unerringly answered the question “Where are you from?” with: The Panhandle of Texas. After her death on October 24, 2026, in Woodstock, Georgia, she has returned to Texas.

Graveside services will be 10:00 AM, November 18, 2026 in Edith Ford Memorial Cemetery in Canadian. Viewing will begin on Tuesday, November 17, 2026 at 9:00 AM. Arrangements are under the direction of Carmichael-Whatley Funeral Directors of Canadian.

Born in Amarillo on July 2, 1942, her home was Borger. Ann was proud to come from the windswept plains. No one outside her home state knew where Borger was, so “the panhandle” was an easy reference point, but also a nod to that being where Texas began, the part you hold on to. Unlike her three siblings, she was not a baby boomer, born in the early years of the war in which her dear father, Lewis Benz, was serving. Her siblings came along after the war, Susan first, then Bobbie, and Eddie last. She adored her brothers and sister as much as children as adults. Lewis was a graduate of the University of Kansas who made his living as a petroleum engineer and Ann’s mother, Cecile, was a homemaker, the two raising a family on Houston Street in an oil town where pump jacks nodded endlessly and the alchemical sweetness of crude scented the air.

When she graduated from high school, Ann matriculated to KU. She earned a bachelor’s degree and then, still uncommon for a woman in the 1960s, a master’s degree in English. There in Lawrence she met the man she swore she would never marry, a bumpkin from another small town, this one in Iowa, who was eating beans from a can with a knife and spoke with his mouth full upon their first introduction. But Ann’s roommate’s boyfriend was the roommate of this oaf, and on further meetings she found Marlin Edwin, known to all as Bud, to be intelligent and a good listener, a handsome fellow working on a PhD in speech pathology. They dated and got engaged.

After completing her master’s degree, she asked, and he agreed, for her to teach in New Mexico by herself while he completed his PhD dissertation, a year without parents, or siblings, or boyfriends, or roommates. Ann always spoke of this rumspringa as the time she truly became herself. They married on June 11, 1965. Ann’s mother, not always effulgent with praise, wrote to her shortly after: “Somehow it would seem a little odd to congratulate the groom on marrying my daughter, but secretly, knowing all your fine qualities, I think he is a darn lucky guy.”

Ann’s first son was born in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, in September of 1970. Soon they moved to Tampa, where Bud had accepted a teaching position at the University of South Florida. A second son followed in 1974, and after a few years as a homemaker, Ann returned to work. Although she had studied English, her passion was for music, and with a dearth of specialists in the county, she was able to land a job in the Hillsborough County Schools as a music teacher at Lake Magdalene Elementary despite not having a degree in music. For thirty years she taught children the basics of rhythm and melody and arranged school programs to show off her pupils’ skills; she took on private piano students too. Bud was often in her choirs, and he was her square dance partner for years. She led youth and adult choirs at St. Paul Lutheran Church and later at St. Timothy Lutheran Church, which she helped found. St. Paul had been an all-white congregation in a black neighborhood, a fact she could not square. She wanted to welcome all of God’s children, a charitable impulse that compelled her to collect aluminum cans to pay for instruments for her students, to buy llamas for poor South American children, or to leave the comfort of her church home to live as Jesus had taught.

St. Timothy was her odyssey, a church that moved locations because the lease ran out, or because there was too much crime in the area, or because the management company stopped cleaning up after wedding receptions. The congregation moved and moved. It grew, it shrank, it changed, it moved again, but St. Timothy always accepted people of all kinds, including the gay community at the height of the AIDS epidemic, the destitute, the homeless. In its last iteration, down to just six women congregants and two pastors, St. Timothy established several foster homes, one of which, Ruth House Ministries, was honored as one of President George H.W. Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light.”

After retiring, Ann and Bud moved to Thomasville, Georgia in 2010 to be closer to family and to be in a smaller city. She relished spending time with her grandchildren, gardening and cooking, and contributing to her last church home at St. Thomas Episcopal, a handy substitute with no Lutheran church in town. As Bud’s health declined, they moved again to Woodstock, Georgia, to be near son Paul, and there Bud passed in May, 2024, the sad conclusion to a happy marriage that had lasted 59 years.

Ann Scheib is survived by her sons, Paul Christopher of Roswell, Georgia, and Samuel Luther of Rockville, Maryland; daughter-in-law, Aimee; grandchildren, Zander, Ivy, Gavin, and Blakely Scheib; her sister, Susan Krehbiel of Canadian, Texas; and brother, Edward Benz of Borger.

She is preceded in death by her husband, Bud; daughter-in-law, Tracy; and brother, Robert Benz.

Bud’s ashes are spread across a verdant lawn at Luther College in Iowa. On her own once again, Ann elected to be interred in the panhandle of Texas, the place she always was from and now will forever be. May she rest in peace.