NEWSPAPER-Appalachian News-Express, Pike Co Ky funeral of Phil & Beverly Wangsness

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Submitted by Gloria Rose <gloriag@iwayne.net> Apr 1999
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Michigan couple's wish was to be buried in Pikeville

Amidst the fun, food and frivolity of the three-day Hillbilly Days festival, the Shriners 
Hillbilly clans took a quiet moment to celebrate the lives of two fallen comrades. "Auntie" 
Beverly and "Uncle" Phil Wangsness of Gwinn, Mich.'s Hillbilly Clan 101, died two weeks and 
four days apart from each another last year, shortly after attending the 1998 Hillbilly
Days festival. On Friday, the friends and family scattered their ashes in Pikeville. "It was 
kind of their wish to come out here and be buried,"  their son, Steve Wangsness of 
Sheboygan, Wis., said Friday. "This was their place. They always used to come down here for 
Hillbilly Days. ... This is their other family -- their big family." "This is our first year 
here," the Wangsnesses' daughter, Deborah Hicks, of Fairborn, Ohio, said Friday. "Mom and 
Dad, they've been coming down since '89 or '90. After they retired, they went all over the 
country at different times during the year, but they always came back here for Hillbilly 
Days." "They just had such good times and good friends and stuff," Wangsness, wearing his
father's Hillbilly overalls, said. "They loved it." Part of the appeal of  Hillbilly Days 
for the Wangsnesses, Hicks said, was the festival's devotion  to helping children. "They've 
always been involved in children's charities," she said. "They just devoted their lives to 
it." "They were really, really special people," Shriner Danny Hayes, a public relations 
coordinator for the festival, said Tuesday. "They were really good friends. Really good
family. It's just hard to describe."

By Geoff Belcher
News Editor