Gloria England
Florence - Pinal County
Inducted in 2016
Gloria is a wife, mother, ranch owner, and fashion model. Her first love is ranching, and she was a partner with her son, Bob, until his death. She has been the Grand Marshal of the Florence Jr. Parade twice, fifty-four years apart.
It’s been years since Gloria England was named the first woman Florence Jr. Parade Grand Marshal in 1955, but the event was one of the highlights of her life. Fifty-four years later, history repeated itself when she was honored as the Grand Marshal for a second time.
Gloria has been described as a gracious lady with a good head on her shoulders. She has been a wife, mother, ranch owner, businesswoman, parade grand marshal, and fashion model in California. She has been involved in Arizona agriculture, having owned and partnered in five different ranches in Pinal Country. The last one she and her later son Bob ran together was The Rail S.
When Gloria was five years old, the family moved to the Kelvin area from Phoenix. Visiting her uncle’s small ranch in that area helped her develop a lifelong love of ranching.
Her father was a highway maintenance foreman who periodically moved from one part of the state to another. During her first and second-grade years, she went to a two-room school. When her father was transferred to Ray, she took the small Ray elementary school's third, fourth, and fifth grades. The next move settled her closer to Hayden, where she attended Hayden High School.
Gloria has attended ASU for two years. After leaving college, she took a job at Williams Air Force Base. “That was a real experience,” she said. “I learned more working for the Air Force than ever in college, which did me some good afterward.” The bomb group for which she worked moved to Deming, New Mexico. “Of all the places on earth, that’s the dustiest place ever made,” she reminisces. It was a different experience despite the dust. Gloria enjoyed it. The girls lived together in a barrack, and “it was fun.”
Gloria’s first husband was Jame Elkner, the father of her twin boys. Sadly, he died on the Island of Luzon during World War II when the boys were just six months old.
“After my husband died, I moved to California because a friend of my mother-in-law had a contact over there. I went to work for a fancy store and was a still model for that,” she said. “I never did get into the big time.” She was not tall enough to meet the 5’8” height requirement.
Gloria returned to Arizona for several reasons: to get her boys out of the modeling atmosphere and because she did not like living in the city.
Meeting Cecil England was almost an accident. “My uncle Ernest Bass was the foreman for the Battle Axe Ranch,’ she said. Her uncle had never married, and her grandmother lived with him at the ranch outside of Superior. She took the boys up there to get away from city life. While she was there, Cecil came up to the ranch to get some saddle horses, and Gloria went out to help him round them up. They hit it off and were soon married in 1947. The couple farmed cotton near Coolidge and raised cattle. 1958, they purchased the Rafter Six Ranch near Kearney and the F Mountain Ranch near Poston Butte in Florence. The historic F Mountain Ranch was sold in 1976.
Gloria and Cecil had purchased a tract of land the year passed away, leaving her to build the property into a fully operational ranch. In 1978, she was one of 467 women in Arizona who were sole or principal owners of ranches or farms. Gloria’s son Bob had always worked alongside her and Cecil and, following Cecil’s death in 1976, continued to partner with her. “was much too young to join a sewing circle or something like that.”
Bob died on March 30, 2015, but she remains active in the agricultural community.
Gloria has long advocated for the state's ranching industry. She was an officer in the Southern Arizona Cattleman’s Protective Association and the Winkelman Natural Resource Conservation District. She was also a member of the Cotton Wives organization and the Arizona Cattle Growers Association.
