By Joshua Benton
Blade Staff Writer
Page 13
Barbara Corbin, a Mormon who believed all Christian faiths should be united, died Friday. She was 39.
She was hit by a rail car at the North Star BHP Steel plant near Delta, where she worked.
Ms. Corbin was born and raised in Toledo, growing up on Nevada Street in a Catholic household. She had a Catholic education, finishing at Cardinal Stritch High School, and was very active in her church.
“She was very artistic,” said her mother, Norma Herman. “She would always be the one decorating the altars or doing paintings.”
But in her early 30s, Ms. Corbin decided the Mormon faith appealed to her more. “She liked the strictness, the discipline. She knew the Mormon church was right for her as an adult,” he mother said.
She became very active in her new church and devoted herself to trying to forge strong links among all Christian faiths.
“She always felt it was dumb that the churches were separate when we were all one people under Christ,” Mrs. Herman said.
So she could stay at home with her children, Ms. Corbin began an at-home day-care service, taking in up to six neighborhood children a day. Often, she took in children rejected by other services because they had difficult-to-care-for diseases like cystic fibrosis.
“If a parent couldn’t find anybody to take their child, she would take them in,” her mother said.
In 1995, she stopped her day-care business and sought outside work. In March, 1997, she began work at the North Star plant. She was a crew leader in the shipping department that loaded steel coils onto flatbed trains, then sent them on to be loaded onto trucks. She was directing those trains when she died.
Her mother said the funeral is being jointly planned by members of the Mormon and Catholic faiths. “Barb would have loved that,” she said.
Ms. Corbin is survived by her mother; father, Chuck Herman; sons, Jerry and John; daughter, Randi; former husband, John; brothers, Chris, Chuck, and Joe Herman; and sisters, Mary Brandt, Holly Herman, Rose Reese, and Margaret Billups.
A memorial service is set for 7 p.m. tomorrow at Hoeflinger Funeral Home, 3500 Navarre Ave., where the body will be after 2 p.m. tomorrow.
Funeral services will be at 10 a.m. Wednesday at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 11050 Avenue Rd., Perrysburg, where the body will be after 9 a.m.