| Summary: | Interior designer Zonia Thomas Way was born Zonia Matticx on May 9, 1905 in Meridian, Mississippi. When her mother died in 1915, her father relocated to Chicago, remarried and sent for Zonia to join him in Chicago in 1918. Way was an honor student at Doolittle Elementary School and Hyde Park High School. Her stepmother, Grace Abney Garnet Matticx, was a chiropodist and a pillar of Black Belt life in the 1920s. Zonia married dentist Walter V. Thomas, and enjoyed an active social life in Chicago and Idlewild, Michigan with membership in the Douglass Chapter of the League of Women Voters, the YWCA board, the Meharry Auxiliary and the Dentists Wives Club. A widow in 1960, when she married John Way, she continued her drapery and interior design business. Way, active at over one hundred years old, was a former president of the Seniors Club of Parkway Gardens.
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