Betty ("Mom") descends from Hester Sheridan and Hester's husband, John Knowles, the grandparents of the poet-lauret of England, James Sheridan Knowles. Hester is the Aunt of the Irish playwright and British politician, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Mom's second cousin is Admiral Kenneth Hoeffel.

Mom loved her daughter-in-law Sue like a daughter and said that although her daughters had very good characters, Sue's character was even greater, stronger and special than their's. (Her daughter Joan derived a degree of national notoriety during the 1980s for her selflessness and self-sacrifice). Sue's character comes from her Sullivan and Slack roots.

After they met at Stuttgart, Arkansas, Mom noticed that Dad, known in the army as "Andy", had a small box clipped to the inside of his army shirt but wouldn't tell her what it was or let her see it. Finally she playfully grabbed it and noticed that it was an engagement ring. Mom then told him that she didn't think there was any way that they could marry (especially after having just met his family), but he said just wear it. The next day she was called into Col. Ryan's office, the head of her outfit and head surgeon. He immediately commented on the ring on her finger and she said, "yes, Andy." He immediately lifted up papers on his desk and ripped them in two. They were orders reassigning Mom to the Pacific where she had wanted to go to be closer to treatment of the wounded there.

Mom enrolled at the University of Detroit in 1937 and St. Joseph Hospital, Hamtramck, Michigan in September, 1939, receiving an R.N. Degree in 1943, and entering the army shortly thereafter.

Mom has a deep faith like her father and is completely selfless and kind. She is also strikingly beautiful. When she was little her siblings could not pronounce her name and they called her "Bitte Nine" rather than Betty Jane. At age 6, Mom was struck by a car as she chased a ball into a street in Detroit near Grand River and West Grand Boulevard and she was taken to Providence Hospital in Detroit with a broken leg. Her father successfully tracked down the driver and called him simply to let him know that he knew he had hit his daughter.

In her early years of grade school, a little girl in school always made derrogatory comments to others, watched Mom play the piano while she was taking lessons and commented that she had the ugliest hands she had ever seen. Mom never again played the piano.

The family moved to Monica Street in Detroit when Mom was 9 or 10. Twenty years later or so, her parents moved to 2850 Oakman Boulevard in Detroit the day she returned home from the hospital after her first child Bill was born in 1945. Mom's brother Uncle Ted had not yet returned home from the war in Europe.

Earlier, Mom's father planned to put money into the construction of a building for his company, Michigan Drilling Company, and came home to find his wife, Jessica, who we called "Ganger", had been crying. He told her then and there that the house on Oakman Boulevard was her's and he did not build the building for Michigan Drilling Company.

Mom attended St. Bridget Grade School and was taught by the Dominican nuns. She then attended St. Cecilia's High School at Grand River and Livernois in Detroit and the University of Detroit from 1937 to 1939, the most wonderful years of her life under the Jesuits. She met, and developed a strong friendship with, Otto Winzen and his family while at the Universtty of Detroit. They had escaped Germany just before World War II. (Bill Andrews was taught at St. Louis University by the former President and Chancellor of Austria, Kurk von Schuschnigg, whom Hitler had jailed. Upon Von Schuznick's invitation, Bill visited him in Austria after Von Schuschnigg retired from St. Louis University.) Otto and his wife in the late 1950s visited the Andrews family farm in Tennessee on their return to their home in Minnesota after a stratospheric balloon liftoff in Florida. Otto produced the scientific balloons that preceded Alan Shepard's flight and the space program. Otto's father was the Henry Ford of Germany. Mom's teacher and friend at the University of Detroit, Father Kuhn, said that everyone in Germany knowns Otto's father, Christian Otto Winzen, just as everyone here knows Henry Ford. Otto's mother, Lily Winzen was the sister of Franz von Papen, Chancellor and Prime Minister of Germany before Hitler. Lily Winson loved Mom, saying that Mom "looks like an Angel." Otto's brother, Hans Winzen was president of Buick Motor Company and came up with the advertizing slogan. "Better Buy a Buick." Otto's wife, Maryanne, was very religious and was being treated for cancer at the time they visited the farm in Lewisburg. They were very much in love. While at the University of Detroit, Mom also knew Roy Chapin (whose father was President of Packard Motor Company) who became President of American Motor Company.

Mom's comments about her college friend, Otto Winzen:
I was good at languages for some reason. In high school, in Latin, every year I would get an "A" because I loved languages. French, in St. Teresa's High School and in St. Cecilia's Latin. In first and second year Latin I always got an "A". I loved languages. At the University of Detroit, Spanish. Dr. Espenosa who I had at U of D said he could not believe it. He said I sat down correcting this one exam and every single answer was exactly right just as if I was copying it from the book. Spanish, Latin, French, even Italian, everything. I never took German but Otto Winzen always called me "shahtzi". I went to a German movie with subscripts and finally learned what that meant. I remember I went to a Legion of Mary breakfast and Otto came up and talked to me. And he got up to give this talk. And he said well Hitler this and that. And then he said, wait a minute. No, this is the way it is. There's not a convent standing in Germany now. And he knew he was on dangerous ground in America because people weren't getting out of Germany except through his uncle, Franz von Papen. Father Kuhn told me every man in Germany and Barvaria knows the name Christian Otto Winzen. He was the Henry Ford of Germany. His invention was the Volkswagen. Smaller and smaller and hardly any gasoline was used in it and took very little of the battery.

Otto's mother Lillie Winzen and I loved each other very much. Her brother was prime minister, von Papen. She was Lillie von Papen [but official records have her maiden name as Lillie Lerche]. Otto never bragged. He never talked about the fact that his mother was the sister of Von Poppen, the former Chancellor of Germany. Every time I'd bump into her, she'd be coming out of the convent, Mary Reporatrix, and I'd be going in.

Otto's wife Maryann was the most beautiful girl I think I've ever seen and the most wonderful Catholic. Otto was the most deeply religious person I have ever met and his wife Marion said, "the most spiritual." Otto took Marion to Oconto, Wisconsin to see Dr. Patrick O'keefe's (Betty's grandfather) residence and offices.

Otto said that his father told him never join any German club when you get to America, like the Bund. The German Bund had looked Otto up. Otto was politically naive and he joined this organization backed by the Bund and meet Vera there, who was not Catholic but German Luthern. Anyway, Otto did get a job through them and invited me to go to an evening social in a park one night sponsored by the Bund. The Bund met in the General Motors building across from the Fisher building in Detroit and I never went to anything other than this social which was in a park closeby. I met Vera, maybe not that night, but I did meet her. Otto called me one day. He said "Betty I have the most wonderful news." He said "could you ever come downtown. Just get on the bus and stay 'til the end of the line." So I got on the bus and the name of this place in Detroit is called Grand Circus Park where the buses all end. And he came up and grabbed my hand and he said, "I want to show you something." And he opened his wallet and pulled out a check. He said, "I've got a job." I don't know how much it was, but many thousands. He said, this is my first paycheck. He said, "I was so excited I couldn't come out to the house. I had to have you come here." He didn't know it but it was from the Bund; he was unknowingly employed by the Bund. It was so much he dared not leave until putting it in the bank.

And then I went into nursing and entered the Army as a nurse and didn't see Otto. He was put in as an American Prisoner of War and I lost track of, and I didn't see him. I'm getting into so many things… but anyway, America made him a prisoner of War and it saved his life. After I was in nursing, the FBI looked Otto up because of his membership in the Bund and put him in a concentration camp in Minnesota I think during World War II. Otto was transferred to a prison camp in Arkansas I think. The FBI questioned me about Otto.

Otto, when he came to our house at the farm, remember, he had the world's highest altitude record that night. After his visit to the farm he phoned me on my birthday [He remembers my birthday from the early days at U of D] and he told me he was up in a balloon and it crashed. It's hard to explain. Otto then told me that "if you hear that I died by suicide or accident, it will be neither."

Otto was the deepest Catholic. When a German has faith, it's very deep. And he knew the whole story as soon as he crashed and got back.

Mom left the University of Detroit before beginning her junior year in September of 1939. She went to the University to register, but later that same day registered for a nursing program at Mt. Carmel Mercy Hospital in Detroit instead. She left the University of Detroit because of the pressures of being very popular (elected queen of many balls and asked out very often). She received her RN degree in June 1943 and went into the Army just before Christmas of 1943 as a Second Lieutenant. She was sent to Montgomery Field, Alabama for basic training and then to Stuttgart Army Air Force Base in Arkansas in January 1944, where she met Dad, a First Lieutenant and Medical Supply Officer. They met while she was looking for the Army Post Office on base to send a letter home, and he saw her wandering around unable to find it. She then went up to solders who were German prisoners of war who did not understand her. Another officer came up and told her that they were German prisoners. Just at that moment that officer hailed an Army ambulance, which had her future husband in it, to take her to the Post Office. Dad introduced himself and, that night in pouring rain, went over to the base hospital and told Mom that he had some nice records that he wanted her to hear.

Later while Mom was on call for surgery, she and Dad went bicycling and saw a plane come straight down and hit the ground. After sounding the hospital alarm, they headed toward the plane and another alarm sounded. When they got there, four boys were sitting safely on the wings smiling as the ambulance drove up.

Dad successfully represented a soldier in a court marshall proceeding after the soldier took a plane home to visit his parents. Dad, as a lawyer, is not aggressive and that helped with the jury (officers on jury) according to Mom.

Mom and Dad met in January 1944, he proposed to her on May 1, 1944 at the nurses quarters and they were married on Saturday, November 25, 1944. Her father, Edward J. Early ("Gampa"), her mother, Ganger and her sister Joan (her brother Ted was flying in Europe), Dad's mother Stella Simpson ("Grandmother") and his sister, Aunt Sara, attended the wedding at the Army Air Force Chapel. They were married by Fr. Thomas Evans. Lt. Emil Mascha of New York was best man. They honeymooned at the King Cotton Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee for two days and then on to Nashville to visit Dad's family. Then both returned to Stuttgart. Mom stayed in the service until June, 1945 at which time she left because she was expecting William Lafayette Andrews, III, (Bill) (his name was changed to William Xavier Andrews later in life). Mom then returned home to Detroit when her husband was transferred to Alexandria, Louisana for four months, after which he was discharged as a Captain. Dad then came to Detroit where Bill, was born.

The family settled on Stokes Lane in Nashville, moved to Atlanta in 1950, Mom and the children left Atlanta for Detroit in January 1951, and then left Detroit for the Lewisburg, Tennessee farm in August 1953. Gampa bought a vacation lake house for her in Canada during her stay in Detroit and son John recalls one cold winter night leaving Lake House for Detroit with Bill in Gampa's car and their sisters, Joan and Susan, following with their mother in the "Old Grey Mare" as they called their car. Just after leaving Lake house and making the elbow turn at the river flowing into Lake Saint Claire, John looked back and noticed the headlights of the Old Grey Mare going on and off and the car did not seem to be moving. Gampa turned around and found that the Old Grey Mare had slid off of the road at the elbow turn and landed upside down on the ice covering the river. Gampa pulled everyone from the car safely.

John remembers his mother as a most loving, selfless and saintly person. She would do anything for others. When the family first moved to the farm in Lewisburg, Tennessee, she immediately had electricity put into the tenant house of Sally and Milton Evans, her husband's sharecroppers with twelve children. (Kenneth and Conslo Andrews, Dad's uncle and aunt, had lived in that house when they were first married and it was known as the oldest house in Marshall County. Mom had it torn down in 1972 and the hand-hued logs transported to the Old Hillsboro farm so that the wood could be used by Roy Wakefield of Lewisburg to add a room to the house there.) She regretted that she could not supply water to the house to save the Evans family the difficulty of having to carry buckets of water the eighth of a mile or so from the main farm house to their house. Mom recalls that in the dark of her first morning on the farm she was sound asleep when she heard Milton say loudly, "Good Morning, Mr. William!" after finishing his milking. Of their 12 children, Harvey Evans, who was 15 when the Andrews family moved to the farm, with his father, Milton, milked the Andrews' cows and did the other farm work. Harvey's twin brother, Howard, would help every now and then. Milton had worked for the railroad, but worked at the steel foundry in Lewisburg, owned by the Weaver family with whom the Andrews family attended mass, during the time the Andrews family lived on the farm. Dad and Milton split the profits from the sale of milk to compensate Harvey and Milton for their work. Harvey would get into trouble periodically and Dad would bail him out of jail. In the mid to late 1950s, men from town apparently followed the Evens boys home from a Saturday night out on the town and a fight broke out at their house. Dad woke up, went upstairs, got a machete, and stood between the Evans house and the farm house waiting. The police then came and broke things up. Milton died in 1965 when Bill and John were in their first year at St. Louis University and this affected John quite a bit because he missed the farm including the Evans family so much. After Milton died, the Evans family moved into a government housing project in Lewisburg. Every evening for a long time after Milton's death, Harvey could be seen sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of the empty house he had lived in on the farm, rocking back and forth gazing off into the distance. Then all of a sudden he no longer returned.

Another example of Mom's extreme selflessness and kindness is that she was kind to her in-laws although they appeared to hate Catholics passionately and to hate her in particular, constantly ridiculing Catholics and their mother when speaking to her children. In her eighties beginning in the mid-1990s, Mom prepared meals for Aunt Sara and took care of her when she moved in with Mom and Dad on the farm after she was unable to care for herself alone in Nashville. Joan and Susan, recall their Aunt Sara telling them when they were in first grade that their mother had died at sea during her trip to Rome with Ganger in 1955 for the canonization of Pope Pius X. The children recall their father having to take all scapulars and all religious articles from them and brief them on what not to say before visiting their Aunt Sara and Grandmother.

In the early 1950s when our family attended Mass at a vacant drive-in theater building on the Nashville highway in Lewisburg, Betty wanted to donate a piece of land at the corner of the farm to the church so that the new Catholic Church could be built there, but her husband's family was opposed to that.

Betty, always very energetic, was constantly attempting to improve the farm house, most of the time to her husband's dismay. She tore one set of walls out of the hallway leading to the bathroom between the kitchen and the bedrooms. She built new closets between the girls and boys bedrooms and put holes in the shape of crosses in the back walls of each closet for the evening Rosaries. (She would sit in the closet on alternate nights in one bedroom and then the next night in the other saying the Rosary with the children. Their father, not being a Catholic, did not join them.) She moved all of the out-buildings, such as the chicken coup which Uncle Bascum had built years earlier, the tool shed and the log cabin, away from the house.

Betty's primary concern in life was instilling a strong faith and love of God in her children, teaching them kindness toward others, even those who might have harmed them, teaching them never to touch a drop of alcohol and the importance of purity even to the point of giving up life rather than being impure.

The children's education was also very important to her. In first grade she would sit with them going over their reading lessons. She constantly corrected their spoken English and drilled them in geography and other subjects. During the summers she would work with the children on their studies so they could either catch up or get ahead.

When with boys were studying to be alter-boys in second grade, she drilled them night after night in their Latin. When the children were in Belfast Elementary School she had each of them take piano lessons and made sure they practiced an hour each day. Bill, Joan and Susan took lessons for a year and John for two years.

When John started high school, he and Bill (who had spent his first year of high school at Marshall County High School) enrolled at Father Ryan High School in Nashville. They lived at a boarding house, Blair House, in Nashville near St. Thomas Hospital the first semester and first half of the second semester, which was just a few blocks from Father Ryan. This was very difficult. The boys recall having a 25 cent tuna sandwich for lunch each day and 5 cent Crystal hamburgers for dinner.

Their Aunt Sara visited them at the boarding house early the second semester and brought bananas. (John recalls them gobbling them up they were so hungry.) Then by Spring their grandmother and Aunt Sara allowed the boys to stay at their house at 4110 Lealand Lane in Nashville. John recalls telling his mother that he would prefer not going to Father Ryan that next year, but he changed his mind later.

He recalls going out into the woods on the farm on Sunday afternoons before returning to Nashville with Louise Gillespie and sitting in a tree to ponder and soak up the farm before leaving. The next school year, Betty and all of the children except Joan moved to the house Betty's mother had given her at 1003 Tyne Boulevand in Nashville. Joan elected to stay with her father in Lewisburg while he continued teaching at Belfast. Then the following year, Betty's husband left the farm and his job in Belfast and moved to Nashville with the rest of the family. The first year he renewed his teaching credentials by taking courses at Peabody College and then began teaching at Lipcomb School on Concord Road in Brentwood.

When John bought the farm in Williamson County in 1972 with a partial loan from his mother from the proceeds from the sale of the Tyne house, her husband retired from teaching at age 52 and the family moved back to the Lewisburg farm. After not having worked as a nurse for twenty or so years, Betty then returned to nursing, initially working at nursing homes and then at Lewisburg Community Hospital on Ellington Parkway near the farm.

Her husband, William L. Andrews, Jr., loved the farm as did she and the children. He spent every summer on that farm with his cousin Paul Harris after his father had died in 1925, when he was 8. Because of his love of the farm, he did not want the children to grow too attached to Nashville by going to social activities at school, etc. during their high school years.

During the years they lived in Nashville, the children loved spending every weekend and every summer on the farm. Elizabeth's son John: "My mother is a very strong and fervent Catholic and was dominant in the home. She instilled very strong morals and values in her children, made enormous sacrifices for them and attempted to protect them from harmful influences. These influences included those coming from my father who had a love of philosophy and whose philosophical ideas were adverse to those of my mother. She feared that my father's ideas would draw the children away from the Catholic faith.

My father was brought up in the Methodist faith and found it lacking. At the time my parents met during World War II, he was not practicing any faith. He appeared to be a deist with a very strong love of God. My father is very kind and loving, yet because his father died when he was only 8 and his mother and sister, who was 8 years his senior, were very domineering, he is a reserved person. He has extremely high morals and intelligence, and I feel very close to him as I do my mother.

Because of my father's beliefs and the interference of his mother and sister in the life of our family, my mother left my father for three years when I was between the ages of 3 and 6 years. When they reunited, there continued to be difficulty over religion despite my father going to Mass with us each and every Sunday. The difficulty, however, was very tame compared to that before their separation. The friction dissipated completely when my father became a Catholic to our surprise within a few years after I graduated from college.

My brothers and sisters and I were very close throughout childhood and are close today. My brother Bill and I were almost inseparable growing up and through college and I introduced him to his wife. He volunteered to serve in Viet Nam to prevent me from having to serve upon finding that I had orders.

I have from early childhood admired, and been in awe of, my sister Joan's unwavering convictions, self sacrifice, kindness and strength of character. My sister Susan and I had a few difficulties during childhood and later in adulthood. The childhood difficulties resulted because I thought Susan was too pretty and feminine, and, as a child, I wanted Susan to be a tom-boy. The later difficulty came because I disapproved of some of those Susan dated and because I did not give Susan enough credit for having the ability to make the right decisions in life. Susan and I are very close today, and I love her very much as I do my sister Miriam and my brother David."

The first time John felt close to his father was during his sophomore year of college at Saint Louis University in 1966. Just days after the start of the semester, at 5:00 one Saturday morning, his father knocked on the door to the dorm room he shared with Bill to tell John he had received an Army draft notice. He had traveled all night via train, derailing outside of St. Louis. When Dad left, John's eyes welled up with more emotion than he had ever felt for his father, as John waved goodbye to him as he viewed him through the back window of his taxi. This trip would have been something formulated and encouraged by Mom.

The Andrews family did not have a car for a period of time after the break-down of the Packard car that Gampa had given them for their trip from Detroit to move to the farm in August 1953. A few years later after owning their own cars, their Uncle Ted gave them his car for a trip back to Tennessee after summer vacation in Detroit. Mom sold her wedding and engagement rings to purchase school books for Bill and John, who were starting first grade at St. Catherine's School in Columbia, Tennessee. Dad did not work the first year the family was on the farm, and did not work after leaving Atlanta some years earlier. The family did not have regular meals and were nurished primarily by milk fresh from the cows on the farm, honey toast and popcorn. The milk was warm with thick cream on the top that Mom stirred into it with a raw eggs each morning before school and then the children took a jug of milk to school everyday as their only lunch food, Chairs March, a year older that John, cleaning the jug every day for them of his own volition. The children never lacked nurishment and they, especially John, loved the farm life they were lucky enough to live.

John recalls arriving at the farm just after dark in August 1953 and all of the children going from shed to shed surrounding the house, looking at the chickens in the chicken coups, etc. It was so exciting. The next morning, the children got up early and went first to the "Island Field" where they saw fifty or more sheep grazing. John loved farming more than the rest of the children and, athough his mother did not want the children's childhood spoiled by having to toil on the farm, he would periodically get up at 4:00 in the morning when he saw Sally and Milton's kerosine lamp go on before they had electricity and help Milton and Harvey milk. John also loved to plant a garden each year and plow and mow the fields. The children had to leave for school between 5:00 and 6:00 in the morning since there were no paved roads between Lewisburg and Columbia. John can remember throwing-up frequently in the mornings at one particular spot in the road just before getting into Columbia. For a period Bill and John rode into Columbia with Bit Hardison in his delivery van while he picked up eggs at farms along the way. Their first year on the farm, their father would wait in Columbia until the boys, who were in first grade together, got out of school and then drive them home. When the boys started second grade and Joan and Susan first grade, their father began teaching at Santa Fe School, thirteen or so miles north-west of Columbia.

When John was seven, he woke up after about an hour of sleep in the early fall of the year unable to control his crying after he had strong feelings about being all alone someday without his parents and family. Mom took him out into the front lawn, joined by Dad, and they sat with him attempting to give him solace.

Dad loved the farm as did she and the children. He spent every summer on that farm with his cousin Paul Harris after his father died in 1924, when he was eight years old. Because of his love of the farm, he did not want the children to grow too attached to Nashville by going to social activities at school, etc. during their high school years. During these years, the children loved spending every weekend and every summer on the farm.

INTERVIEW WITH MOM DECEMBER 15, 2012:
My sister Joan, my dear sister Joan, the dearest soul in the world, and she had it very, very hard. From the time she was born she was very weak, so when it got time for school, she went to St. Bridget's, and the local schools - St. Bridget's and St. Cecilia, so when it got time that she would naturally go to college, they sent her to a Catholic, very expensive school in Canada in, the first town in Canada after you cross, we didn't go under the tunnel, after you go across the Ambassador Bridge; Assumption. My father took borings to take footings for the Ambassador Bridge and the Tunnel. But anyway, they had my sister go to school there. I think it was – I think they called it Assumption. It was all girls and the girls were taught by French nuns, and they were taught very proper behavior. They used to call them finishing schools for wealthy girls. She didn't go to college. She went to this Assumption. May I tell you this? My mother, and I even I must say, and my grandmother and my Aunt Gertrude, they favored me over my dear sister Joan. She's the dearest girl in the world. And I was too dumb to see. I loved my sister but my mother would say at night, let's take a walk. I should have, I was too dumb to realize, why doesn't she take my sister Joan. I really mean that. I just loved everybody and I just didn't think there was such a thing, know there was such a thing as favoring. And when my mother said do you want to take a walk with me, everything my mother said was gospel to me and I just couldn't think for myself. My mother would say, Betty, let's take a walk and she'd buy me an ice cream cone. My mother took me for a walk, so that was it. It was strange. Everything my mother said is what I did. My first summer vacation at U of D my mother took me to Wisconsin with her and my mother thought my father's family, the Earlys, were just second class. My mother - I'm telling you as it is now - I never heard my mother say anything nice about my father. She wasn't bad to him. At dinner he would say all I'd like is a glass of water with the meal. I never heard her say, oh, put a glass of water at your father's place. I just can't explain it. But I never remember her saying anything good about my father. My father had a very lonely home life. He belonged; Daddy was deeply religious, deeply fervent. He was a third order Franciscan. When he died he was buried in his suit and some Dun Scotis priest came to the house and they brought a Franciscan robe. It wasn't put on my father. He didn't know that. And I said that's very good of you. And he said, I'd do anything in this world for that man. That's the way people felt about my father. My mother put it in the coffin, but not in a place you'd see.

LETTER FROM BETTY EARLY TO HER FUTURE HUSBAND:

Postage
Free

Lt. Betty J. Early
A.N.C. N-790172
Stuttgart, Ark. SAAF
July 4, 1944
____________________

13637 Monica Ave.
Detroit 4, Mich.

Lt. William L. Andrews 01533246
Sec. E. 2141 1st AAF Base Unit
SAAF Stuttgart, Arkansas

Monday
July 3
13637 Monica
Detroit

Dearest Andy --

Here is a setting of music ("Now I Know") and everything nice. I'll have a visit with you. All morning we've had beautiful music. I woke up with the strains of "I'll get by" from the radio in Joan's bedroom. Then we all came down for breakfast at 9:15 am and Joan had orange juice ready for us, and we turned on the radio downstairs.

We left on the train about 7:00 pm Friday night. I took some pictures of Ruth Habig and Wanda before leaving. There were quite a few people at the station leaving on that train and it seemed that everybody knew everybody else. I saw the Haytes there at the station. There was much excitement and the station manager came out and carried the baggage to our train! I bunked in with Ruth from Stuttgart to St. Louis, and we got into St. Louis about 9:00 am. The train for Detroit left St. Louis about 9:15 am, and it got to Detroit about 11:30 pm! (St. Louis was the only change.) Mother, Dad, and Joan were at the station! Golly, it was wonderful! The station was just packed and Joan was the first one that I saw. She was in a sweet orchid suit. We got home and had chicken a la king. And there were candles on the table and flowers in the house and music! We talked around the table until after 2:00 am. The house just looked like a jewel box! It just thrilled me to see the lights from the French windows shining through the trees as we drove up. Then the front door and the knocker, and the moon shinning down on the house! And inside! .......the living room in mulberry and moss green! And the dining room with the roses and candles and table set with the mulberry luncheon set! It just seems to me I never deserved all this. Mother and Dad gave Ray and Joan a beautiful dining room set that they're keeping packed in the basement and Joan showed me the pictures of Ray she had gotten, and they're both wonderful, both the smiling and serious one! Not a thing was changed in the bedroom. It is so grand to wake up in the morning and look around to the sky blue ceiling and soft rose walls and pretty little bedroom that I love!

Yesterday morning we went to 12 noon Mass at Gesu. Then we had dinner about 2:00 pm and visited. We took some pictures which I'll send to you Thursday, Andy. Joan continually asks me about you, Andy -- I wish you were here! The silver fruit basket is kept filled with fruit -- oranges, bananas, plums, green grapes, and big dark sweet cherries!

Joan is writing Ray right now and Mother is writing Ted and I'm writing to Andy darling. Ray is in Las Vegas, Nevada for this coming month. Ted has a new assignment and is in Spaghetti country. He said "all hell has broken loose" over there.

With the radio going all the time, I think of you more than ever, Andy. "I'll be Seeing You" - "Would you Rather be a Mule," etc. Have you heard "I found You in a Dream," Andy?

Frank Davner happened to phone yesterday and explained to Joan that he wanted to be a brother to me. I could see the new Officer's club at Romulus tonight, but I' not, Andy.

Your letter just came, Andy, and I was so happy to get it. Yes, I was so sorry that I did not go down to the train with you. As we stated off in the car I said to Ruth, "I wish Andy were in the car here." Several times on the train I almost said aloud to myself "I wish you were along."

I'm so glad to be home, I don't know how to act.

Well, Andy. Good bye, hasta la vista. Right now I'm eating a plum! Yummy it's good! Chew, Chew, lick, lick, smack!

Good bye again, Honey bunny, and don't work too hard.

Yours, Betty

Granddaughter Elizabeth Andrews:

Although there have been many experiences in my life that have encouraged and inspired me to pursue a career in nursing, the most memorable and impactful experience was one I shared with my grandmother. She loved to share stories with us and I was always captivated by her stories about her work as a nurse, both in the army during World War II and in civilian life. Through her, I began to see the life changing roles nurses play within the lives of their patients. Being a deeply compassionate person, my grandmother loved to care for the dying, especially those who had no family. She felt a responsibility to be there for those close to death to bring them reassurance and comfort. Not only did she care for her patients' physical needs, but for their emotional needs as well. She loved to get to know her patients and to spend time with them. She recognized the dignity and value of her patients regardless of their background and went out of her way to make them feel cared for. Hearing her speak of the different ways she brought meaning and joy into the lives of her patients instilled in me a desire to help people just as she had with cheerfulness and joy.

Some of my academic accomplishments include being on the President's List at Cecil College with a 4.0 GPA and also becoming a member of the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society in 2015. I also received two awards for National History Day, including one for Ethical Issues in History. Additionally, through my diocese in 2015, I received the St. Timothy National Award for Outstanding Young People. Some of my interests include reading, sports (I very much enjoyed the intramural sports at Franciscan!), hiking and other outdoor activities. I also love being involved in my parish youth group and respect life group. I also hope to gain experience working in a hospital or nursing home this coming semester.

"THE ARROWHEAD FIELD" BY SON BILL:

Where my dad is laid back and soft spoken, Mom is a firecracker, a body constantly in motion whose outspoken candor and hardheadedness are perceived by many southerners as emblematic of Yankee assertiveness.

In 1918 Gampa was serving in France as a captain in army ordnance when Ganger gave birth to my mother, Betty Jane Early. Mom was born in Washington DC, during the opening phase of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive that ended the Great War. Reunited at war's end and anticipating economic opportunities in the bourgeoning automobile Mecca of southeast Michigan, Gampa and Ganger moved their young family from Green Bay to Detroit. There my grandfather founded the Michigan Drilling Company, an engineering firm that drilled and analyzed core soil samples to determine foundation strengths for the skyscrapers being built during the boom years of the Roaring Twenties. Gampa's rigorous work ethic built wealth for his family and his savvy investment sense spared him the great economic losses visited on so many other families during the depression.

During the late 1930's, Uncle Ted and Mom attended the University of Detroit, a Jesuit institution similar to Gampa's alma mater. Uncle Ted followed in Gampa's engineering footsteps and Mom majored in the liberal arts as had her mother... Mom was enjoying an active social life at U of D where she was a popular coed, a class officer, and a sorority sister in --- ---. Twice her peers elected her Snowball Queen for the university's biggest social gala. In old black and white photos and newspaper clippings collected by Ganger, Mom is always shown with a coterie of young men flocking about. In these time-capsule portraitures, she reminds me of Vivian Leigh's rendition of Scarlett O'Hara in the opening scenes of Gone with the Wind, with potential beaus flittering around her, solicitous to the point of sycophancy. One of Mom's beaus was Otto Winzen, an anti-Nazi German student who remained in the United States during the war, became an American citizen, and later gained renown as the inventor of high altitude balloons for scientific exploration of the ionosphere.

In September of 1939 when World War II erupted in Europe, Mom was enjoying an active social life at UD and Dad was in law school at Vanderbilt. A year later, as part of a preparedness program, Franklin Roosevelt inaugurated the first peacetime draft in American History and Dad was the first young man conscripted from Vanderbilt. The army permitted him to finish out the academic year before entering military service. He was one year shy of finishing law school when he entered the army.

Unlike many of their generation, neither of my parents was much affected in the quality of their lives by the Great Depression. It was Pearl Harbor that transformed frivolous and carefree youngsters into serious and responsible adults. Uncle Ted, Mom's brother, joined the Army Air Corps and after training piloted a B-24 Mitchell bomber in the European Theatre. He fell for an English girl, Katherine Thomas, and named his plane "Kate." Eventually he married her and brought her back to Detroit where my grandmother, long an aficionada of English manners and customs, treated her like royalty. Mom dropped out of the University of Detroit at the end of the spring semester in 1942 and entered St. Joseph Hospital's nursing school where enrollment soared due to the war's demand for medical personnel. She was recruited by the army at her graduation in the summer of 1943 and began basic training at Montgomery Field in Alabama in January of 1944. Her first duty assignment in March of 1944 was to the main hospital at Stutgartt Army Air Corps Base in Arkansas' rice and duck hunting country.

The 1940 draft that snared my dad was the first peacetime draft in the nation's history. It was a war preparation measure because things looked so bleak for England. The Battle of Britain was not going well and England was running out of funds to pay for the Cash and Carry provisions of the 1939 US Neutrality Act. At the time Dad got his draft notice, Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented third term on a platform that called for loaning England our planes and tanks. To promote his Lend-Lease program, Roosevelt used the example of the neighbor asking to use the fire hose. Dad was inducted into the army on 16 July 1941, one year shy of graduating from law school and five months prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Mom was still a college student in Detroit when Dad entered the service. He received his basic training at Camp Lee, Virginia, and advanced training at Camp Barkley near the Texas town of Abilene. In mid 1942 he was sent to Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania for Officer Candidate School where he received his commission as an officer in medical administration. After a brief stint at the military hospital in Columbus, Ohio, Dad was transferred to Stuttgart Army Airfield in Arkansas where he spent most of the remainder of the war. However, in late 1943 he applied to aviation school and was sent on temporary duty to an airfield near the Davis Mountains of southern Texas to learn to pilot an aircraft. He trained in an old Fairchild biplane and was already flying solo when he experienced a near collision one day. The incident occurred when he was on a flight with an instructor whose job it was to certify him. Dad was in the front seat of the cockpit when he saw an approaching aircraft ahead of him. In the confusing sounds of rushing winds swirling around the open cockpit, the instructor yelled or signaled to Dad in a way to suggest that he was taking the controls. Apparently the teacher didn't see the plane and thought Dad had the controls. It was a near miss and such a traumatic moment for Dad that he washed out and, to this day, flies infrequently. In fact, over the past sixty-two years, Dad has only flown three times as a passenger on a commercial aircraft and then only with white knuckles gripping the armrest. I find it interesting to speculate that if my father had not washed out in February of 1944, he never would have returned to Stuttgart to meet my mother and to father the child who would be I.

Back in Arkansas doing medical administrative work, he was called upon once to assist in a special court martial case where he had to work as an assistant defense council for a homesick soldier who had gotten drunk and stolen a plane for a flight home. Although not a pilot, the young man took the plane up and actually manage to land it without much damage. It was a cut and dried case with a sentence of about six months in the brig. Because Dad was within a year of graduating from law school, officers in the judge advocate division prevailed upon him to help in the case.

It was at Stuttgart that my parents met in the spring of 1944 when Mom was assigned to the post hospital as [chief] surgical nurse caring for the medical needs of young soldiers wounded in the Pacific Theatre. They met under circumstances not uncommon for men and women far from home in the midst of a global war. On the evening of her arrival at Stuttgart, she ate with the other base nurses in the Officer's mess where she was introduced to Dad and the other male officers at the hospital. The next day after work, she was walking around the base looking for the post office where she planned to mail letters home. She got lost because nearly all the buildings looked alike – the long, white, wood-framed one story structures characteristic of military structures during that war. At one point she noticed a large group of men in overalls on the other side of a fence and she approached them to ask for directions. They enthusiastically offered assistance, although in such heavy accents that she had trouble understanding them. About this time an officer approached her in a jeep and asked her if she needed assistance. The first lieutenant in the jeep was my Dad and he took her to her destination. He also explained to her that the group of men with whom she was fraternizing was a detachment of German prisoners-of-war. My mother was unaware that Stuttgart was not only an army air base but also a large POW facility. She was immediately struck by my Dad's easy, soft-spoken ways, his intelligence and his sense of humor. They were an attractive couple.

Not long after they began dating, an assembly was called for all hospital personnel where the commanding officer, Colonel Ryan, notified everyone that large crates of oranges were disappearing from the hospital at a prodigious rate. Dad informed on my mother, explaining that his girlfriend was manually squeezing the oranges into pulpy juice and serving the patients. She was a big believer in the efficacy of vitamins and none of the recovering patients on her ward lacked for Vitamin C. When Dad told me this story I was not surprised.

Throughout the childhood of me and my siblings, Mom had a propensity for filling our glasses to the brim with orange juice. For as long as I can remember, she force fed us this juice and justified the routine by citing health benefits. Interestingly she was doing the same thing in 1944 for those seriously wounded soldiers of the Pacific Theatre.

Photographs I have of my parents during their courtship at Stuttgart reveal of couple smitten by love. They met in March of 1944 and were married the following November at the Riceland Hotel in Stuttgart, in a private ceremony whose simplicity was in keeping with wartime restraint. When in February of 1945 Mom learned that she was pregnant, she applied for separation from the army. It took a month for her papers to be processed and in March she left for Detroit to live with her parents, to prepare for my birth, and to await my father's separation from the military. While my parents wrote love letters to each other and spoke of a bright future devoid of kaki and regimentation, world events were moving with inexorable momentum toward the conflict's finale. By the time Mom reached Detroit, American soldiers had just crossed the Rhine and were racing into the heart of Germany while Soviet troops were smashing into Germany from the East. Within weeks Franklin Roosevelt would be dead and two weeks later, at the end of May, Mussolini and Hitler would be history.

Soon after Mom left for Detroit, Dad was transferred to Exler Field outside of Alexandria, Louisiana, his final duty station. He was still in medical administration under the command of Major Ghatti, an army officer and a physician. Dad lived on base in a canvass-roofed hooch for about a month until Mom arrived by train from Detroit after which time they rented a room in a private home in nearby Alexandria and took their meals together in town. By the time she returned to Detroit a few months later, war news was bright and Dad could sense that he would soon be out of uniform. The war in Europe was already over and the conflict in the Pacific was nearing its conclusion. Dad knew that because he had been in service since July of 1941 – five months before Pearl Harbor, he would benefit from an expeditious demobilization.

I was born at Grace Hospital in Detroit on 14 November 1945, three months after the end of World War II. Dad was visiting Mom in Detroit at the time of the birth and, while on leave, helped my maternal grandparents move into their new and imposing home on Oakman Blvd. Their previous dwelling on Monica, two blocks away, had been my grand-parents' residence since 1926. The new home was a large structure, a mix of Tudor and Gothic in architectural style, with a large garage that Gampa converted into an office for his Michigan Drilling Company. At the time of my birth, Dad had only one more month left in the army.

Dad left the army as a captain in early January of 1946. As he was in a hurry to complete law school, he reapplied to Vanderbilt only to discover that in the dislocation of war the law school was temporarily closed. He decided to finish his last year at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and rented a room for us in a spacious private home that before the war was a Catholic retreat house. There were only two rooms available for rent and the other one went to a first year law student who lived with his new bride. Like Dad, he was a veteran taking advantage of a very generous GI Bill to pay for tuition, books and living assistance. I was only two months old at the time of our move to Tennessee and, of course, have no recollection of the eight months we lived in Knoxville. Mom's prodigious affection for photography, however, gives me a visual record of that time and, as always the case with the first-born, most of the pictures were of me. While Dad was in class, Mom carried me on walks into the fields behind our house to experience nature. On weekends there were picnics with cows grazing in the background. One photograph on the front porch swing shows me offering a graham cracker to my mother. To this day I still am in the habit of dunking graham crackers into milk. We lived in this bucolic setting of Knoxville until Dad got law degree. In a graduation photograph with Dad in cap and gown holding me and with Mom's hand on her husband's arm, my parents looked happy and contented.

It was obviously a time of optimism with the war over, couples getting married, a baby boom beginning, and feverish spending after four years of national thrift and rationing. A photograph of the University of Tennessee's incoming class of 1946 reveals something of this optimism in the expressions of male students registering for courses in coats and ties. Their dress and demeanor reflects a class of men who were older, more conservative and more serious than the typical incoming class of college students. They were, like my Dad, veterans returning to school on the GI Bill. This was the so-called Greatest Generation, young men who didn't complain about tough course loads and intimidating professors because life was now gravy for them. Just months earlier they were sleeping in fox holes, experiencing combat, and distant from families they loved.

With a law degree under his belt in September of 1946, Dad moved Mom and me to Nashville where he planned to study for the bar exam and look for a house. As was typical across the country, housing was in short supply after the war and we were forced to live with Grandmother Andrews and Aunt Sara for several months. Dad could not practice law until after he took the bar exam so he worked in management for Southern Bell at the company's Nashville office. Mom was pregnant with a second child, Dad was studying and working, and tensions began to grow between Mom and her in-laws.

Aunt Sara and Grandmother to an extent exhibited the stereotypical Southern WASP prejudice against Catholics. To make matters worse, Mom was a strong-willed Northerner who seldom let slights or barbs go unanswered. Aunt Sara and Grandmother let Mom know that they disapproved of her being pregnant again when Dad had not yet obtained a position in a Nashville law firm. They not only communicated their dissatisfactions to Dad, but in the subsequent decades they would also tell me and my siblings repeatedly that it was my mother who stifled Dad's ambitions and saddled him with too many children. The friction never ended. My earliest memories of Aunt Sara coalesced around the toy drawer she opened for me and her animated denunciations of my mother. Into adulthood I got along well with my aunt and grandmother because I generally didn't come to Mom's defense and simply remained silent during their denuncations. My more undiplomatic sisters, however, were much more willing to defend Mom and, in consequence, always remained emotionally at arms length from Aunt Sara and Grandmother.

January 1947 was a good month in the history of my family. My little brother John was born on the same day that Dad received word of his passing the bar exam. This was also the month that we moved into a home of our own on Stokes Lane. The house, in the Belmont area of South Nashville, was a convenient five minute walk to Christ the King Catholic Church where Mom attended daily mass with her children and about six blocks from Grandmother and Aunt Sara. During the three years we lived in our little yellow-stone home on Stokes Lane, two additional children were born to my parents. By the end of the decade, I was one of four children. My sister Joan was born in 1948 and my sister Susan was born the next year.

Because we were so close in age – only fourteen months apart – we were never lonely. Mom remained home to dote on us and Dad continued to work in management at Southern Bell. He never practiced law. To this day Mom claims that it was because Dad did not like the contentious nature of law practice and even Dad admits that his distaste for law stemmed much from its proclivity to win cases rather than to seek truth. To this day, I don't believe Dad regrets his decision to eschew law as a career.

Our little home on Stokes Lane was a protective wonderland for me and my three siblings. We enjoyed a tree-shaded fenced-in back yard that we called "Never-Never Land." It was a perfect life for children growing up and we were never in want for attention and adulation from our parents. There was stress whenever we visited Grandmother and Aunt Sara but it was not because we were sucked into the verbal crucible of denunciations against our mother. We were too young at that time. However, as the oldest of four children, I can remember by 1949 that Dad would often have to endure the diatribes against Mom – her Catholicism, her affection for having many children, and her hard-headed unwillingness to take advice. By the end of 1949 I can remember that after our weekly visits to Grandmother and Aunt Sara, loud and animated arguments would ensue at home. Mom refused to accompany us on these visits and Dad was torn between loyalty to his family and loyalty to his wife. We felt loved but we could also sense the tensions aroused by the animosities of our mother and her in-laws.

Chapter Five Uncle Sam and Viet Nam: First Draft

The summer of 1967 was one of the most fruitful when it came to arrowhead hunting. It was also the season of much reading. As was the custom inaugurated back in high school, I would take an hour or two looking for arrowheads and then, to cool off, head for the spring, kneel on the bedrock at the deepest end of the pool, and, as doctor fish and crawdads scurried for safety, dipped my upper torso into the cold water. Then I would grab a book and knock off a chapter or two before returning to the field. By this summer I began to use a golf iron to break up clumps of dirt while looking for arrowheads. Where I acquired this iron I cannot recall as no one in my family played golf.

No longer thinking about college, I was reading for fun and I went through the books with an earnestness which came from sheer pleasure. The entire family was on the farm that summer with the exception of John who was at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, finishing up his training in ground control radar. There was a great void that summer without John and the entire family seemed diminished in its collective vigor from a pervasive anxiety. Vietnam was on everyone's mind if not on their lips.

I also thought of our family vacation the previous summer. Dad had gone west on an ambitious camping trip with the four older children in our white '65 Impala. The heavy canvas umbrella tent and sleeping bags were strapped to the roof and cooking gear was in the trunk. We saw the Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs, visited the Custer Battlefield in Montana, and hiked around Mt. Rushmore and Devil's Tower. Camping out each night in state or national parks, we followed a rudimentary agenda set by Dad to entertain and educate us. The majestic Rockies, in particular, stood in stark contrast to the older and more familiar Appalachians.

When Dad took us to Rocky Mountain National Park, John and I got the notion to scale Long's Peak, at 14,000 feet one of the highest in that cordillera. We began early in the morning, leaving Dad and the girls to watch the wedding of Lucy Baines Johnson, the president's older daughter, on the miniature B&W battery powered TV which Dad brought for his never-to-be-missed Huntley-Brinkley newscasts. John and I reached the mountain's boulder field by mid-afternoon and, although winded easily from the thin air, enjoyed a snowball fight at a slightly higher elevation. By dusk we stopped directly under the last leg of the climb realizing that without pitons and ropes, scaling the summit would be hazardous in the dark. We rested until darkness descended and viewed the distant lights of Denver. It was peaceful and serene up there, reminding me of the poem by World War II pilot _____ Campbell airing frequently on television like a soap commercial. " …I can "reach out and touch the face of God." This would prove to be the last summer in many years before John and I would share such a sublime moment.

So now a year later I was looking for arrowheads and finding them by the score each day. One of the books I devoured that summer was "The Arrogance of Power" by Arkansas Senator J. William Fullbright who had acquired the reputation of a hardhitting war critic in his role as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I also read William Lederer's "A Nation of Sheep," Dostoesvski's "The Idiot," William Manchester's "Death of a President," and Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native." I also finished William Shire's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," a book which I began early in my sophomore year at St. Louis [see friend Kurt von Schuschnigg] but which I had abandoned due to required assignments and Joan's request for it. She had the bulky volume read within weeks.

Although only a year away from graduating with a major in political science, my interest was increasingly moving toward history. I could see this change most dramatically a year earlier in my SLU political science classes with Drs. Legeay-Feueur and Daugherty. Now in the arrowhead field, I could remember the historical anecdotes they employed to illustrate the theories that had been long since forgotten.

We heard that John, as he was finishing up his training in New Jersey, would be reassigned soon and it was anyone's guess where. I spoke to Joan and Susan about a quick trip to see John, got the OK from Mom and Dad, loaded up the VW bug, and took off with Joan and Susan on another fine adventure, my last before leaving for the army myself.

Fort Monmouth provided family visitors with special quarters at a very reasonable rate so we did not have to break out the tent and camping gear. John was free after 4:00 each weekday and we had an entire weekend together. Once John invited me into his workstation and introduced me to some of his classmates. Without thinking, in a sector of the high tech satellite and communications center, I took a flash photo of John standing in front of some highly classified equipment. It didn't dawn on me until later that it was the Ft. Monmouth soldiers who came under investigation by Senator Joe McCarthy for treasonable espionage thirteen years earlier.

We spent the weekend with John at Asbury Park and its beaches. Susan had a little romantic fling with a young man by the name of Jeff Goldstein whose mother was proprietor of a shop on the boardwalk and Joan served as an invited chaperone. John and I flirted with two girls who looked great in their bathing suits but who were too young to take seriously. Interestingly, the girls spoke about how they supported the right of women to have an abortion. I had never considered the subject before and I frankly cannot recall the conversational tangent that conveyed us to this topic. I remember them telling us that they were Reformed Jews.

If it was an idyllic weekend at the beach, what I saw at the military installation gave me some reason for trepidation. For one thing, John hated his military service and was extremely homesick for family and St. Louis University friends. He had the sense that he was wasting time, not learning much, and constantly subject to the whims and machinations of superiors whose only claim to authority was an extra stripe or a little more time in service. It was an inauspicious introduction to the life that awaited me.

Looking back on it, I must confess that we were all aware of college deferments and we knew that all it would take was a letter from Father McGannon, Dean of Students, to verify our status as students in good standing at an accredited university. But we never went that route. Perhaps we should have but I speak from present prejudices and predilections. In fact, John and I had talked of this before. We felt that many people were flocking into colleges and universities all over the country for the wrong reasons. College had become a haven for many young men who, except for the fear of Nam, would otherwise have been content elsewhere. And conversely, many young men were fodder for the cannons with SAT scores too low for college admissions or, if sufficiently endowed with intelligence, with insufficient financial resources to afford a higher education. Of course, this was before the days of inexpensive and accessible community colleges or readily available tuition assistance. The irony was the Higher Education Act, a Johnson priority for his Great Society agenda, was being trumped by the president's increasing obsession with the war. As Johnson later said "The Great Society was the woman I really loved and the war was the bitch who…" - well you know the rest.

In any case, we felt the draft was inherently unfair, favoring the rich and the well connected and victimizing the poor and academically unprepared. ..

There were other reasons for our unwillingness to seek deferment status. Admittedly John and I were both getting a little bored with school and we also knew that Mom and Dad were making some very real sacrifices for an education which we ourselves could not appreciate at the time. Perhaps we were ready for some travel and adventure which, in our naiveté, did not include combat zones. And there was another reason. Mom and Dad had both been officers in the Second World War and had served their country selflessly. I cannot speak for John but, as for myself, I did seek parental approval and thought that to make a dramatic appeal before the draft board in Nashville would look cowardly. Such are the concerns of uncynical youth and I suspect there were many others who enlisted in those years for reasons of parental or peer approval.

I entered the army on 21 September 1967 with little fanfare, waving goodbye to my family as my olive drab bus left the Nashville induction center for Fort Campbell near Clarksville, about an hour's drive north. I recall that there was little talking on the drive up. Few people knew each other and most, I suspect, were like me spending the time reflecting on an uncertain future. Most of the men were young draftees.

Basic training was not the culture I had anticipated. Living for two years in a men's dorm at college was an experience that imparted some important social and survival skills. There was a decided pecking order which was obviously based on physical prowess but there was also – and this came as a surprise to me – respect shown for intelligence and common sense. The shock for me was the extent to which boys in my company were physically unfit. Many had difficulty on the obstacle course. Many feared heights. Many were easily exhausted by the rigors of forced marches and bivouac. The fact that John and I during high school and college routinely ran ten to twenty miles cross country – and this was before jogging became a popular fashion – made the marches easy. On the mile race under full backpack, helmet, boots and M-14 rifle, I was always one of the first to reach the finish. I actually enjoyed the obstacle course and felt that my years playing tennis helped with balance and coordination. When we crawled through the mud at night, negotiating our way under concertina wire and machine gun tracers over head, it was no big deal. In fact, it was sort of fun.

On our first day at the rifle range, we were ordered to fire live rounds at a target just thirty meters away to scope in our M-14 rifles. I was told to fire three shots at the target and retrieve it. When the drill sergeant looked at mine he stopped and told me to put up another paper. I was told to fire three more shots. I did. After the third sequence, the DI took my paper targets and walked over to the other instructors. Whatever he told them, they all looked over at me. In each of my targets, the pattern of three shots all could fit within the size of a dime...

My most anticipated visit came from John as my eight weeks of training were drawing to a close. He was a PFC stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado, and he told me about his adventures and adversities. He was taking classes part-time at the university there and he told me about how he ran into Olympic skater Peggy Flemming at the school library. In retrospect, I believe that John suffered much more than I did from the harassments and humiliations from the army's pecking order, and the arbitrary edicts of petty, small-minded men with a power they could never expect to exert in the fluid and freewheeling civilian world. When John and I shook hands as he was about to leave, I could not control it, hard as I tried, but my eyes watered up and I had to turn quickly away before I embarrassed myself more. I remember thinking what a good brother John was. He was the most sensitive of my siblings, the one who broke down and cried when Milton Evans, our black sharecropper, died. Years later when Ganger died, it was John who broke down and sobbed. The irony was that Ganger always showed more favoritism toward me, showered me with more gifts, and requested that I be the one to stay with her in Mobile. Of all my siblings, it seemed at the time that John had the greatest capacity for sentiment and yet, like Mom and my sisters, was also somewhat disinclined to compromise. These traits would make the regimentation of military life very difficult for him.

From: William Andrews
Sent: Monday, December 26, 2016 6:53 PM
To: Andrews, John (DC); David; dandrews
Subject: Mom and Dad

Hi John and David. I was playing tennis this afternoon in Lewisburg and one of the players was Les Woodard. When he said that his sister is a nurse at the nursing home near the Recreation center, I told him that my mother worked there for a time. His mouth dropped. He asked "Betty Andrews?" When I said yes, he said he remembered her and that Mom would have Daddy come over to play the piano at the nursing home. I never knew Daddy did this. He said he loved Mom and Dad. When I told him that Mom was 98 and living with our sister, he said "amazing." And then he said that our Dad lived to a ripe old age. I told him he was a few months shy of 89 and that he would be 100 now if he were still living. Did you know that Daddy played at the nursing home at Mom's request? John, when you see Mom again, ask her about it. I'm surprised that I didn't know this bit of info. WillyX

Comments by Betty's grandson John Patrick Andrews to his Dad, April 2017: But I do want to be like you. I want to be so strong that I can do everything I have to - sleep, food, comfort, who needs it? I want to be able to put others first consistently, instinctually. I want to be able to recognize the beautiful Spirit of God - in people like grandmama, mom - and I want to be able to keep them in my life. I want to be honest, especially when it's hard.

Mom sold the family's Tyne Blvd home in Nashville in 1972, bought 207 acre farm from Joe Dickinson and she and her family moved back to their farm in Lewisburg.

Monday July 17 - 1972

Beloved John -

Your check for $1,487.00 just came in the mail & I am depositing it immediately. Thank you. I am very grateful that you would clear out the bank there & will also send each pay check through Aug. 15th.

Tyne Closing is August 12 and our meeting with Joe Dickinson will be August 17th (my birthday) after your Aug 15 check arrives. Please, dear John, send every penny you can scrape up. I know you are.

John dear, Daddy thinks you should try your first years to make your money off of the land __________ since you made this huge investment in your farm. He thinks if you work at some regular job like (well, even sales at Friden). You can put each pay-check in beef cattle . That is a big investment & will double every year if you start out buying only springing heifers.

Daddy said since you bought the farm, it's right to make your money that way. He said you can rent your tobacco base each year & make $1500.00 that way too. Beef is big money.

Daddy said construction would take a huge investment, and he said the farm was big enough for you to invest in. He thinks you can really make a real thing of beef cattle if you put even a selling or teaching or modest monthly salary in it. If you set aside your salary each month.

You cannot believe how beautiful our farm is becoming with Daddy working with the side-winder every day. We will have wonderful grazing land.

GOD BLESS YOU. Bill loves Mexico. Daddy, Joan, Susan, Dave, Miriam.

Joel and Mariah (horses) are perky and happy.

Chuck H. Spell:
John, on a whim, I read about your father... what I read was Very Touching. I'd have to say, your father had to be a Great Southern Man, as Great Southern Men go. Seems he was a very positive role model, and a Very Good Man. And Yes, John, I do firmly believe your father is in Heaven.

Sounds like you grew up on a Family Farm, as did I. I've done everything you can do on a Family Farm except String Tobacco and Pick Cotton. But my Mom string tobacco as a girl and my father picked cotton – so I think I am still covered in that respect.

On your father's side you have a connection to a former Commissioner of the IRS. NOW THAT IS VERY INTERESTING!!!! considering where I ended up working right after I finished at the College of Charleston in 1986.

Prentiss Andrews :
I wanted to say that my wife and I were very moved by your brother's fine memorial to your father. We have lost our beloved parents and had to try to hold back our tears when reading his piece.

Prentiss Andrews
Denton, Texas

Daughter-in-law Sue was staying with Mom at a time during about 2012 or so and Mom asked her to open the curtains to let a little light in. Sue told her that the curtains were open. Mom responded by saying, I really am blind then!

Daughter Susan recalls being in the back year at her grandparents', Gampa and Ganger's, house in Detroit when her brother Bill came out and said, "Our Daddy is here." Susan replied, "Of course he's here." Bill said, "No our real Daddy." Susan said, "Gampa is our real daddy." Right after this a tall, skinny man came out and hugged her and Susan was stiff and didn't know what to think. This is the first she remembers of her father.

Susan also remembers the first day at the farm as her sister Joan spent hours chasing all of the chickens all over the yard and then putting them all into the car because she wanted to bring them back to Detroit with her. Her parents asked her why she had done this and told her that the family was not going back to Canada or Detroit. One of Susan's first memories of the farm that first week or month was a windy stormy night when the corn had to be harvested and put into the barn before the rain. The corn was in the field beyond the corn field and arrowhead field near the high field in the field with the sink hole in it. The corn was huge. The boys from the Eavan family, the black tenant family who lived on the farm, Harvey and Howard, were out there, but not Milton. The tractor lights were on against the wind and the oncoming rain and it was beautiiful, but Susan was afraid she would get lost in the rows of corn if she let go of her mother's apron. She also remembers a chicken named knotthead that would always run into fences. Susan thinks he was mentally ill and that he was the one who fell into the pond and got frozen. Joan carried him around in her pocket for two days and he recovered but was never the same again. She remembers Suzie her cow who fell into the sink hole to the side of the house and Daddy pulling her out with the tractor. She never seemed to grow more after that. Susan's memories of Lake House in Canada were the water and the wind blowing against the water at night. She remembers the well in the shape of a hand pump. Her mother had a garden that a farmer tilled for her and Susan was out there with her mother eating a sandwich. Susan was playing in dirt and found a grub and called to her mother, "look." Her mother said "eat it" every time Susan said, "look Mama." Just as Susan was about to put the grub into her mouth, her mother screamed and Susan dropped it. She remembers really feeling bad when Bill and John burned Gampa's bus. She remembers them getting into trouble and hiding, and she remembers crying and hearing the fire engins and hearing Bill and John cry or get scolded by Uncle Ted. She also remembers Uncle Ted taking her out on his motor boat on a place in Detroit like Old Hickery Lake in Nashville. Only Susan, Jamie and Uncle Ted were there. Susan thinks she fell into the water and couldn't breath and she remembers being afraid of water after that. Susan remembers floating on the water head down at Lake House in Canada and being able to hear things such as the sound of the water but being unable to do anything. She remembers she and Joan getting lost in Detroit and a policeman bringing them home. The man sat on a store counter and gave them an ice cream cone. Joan kept saying, "2850 Oakman Blvd," over and over, but he couldn't understand her since she spoke so fast. The policeman put her on the counter at the restaurant and then Susan told Joan that she could find the way to the school where their mother had gone to take Bill and John to school (St. Bridget's). In Canada Susan and Joan got lost and mounted police brought them back.

When Susan and Joan were 4 and 5 and their mother had taken a ship to Europe with their grandmother, their Aunt Sara told them that their mother was dead; that she had drowned. Up until 4 or 5 years ago (1998?)Joan and Susan had never talked about this. One time Susan had talked to her father about putting the farm in her mother's name also because if he died Aunt Sara would get the whole thing. So after Susan built the Chalet on the farm, she told Daddy that not also putting the farm in Mama's name wasn't a fair thing to do to her mother. This was after her father had collapsed at Mass while playing the organ. So her father said that the farm had nothing to do with her mother. That his father had given it to him and his sister and it had nothing to do with Mama. Susan told Daddy that when they moved to the farm, it looked like a trash farm because it had all those barns around the house and the upstairs had corsets and snake skins and it was real messy. There were chicken coops, the smoke house, the kitchen of the original house that had burned down that was used as a garage and old barns. She told Daddy that every night and all day long while Daddy was at school, Mama would pull up all those bushes that had stalks like trees and red berries. She would pull them up by their roots. And every night when everyone got home from school, they would have a bonfire. And now it looks like a park and that Mama made it look like that. "How can you say it has nothing to do with Mama?" Aunt Sara has never lived there one day in her life. To prove her point, Susan said she had never told anyone this before, but Aunt Sara really hated Mama. (Susan felt that her grandmother had talked Aunt Sara into hating Mama). Susan's father said that wasn't true. To prove it, she told him that when she was 4 years old and Joan 5, when Daddy brought them to Aunt Sara's house, and Daddy left Bill and John there for a week and then Susan and Joan there for another week, one night when Joan and Susan were playing on the floor and grandmother was sitting on one recliner and Aunt Sara on another, Aunt Sara called them over to her chair and showed them a picture of an oceanliner in the newspaper. She said, "look your mother's ship sank and your mother's dead." Joan grabbed Susan's hand and pulled her into the bedroom as Susan was crying and told Susan that Aunt Sara was lying, that she hates Mama and Mama wasn't dead. So, years later, Daddy told Susan what Susan had said about Aunt Sara was a lie, that it never happened. Susan was so shocked that Daddy called her a lier than Susan said, "Daddy why do you choose to believe Aunt Sara instead of us? You've never stuck up for Mama and act as if Mama is wrong. If you don't believe me, ask Joan. She was older at five and she'll tell you." Joan and Susan had never talked about it. It was raining the night Aunt Sara said this and Susan remembers everything about it. Joan said, "Come on, we'll run away." They took some toys they had been playing with and an unbrella. A couple days later after telling Daddy this many years after it happened, Susan picked Joan up at airport and said, "Joan do you remember? Daddy says I am lying." Joan replied, "Of course I remember." Then Joan told Susan things about that weekend that she didn't even remember. Susan asked how did you know that Aunt Sara was lying. Joan said, "I didn't, but I knew how much Aunt Sara hated Mama and just hoped she was lying." Joan said that Daddy never asked her about this as Susan had asked him to do.

Susan's memory of her brother Bill is playing in Bill's barn and Bill saying Teddy (his teddybear) could do anything. She remembers that John pulled out Teddy's eye to prove that he wasn't real. Bill said that Teddy was so incredible that he didn't need an eye to see. Bill told the story that he himself had really been reincarnated. That he was a civil war soldier and that his grave was that big obolisque monument on top of the hill in Columbia just before St. Catherine's School on West 7th Street. The other children wanted to believe him because he was such a great storyteller. Later they found out that the monument was to a dead horse. At school a needle broke off in Chairs March's arm as he was getting a shot and Bill, who was trying to act so tough, keeled over and fainted. Susan remembers John as the peacemaker and always trying to look out for everyone, but that Bill and John would always try to leave her. She remember her father spanking John often, and the time their dog, Bo Bo, wouldn't let Daddy spank John and chased Daddy into the house. Daddy had given John a spanking for breaking something and John said, "thank you." Daddy thought John was being sarcastic, and was angrily going to spank him again, but really their mother had always taught the kids to be respectful and to always say thank you. As he started to spank again, Bo Bo started growling at Daddy and chased him into the house before he could spank John. Susan remembers John digging a pig-pin and the post hold digger cutting off the tip of her finger and John carrying her home. This happened the night Kennedy was nominated by the Democratic party and Susan got to sit up and watch TV and soak her finger in coal oil. She remembers that Joan would get into a fight and Mama would separate Susan and Joan, and Susan would pretend she was going to touch her things and this make Joan so mad. When Mama would separate the children, she would put the girls in the front yard and the boys in the back with a rope on the ground separating them. So the girls had very little land to play on while the boys had all the rest of the farm. She remembers the rules Mama had written in cardboard in pencil. She drew a hand and foot etc. to say "no touching," "no hitting," etc. Joan beat up Ralph Fuller at Belfast School in 3rd grade, Mrs Orr's class, in the long hallway. Joan would always protect Susan. Ralph was kept back a couple of years so was a big, tall guy. One day after school in the long hallway, Ralph starting pulling Susan's hair and making her cry. Gail Hobby went and got Joan who came running down the hallway at full speed with her hand stretched out in a fist hitting Ralph's noise and knocking him down with a bloody nose. Gail Hobby started running through the school yelling, "Joan Andrews beat up Ralph Fuller." By the next day it was all over school. So Ralph's reply to that was, "Gail Hobby's too skinng, Kathy Beach is too fat, but Joan Andrews is just right," and he started liking Joan and gave her perfume for Christmas. Joan was so embarassed, but he never picked on Joan or Susan again.

Susan remembers Joan had David and Miriam in her "holy club." In high school she would take David to school dances and Susan's friends would dance with him. Susan always thought of Miriam as their age. They were like triplets. Miriam always had bad dreams, one where her mouth was too little and she couldn't talk, etc. Susan remembers how Daddy would get mad and squeeze the children's arms if they would try to defend Mama from the bad things Aunt Sara and Grandmother had said.

Susan recalls her father asking her in adulthood why his children always took that smelly jug of milk with them to school at St. Catherine's in Columbia, Tennessee. He appeared shocked when Susan responded that it was because that was all they had to eat. Susan's mother had always tried to keep expenses down for her husband so that he would not so adamantly object to having children and always gave him everything he liked, especially sweets, so he was unaware that the children didn't have the same things.

_____________

THE ARROWHEAD FIELD:

We heard that John, as he was finishing up his training in New Jersey, would be reassigned soon and it was anyone's guess where. I spoke to Joan and Susan about a quick trip to see John, got the OK from Mom and Dad, loaded up the VW bug, and took off with Joan and Susan on another fine adventure, my last before leaving for the army myself.

…We spent the weekend with John at Asbury Park and its beaches. Susan had a little romantic fling with a young man by the name of Jeff Goldstein whose mother was proprietor of a shop on the boardwalk and Joan served as an invited chaperone.

… As a gift for getting my masters in record time, Dad and Mom offered to send me to Europe during the second half of the summer. John was also invited but declined the offer. He wished to plot on with his course work, hoping to enter the university's MBA program soon. Joan and Susan wanted to come along and, I surmised, perhaps my real purpose was to serve as a chaperone for my sisters.

… Susan was the most romantic of my sisters, attending SLU for only a year and taking art classes. Mom had sent Susan to Portugal the previous spring and my sister was awash in admiration for the beauty of the country and the character of its people. I believe that there was also a young man over there in whom she had taken an interest. Susan told me that she wanted me to learn of the country's charms for myself.

…I flew with my sisters from New York to Lisbon where we rented a small Ford ---- from Avis and spent our first day exploring the capital. Almost immediately I realized I'd have my hands full in the chaperone department as young Portuguese men hit on Joan and Susan constantly.

… . Joan and Susan initially made two demands of me. They wanted me to drive them to the religious shrines of Fatima in Portugal and Lourdes in France. I decided to indulge these requests in an effort to build up credit for later plans of my own.

… When we got our rooms at a beachfront inn, my sisters seemed to be impressed by a cute female hotel assistant who spoke a little English and who seemed solicitous of their every need. Joan pointed out that she wore a gold crucifix around her neck and Susan informed me that, if I had not noticed, she was not wearing a wedding ring.

… . Judge after judge would promise Joan that sentences would be dropped if she would only agree verbally to stop blocking the doors to clinics. Stoically she would refuse and, on more than one occasion, she was placed in solitary confinement . Joan and Susan, and later our youngest sister Miriam, would rail against my indifference, my insensitivity, and my willingness, like the herd animals of Nazi Germany, to sit by complacently in the nefarious presence of the new holocaust. At Thanksgiving dinners with our parents on the Lewisburg farm, Claudia and I insisted that table conversation not stray to this volatile topic. Privately both sides in the abortion controversy disillusioned me. I was turned off by the holier-than-thou judgmental tone of the Right-to-Lifers, many of whom could not comprehend the inconsistency of fighting for fetuses while supporting fat military budgets, the death sentence, and cuts in welfare aid to mothers with dependent children. On the other hand, I was turned off by the strident rhetoric of the pro-choice movement which often seemed to celebrate the slaughter in a self-serving denial that human life was being sacrificed for convenience and social engineering. I wished to wash by hands of both extremes and I resented the refrain by both sides that "if you're not with us, you're against us." Like Claudia, I felt that both extremes were incapable of a dialogue, that the bitterness and stridency only served to embolden the resolve of the other side and carry it off from the rational to pure emotion.

_____________

David Andrews
1637 Berkley Circle
Chattanooga, TN 37405

Elizabeth Andrews
c/o Miriam Lademan
1677 Pleasant Plains Rd.
Annapolis, MD 21409
March 28, 2010/Chattanooga

Dear Mama,
Judy has just taken Eli & Lydia to a movie, giving me a chance to thank you for your note (March 7, regarding my letters to Daniel and Susan). Your response was very unexpected and welcome. I appreciate so much the faith and genuine kindness in your asking me to smile and wish well every person I come across. I can't think of anything less complicated or more fundamental in its goodness.

I will try my best to do this and with you in mind too.

Just goes to show how much we still have to learn of each other and how much happiness we can still give in our letters.

I miss and love you.

David.

1/23/03 - Susan mentioned to her sister-in-law, Susan Sullivan Andrews, that her mother collected bottles to earn money to buy a piano for her husband when the children were very young on Stokes Lane in Nashville. Susan also mentioned that one late afternoon while her mother was out with the children pushing a stroller, her mother saw her father get off a bus and get into a car with his mother and sister. When he got home a couple of hours later she told him that she saw him get off the bus and asked him why he had said he was going to work late. According to Susan, her father got very mad and accused her mother of spying on him, and told her it was none of her business. Apparently he had done this frequently if not every afternoon.

Susan said that her mother always told the children that their father was a saint. She also said that her mother told her that the girls were responsible for the boy's souls.

At Lake House in Canada one summer, Susan's mother and the other children were looking into a large tub containing sand and turtle eggs gathered from the beach which were hatching. All of a sudden they looked out and Susan was floating face down in the water. Susan's mother rushed out and saved her from drowning. Later in the upstairs of Lake House, Susan was carrying a large, metal tub while her brother John was lying on the floor. Susan tripped and broke-off John's eye tooth half way down. Later her Uncle Ted was throwing a clam to his son Jammie while both were in the water and John popped up between them just in time for the clam to hit him in the mouth, breaking off the other eye-tooth and an adjacent tooth. John now had three teeth half-broken, the adjacent tooth later dying during orthodontic work.

At Lake-House, John and Bill built a boat from a ladder by tying innertubes under it. They drifted out too far and started crying for help. Little Susan walked out on her tip-toes and rescued them.

At one point on the back lawn at Lake House, Susan was holding up a dead animal or something saying, "Look, Mommy, look Mommy." Her mother had just given her a sandwich and was distracted with something, so responded instinctively by saying, "yes, eat it!" Susan keep repeating herself and her mother kept saying, "yes, eat it." She had it in her mouth just about to bite when her mother looked up and screamed.

One early morning in the dark and pouring rain their mother took everyone to Mass at St. Gregory's Church in Detroit. John saw a prayer book at the back of mass and asked for it. It cost $.25. His mother said to him, "Pray of it and I'm sure we'll be able to get it later." As they walked out of the church, John saw $0.25 in the mud and was able to go back and buy it. Susan was very popular after high school and dated quite a bit. She dated some of the nicest boys in the world. One of the nicest was Tom Berens. Tom was a Glenmary seminarian who was sent from Cincinnati to Lewisburg after receiving an electrical engineering degree from the University of Cincinnati. Tom was struggling with whether he had a vocation or not and finally called from Cincinnati to tell Susan that he was meeting with Fr. Frank Ruff, the President of Glenmary, to tell him he was leaving the seminary. He talked to Susan's father who said Susan wasn't home but failed to tell him that Susan was at Bill and Claudia's so that he could call her there. Bill and Claudia were concerned that Tom was merely stringing Susan along and they had a long talk with her. Susan then wrote a negative letter to Tom which he got after he had talked to Father Ruff but before he left to propose to Susan. Ultimately he never came down to Tennessee. Tom continued to see the family for years after that. While in Saudi Arabia several years after that, Susan's brother John brought a letter to the Dhahran Airport and asked someone to mail it for him when he arrived in New York. This person asked John to sit down and talk awhile before his non-stop, Pan Am flight left. It turned out that he worked for Procter & Gamble in the same area as did Tom Berens and had just engineered the opening of a soap plant in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. Tom at the time was in South America doing the same thing. Tom rose up the executive ranks at Procter and Gamble. In 1971,

Susan's brother John bought a 2 1/2 acre lot in South Nashville off of Granny White Pike for $9,000.00. Without John asking her, Susan worked very hard clearing the lot while John was in graduate school in St. Louis. Susan joined the Carmelite monastery in St. Louis as a novice while her brother John was working on his M.B.A. at St. Louis University. A very good person by the name of Bob Rider, who lived on the monastery grounds and whose sister was a carmelite nun there, would drive down to Nashville and help John from day-break until dusk install fencing for the cattle on the Old Hillsboro farm.

February 16, 2004 while driving John to the airport following construction work on the Robinson Road bridge, Bill mentioned to John that [_____] kept saying that Daddy and Mama had given Bill and Claudia the Santa Fe farm and that they hadn't paid for it. John mentioned to Bill that [______] said John had not paid for the Old Hillsboro farm and that Bill and Claudia had gotten the Santa Fe farm free while they had been given nothing. John also mentioned that in 2003, Daddy had taken [_______] into the back bedroom of the Lewisburg farm and showed her several $10,000 checks that John had written to his father in payment of the Old Hillsboro farm, saying that they had never cashed the checks. [_____] told John's wife who in turn told John and that following Summer John's mother gave the checks to John. John and his wife Sue then went to Norma Aldredge at Peoples and Union Bank in Lewisburg to see if these uncashed checks were still in this account or if the account had been closed and the funds eschewed to the state. Norma spent a lot of time investigating and reported that it was so long ago and that because of the bank's merger, they had no record of the account. John then went through his old records and found that the account had been closed and that he had endorsed his Vulcan Material Company paychecks over to his father to replaced these checks. He then remembered that he had written these checks to his father before he went to Saudia Arabia because his father kept asking for payments on the Old Hillsboro farm because he was using this to pay for the Santa Fe farm. John went to Saudia Arabia because his father kept asking for the money even thought he had made advance payments. He wrote the checks to his father to relieve his mind that payment was forthcoming. When he got to Saudi, however, he found it difficult making deposits into the account and wanted to close the account because of its expense and told his father not to cash those check and instead he would endorse each of his pay checks over to his father. In the summer of 2003, however, John's father surprised him by detailing how he had paid for the Santa Fe farm from proceeds for the sale of the Peoples and Union Bank Building and from the sale of his bank stock, so apparently he didn't need John's payments on the Old Hillsboro farm to pay for the Santa Fe Farm.

[_______] had asked recently if Daddy would deed the Chalet and 30 acres to her, but Mama said that he wouldn't do this or deed the land under John and Miriam's house, but that he was softening up. Apparently he had a difficult time relinquishing control of money and assets. This may have been why he refused to sign a will that his son had prepared for their parents so that the farm wouldn't have to be sold, or if sold, a great deal would have to go to the government.

[It's wonderful to see how protective Mama is of those of her children see sees as most vulnerable. She was so concerned about how this letter below would effect Susan. She has always told her other children how Susan in grade school scored highest of all of her siblings on the IQ test. Bill thinks that Mama shows favoritism towards some of her children because he thinks she doesn't seem as interested in his grandchildren (her only great-grandchildren up until the birth of Danny's son in early March 2010). She in fact talks about them all the time. Bill doesn't understand that she has been very hard of hearing, and her eyesight has declined, since her automobile accident in Annapolis a couple of years ago. When Bill shows her pictures of his grandchildren, she doesn't know who they are and can't hear him explain the pictures. Bill is hard of hearing himself now because of his Viet Nam days and may not completely hear her responses to him.]

[Son's letter to his sister]:

I went to the dentist last week. While in the chair listening to the dentist and worrying about paying for another crown, a wave of irritation hit me. I remembered the farm and all the cavities I got as a kid and in my teenage years. I thought, how could Mama and Daddy have been so negligent. I would never let [___] and [_____] go without fluoride in their toothpaste, especially if they were on well water! And then I remembered that they are not better or worse than I am; Mama and Daddy did love me to the best of their abilities. If Mama's faith in baking soda was too nearly religious in its nature, and Daddy was passive to the point of being absent at tooth brushing time .... It's [not] in me to see complacency or irresponsibility in the facts. I could even interpret the facts as an absence of love. I know my irritation was an impulse to blame Daddy and Mama for my dental problems.

But to go in that direction I must forget all the times as an adult I didn't floss or brush. All the times I chewed on ice or stuck a pebble in my lentils. And then there was Pat Bush's pulling my legs out from under me on the monkey bars .. . (I might allow myself a little irritation in that case) .. .. It's not that it's unfair for me to blame Daddy and Mama; there are some who would be appalled at Daddy and Mama's methods. What's really unfair is how easy it is to blame.

The letter that follows was written before receiving your letter. But reading your letter, I feel my recent experience with the dentist take[s] on epic significance. The heartache in your letter seems to be about a hole in your life. But for me, what is clearest is the hole that can exist at the center of our consciousness. When I hear you blaming Mama and Daddy for our differences and disagreement, I can't help saying aloud, "[_____], you're sixty years old; when will you take responsibility from your parents for your life and your actions?" When will you stop blaming Daddy and Mama for being human beings? They are who they are (were). They are probably as mysterious to themselves as to us. When will you allow that they are human and not a whole lot more mature or wise or powerful than you are? They are simply doing their best. They don't have to do what you want to be good parents! I don't know about you, but I'm sure we're doing the worst for our children by the way we see our parents and each other. I don't remember Mama or Daddy ever being as bad parents as we are being in dividing our inheritance, and making sense of property. How can you judge Daddy and Mama so harshly and hope to escape such judgment by your children? You won't be able to give your children enough to make your scorn for us look like love.

How could you expect a salary when Mama didn't want you to take care of her? All you two did was argue the year you took care of Daddy. It wasn't all Mamas' fault. And even if it was, can you not accept that Mama has her own sense of fairness? I say this as one who hasn't often agreed with Mama's view of fair. No one complained when you went to take care of the lady who invested in your books. You still made your salary. No one complained when you were too tired to take care of Daddy toward the end because you were too busy taking care of others from whom you'd received business or help; or you were busy caring for your children and their friends ... No one wants you to feel bad, [_____]. I just want you to respect yourself by acknowledging how much we have respected you. If you could just appreciate yourself for more than your sacrifices, you might realize there's been plenty of sacrifice among others in our family. If you could expect and need less from those who love you, you might feel less anger. But your letter goes in the exact opposite direction. It's an insistence that you are the only source of truth, fairness, charity and caring. Your letter is a negation of any other contribution but your own. Your letter says any challenge to your position as supreme victim comes from the devil and hate.

What did I ask that incensed you so? When you insisted we must make [____] pay back the loan and the tractor, I said, of course [____] should pay back the money. But I asked - if [____] wouldn't or couldn't make himself give it back - would you be able to pull upon your beliefs as a Christian. Can you let go of your need to have [___] give back the money? I told you that I felt I'd done that with you and Mama more than just over the Santa Fe farm. I've had to accept that my sense of fairness is not as obviously true to others as it is to me. You went livid in that moment over just the question, and your rage gave me considerable doubt in your ability to see anything from any perspective than that of a victim. Your behavior seemed to answer that you can't let go of your sense of outrage. You need money and you need to punish. You feel entitled to have what you want to the point that your wants are needs. You're no freer than the person you scorn. You're no more able to give up your idea of what are Truth and Fact and Truly yours than [____]. I don't know if [____] could give back money, no matter how little the amount owed, no matter how much he has. I don't know if you could ever say, I've gotten enough from my family.

I heard you say Daddy answered your prayers by letting you find his checkbooks. It seemed to mean so much to you. But I just don't get what you're trying to prove. Maybe I'm stupid, but I can't see your system of accounting, your memory math, Daddy's checks, [____]'s enabling you by saying that a verbal agreement is admissible in court ... makes any difference to anyone but you. It's all equivocation and afterthought. There's no need for calculus in this.

You told me you wanted to build a cottage for Daddy and Mama. You said it would or did cost $80,000. You said the money would mostly come from [____ O'N____], but those in the family who could, would also help. I thought, Wonderful! No mention was ever made to me about it being a loan to Daddy and Mama. I was never brought into a decision that said, by the way, this would be [you're] house. No one told me I'd be giving up my 1/6th of the Santa Fe farm for your plan. Where's the need for math in this [_____]? When Mama asked me if I wanted the Santa Fe farm, I didn't say, "No." I said, "I can't take it. It belongs to all of us." There's no math needed to see how you've profited from your charity: [____ _____] or Daddy and Mama's or ours. Before your help, we had the Lewisburg and Santa Fe farms. For your help, we lost the Santa Fe farm.

We've all received money from Aunt Sara and the estate, and we've all [received] more since Bill paid us for Aunt Sara's house. But how we lost Santa Fe cannot be explained by addition, only subtraction. It's that simple.

You have Guadeloupe [the farm]; at least one house in Ohio; [_____] has the Cottage and a house in Ohio; your children have traveled and gone to schools, had lovely weddings .... I imagine these have at least something to do with what you've received from the estate. But if you need more ... if you're in debt. .. if you have overspent or banked expecting an eternal salary from your mother. .. these are things you should not blame on your brothers, sisters, father or mother. If you need help, could you not ask for a family intervention? Your interpretation of [____ ____'s] letter and its influence is bizarre. I guess Chris' letter made him feel good. And if it had an affect on Mama, we should all be grateful to [____]. But to be unaware of ongoing concern and communication and previous attempts made to move Mama is ignorant.

In my books, we should be very grateful. Can't you just allow us gratitude? Can you allow yourself gratitude? So where do we go from here, Susan? Seems to me you've left no way for any of us but your way.

January 9, 2010

Well, see and see but do not perceive, hear and hear but do not understand, as the Lord says. I can't claim to understand that saying, as many times as I've heard it, and even preached on it. It simply states a mysterious fact. You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might be still nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

My point in mentioning this is only to say people who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you're just quietly going about a life of your own choosing. They will make you doubt yourself, which, depending on cases, can be a severe distraction and a waste of time. This is a thing I wish I had understood much earlier than I did.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Dear [_____],

Why must we make each other feel so bad? I can't help thinking our last conversation came down to what you said about my not liking you. I do like you. I feel great love for you. But here's what I must tell you. When I come to the farm or visit you, and you're wonderful to my children, and my children fall for your children, it seems to me that you put a great weight over the uplift of love. The wholesomeness and hope and even pride I feel for our relationship becomes disappointment when you tell me you need to talk to me and then begin to tell your version of the past, or of a new misunderstanding or transgression. I begin to feel that I'm being persuaded into taking sides or seeing evil in those you disagree with. I begin to feel you want something different than love from me. If so, you're asking me for something I can't give you. It begins to feel as though you really don't love me, but that you're just nice to me because you want things from me. When I tell you I don't want to participate in that kind of exchange, when I won't go along with the way you want to tell the story of the past, when you want me to side with you against [____] and Daddy or even Mama ... you tell me I'm selfish.

I know you love me. I remember your love from childhood when I didn't have much but love in return to give you. But the press of your needs these days complicates your love. As absurd as it was, I found an understanding in the moment you brought up my being a vegetarian. Well, maybe not in the very moment. Then, I was only aware of your pulling from consciousness anything you could to try and reach me with a personal criticism. But that you were trying so desperately to judge me made me understand how judged you feel, to see my way of life as a criticism of yours.

I hear your talk about not being liked. I know it's a device to invalidate any point of view in disagreement: It's not that you differ from me, it's that you don't like me. But I'm also able to hear in your words the regression of regressions. The reduction of love to, if you love me, you'll agree with me. You'll let me have what I want.

I've been honest with you, [_____]. I don't agree with your version of why the Santa Fe farm and Cottage should be yours. I don't think love means having to agree or condone or to be like you. But here's where I think you may be right about my being selfish. You are [a] hard work[er]. You are not accepting of what you have. You want so much more. And even if you say it's for your children or for [____] or for [______] that you are fighting, the fact is, you seem to see only two kinds of people in the world: those who are there for you and a part of you, and those who are against you. But you're very afraid no one loves you enough to give you what you believe you need. I have been selfish because I've not done the work you ask of me. Not to agree with you or to give you more, but to stay with you in disagreement. In conflict. Even if it's not been consciously, I guess I know an ambivalence before I go to see you, especially when I hear you want to talk. I steel myself before a visit. I know I have to be very, very clear with myself about what matters, to be very conscious about my sense of impartiality and fairness. Because I have found myself nodding with you in the past when you say, "You know Mama. You know [____] ..." Meaning, "You know how wrong or how crazy they are. I guess I have come to fear you too. I learned that you ascribe evil to those who disagree with you. You can project ugly, slavish motives upon those who don't act in ways you see as for you. There's a violence in you that can go far beyond the childish, immature lashing out that we all do in stressful moments, and I've experienced that with you more than once. It's your ability to take from someone disagreeing with you any authenticity, any reason not to agree but [it is?] evil. It's not an impulsive, in-heat-of-the-moment judgment. It's not something you let pass from you. You invest in your disagreement with people so that their perceived dislike becomes your ground for going ahead and taking what you need. And another round of victim/victimization begins. You apply all your powers of memory and piety and righteousness and every lesson of charity, and you invert it all by bringing it to bear against the other.

In this you and [____] are very much alike. You both cannot take responsibility for shortcomings or bad relations in your life. You give Daddy or Mama or your siblings or spouses-anyone who cares or loves you the responsibility for you're not being happy. For not being satisfied. You asked me if I told [____] what I told you the other day. Do I tell him I don't want to hear his telling of the past that blames you for all his and the family's ills? To be honest with you, it hasn't come up that often with [____]. He simply hasn't demanded as much from me, and we've been quite a lot more distant than you and I have been, at least in the past. On the occasions [____] has tried to tell me why Daddy is responsible for his having to sleep in his car or waste two years of his life in Saudi Arabia, for instance, I did challenge him. I reminded him that if Daddy asked him to pay the family back, it's because [____] was buying more land. It seemed to nearly kill him to pay back that loan, literally. And to this day I know he feels it unfair that Daddy asked. It's as though [____] feels his sacrifice of living in a car and in Saudi Arabia should be more than enough for us. Or that his need indebted us to him. But, again to be honest, I get much of this view of [____] from you. [____] hasn't pressed me to pit my memory against his. It's more simply that I've never heard [____] take responsibility for the havoc I as a teenager felt his life had on the family. [____] hasn't tried to monetize or act upon that blame, at least as far as affects me. I have e-mailed [____], after our conversation, and asked him to pay back the money for the loan and the tractor.

I do know both you and [____] see yourselves as victims of the other. Both have a problem with money ([____] can't spend money on anything but land, and you can't stop spending), and both blame others for making your life worse by frustrating or not helping the other. [____] thinks [____] is selfish or weak or unfair for not standing up to anybody [you] for him [for the rest of the family]. And in truth I have seen and heard [____] and [_____] act where you are concerned the way Mama acted regarding [____] in the '70s: like enablers or even co-dependents. I've heard [____] and [_____] validate your sense of victimhood and justify your dependence the way I've listened to friends of alcoholics excuse destructive grasping and dependent behavior. Like Mama, [____] and [_____] seem to confuse pity with love. [_____] even described an economy of sacrifice, monetizing a connection between good deeds and pity. She's implied your sacrifices for [____] and the Pro-life movement make you more deserving. So I guess we come by the confusion between pity and love honestly. I got it from Mama too, though at some point I realized it's nearly impossible to respect or truly love someone you pity. Pity can be a form of infantilzation that isn't at all helpful. In fact, pity isn't a helpful emotion. It's a distancing device. The superiority that looks upon an other with pity can turn in an instant to resentment. I think sometimes this is what happened between you and those who received John O'Neal's help through you.

I guess I am selfish, in light of all this. I do recognize now my pulling back and walking away from our conflict (what I thought of as attempts to disembroil) as a type of selfishness or cowardice. The thing is, none of this is anything if not typical. There's no evil. Or if there is evil it's the moralizing with which we make our view God's. It's simple narcissism that turns those who justify us into saints. But evil is turning those who don't believe what we believe or disagree with us into villains. This is the genesis of true and lasting damage. The kind of damage that is passed down to our children. The damage of our failure to love our siblings is far greater than any loss of property or money. By blaming others for the evil within us, we pervert spirituality.

I am writing to [______] as well, in an effort to confront my own complicity in his infantilization. [______] is at the heart of all this, and he is the one whose strong independent and loving nature is being brought under the next generation of dependency, pity and blame.

I tried to tell you the other day how much it means to me that [___] and [_____] have such wonderful cousins as your children. An aunt as wonderful as you. I do love you and appreciate the gift you've given my family of such great relations. Is there any way that you could just love us too? There was a time in my life that I think I truly was as bad as you seem to think I am now. There was a time when I felt as judgmental and critical and superior as you seem to see me. So I can see where your sense of my difference from and differing with you might be a form of disrespect or scorn. You are not crazy. It must have been that Mama had it given her from her childhood, but I know my way of judging others came from her. I've worked very hard to get to the other side of it. I've worked consciously to pay back Mama and Daddy for every loan they ever made me. To the best of my knowledge, I've done that. I've also refused to accept any gift that was not shared with each sibling. Sometimes I think you either resent my not wanting as a gift the money the family loaned Judy and me to adopt Lydia. You mentioned it in anger as though it had been a rejection of your love. At other times I feel unappreciated. As though because I didn't complain or make a production of paying back Daddy and Mama in the past, it wasn't hard enough for me. But the fact is it was hard. I've never made a lot of money, and I did without a lot to pay back loans.
Changing, for me, started with my realization that the way I saw the worst in other people made me feel worse about myself. I got this in so many lessons from God or human nature ... whatever you want to call what clears our head of fear and hate. I'm far from where I want to be before I die, but I know one thing for sure, and that's that my spiritual battle is with myself, not with you or [____] or Mama.

Talking with you about the farm brings up the fear in me that no one, perhaps especially not you, will look at things from my perspective. My spiritual readings tell me I should be grateful to you about this even though it feels pretty awful. It's in me to be protective of my family in all the ways I see you for yours. The more I see it in you, the more I feel it for myself. I can view what Daddy and Mama leave us as a pie from which you've already taken the filling, the Santa Fe farm, and my 1/6th seems like shell and crust around what you want for [_____] and [____] and each of your children. I can feel my heart clenching at the thought you or your children are getting more than my children because we don't tell Mama of our needs.

There have been times it seemed not expressing anger with you over the Santa Fe farm gave you the sense I am okay that you to took it. Or that I'm all right with your history of events leading to being owed the Cottage or Santa Fe farm. For a while I tried very hard to let go of my feeling that what you did was wrong. I felt I succeeded too. I let go of my desire for part of that farm. I even tied to forget memories of being there with [____] and Daddy and Mama. But perhaps this was just pity. Because it's your need for more that brings it all back to me and let's me know I was very wrong to think you would either be satisfied by what you took or that you'd at least appreciate what others in the family gave up.

I'm not okay with the story of the past you want to tell me. It all seems based in a system of accounts in which gifts from [____ O'N___] were entered into a ledger as loans from you. It's the bookkeeping behind your blame--which validates and maximizes the goods you've given but minimizes the value of any others' contributions or sacrifices--that I feel you insisting on, even with the IRS, that makes me saddest. The systematic and relentless memory, whose every resource is put to the task of proving in net that you received less even as you are more deserving than the rest of us, is what I feel brought to bare upon me when you want to talk. It doesn't feel like love. It feels like dependence and desperation and occasionally like resentment and hate. It feels like you want too much for your children, far more than you can give them. And you want us to help you give them as much as you can get. It's a terrible feeling. It feels like you've pitted us against your children's happiness.

I would love to feel faith in my family. I'd love to feel when I visit we can just enjoy each other. Truly enjoy in the spirit of asking nothing of each other but being together. That we can try not to ask for more than love offers: acceptance and non-judgment. I don't think this is possible when all that's settled on our farm is Danny's place. It is not good for getting along to go there without knowing our place in relation to his. We should never ask for more acceptance for one sibling than for another; We should never be asked to take sides or to view another as evil, not brothers or sisters, not our father or mother, and not even Aunt Sara. It's a lack of charity that not only makes us wrong but also makes us ugly. It may not seem to matter at all, but I think the way we dealt with Aunt Sara and treated her is the clearest failing of our family. It showed us at our worst. Our faith at its weakest. Aunt Sara was difficult, of course. She was the most bitter and fearful person I've met. But none of us was able to give her what she needed to turn from resentment to love. We only fed the resentment. To say she stole from you is to get something terribly wrong: We shouldn't covet what we haven't been offered.

Mama shouldn't have offered you what wasn't hers. And you shouldn't have expected her or Daddy or Aunt Sara to make good on Mama's offer. The fact is Mama has never offered anything without it being an answer from guilt to a perceived need in us. Mama knows our needs as her maternal inadequacy. Maybe Mama wouldn't feel this way if we didn't let her know of our unfulfilled needs. I believe that we can ask for things from our parents and family through our unhappiness and dysfunction and our blame. It's with Mama where blame is so effective that it need only be expressed as a sigh. Her guilt is so ready to hear in your need her failing as a mother. She already sees what you need as her need. Her need to solve problems. Her need to make up for mistakes in parenting. If I remember one thing clearly from the '70s, it was Mama's fierce defense of [____], siding with [____] against Daddy, in her expressed need to relieve [____] of debt [or more accurately, [____] purchasing 1/3 of the Old Hillsboro farm he did not wish to buy for price and residential buildability reasons, upon the agreement for a loan to purchase the other 2/3 from his mother and a later disagreement over whether Mama and Daddy should go ahead with the loan to him, rather than whether he should pay back the loan, a large portion of which he had paid in advance before due before leaving for four and one-half years in Saudi Arabia, but upon which payment was not being made fast enough to satisfy Daddy's claimed need for a source of cash to pay off the Santa Fe Farm, a source Daddy years later said came instead from proceeds from the 1960s sale of the Peoples and Union Bank building]. In her guilt for not being a better mother to him as a child. She pitied John and wanted so much for him. It seems to me she acted the same way with you regarding the Cottage and Santa Fe farm during Y2K.

We've never talked directly about Y2K. I guess this is where my cowardice or selfishness is clearest to me. And to be fair to myself, I don't know if I could have articulated anything beyond bewilderment for a long time. Though I knew there was something terrible to it, including but not only loss of the Santa Fe farm, I just thought the mistake must have been overwhelmingly obvious to you and [____]. To say something seemed like rubbing salt in a wound. I felt more embarrassment for you than anything else I could understand. It wasn't until you blamed me and [____] for your loss of the Cottage by something as bizarre as saying I'd manipulated you by asking a question four times that I finally realized what was going on. Once I recognized paranoia on such a personal scale as the projection of evil into my awkwardness, I began to realize you would never see your fears leading up to Y2K for what they were: a lack of faith in and fear of humanity. Paranoia on a grand scale.

We'll never be right in our family until you understand that your fears wrought suffering in all of us. Y2K, the Cottage, the Santa Fe farm, Guadeloupe ... Choices you made in these things took freedom from those close to you who believe very differently than you. Your actions worked to the disadvantage of others. To blame others for a failure to appreciate your good intentions (to save us from your fear and lack of faith in humanity), as if your intentions were love .... Well, what would you call it, [_____]? If [____] had taken the Santa Fe farm and claimed his need to pay taxes on his investments in land was our fault... That he was just trying to be the responsible child in the family to be there for the rest of us when our way of life fails ... What would you call it if [____] had saved us from his fears the way you saved us from yours?

I have very different causes than you, but those I consider as moral and spiritually essential. What would you have called it if I took the Santa Fe farm to act upon my beliefs and fears? Would you have wanted me to save you from fundamentalism and militarism? You probably know from our differences in bumper stickers alone, some people you think of as heroes I regard as war criminals. I know we believe very different things, and I know that to tell you my beliefs in a fully authentic conversation would lead to a meltdown that neither of us could withstand. I know the burden of tolerance is upon me, but that too is part of my faith: acting with humility. Trying to avoid participation in evil through fear, hate and harm by allowing that I haven't got the only truth. Mine isn't the only way to be good. I would never act upon my fears...

December 24, 2009
1637 Berkley Circle
Chattanooga 37405

Dear Mama!

It was nice talking with you a moment ago. Our new telephone line made your voice much clearer to me. I hope you too could hear a difference.

I think you got this from my call, but I sure do miss you. There's a music CD with this letter that I hope Miriam will play for you, so that the two of you can listen together. It's pretty neat. One of the things I'm most grateful for is the pictures and sound recordings that you and Daddy made. The recordings are getting a little scratchy, but there's plenty enough there to evoke memories that would be gone forever. I hope you'll find the same pleasure and sense of life fully lived that I get from listening.

I think my greatest pleasure comes from imagining your and Daddy's depth of appreciation for the moments recorded, far beyond what's left of content in the scratchy, fading sounds, is the implicit consciousness of what you two were experiencing as parents, which made reflection an added sense of love.

An examined life.

We're doing really well. Judy and I were marveling today at our own life and how fortunate we are. We were wishing we could step back more often, in the way this day off from routines has allowed, to appreciate how great life is. If I have one thing to pass on to my children, it would be to never take for granted such an appraisal. It's all so easy to think about what we're not doing right, what we want rather than what is right and good and here in our life.

I gave Judy a day or so to her self last weekend to wrap presents and get the last few things together for Christmas. I took Eli and Lydia to the farm. We stayed with Danny and Kaitlyn, and just by luck were able to see John and his family. John extended by one day his visit to the farm, so that we could spend a little time together. It was all so wonderful. Danny and Kaitlyn were selling Christmas trees, and showed off the way they've fixed up the old farm house kitchen as a little crafts shop. Things seem to be working out with division of the farm in a way that makes Danny's work seem part of a bigger plan .

Danny and Kaitlyn were so giving and welcoming. It made us feel really special. That, and the way Lydia seemed to for the first time big enough to get for herself a sense that this place was special. .. to her ... that these cousins are hers. We even planted a little flag Lydia'd made in the field that we've begun calling Lydia's field (the field Susan called Star Gazer field). Lydia is gaining so much a sense, like Eli has had, a sense of belonging to the farm and of belonging among cousins.

We're going to Atlanta to spend Saturday with Judy's family. It'll be nice. Eli and Lydia have cousins there too, of course. Their closest cousins are Addie and Lucy: Judy's sister, Nancy's. But one of the things that makes me really happy is how much they like to talk with Addie and Lucy about the cousins on the farm. There's a great sense of sharing something special.

Please give my love to Miriam and her family. You're always in my heart and prayers. I love you,

David.
____________

Mama didn't want Uncle Ted to be David's Godfather because he drank but Ganger did and Mama always did what Ganger wanted. Uncle Ted died within weeks of David's birth.

The summer after David's brother John's freshman year at Saint Louis University, John was using a skill saw while his sisters Joan and Susan were putting their brother David on a pony next to the back porch of the farm house. John did not realize that the girls had gone into the farm house leaving David alone on the pony at 8 years old. John started the skill saw and startled the pony into taking off and bucking David head first into the Mulberry tree in the yard. David's mother was coming back from the mail box and put the unopened mail with John's reclassification to 1-A draft status and appeal notice (St. Louis University's computers had apparently failed to report grades to draft boards and thus the reclassifications took place) in her apron pocket as she saw what was happening to David. As she tended to David, her apron became covered with blood and she tossed it toward the hamper as she rushed to take David to the hospital, unaware that the mail had slid under a dresser. This was just the beginning of the bad consequences of John's starting the chain saw with the pony close by. Their mother held David's bleeding head as everyone drove off to Gordon's Hospital in Lewisburg. The injury was very serious requiring many stitches.

David spent two years in Ireland during the 1980s working at a hotel and about the same amount of time in Germany.

DAVIDANDREWSPHOTO.COM:
Even I know each image you see here is a confession. Each image is about a will to have something that cannot and should not be kept: meaning, greatness, eternity. My work, over the last ten years, seems a return to an early project of childhood: learning to tell time. It's just one of many undertakings that humbled me into adulthood, but it's the one I feel most obliged to correct. I was a slow learner when it came to understanding hours and seconds. The face of the clock seemed inadequate in comparison to the circumference of my day. But then, no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold*. As an adult, I remain a dilettante of time, just determined enough to know when I'm late. It seems I was never meant to experience or tell time in hours. In my work, I want to recognize the world and my own heart surely this is as much as there is to knowing greatness. David Andrews, Knoxville

Photography has always been a part of my life, perhaps even more than for most: my mother snapped obsessively and almost religiously; my father dabbled in making S-8 films and b/w prints in our home. And then my brother, Bill, came home from Vietnam with a camera. He'd begun putting images together with his love for literature and history. The images he brought upon each of many returns to our farm in Lewisburg, affected me greatly.

I love photography as I love poetry and as I love people. For method, I simply carry my camera with me everywhere and try to photograph well everything that moves me. Honesty with myself and with my subjects seems to me what photography--and life--is all about. Artist Statement: Even I know each image you see here is a confession. Each image is about a will to have something that cannot and should not be kept: meaning, greatness, eternity. My work, over the last ten years, seems a return to an early project of childhood: learning to tell time. It's just one of many undertakings that humbled me into adulthood, but it's the one I feel most obliged to correct. I was a slow learner when it came to understanding hours and seconds. The face of the clock seemed inadequate in comparison to the circumference of my day. But then, no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold*.

As an adult, I remain a dilettante of time, just determined enough to know when I'm late. It seems I was never meant to experience or tell time in hours. In my work, I want to recognize the world and my own heart surely this is as much as there is to knowing greatness.

*He who does his own work well will find that his first lesson is to know what he is and that which is proper to himself. *-Dostoevsky

I enjoy working with existing light but feel very comfortable lighting shoots too. I will use small, on-camera strobes to move and shoot quickly or multiple light banks--or no added light--whatever works best given the project. I love film, both b/w and color, and do much processing and printing myself, including large gallery-quality prints, but I know the digital camera and digital production too. This collection of portfolios may reflect a diversity of interest and abilities, but I hope it will evidence my determination as much as my excitement.

Under the influence of caffeine--a dangerous thing for a photographer who can't seem to shoot over 30th of a second: these images have been made since moving to Chattanooga nine months ago. I've been spending a lot of time with my three year-old son, reading, writing and making picture forays from the many local coffee shops in Chattanooga.

April 13, 2009
Dear Mama,

... There are things that I haven't recognized until lately, perhaps because there's a part of me that also thinks like you and Miriam, but in seeing Daddy's fairness as more like God's. The truth is that you, Mama, are all that's left of the way we were raised. Susan and Miriam and Joan are closer to you in so many ways. The truth is that they can take care of you in the ways that you want. Even though I've wanted to be with you more and to take care of you by sharing time and the responsibility of being with you with my siblings, that too was not meant to be. It's not the way you have chosen.

And this is where it's begun to seem somehow only Life that you should recognize and love Daniel for the way he is close to you and what you care about. It doesn't matter that I know Daddy would have done differently had he been the last parent. It's only honest that you don't have to accept me and my beliefs or worry about my desires for my family. The truth is that I have been blessed even when I didn't ask for it. What has hindered me has been what I've thought of as my need: the equal division of Daddy and your property as if property were love. Nothing can take away from the love that was Daddy's acceptance and kindness; Nothing can take from the intensity that was your way of giving an edge to all that we had growing up, to push all experiences past the ordinary toward the miraculous. I love both you and Daddy beyond any money or even beyond any part of the farm. Because of what you have already given.

It's funny but I have thought for so long that the only stories you read or told Miriam and me growing up were those of the saints or of God. But since being a parent, one of my greatest pleasures is reading to Elijah and Lydia. And it's amazing how many stories I remember you reading to me through my children. And just stories. Not only the religious ones. Cowboys and houses and tugboats and ghosts and monkeys.... It's through remembering these stories that had no overt spiritual lessons that I realize you must have loved not just teaching me about God, but just being with me when I was little. I don't know how to explain it completely, but I think that maybe it's good that Daddy died before you. This is where I feel it is all good...especially you. More than the conversion that I know means a lot to you, I see Daddy's leaving it all to you as his life's act of faith. It's this I want to accept and find good.

The last thing I want to say in my letter to you and my family is to tell you what I want of the farm for my family. I want to be clear: I do not "need" to have any of the farm, and I will accept what you've given others in the past and now regardless. But I think it is my responsibility in this last division to say what I would like, so you won't have to guess about what might make me happy:

I would like to have a part of the farm with some nostalgic significance (apart that I know); a part without a driveway dividing it; I like fields, the way they were made a long time ago into places with an integrity that I learned to feel made natural sense. I would like a small portion of the spring area, if possible; and I would like the minimum amount of frontage.

I've attached a map below that shows in green the section that I like. Having written this letter, I am looking forward to Daniel's wedding and to seeing my family there.

I love you,
David

March 13, 2011

Dear Mama,
Its been raining all week, but this weekend is beautiful. Hope its as nice for you. Judy, Eli and Lydia are at Disneyland, down in Florida. Judy had to chaperone the seventh grade on the school trip, and they let teachers bring two children. Its not my idea at all of fun, and I don't have the days off anyway, but she says the children are having a good time. So I'm doing taxes this weekend.

Thank you for your letter. You're trying your best to make everyone happy, I know. But your letter let me know I need to give up counting on a place on the farm for my children. In some ways its a relief to hear that so clearly in your words. I can see where your plan makes sense for Danny, Joan, Susan and Miriam. It certainly would minimize any change to Danny's life and operation on the farm, but for Judy and me and our children existence there would be circumscribed by crisscrossing rights of way, a shared driveway that's primarily used for Dannys business and dependence getting along with those who have very different needs and values. Without independence or a share of the farm that has integrity as ours, I can't plan or build or think of living on the farm.

It would mean a lot to me, Mama, if you would own your decision over the farm and not use Daddy as your reason for dividing or not dividing the farm. Daddy wanted one entrance to the farm when you and he were living there. The cottage and Miriam's house were often empty. He told me his thinking on that. But giving Daddy's thought from a particular situation long gone as the reason for a way of dividing (or not really dividing) the farm now feels like taking him out of context in a way that fundamentally changes his desire to yours. Even things that Daddy felt strongly about in life were things you weren't slow to question or counter.

The Santa Fe farm for instance. Daddy and I talked about many things. Daddy tried very hard not to polarize the situation, but he felt he had to tell me why even if he thought it wrong, you felt you could give Santa Fe to Susan: because you saw it as yours, bought with Gangers Tyne money.

Daddy isn't able to correct or affirm anything now, so all we can do is know what we each already know, which is that you and Daddy had different wishes, different values, different ideas of fairness, different ways. If one thing over the years made me feel distance between us, Mama, its been your tendency to tell me what others need or want or would love to have from me. What would mean so much to others: Daddy, Bill, John, Joan, Susan, Miriam. Its habitual, I guess, and its been over small, even well-intentioned things as small as having another helping of food. But its been over important things too.

I'm not telling you this to make you feel bad about what you want or what you do with the farm. I'm not writing to be petty about a technicality. I don't want you to feel bad. But I don't want to feel the havoc in my soul and memories wrought when you say the way the farm division is going is because of Daddy.

I can understand if you want Danny to have the farm. I can accept that he may carry an ideal of the farm that you two share forward. All that seems true. I would feel it honest and even admirable if you could act upon and allow yourself that, as long as you could allow me the truth of it. I want your honesty and your respect more than I want the farm. I can live without the farm, but I know living without your honesty is not what I want to carry forward.

As it is now, Joan, Susan and Miriam pretty much have what they want. Danny has the run of the farm. Miriam's driveway cuts across everything. I realize to give me or Bill or John a real part of the farm with frontage and without trespass would be to limit Danny's business. After all, any real ownership for us would mean less for Danny than what he's got in most practical ways now. I actually understand how hard this might be for Danny, Susan and Joan to give up. Its the reason I thought we should divide the farm before Danny moved in. But all that's done.

The farm you've now in mind has no real place for me, my family and our values. That's the consequence (for me and my family) of dividing the farm in a way that makes sense to Joan, Susan and Miriam and their families. I recognize that you were given a dilemma. I'm sorry you were put in this position at this stage, though I suppose we could have seen it coming our entire lives.

Can't an arrangement be made to compensate those who can't have an independent part of the farm? Why don't we find a fair value for the 38-39 acres (not the value of scrub acres, but essential acres), and offer at least Bill and me a way to get on with our own lives (John may be okay with his part for his family)?

I want to be honest with you and the family too. I recently bought a tiny place and two acres in Sewanee. Its not a thing I could afford. Getting the down payment and loan took every bit of any savings (every penny I had in my small retirement 401Ks). Everything, including penalties I had to pay to tap my retirement early seemed necessary the way things are going regarding the farm.

The place I bought is in a pretty undeveloped area, plenty wild. I can be with my family and feel as close to the way I felt on the farm as I can afford. On drives to the farm, Sewanee has always been special to me. Its near where Daddy took us camping (Fall Creek Falls) and its near where Bill took me hiking when I first went to college (Savage Gulf). Those things mean a lot to me now especially as the farm has changed. Not just the changes made with houses and driveways being built on the farm, but also as the city and highway and Walmart has surrounded. In some strange way, the place in Sewanee feels connected and meaningful as on the way to the farm, but on the way to the old farm. Most of all I feel I had to buy the place to prevent becoming bitter over decisions being made regarding the farm. Having bought a place for my family, I don't resent losing my dream of the farm, and I don't begrudge you acting to realize the girls dreams and ideas for the farm and their children. As dear as it is to me, I know were approaching the point where Susan and her kids have spent perhaps more time on the farm than I have. Its could be as formative for them as it has been for me. As I listen to talk about how expensive Miriam's driveway was, where flood waters rise& (words that ignore solutions offered), I realize how dependent their dreams are on the farm. How much what they want for the farm makes compromise impossible for them. I want them to have it and keep it whole for their families.

I ask you and the girls to acknowledge what I give up to displace my dream for theirs: The farm was something I loved as much as you loved it. I counted on it for my family as much as any of my siblings for theirs.

I also need to admit I have no savings or retirement and no way to pay for my children's education without my part of the farm. I've indebted myself to my ideal from the farm by buying the place in Sewanee, feeling I had to have a place like the farm while my children are still young enough (Elijah turns ten today). I would appreciate Danny's paying me the portion of the cottage that he once said he'd pay. And I ask Danny or Joan, Susan, or Miriam to compensate me for the part of the farm I had hoped for. I would love to pay off my loan on the place in Sewanee and perhaps buy a few surrounding acres.

I do want my children to know and love their cousins. But the farm is growing more loss than love & for my family. That's something I no longer want my children around. Let those unable to give it up have it all.

If I feel were fairly compensated, I will want my children to visit and know our Lewisburg family. If not, Ill know were better off now than well ever be.

Son John
John has a few memories of Stokes Lane in Nashville (such as wagon rides with his brother and sisters, the one acre back yard "Never-Never Land" and eating popcorn) before moving at 3 years old to Atlanta where his father was transferred by American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). (His father did strike break duty in Pulaski, Tennessee before being transferred to Atlanta.)

John has only one memory of Atlanta and that is the one visit he and his brother Bill made to neighbors Mary and Terry Moore. After one year in Atlanta, he remembers vividly the night-time train-ride from Atlanta to Detroit-the enjoyable rocking back and forth of the train while sleeping in a berth.

He has many wonderful memories of Detroit and Gampa and Ganger (his maternal grandparents), Michigan Drilling Company, the trucks and bus parked in the adjacent field, the storage building on the corner of the property with drill pipes and equipment in it, Gampa's lab in the garage, jeep rides with Uncle Ted (jeep brought back from the Army by Uncle Ted), he and Bill setting fire to the grass under the bus (an inoperative bus Gampa previously used to take his men to job sites) because they thought their mother had missed that grass when burning-off the field and then playing in the bus until it was engulfed in smoke, fire trucks arriving, crowds forming, Uncle Ted rushing to spank Bill and John only to find Bill secluded away with Ganger in her bed under her protection, John hiding behind the couch and Gampa not allowing Uncle Ted to spank either of them, Jammie teaching John to ride a bike and John catching his foot in a rear spoke when riding behind someone else, Uncle Nevil, Aunt Joyce and their family living in the basement at Gampa and Ganger's house at 2850 Oakman Boulevard, the huge pine panelled play room left when Uncle Nevelle and his family moved out, getting a flashlight for Christmas and exploring the coal shoot with it, the laundry shoot, Lake House in Canada (which Gampa had apparently bought for John's family as a get-away), uncle Ted throwing a clam to Jamie at "Lake House" just as John popped up in the water and the clam hitting him in the teeth and breaking the two front teeth (Bill recalls that he never saw Mama madder at anyone than she was at Uncle Ted at that time - Daddy was there at the time according to Bill), his mother sewing vestments so Bill and John could say Mass at Lake House in the screen building they had built, the story their mother had told them about Gampa buying horses for each of them to ride, neighbor "Farmer Rosaire" with his huge barn and wheat which he gave them, the City of Detroit birthday cake and riding ponies at Belle Isle.

Uncle Nevil took over Michigan Drilling Company after Uncle Ted died. (Uncle Ted worked for Michigan Drilling his full work career, as President after Gampa died.) The Andrews family saw Uncle Nevil for the last time was when he came to Nashville for Ganger's funeral in 1971. John's father accompanied Ganger to the $70,000 settlement of Michigan Drilling Company, Nevil paying it out of his own salary, and John's father bought some Voice of Music and other stereo equipment with Ganger's payment to him.

John remembers the August 1954 trip to the farm, his father putting their dog out on the road along the way as punishment, staying at the "tepee motel" the night of the first day of the trip, arriving in Columbia, Tennessee and sitting on the deer statue, going by St. Catherine's School (twenty miles from the farm), which the children would attend, arriving at the farm just after dark and excitingly going through each barn and shed surrounding the house, getting up the next morning and seeing the sheep grazing in the "Island Field," attending Mass at the abandoned drive-in theater on the Nashville Highway their first year or so on the farm, their father attending farm school at night that first year using his GI Bill, Paul Harris bailing hay during the summers, the combine harvesting wheat in the "Corn Field" that first year, oats in the field closest to town, Bill putting the collie dog they loved, "Bo Bo", on the electric fence and never seeing Bo Bo again, his father for an unrecalled reason having Milton take another collie out to the woods beyond the spring with the children in tow crying, aiming his shotgun at the dog tied to a tree, hitting the rope and, to the children's happiness, the dog running off safely, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and a Hungarian family attending Mass at St. John's, becoming interested in the news for the first time during the 1957 Little Rock desegregation, new school construction at St. Catherine's and getting yelled at by Fr. Elliott for nailing together scrap wood on the steps of the rectory, colliding with Barbara Newbert next to the convent at St. Catherine's and placing deep teeth marks in her forehead with his buck-teeth, getting up at 5:00 every morning for a glass of milk straight from the cows with a rew egged cracked into it for breakfast before the one-hour, 20 mile trip to school on gravel, winding roads, his father pulling over at about the same sopt in the road every morning so that John could throw-up (during their first year at school their father didn't work and after having breakfast at a resturant in Columbia, would pass time in Columbia until the children were out of school), liking the transfer to Belfast School in 6th Grade much less, their father as a teacher in 7th and 8th Grade, remembering his father as the best grade school teacher he ever had, his father skipping Bill to 8th Grade from 6th Grade and doing the same for Joan, seeing his father called from the classroom for a phone call, his car screeching away, taking a school bus to Lewisburg, walking the two miles to the farm and seeing their mother on a mattress on the floor in the kitchen and their brother Joel, who had been born alive.

During the early years on the farm, Susan was charmed by a rattle snake in the woods just past the "Island" between the spring and the high field. Susan was staring straight at the curled up snake with its rattle sounding when John rushed in and pulled her away. Snakes including water moccasins, rattle snakes and other poisonous snakes were seen often in these early years, but later they became rare. The children would see snakes in the 'Clay-Pond" as they swam in it during the summers. The children also got stuck in the mud in the high field one rainy Saturday morning. John and Bill pulled themselves loose and got their father for help. Later the children discovered an abandoned one bedroom house in the middle of the woods along a trail just over the Andrews property line on John Ezell's property and decided to convert into a hideout until their parents forbade them from leaving their property. Their Great-Uncle Kenneth and Aunt Conslo had lived in this house at an early point in their marriage.

The children also converted a rock overhang at the spring into an "Indian Dwelling" by forming walls of stones around the overhang. The children also helped Howard and Harvey as a wagon was pulled behind the tractor in the "Corn Field" and corn was manually plucked off their stalk, each ear was shucked and then thrown into the trailer. The children played often at rock outcroppings in the woods that they called the "Robin Hood Camp." At one time, Bill, who loved bows and arrows, shot an arrow at a tree only to have it ricochet and hit John in the center of the forehead and blood to flow. Luckily the sharp, hunting style medal tip had broken off when it hit the tree.

One Sunday afternoon during the winter while everyone else was in the house watching Zoo Kingdom on television, John went out to the pond field to clear bushes with an ax. As he put his foot on a bush to hold it down, the ax hit and cut his big toe, leaving a scar that was visible throughout his life.

A man by the name of Tom? Cheatham was helping the children's father with some planting or harvesting a crop and for some reason Bill and John rode with him and another man or two out Highway 431. As they passed the farm with the underground lake, a "colored boy" under 10 years of age was sitting on the white rail fence and Mr. Cheatham yelled out to him in a harsh voice, "Boy, I'm going to kill you when I come back this way." He may have been joking, but it scared Bill and John to death and they never forgot it.

The spring on the farm was connected to the Duck River system, so whenever it rained hard and the Duck River rose, the farm would flood making it impossible for the car to get out for school or anything else on the entrance road. John recalls that a ridge ran parallel to this entrance road and he was told that an old railroad track used to run along this ridge into the woods. As a child John had exciting dreams about trains and train stations in the woods. This same train line probably ran by his grandfather's store in Silver Creek just this side of the Maury county line.

John recalls how special lent was on the farm and walking to St. John's on certain Fridays for the stations of the cross. He also loved the May Processions at St. Catherine's and First Friday Mass with confession after which there were donuts and sweet-rolls in the cafeteria of the school.

He recalls going to the incinerator in the woods behind the school with Michael March and getting caught inhaling smoke from lighted paper straws. John also recalls the children going to a fall festival with their father at Santa Fe School, Halloween at their Aunt Sara and Grandmother's house and the trip to Lookout Mountain and Rock City while their mother was in Europe.

Bill loved to play Army, dressing in his father's old World War II officer's uniforms and other gear acquired from Army surplus stores. He was always the captain giving orders and the other children were the privates. He ordered Joan to put on a parachute made from a sheet and jump off the apex of "John's Barn" (Bill and John each claimed one of the two large barns when they arrived at the farm, Bill getting the milking barn and John getting the barn with the corn crib and hay loft which was torn down by John Lademan, Chris Bell, John and Joseph Andrews and the Brindle boys in 2001 - Bill's barn collapsed in the 1980's.) Luckily, Joan had enough sense not to jump although she positioned herself at the top of the barn perched to jump.

The children also made home movies of their war activities. In the woods they would tie their legs to the top of bent-over, flexible Hickery trees and cut the rope tying the top to the ground so that their leg (and body) would be lifted into the air as a supposed bomb exploded.

Bill also loved looking for Indian Arrowheads in the field next to the spring that the children appropriately named "The Arrowhead Field" because of the abundance of arrowheads found there. Apparently the Indians would shoot animals in this field as they approached the spring to water themselves. After this field was plowed, many arrowheads would be turned up in the soil making them easier to find.

Winston Rutledge and his brother [Warren, a medical doctor in Lewisburg] pointed out to the children that a mound in the woods just behind the spring was probably an Indian mound, so Bill and John earnestly began digging the mound up over several years hoping to find "treasures." To clear the bushes off of the mound, John poured gasoline over them and then lit a match to it, causing a quick combustion that singed the hair on Johns arms, his eyebrows and his frontal hair on his head. There was a large cedar tree growing atop the mound, so after digging a pretty deep hole in the mound, John attached as rope to the tree pretty high up and as he attempted to pull it down the front wheels of the tractor would lift into the air. John would put in the clutch just before the tractor rolled over. After several attempts he realized that the tree was not going to budge so he gave up. Later their father dynamited the tree and it came down. Dynamite was easily obtainable in the 1950 and the children's father would use it fairly often.

After the children's maternal grandmother, Ganger, moved back from Mobile, Alabama to Nashville while they were in High School, she rented an Apartment at the Stephen Forster Apartment complex on Granny White Pike. In building additional apartments, the excavators unearthed some Indian graves with flat stones forming the coffin walls. John and Bill brought the bones of one Indian girl back to the farm and their mother insisted that they rebury the bones on the farm.

Their father built a tree house for them in a large tree at the spring. The children developed a camp at the spring for camping out by placing large, hued, rectangular stones to form a 25 or 30 foot square with a campfire site in the middle also formed by stones. They would erect their pup tents here and pretend it was an Army camp.

John remembers high school at Father Ryan in Nashville, disliking the first two years but loving the next two; K.C. Skull announcing to his noon religion class that, "the president had been shot" and thinking, "what president?," Bill and John going to the hills behind Tyne that rainy Friday evening and discussing the Kennedy assassination, their television having broaken down and not seeing the coverage; being editor-in-chief of the school paper, the eight Greek class friends (Fred Funk, valedictorian, K.C. Skull (West Point), Bill Farmer (future attorney),Ted Hanson, George Kawnaziwich, Mike Shelton, Geraldine Edmondson, Suzanne King (St. Bernard valedictorian/National Merit Scholar who asked John to her prom and who John then asked to his with photographer taking an over-abundance of pictures of John and Suzanne for the yearbook, John being too embarrassed to give them to the yearbook staff for publication); going out for football Senior year and being cut just before the season started; visits at Christ the King before dates and Fred Funk also dropping in; missing Bill a great deal his senior year and being allowed to visit Bill at Springhill College in Mobile, Alabama for Thanksgiving; receiving 4 grades of zero in Sister Mary John's calculus class senior year for allegedly cheating, then proving himself at the blackboard and finally transferring to Everette Hozaphel's calculus class (interestingly, the following year at St. Louis University John had received the only "A" in a calculus class taken primarily by engineering and pre-med students from a teacher who was known for never giving an "A"); Bill being invited to, and photographed at, a Tennessean banquet for writing at least three "Letters to the Editor" in one year while in grade school and John attempting to do the same thing, but never being published.

John recalls being picked up for school in the mornings in front of the grocery store across the street from Christ the King Church on Belmont Bpulevard by John Rowling and his brother Mark (whom Joan had a crush on during high school) in John's new Chevy Covair and then hitchhiking home in the evenings. He recalls being picked up several times by Dave Overton, a WSM Channel 4 celebrity and "Waking Crew" show host on the radio and another time by someone who said he was a teacher from Memphis running for governor and then the next day seeing this person on a debate panel on television.

John Rowling became a star football player (end) at Father Ryan and received a football scholarship to Vanderbilt, where his father had also played. John died of cancer a decade or so later after marrying and having children.

John also recalls Joan asking her brother John's classmate Dale Green to a Sadie Hawkins dance at St. Bernard's. They double dated with John who had been invited to this dance by Joan's classmate Angela Florish. During the dance several girls tapped Angela on the shoulder to dance with John, but Angela just ignored them.

John was invited to a Christmas dance at St. Bernard's by Linda Breen, whose brother, Tom Breen went to the seminary with George Frazier and whose uncle, Fr. Phillip Breen, was a priest in the diocese of Nashville. John also invited Linda out several times after that.

John also recalls going to dances at Father Ryan after football and basketball games and standing against the wall being unable to "fast-dance." One time he broke in on Mary Jo Pruett, a cheerleader from St. Bernard, for a slow dance and she forced him to fast dance with her after that, a very awkward experience, but enough for him to try "fast dancing" after that.

John's mother had never let John go out for football during high school, but she reluctantly agreed to it during the summer before his senior year after his braces had been removed. While the rest of the family stayed on the farm, Bill and John (and sometimes their mother) stayed at the Tyne house in Nashville during August of 1964 while John went out for football. John recalls one occasion when John and Bill jogged all the way from Father Ryan to Tyne in the glaring sun after football practice and ate raisin brand upon arriving home, both of them got sick and John did not touch raisin brand again for several months. The boys generally ate watermellon during that August. John was cut from the team the day before the first game of the season and after the scrimmage games were over. This was the first time Father Ryan had ever cut players, but the team had been first in the state for two out of the previous three years and too many had gone out for the team as a result.

John's best friend in high school was Fred Funk who was the class valedictorian. Fred dated Suzanne King his senior year, but toward the end of the year he told John that he and Suzanne were breaking up. Just before the prom, John got a call from Suzanne one night and she asked him to her prom. John quickly thought about it and said yes. He had no plans to go to his prom, but then called Suzanne back and asked her to his prom. During the prom with Suzanne, the photographer who John had used for the school paper, "The Moina", took many pictures of John and Suzanne for the yearbook and, instead of giving the pictures to the yearbook editor, he gave them to John for delivery to the yearbook. John culled the pictures of Suzanne and himself and gave the rest to the yearbook.

John talked Bill into transferring from Spring Hill College to St. Louis University where John wanted to pursue engineering. (John's mother had wanted the children to attend a Jesuit college as she had and St. Louis University was the closest Jesuit college with an engineering school.) Joan and Susan eventually joined them there.

In the evening of their first day in St. Louis, Bill, John and a friend decided to tour the area around the University and ended up chased from a ghetto into the Cardinal's baseball stadium on Grand Avenue while Sandy Kofax pitched his last game and the boys saw Kofax presented with a car. The following weekend, Bill and John (together on one bike) biked across the Eads Bridge to the Choachoia Indian Mounds just past East St. Louis.

Bill, John and their friend had signed up for a computer matching dance as part of orientation. Everyone was to wear a number to find the blind date, but boys cheated by not putting their numbers on until after seeing their dates and then deciding whether the date was worth it. Bill and the friend decided they did not want to meet their dates and, although John didn't like the idea and felt guilty every time that he saw his blind date on campus after that, all three left the dance without meeting the girls.

A few weeks later, Pete Cassiopio, who had transferred from Springhill College with Bill, drove Bill and John to a party in a warehouse in a bad part of town. Just after arriving the police raided the place and arrested Pete for under-age drinking, leaving John and Bill to walk back to campus and Pete's father to bail him out of jail.

Later while Bill and Pete were double-dating, they were involved in a serious automobile accident in front of Lewis Memorial Hall at about 3 or 4 in the morning in Pete's father's Lincoln Continental. John heard the crash blocks away while sleeping in their Walsh Hall dorm room. John thought nothing of it, but two or three hours later Bill walked into the room with a swollen and bloody lip while John was still sleeping. A little while later their mother called and asked what had happened because she had a premonition that Bill had been in some kind of accident.

The summer after John's freshman year at Saint Louis University, he was using a skill saw while Joan and Susan were putting their brother David on a pony next to the back porch of the farm house. John did not realize that the girls had gone into the farm house with David alone on the pony at 8 years old. John started the skill saw, and startled the pony into taking off and bucking David head first into the Mulberry tree in the yard. Their mother was coming back from the mail box and put the unopened mail with John's reclassification to "1-A" draft status and appeal notice in her apron pocket as she saw what was happening to David. (St. Louis University's computers had apparently failed to report grades to draft boards and thus the reclassifications took place.) As she tended to David, her apron became covered with blood and she tossed it toward the hamper as she rushed to take David to the hospital, unaware that the mail had slid under a dresser. This was just the beginning of the bad consequences of John's starting the chain saw with the pony close by. Their mother held David's bleeding head as everyone drove off to Gordon's Hospital in Lewisburg. The injury was very serious requiring many stitches.

John's draft reclassification appeal period then ran and his draft notice came the first week of his sophomore year at St. Louis University. Upon John's parents receiving the notive, his father took a night-long train trip to St. Louis, wanting to tell John in person of the draft notice. Because his train broke-down in Bellville, Illinois, he had to be bussed into St. Louis, arriving and knocking on Bill and John's dorm door at 5:00 Saturday morning. They spent the weekend together and as his father was getting into a cab in front of the college church, more emotion than he had ever felt for his father welled-up in John and his eyes watered-up as the cab was pulling away while John and Bill waived goodbye.

John was inducted into the Army after Thanksgiving in November of 1966 (Ft. Campbell, Kentucky for basic training, Ft. Huiachuca, Arizona by mistake for two weeks, then to Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey for advanced individual training at the Signal School, then to Ft. Carson, Colorado, Oakland Army Depo for two weeks and finally to Fr. Riley, Kansas). Joan was so distraught over this that she left St. Louis University at Christmas and Bill volunteered for the draft that following spring after completing his junior year at Saint Louis University. (Bill had basic training at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky and was sent to Ft. Polk, Louisiana for advanced infantry training but was reassigned to clerk school because at that time no room existed in infantry for him or anyone. After training, Bill was sent to the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia. At one point, Bill's Aunt Joan, not knowing that Bill was at the Prep School, called Bill's office to find out how to get her son Tommy Watts into West Point. Bill just happened to answer the phone and after listening to her for a short time, interrupted her by saying, "Aunt Joan?"

Bill had the same type of thing happen to him after he got out of the Army when his cousin Jammie Early, whom he hadn't seen for years, just happened to be on the same Greyhound bus between Florida and Nashville.)

After his father returned to the farm from St. Louis, John found it difficult to concentrate on his electrical engineering studies. Although he had socialized minimally during his first year in College, John's brother Bill introduced him to Marianne Braun through Ann Wynn, the girl Bill started dating, and Bill and John began double dating. John knew he would have to report for, and take, his induction physical for the Army at Thanksgiving and decided that he simply wanted to go into the service as soon as possible and get it over with. When he returned home for his physical he spoke to a Navy recruiter and found that the Navy had a minimum 4 year commitment. He then decided to sign up for radar technician training in the Army and be inducted right after Thanksgiving. John was accompanied to the induction center by his mother and as she was waiving goodbye, he went to her and took the movie camera out of her hands and took a movie of her in tears as he was leaving.

John's sister Joan was very popular at St. Louis University her first semester, but left college after Christmas but before completing the semester because she was so disturbed by John's going into the Army. Joan had read as much as she could about Viet Nam beginning in the early 1960 and had been as aware as anyone of the situation there. She was disturbed when Diem and his brother were killed.

The physical and induction process took all day and John recalls having a sandwich consisting of two pieces of bread with a piece of meat between them for lunch. Just as it was getting dark at about dusk, he and the other recruits were loaded on a bus for the hour long ride to Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. There was a bee-hive of activity once he arrived, from the crew-cut haircut to the issuance of Army clothing, gear and bedding. The next morning and for the next two months of basic training, it was up at 5:00 a.m., quick shave and shower, to the mess hall at a run (everything had to be at a run) with only 5 minutes or so to eat and then the grueling basic-training schedule. John's electric shaver was stolen from his footlocker his first day in the Army and he never again in his life used an electric shaver. He recalls thinking after the first day, how his tour was going to seem like a life-time and how he didn't look forward to it.

The worse part of the Army for John was the demeaning and crude behavior of other service men and the superiors. He never acclimated to this and never enjoyed the Army although things got much better after he was out of basic. Christmas just happened to fall during basic, so everyone was given a three day pass for Christmas (very unusual).

After Christmas, John's company bivwacked for a week in the field during which they were given rifle training. Snow was on the ground and it was freezingly cold. Half of John's company ended up in the hospital with pneumonia, spitting-up blood. The 12 mile march out to the field was "double-time" in full gear with M-14 rifles in hand. A week later the march back at night was the same and they got back at about 2:00 a.m. John was so cold that he stood in the shower for a long period of time just soaking up as much heat as he could.

During basic training Ed Ames came out with the song, "My Cup Runneth Over," which John loved listening to. After basic training was over, John recalls seeing the cover of Time or Newsweek Magazine with a picture of his fellow National Guard basic trainee from Detroit, Jim Brady, in full riot gear on the cover during the Detroit riots. John recalls that, probably because he was brought up on a farm, he always scored higher than anyone else in his company on physical training tests during basic, as did his brother Bill.

John completed basic training in early January of 1967 and flew by leased commercial jet from the Ft. Campbell airfield where it was 10 to 20 degrees to Tuscon, Arizona where the temperature was 70 degrees. As soon as he got to Ft. Huachuca, Arizona, he notified the people there that he should have been sent to Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey for radar repair training. John spent 2 weeks at Ft. Huachuca, somewhat of a vacation, where drone training was done. He recalls how beautiful the desert was, especially how the stars never seemed clearer looking up at the dark sky and stars during revelrie at 5:00 each morning.

When John arrived at Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey for eight months of radar training, he was scheduled into a class starting at 3:00 each afternoon and continuing until 11:00 p.m. Bill and Joan visited John at Ft. Monmouth during Bill's Easter break from St. Louis University and Bill spoke to John's commanding officer about his getting a pass over a weekend. The officer told Bill that he'd have to check to see how John scores were, and after looking, told Bill that John had the highest score in the class and he got the pass.

After Easter, as the weather warmed up, John as a daily routine would get up in the morning, pick-up a bike at Special Services and bike the five miles or so to the beach at Red Bank. This was a daily routine and it was like a vacation for John. The Army bused troops, including John, up to Carnagie Hall one Saturday night to hear "Up with people," which John really enjoyed.

A fellow classmate at radar school who was from Boston, Marvin Chambers, who had attended M.I.T., was marrying a catholic and asked John to be his Godfather at his baptism in the Army chapel. Thereafter, he called John "Dad." John and his God-son took a test and qualified for helicopter flight training after radar school, but decided against it when they became aware that it would add a year to their tour of duty. John recalls his radar tests where students were given 10 minutes to isolate and identify the exact component causing a problem. Jim Grady who had graduated from Rockhurst University in Kansas City was in John's radar class and his sister Ann Grady was at St. Louis University when John returned from the Army. John introduced her to Bill and they dated a couple of times.

On weekends at Ft. Monmouth, John would frequently bike for miles along the sea coast through the beautiful New Jersey towns and countryside. He recalls how he loved hearing at the time a song by Harry Belefonte on the portable radio he took on bike rides. He also recalls being on CQ the weekend before leaving Ft. Monmouth with the sky overcast but beautiful breezy weather with the smell of the ocean in the air.

Bill volunteered for the draft after completing his junior year at St. Louis University in June and also had basic training at Ft. Campbell. John recalls being on leave and visiting Bill at Ft. Campbell on a Saturday. They were eating Oreos in their Volkwagon bug when someone came to tell Bill that the drill sergeant wanted Bill right away and his visit would have to end. Tears came to Bills eyes as he had to say goodbye.

John completed radar training in September 1967 and was assigned to a radar unit at Ft. Cason, Colorado. He recalls being on KP duty during the first Super Bowl in 1968 in which the Kansas City Chiefs played the Green Bay Packers. After another week-end KP, John recalls going to the top of a hill on base in the shadow of Chyenne Mountain and being perked up when he heard for the first time the song, "What a Wonderful World", by Louie Armstrong for the first time. Someone in his company and that person's wife had been seriously injured in a motorcycle accident on a mountain road, leaving a couple of children at home and John felt pretty bad about that.

While John was stationed at Ft. Carson and on leave in Tennessee, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot that April 4th and later in June Bobby Kennedy was shot. John was on riot control alert for Chicago during this period. He had worked in the cafeteria at Colorado College on weekends and had started courses at Colorado College, including a physiology course, and had to drop them because riot alert prevented him from leaving base. John recalls that each soldier had all of his gear required for riot control duty positioned in a large field in front of the barracks so that when the alarm sounded, they could rush to the field gather their gear and be bused to the airport and put on planes to Chicago. John never flew to Chicago, but did get as far as the airport once.

The most enjoyable duty at Ft. Carson was going out into the "field" for several days at a time for maneuvers. He usually drove the battalion commander and recalls at one point seeing the colonel he was driving motion to a tank to stop because it was running over communications wire. The colonel directed John to pull in front of the tank to stop it, which happened. He chewed the driver out and ordered him to back the tank up. Instead, the tank started forward rolling over the front of the jeep as John jumped out and the sergeant major tried to jump-out of the back which was rising into the air. Luckily the driver was able to stop before the sergeant major fell into the tracks of the tank. The colonel then stopped another jeep passing by, ordered everyone out and had us jump in and take off, leaving those people stranded.

John recalls the cold of the night as the 50mm and other artillery would practice shelling objects in the night. He would sit on the hood of the warm jeep to keep warm. During the day, the radar unit with which John was supposed to be working would be positioned on top of a hill and for fun, direct the artillery toward cows running wild from an adjacent abandoned ranch which the Army had purchased. At one point, John had to drive an "18 wheeler" tanker truck out to this ranch to deliver water.

John also enjoyed his duty helping with the training of the Colorado National Guard and the Air Force Academy cadets during the summers. He worked evenings at the service club on base until it closed at 11:00 pm during this period. He returned from the field late one evening and, so that he would not be late for his job, drove his jeep to the service club rather than parking it behind his company headquarters. When he got off work at 1:00, he found his jeep missing and worried that it had been stolen. He walked to the battalion headquarters where he was relieved to hear that it had been towed in by the MPs.

Also while at Ft. Carson, John took courses at the University of Colorado, Craigmore campus in Colorado Springs and on base through Southern Colorado State College in addition to Colorado College. He also worked as an editor on the University of Colorado student newspaper.

His sister Susan visited John at Ft. Carson one October and, although the snow hadn't fallen yet, they traveled to Aspen together. John took Susan to the Denver Airport for her return trip to Tennessee and forgot where he had parked his car. He searched for a good deal of time and fell asleep at the wheel on the way back to Ft. Carson, awakening a spilt-second before his volkswagon bug slid under a slow moving tractor-trailer, just in time to swerve into the other lane.

Joan also visited John at Ft. Carson and he picked her up in his jeep at the guest house one afternoon while he was dragging chains in the desert to get the rust off of them - fun rides up steep hills, etc.

The day in October 1968 that John received orders for Vietnam, he heard on his radio that Lyndon Johnson had halted the bombing of the north and had call the Paris Peace Conference. John then took POR training for Vietnam and was given 30 days leave during the month of December 1968 which he spent in Tennessee.

In the Fall of 1968, Bill heard that John had received orders for Viet Nam, so he contacted Senator William Fulbright, in whose Washington office he had worked during his off-hours. Bill asked if Fulbright could do anything to get him to Viet Nam before John. Fulbright called the Ft. Belvoir Post Commander, Bill was given two weeks at home, then he was off to Viet Nam.

On New Year's day, the family, including Bill, accompanied John to Sewart Air Force Base in Smyrna, Tennessee, where he took a very large propeller driven transport plane to Norton Air Force Base near Los Angeles. There were only the pilots on board plus four or five passengers. The plane was very cold with only pull down seats on the sides and looked like those planes in the movies carrying paratroopers. From Norton, John took a C-130 jet to Travis Air Force base in Sacramento and was then bussed to Oakland Army Depo.

On January 1, 1969, Bill left for Viet Nam from Ft. Dix, New Jersey after seeing John off at Sewart Airforce Base in Smyrna, Tennessee

Shortly after Bill arrived at the First Aviation Brigade in Long Bien, Viet Nam, a shell from the 1st of the 33 Artillery, which had just arrived from John's post at Ft. Carson, Colorado, landed short and blew Bill out of his bunk in his houch uninjured. Bill's good friend John Love was killed in the next houch. Bill was responsible for preparing orders assigning new arrivals to various locations in Viet Nam where needed. At one point his unit was assigned a new Commanding Officer whom nobody liked, so Bill and his group decided to cut new orders reassigning him to the DMZ. This new CO was really puzzeled because he thought he was being permanently assigned to Bills unit. Bill received the Service Cross(?) for his work in Viet Nam.

As soon as he began processing in at Oakland Army Depo, John informed the people there that his brother had left that same day from Ft. Dix, New Jersey for Vietnam. John was still issued two duffel bags full of jungle gear and put on hold. After two weeks, John was given additional leave in Tennessee and then reassigned to Ft. Riley, Kansas where he was to accompany a unit there to Germany. As it turned out, the company had left for Germany during John's leave, so he was assigned to a another unit at Ft. Riley as a radar technician with nothing to do other than pull guard duty. That first Sunday at Mass, the priest announced that chaplain's assistances were needed. John volunteered but was told not to tell his unit until the Post Chaplain was able to throw his weight in to the reassignments. For the next six months until he left the service, John was reassigned to the headquarters company near the family quarters of William Custer before he left for the Little Big Horn. He worked at the oldest church in Kansas (first church built in Kansas) with an Irish priest with a thick Irish accent, Fr. Carr, who had been an engineer and had a late vocation. On Sundays he would drive a large bus to pick people up for Mass.

John took classes at Kansas State University while at Ft. Riley, one class being a geology class which afforded the opportunity to go on field trips to observe rock strata's, etc. He also took a fortran computer programming course and was allowed to take the final exam later than others because she was scheduled to be on leave in Tennessee when the final exam was to be given.

John recalls that he was in a department store in Manhattan, Kansas when he heard of the death of President Eisenhower.

The night before President Eisenhower's burial, John Andrews received a call from a representative of Mame Eisenhower on the funeral train saying that Ike and Mame had attended services at the oldest Church in Kansas located at Ft. Riley, Kansas and wanted a large white cross that they prayed before there in their younger days to be used at the burial. The cross, however was not found. Early on the morning of the burial, at about 5:00 am, John was driving to the guest quarters for a quick visit with his sister Joan when he saw travelling parallel to the road upon which he was driving the black draped funeral train slowly making its way thru Ft. Riley. Joan attended the burial with chaplins from Ft. Riley. John was serving Mass at noon when President Nixon's helicopter landed to a 21 gun salute. [At ten years old in 1957, John Andrews for the first time became very interested in the news when President Eisenhower sent troops into Little Rock, Arkansas to desegregate the high school there.]

During his last three months at Ft. Riley, John signed up for an industrial drafting course through the army's Project Transaction program. John recalls being on break for his courses in July of 1969 and listening to the lift-off of Apollo 11, which landed the first men on the moon. That Friday afternoon after classes he drove to Tennessee in his volkswagon bug for a three day pass and by the time he arrived, the astronauts had landed on the moon. He also recalls driving back to Kansas either at that time or a later time and hearing on his radio the news about Ted Kennedy's event at Chappaquitic.

The last couple of weeks before getting out of the Army, John slept in the basement of the church where he worked and assembled a stereo receiver kit from Heathkit. The church had a piano in the basement and John loved to play the piano during the evenings and on weekends. One evening after he had locked the church doors and had gone to bed, he heard footsteps going from the back door of the church to the front. Although he knew he had locked all of the doors, he wasn't concerned. He went back upstairs and checked the backdoor which was locked, looked between the pews, found nothing, so went back to bed. On an earlier night, John was relieved from guard duty atop a hill at Ft. Riley and the preson who relieved him reported early the next morning that a hand had grabbed him from behind, choked him bringing him to the ground. When he got up he saw someone on a white horse riding off. Stories of similar incidents had been apparently reported for years at this sight at Ft. Riley.

John completed about a year of college while in that Army taking courses at places such as Colorado College (where he also worked in the cafeteria for extra money as well as the Service Club on base), Southern Colorado State College, University of Colorado, Craigmore Campus (where John also worked as an editor of the paper) and Kansas State University. John was required to pull out of his courses at Colorado College after Martin Luther King's or Bobby Kennedy's assination because he was put on alert for riot duty in Chicago and was unable to leave base. At one time, John was going to be a little late for his job at the service club after returning from the field where he was helping with the training of the Colorado National Guard or Air Force Academy Cadets, so he parked his jeep at the service club rather than behind company headquarters and the jeep was towed in by the MPs.

Bill left the Army in June 1969 and flew through Hawaii directly to St. Louis to begin classes at St. Louis University. The entire family with the exception of John waited at St. Francis Xavier Church on Campus for Bill who met them there. Joan had sat in on a few days of Bill's classes taking notes for him since classes started before Bill's discharge.

When John left the Army in Sept. 1969, the exit physical showed a spot on his heart so he had more tests. When back for the results he overheard doctors saying they had never seen a heart in such an unusual shape. They said heart was very muscular. John had always placed first in his company in physical training tests in the Army. After the Army, John enrolled in Electrical Engineering at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Because he missed his brother and his sisters at St. Louis University and was having trouble acclimating to engineering studies after almost three years, he left Vanderbilt and transferred back to St. Louis University, enrolling in the School of Arts and Sciences, majoring in Economics and taking 20 or 21 hours each semester so that he could graduate as soon as possible.

When John returned to St. Louis University after the Army, he was asked by the editor of the yearbook to help with the yearbook. He organized the taking of pictures of the various sports, academic and social organizations on campus. John didn't date very much in college, however he met and asked out a couple of times a Rosie Morweisel from Ohio who was the president of the Rogers Hall Dorm Counsel, one of the nicest girls he had met at St. Louis U. On one date in the chilling snow to the movie Withering Heights, his volkswagon bug broke down and he had to call his friend, John Cherron, to pick them up. After graduating and returning to St. Louis U at Christmas time, he bumped into Rosie at the College Church and found that she was in Medical School at the time.

John took a bus from Nashville to St. Louis the night before his graduation in June 1971 because his family was unable to make the graduation as they had planned. He slept through most of the commencement speech by the CEO of AT&T, got on a bus for Knoxville, Tennessee after his graduation arriving in Knoxville the next day to begin law school at the University of Tennessee. He remembers carrying his suite cases, in the sweltering heat, from the bus station to his dorm room and a cool rain coming later that day. He enrolled in four courses (Torts, Contracts, Civil Procedure and Property). The Sunday after his second week of classes he was feeling pretty homesick and exhausted and decided to take a walk the two or three miles down the scenic road along the Tennessee River and visit his high school friend, George Frazier, who had left the seminary and was living at a rectory in Knoxville. George was at home in Nashville and John was unable to see him. That Monday, John decided to leave law school and enroll in the M.B.A. program at St. Louis University that fall.

During his M.B.A. program, John started working full time at Marshall and Stevens (a national appraisal company) while he took night courses. His friend, John Sharon, who was in Law School at St. Louis University, was working for a home construction company and reinkindeled John's interest in building homes. John looked in St. Louis for a lot upon which to build a first house, but then decided to buy a 2 1/2 acre lot in South Nashville off of Granny White Pike for $9,000.00. John's sister Susan worked very hard clearing the lot while John was in school in St. Louis. A while later, John decided to look for thirty acres or so in a less developed acres south of Nashville, so that he could build multiple houses with proceeds from the first. He saw an advertisement for 207 acres on Old Hillsboro Road and, although the possibility of a purchase was remote, he asked his parents to look at it and let him know what they thought. He returned to Nashville the following weekend and visited the property with his parents, having the first impression that although the property was beautiful, he didn't want to buy a "state park." His mother said that they were going to buy the property if he didn't and that they would loan him the additional $50,000 he needed for the purchase by selling their Tyne Blvd. house.

John sold his lot and a few months later his parents sold the Tyne Boulevard house, his father retired from teaching at Lipscomb School, and his parents returned to the farm in Lewisburg. John then transferred to the M.B.A. program at the University of Tennessee in Nashville that following fall so that he could tend to the farm and he began working full time for the U.S. Crop Reporting Service in Nashville. The land was so beautiful that John was reluctant to develop it and wanted to keep it for raising his own family someday. John's sister Susan helped John select a registered springing angus hefer and twenty weaned hefers for the farm. That fall, however, John's father felt that it was unfair to John's brothers and sisters that the farm be in John's name alone and decided that the 2/3 of the farm securing the $50,000 loan to John should eventually go to the other children and the loan terminated. John wanted the farm for his own eventual family and his mother fell in the middle of this controversy. This was very hard emotionally on her and she then became detached from just about everything. John then decided to return to the M.B.A. program in St. Louis and forget the farm. The cattle were given to John's father and transferred to the Lewisburg farm. The herd grew to well over a hundred head, which John's father sold for a good sum. Later, things were left as they were and John continued repaying the loan.

John's sister Susan joined the Carmelite monastery in St. Louis as a novice while John was working on his M.B.A. at St. Louis University. Bob Rider lived on the grounds of the convent and drove down to Nashville with John on weekends to help him put up fencing for the cattle. (This was before Interstate I-24 was built between Nashville and St. Louis. Bob and John would leave St. Louis about 5:00 p.m. or so, arrive at the Old Hillsboro Farm at 2:00 or 3:00 the next morning, sleep until 7:00 or so, begin building fences, and then begin the return trip to St. Louis late Sunday afternoon.)

Susan's fellow Carmelite novice, Germaine, left the order a month or so before Susan, and Susan asked John to call Germaine to see how she was doing. John was asked to dinner at Germaine's house, after which she showed him the facilities in her community. They bumped into Claudia Sainz (who was an intern at Parkland Hospital in Dallas and a former classmate of Germaine's) and Claudia's sister, Beverly, at a gym while they were working out. John later wrote Claudia and flew down from Delaware to see her several times.

When Bill returned home from Barcelona Spain (he had been working on his Ph.D. at the University of Texas through the University of Barcelona), he visited John in Delaware on his way home and John talked him into driving to Dallas with him to see Claudia. Bill ended up moving to Dallas and teaching at a junior college there. When John later flew to Dallas to see Claudia, Claudia picked him up at the airport and, when he asked her what she wanted to do that night, she said, "Let's go over to Bill's." Bill and Claudia were married in the Washington University Medical School chapel on December 31, 1994. They spent their honeymoon traveling back to Dallas and camping out in the cold and possibly snow on their way back. After Claudia finished her residency at Parkland Hospital, she and Bill signed up for a year in Columbia South American with the American Medical Missions Board. Bill came down with malaria and recalls having to get up during the night with malaria to try to get the generator started while Claudia was trying without electricity to save the life of a dehydrated mother giving birth.

After finishing his M.B.A., John was asked to interview with the corporate offices of Crown Zellerbach Corporation in San Francisco in August 1973. He flew from Nashville to St. Louis and placed his suit coat on the door of a phone booth while he called a friend, only to find his wallet and ticket missing from it after the call. A few minutes later he went to the ticket counter, saw a man handing his wallet over to the attendant with his ticket it in, but absent all cash. He missed his flight but was able to get to San Francisco at 5:00 the morning of his scheduled interviews. He had five interviews, was offered the job during his last interview and returned home to Nashville that afternoon.

John started in a management training program at Crown Zellerbach Corporation's corrugated container division in St. Louis and was transferred to its Newark, Delaware plant nine months latter, in March 1974, as assistant controller. He then bought a three story Victorian house in downtown Wilmington from the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development for $400.00 planning to restore and live in it. Joan, Susan and Miriam stayed with John during the summer of his first year in Delaware and worked at the race track (Miriam as a jockey). Joan and Miriam returned home after the summer while Susan stayed in Delaware. John enrolled in an evening biochemistry course at the University of Delaware that fall.

Bill and Claudia immediately returned home after only six months in Columbia, South America, began living on the Old Hillsboro Farm, Bill working for the Herald Tribune and Claudia at in the Pediatric Clinic in Columbia, when they heard that Susan had been abused by a person at the Delaware race track. John left his job in Delaware a short while later to return home after about two years in Delaware. At this point the entire family was back in Tennessee.

John decided to buy 44 of 90 acres that came up for sale on Robinson Road to give the "Old Hillsboro Farm" road frontage. He was substantially ahead in repaying his parents, so he put every penny into paying off the lien on the 44 acres. His parents were using the proceeds from his loan to buy a 100 acre farm in Santa Fe, Tennessee with Bill and Claudia, Bill and Claudia getting the house for $15,000, so when John started focusing on repayment of the 44 acres, his father began asking for continued payment of the lien. At that point, John owed a balance of $32,000 on both tracks of land, did not know how he was going to get out of debt within a reasonable time, did not want to sell the land because he had put so much effort into it and always wanted to raise his own children on a farm, saw an advertisement in the paper for a job in Saudi Arabia and decided to spend a couple of years there to pay off his loans. John was puzzled when his father could not understand why he was going to Saudi Arabia.

John's father and Aunt Sara accompanied John to the Nashville airport for his trip to Saudi Arabia and, being distracted, John ended up going through the wrong gate and onto a plane to Pittsburg rather than Newark, N.J. The plane had to return to the gate to let John off so that he could get on the right plane. On the flight to Newark, N.J., John talked to the person next to him who said he was from Shelbyville and was on his was to mountain climb Mt. McKinley in Alaska. He said he had graduated from a small college in Massachusetts and was working in a bank in Shelbyville. John asked him which college, and he said Harvard. He then introduced himself as John Cooper and John replied that there was a former governor from Shelbyville named Printice Cooper. He said, "that's my father." John then said there is a congressman from Tennessee named Jim Cooper and he said, "that's my brother." He had another brother who had graduated from Harvard Law School.

John spent 4 1/2 years in Saudi Arabia, bought 60 acres on Cotton Road west of the intersection with Del Rio Road in Williamson County after he had paid off his previous loans, during his vacation in Tennessee after his first year in Saudi Arabia at which time he also took the Law School Admissions Test at Vanderbilt University. The 60 acres ran along the Harpeth River, was flat and tillable, only 14 miles from Nashville and he thought better situated for his eventual family. John sold this property in 1992 and the proceeds were used to pay off the loan on 11.35 acres in Hillsborough, Virginia and to purchase a home in Hockessen, Delaware.

Fridays in Saudi Arabia were equivalent to Sundays in the US and were the only days off. Work days were 6 days a week, ten hours a day beginning at 7:00 a.m. John recalls how in his second year in Saudi Arabia, Aramco could not decide whether to let Mass be held Christmas eve for fear of offending the Saudis. John's went out fishing or water skiing in the Persian Gulf on days off on one of two fairly large boats owned by his employer. He was amazed to see plankta light up and sparkle in the water of the gulf at night as ships left a trail or as people walked in the water. Poker games on Fridays was the most common form of entertainment for most and some would begin a game after work on Thursday and continue playing through the nights until work on Saturday morning. Some lost everything they earned the previous week or for the month in a single game.

ELIZABETH JANE EARLY ANDREWS
TIMELINE
Birth
August 17, 1918 Washington, D.C. while her family lived at 550 Irving St. NW
In 1918 Gampa was serving in France as a captain in army ordnance when Ganger gave birth to my mother, Betty Jane Early. Mom was born in Washington DC, during the opening phase of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive that ended the Great War.

Baptism
1918 Washington, DC-The Church where Mom was baptized burned down so there is no record of her baptism; she was re-baptized at time of first communion at St. Bridgets Church in Detroit by father Halfpenny and her Aunt Gertrude stood-in for her Godmother Marion Bentley. Gertrude O'Keefe was very bright and joked at the time of Betty's rebaptism at St. Bridget's in Detroit that she'll bring the baby blanket for the baby. Fr. Halfpenny did the baptism.

Age 2 — Residence
1920 Oconto, Wisconsin
1920 Federal Census - living with grandmother Elizabeth "Nanny" O'Keefe, her mother and brother Ted. When she was little her siblings could not pronounce her name so she was called "Bitte Nine" rather than Betty Jane.

Age 2 — Birth of Sister Joan
February 6, 1921 Detroit - My sister Joan, my dear sister Joan, the dearest soul in the world, and she had it very, very hard. From the time she was born she was very weak, so when it got time for school, she went to St. Bridget's, and the local schools and St. Bridget's and St. Cecilia, so when it got time that she would naturally go to college, they sent her to a Catholic, very expensive school in Canada in, the first town in Canada after you cross the Ambassador Bridge, Assumption

Age 6 — Hit by Car
1924 Detroit, Wayne, Michigan, USA
Her father tracked down the hit and run driver and called him just to let him know that he had found him.

Age 7 — Residence
About 1925 Begole Street, Detroit, Michigan - Next door neighbor, Mrs. Webb, was a psychic who would love to tell Mom her future. Mom asked why all of these limosines would pull up to her house. There were executives from Ford, Fisher Body, etc. who would come to her for advice. Her husband Jack could not keep a job and she supported the family this way. Her sister Julia married Julius Stone, a prominent lawyer in Detroit.

Age 8 — First Communion
1926 about Detroit- Betty had to be rebaptized at her first communion & her Aunt Gertrude stood in for her Godmother Marion Bentley. Betty always knew who her Godmother was because of the direct family relationship but because the church in Washington, DC where she was baptized burned down she has never known who her Godfather was and now she's wondering whether it was George Bentley.

Age 9 — Residence
1927 about Detroit, Michigan
Moved to Monica Street in Detroit when 9 or 10 and lived next door to Blair Repligo, an extremely handsome and wealthy man who manufactured globes. They would let daughter Shirley play only with Betty.

Age 10 — Confirmation
1928 St. Bridget in Detroit

Age 11 — Piano
1929 Detroit, Michigan
In her early years of grade school, a little girl in school always made derogatory comments to others, watched Betty play the piano while she was taking lessons and commented that she had the ugliest hands she had ever seen. Betty never again played piano

Age 11 — Grade School
1929 Detroit, Michigan - Attended St. Bridget Grade School taught by the Dominican nuns. When Betty was in 5th or 6th grade her mother took her out of St. Cecilia and enrolled her in the elite Winterhalter School. She then attended St. Cecilia's High School at Grand River and Livernois

Age 12 — Census
1930 Detroit, Wayne, Michigan

Age 16 — Residence
1934 Oconto, Wisconsin
Betty was her grandmother Nanny's (Elizabeth Hoeffel) favorite person. She lived with Nanny in Oconto, Wisconsin for a full year when she was 16 before Nanny moved to Detroit to live with Betty's parents, where she died.

Age 17 — Depression Era
1935 Detroit, Michigan
Son Bill Andrews - Unlike many of their generation, neither of my parents was much affected in the quality of their lives by the Great Depression. It was Pearl harbor that transformed frivolous and carefree youngsters into serious and responsible adults.

Age 18 — Education
September 1936 Detroit, Michigan - Betty had a summer job at D. J Healey (dept store?) before she was to start her junior year at the University of Detroit but instead went into nursing.
Mom enrolled at the University of Detroit and was elected class secretary each of her years there. She was in a Spanish Quartet and they traveled around to other schools singing.

Age 18 — Summer Vacation in Wisconsin
June 1937 Oconto County, Wisconsin, USA
My first summer vacation at U of D my mother took me to Wisconsin with her and my mother thought my father's family the Earlys were just second class. My mother, I'm telling you as it is now, I never heard my mother say anything nice about my father.

Age 19 — Education - Languages
1937 Detroit
Mom said that she always loved languages in High School and at the University of Detroit and that they came second nature to her. She received straight As in languages & at the University of Detroit Dr. Espoinoisa was amazed at how her tests were flawless.

Age 19 — University of Detroit - pre-World War II
1937 As World War II erupted in Europe Mom was enjoying an active social life at UD where she was a popular coed, a class officer, & a sorority sister in-. Twice her peers elected her Snowball Queen for the university's biggest social gala.In old black & white
photos & newspaper clippings collected by Ganger, Mom is always shown with a coterie of young men flocking about. In these time-capsule portraitures, she reminds me of Vivian Leigh's rendition of Scarlett O'Hara in the opening scenes of Gone with the Wind.

Age 19 — Education
1937- 1943 (Sept.) University of Detroit 3 years; RN Degree St. Joseph Hospital, Hamtramck, Michigan. She was registering for her junior year at the University of Detroit when all of a sudden she decided to walk over to Mt. Carmel Hospital and told them she wanted to be a nurse. She was told to go over to Hamtramck, Mercy College of Nursing and see Sister Valentina, head nurse. There she told sister Valentina that she wouldn't have any dates. Sister asked if she had a lot of dates. One weekend Mama had 16 corsages in the refrigerator.

Age 20 — Leaving the University of Detriot for Nursing
September 1938 Detroit, Michigan - It was almost as if it was meant by God. I walked off the campus right at the Chemistry Building where I was to go in to register. And I walked a couple miles to St. Joseph Mercy Mt. Carmel Hospital. I guess I said can I speak to the mother superior and I said I'd like to enter nursing.

Age 21 — Pre-Military Induction (Cont'd)-Betty told son John
September 1939 that Otto said to her while he was still married to Vera, "if you ever hear that I died in an accident or suicide, it is murder." He was a fervent Catholic & never would have committed suicide. He & Maryanne were very much in love, but she had cancer about the time they visited the farm. Mom was always making retreats while at the University of Detroit and that's how she met Otto Winsen's mother. Everyone was convicted for German war crimes except her brother, Von Poppen.

Age 21 — Pre-Military Induction
August 1939 ...with potential beaus flittering around her, solicitous to the point of sycophancy. One of Mom's beau's was Otto Winson, an anti-Nazi German student who remained in the United States during the war, became an American citizen, and later gained renown as inventor of high altitude balloons for scientific exploration of the ionosphere. On July 24, 2007 Otto's widow Marion Winzen called Betty and they spoke for over an hour. Marion said that she thinks of Otto every day and would never have remarried. They did not speak of his death. Marion said, Otto loved you very much to which Betty responded, it was platonic.

Age 21 — Student Nurse
1939 Detroit, Michigan - - St. Joseph's Hospital. Between Pearl Harbor & late 1943 as a student nurse at St. Joseph Hospital, August Schoen, a wealthy Jewish man in a coma had earlier asked her to be with him when he died. She baptized him, he came out of coma and said "what have you done to me," then "my Lord Jesus!" and then he died.

Age 22 — Census
1940 Detroit, Wayne, Michigan
1940 Federal Census Student Nurse

Age 22 — Occupation
1940 - Stewardess - Capital Airlines I met Roy Chapin through the airlines. I was working for Pennsylvania Central Airline I got a job with the airline through Jim Shields. It was before I finished nursing. I had two years of nursing and then I got this offer to go with the airlines and I
left nursing for one year and I took the airline job and it was wonderful, but I wanted nursing, so I went back. In other words I picked up in the fall and finished nursing in 1943. I was going to go with Delta Airlines, but decided to go back to nursing.

Age 24 — Death of Grandmother Lizzie Hoeffel
April 16, 1943 Detroit-Aunt Lizzie died Friday April 16, 1943 at 9:30 PM at Jessie's home in Detroit of an attack of her old ailment. Ed & Jess brought her body to Oconto by train. The funeral was at 9 AM Tuesday April 20 from St Joseph's church, burial in Catholic cemetery. Carroll had died at Christmas time in Chicago, and Horace was in New York, and could not be there for the funeral, but Gertrude drove up and was with the family for several days, also Uncle Jim, the remaining survivor of our mother's family.

Age 25 — Graduation
September 19, 1943 Detroit, Michigan
Bill: Mom [left] the University of Detroit at the end of the spring semester in 1942 and entered St. Joseph Hospital's nursing school where enrollment soared due to the war's demand for medical personnel. She scored 98.9 on her nurses exam from Geneva.

Age 25 — Military Induction
November 1943 Head Surgical Nurse at US Army Hospital, Stuttgart, Arkansas
She was recruited by the army at her graduation in the summer of 1943 & began basic training at Maxwell Field in Alabama in January 1944. Her first duty assignment in March of 1944 was to the main hospital at Stuttgart Army Air Corps Base in Arkansas.

Age 25 — Military Service - Courtship (Cont'd)
Nov 1943 On the evening of her arrival at Stuttgart, she ate with the other base nurses in the Officer's mess where she was introduced to Dad and the other male officers at the hospital. William Andrews introduced himself & that night in pouring rain went over to see her. The next day after work, she was walking around the base looking for the post office where she planned to mail letters home. About this time an officer approached her in a jeep & asked her if she needed assistance. Dad was this first lieutenant.

Age 25 — Military Service
December 1943 Sworn in as Army Air Force nurse at Fort Wayne, Michigan. She chose the Air Force because her brother Ted was an Air Force troop-transport pilot. Surgical Nurse with Third Army Airforce AAFB hospital, Stuttgart, AR. Her future husband, William L. Andrews, was a First Lieutenant and Medical Supply Officer there. They met while she was looking for the Army Post Office on base to send a letter home, and he saw her wandering around unable to find it - She went up to soldiers who were German prisoners of war

Age 25 — Engagement
January 1944 about Stuttgart, Arkansas - Daddy took his pre-cana instructions from Father Ware in town. 5/23/2004 Mom said that after they married, Dad told her that he thought he could break her faith within a year, but he now knows that nothing could break her faith. (8 Media)
As death approached him during late May 2005, it was still unclear whether he had embraced the Catholic faith, or any faith.

Age 25 — Military Service (Cont'd)
January 1944 Stuttgart Arkansas - She was immediately struck by my Dad's easy, soft-spoken ways, his intelligence and his sense of humor. They were an attractive couple.
They were married in a private ceremony whose simplicity was in keeping with wartime restraint. In February 1945 Mom learned she was expecting me.

Age 25 — Military Service - Courtship
March 1944 It was at Stuttgart that my parents met in the spring of 1944 when Mom was assigned to the post hospital as a surgical nurse caring for the medical needs of young soldiers wounded in the Pacific Theatre. They met under circumstances not uncommon for men & women far from home in the midst of a global war. Photographs I have of my parents during their courtship at Stuttgart reveal a couple smitten by love. They met in March 1944 and were married the following November at the Riceland Hotel in Stuttgart.

Age 25 — Proposal and Engagement
May 1, 1944
Mom left the University of Detroit because of the pressures of being very popular (elected queen of many balls and asked out very often). Betty Early and William L. Andrews met in January 1944, proposed to her May 1, 1944.

Age 26 — Wedding
November 25, 1944 At her wedding, Betty could not get the words "I do" out of her mouth and after a long pause, apparently tears came to her eyes and her sister Joan handed her a handkerchief which she put to her face and a mint from the handkerchief attached to her face,
which caused her to smile and after which she was able to say, "I do".

Age 26 — Marriage
25 Nov 1944 Base Hospital, Stuttgart, Arkansas; Betty's father, mother, and her sister Joan, and Andy's sister Sara and mother attended the wedding in the base Chapel; and the honeymoon was spent at the Riceland hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. An example of Betty's extreme selflessness and kindness is that she was kind to her in-laws although they appeared to hate Catholics passionately & were hostle to her. Despite that, her husband appeared to have primary allegiance to his mother and sister.

Age 26 — Husband's Instructions in the Church
1944 Betty was married by Father Ware at the Stuttgart Army Chapel in Arkansas w/o a Mass. Betty had never kissed anyone before her husband proposed to her after he kissed her for the first time after dating for about 3 months. Betty was not in love at the time but said yes because he was a good man. They went right down town to sign up for instructions in the Catholic church.

Age 26 — Army Discharge
April 1945 Stuttgart, AR-She returned to Detroit while her husband was transferred from Stuttgart to Exler Field in Louisiana. Our family the product of two worlds colliding; Mom's family - Wisconsin Mich Catholics vs. Dad's Unitarian transcendentalist Methodist Mom's Sense of alienation in South, her contempt for small town gossip, Bigotry, hypocrisy enhanced by less than a warm reception from Dad's Mom and sister; mom considered herself more urbane, elitist.

Age 27 — Raising Children
1945 Betty always enthusiastically embraced and supported the ideas of her children and involved herself in seeing them through almost to a fault, encouraging their dreams & never making them feel that they couldn't accomplish, unlike her husband who seemed to have somewhat of a fear of the world & discouraged them from taking risks and accomplishing, preferring them to sit back and enjoy life. She was extremely intelligent and had boundless energy.

Age 27 — Residence
1945 Exler Field, Alexandria, Louisiana
Exler Field

Age 27 — Move from Detroit to Knoxville
February 24, 1946 Knoxville, Knox County, Tennessee
Flew into Maryville airport

Age 28 — Residence
1946 Knoxville, Knox County, TN

Age 28 — Birth of son John Early Andrews (1947–____)
January 17, 1947 St. Thomas Hospital, Nashville, Tennessee by Dr. Arthur J. Sutherland at about 9:00 a.m., just after John's father had left to take the 2nd day of the Tennessee bar exam.

Age 28 — Residence
March 1947 Nashville-The house, in the Belmont area of South Nashville, was a convenient five minute walk to Christ the King Catholic Church where Mom attended daily mass with her children. First home was at 1616 Stokes Lane in Nashville, then they were transferred to Atlanta and lived on Scott Circle in Decatur, GA

Age 29 — Birth of daughter Joan Elizabeth Andrews(1948–)
7 Mar 1948 St. Thomas Hospital, Nashville, Tennessee at 4:25 a.m. Named after her maternal Aunt Joan.

Age 29 — Daughter Joan's Birth
March 30, 1948 Nashville - Gampa and Ganger came down for Joan's birth and every day Gampa parked his car facing out so that he could quickly drive to the hospital from Stokes Lane, except the night of the birth. Although Daddy worked for Bell Telephone, they had neither
a car or telephone so Gampa had to drive. Mama said she loved poverty and loved living in poverty on the farm.

Age 30 — Residence
1948 Nashville, TN -Mom went to daily mass with her children, about six blocks from Grandmother and Aunt Sara. During the three years we lived in our little yellow-stone home on Stokes Lane, two additional children were born to my parents. By the end of the (1616 Stokes lane) I was one of four. Mom remained home to dote on us and Dad continued to work in management at Southern Bell. He never practiced law. To this day Mom claims that it was because Dad did not like the contentious nature of law practice.

Age 30 — Birth of daughter Susan Catherine Andrews (1949–)
30 Apr 1949 St. Thomas Hospital, Nashville, Tennessee (birth Certificate has Jean as her middle name)

Age 31 — Residence
1949 Stokes Lane, Nashville, Tennessee at time of daughter Susan's birth.

Age 31 — Residence
April 1950 Decatur, De Kalb, Georgia, USA
Left Atlanta GA in about December 1950 for Detroit and her husband left his job and went to farm in Lewisburg, TN and didn't work for the next four years.

Age 32 — Marital Separation
January 1951 about Decatur, De Kalb, Georgia, USA
[Coming to the farm] and I just dreaded it, to go back to Tennessee and everything was so hard. To think of going there.. everything was awful, going back to Tennessee. And we drove in the front gate and we drove in, and this peace, this joy came over me.

Age 32 — Residence
February 1951 2850 Oakman Boulevard, Detroit
David Mon 2/25/2008 Daddy and bicycle - I know Mama knew how to ride a bike. I remember the great photo of you guys on the bikes all together at Lake House. But I don't remember seeing Daddy ever on a bike.

Age 34 — Anticipating the Farm
1952 After her separation, Mom dreaded coming to the farm, but as soon as she arrived a peace came over her and she never wanted to leave. Upon arrival the children took off exploring the chicken coop and everything around the house in the dark.

Age 34 — Lake St. Claire
1952 Point er Roache, Winsor, Canada - While biking at Lake House on Lake saint Claire, Mama would take Bill to school [first grade] at Ecole Brebouf in Point er Roache, Canada on her bike and one morning she was hit by a car on her way back and ended up in a a ditch unhurt. The car never stopped and was probably unaware that she was hit. Gampa bought Lake House not to keep her from Dad, but to avoid the embarrassment of Mom bumping into U of D boyfriends.

Age 34 — Farm Arrival
July 1953 The Andrews family did not have a car for a period of time after the break-down of the Pakard car that Edward J. Early had given them for their trip from Detroit to move to the farm in August 1953. A few years later after owning their own cars, Uncle Ted gave then his car for a trip back to Tennessee after summer vacation in Detroit. Betty told her son John that that some of the most wonderful years of her live were those living on the farm in poverty.

Age 35 — Residence - Farm Arrival
August 1953 Lewisburg, TN -The 1st morning on the farm, sound asleep, Betty heard Milton the sharecropper say loudly, "Hello Mr. William." His daughters each morning carried buckets of water from our house to their house. A couple years later she talked her husband into providing them electricity. Uncle Kenneth and Aunt Conslo Andrews had lived in that house when they were first married and it was known as the oldest house in Marshall County.

Age 35 — Finances for Children's Schooling
September 1953 Betty gave her wedding and engagement rings to her husband to sell to purchase school books for her children, Bill and John, who were starting first grade at St. Catherine's School in Columbia, Tennessee. Betty's engagement ring was found with her sister--in-law Sara's things after Sara's death in June 2002.

Age 35 — Books and Reading
1953 Lewisburg, Tennessee
Nanny (Betty's maternal grandmother) had a whole set of flowered books by Ralph Waldo Emerson that her granddaughter Betty had in the bookshelf at the farm and this is how Betty's husband became interested in Emerson.

Age 36 — Religion
1954 Like her husband, she came from a conservative background. She was the daughter of Edward Early and Jessica O'Keefe, themselves both grandchildren of Irish immigrants who settled in Wisconsin. To us children, they were Gampa and Ganger. My mother is a devout Irish Catholic of the pre-Vatican II school, believing in the efficacy of Lourdes water, festooning the old farmhouse walls with reproduced Renaissance iconography of Jesus and Mary. She lamented the absence of a resident priest in Lewisburg so she can attend daily mass.

Age 36 — Trip to Rome for Pope Pius X Canonization
1954 Rome, Roma, Lazio, Italy - Betty father sent Betty and her mother to Rome for the Canonization of Pope Pius X. Betty's daughters, Joan and Susan, recall their Aunt Sara telling them that their mother had died at sea during her trip to Rome with her mother, Jessica Early, in 1955 for the canonization of Pope Pius X.

Age 37 — Death of father Edward James Early(1888–1955)
October 23, 1955 Detroit, at midnight, found with arms out-stretched toward his large crucifix in his chapel / bedroom - Grandson John recalls the last time he saw his grandfather in Detroit in August 1955.

Age 37 — Father's Death
October 1955 Detroit, Wayne, Michigan
Betty said when her mother, Jessica O'Keefe, told her that Michigan Drilling Company was going to Jessica's daughter-in-law, Catherine Thomas Early, Betty told her mother, "We'll bring it to court." Jessica said, "Oh, no." Betty then said nothing more.

Age 37 — Probate of Father's Estate
1955

Age 39 — Birth of son David Edward Andrews(1957–)
September 6, 1957 St. Thomas Hospital, Nashville, Tennessee. David's Uncle Ted called and spoke to David's brother John the morning David was born. Uncle Ted died a short time later

Age 39 — Death of brother Edward Carroll "Ted" Early (1916–1957)
November 19, 1957 Detriot, Michigan

Age 41 — Daughter Miriam's birth
October 7, 1959 St Thomas Hospital, Nashville-Miriam's father phoned her the night Miriam was born to tell her that he was staying on the farm in Lewisburg that night, to which Miriam's mother responded that she wanted him in Nashville at Tyne. She said that she was reading a newspaper article that night about a wealthy Jewish diamond magnate who left his fortune to his daughter Miriam. Nurses wheeled her into the hospital, turned around and asked in astonishment, "where did that baby come from?"

Age 41 — Birth of daughter Miriam Ann Andrews(1959–)
October 7, 1959 St. Thomas Hospital, Nashville, Tennessee at 12:01 a.m.

Age 42 — Birth and death of son Joel Andrews 1 Dec 1960 Farm House Kitchen in Lewisburg, Tennessee

Age 42 — Son Joel's Death
December 1960 Lewisburg, Marshall County, Tennessee – Daughter Joan: I remember times when Mama would cry. I remember when Joel died. John and I planted cedar trees on either side of tomb near the clay pond. I remember Mama always singing to us, saying rosary with us and Mama saying that John was the only one who stayed awake for the entire rosary each night.

Age 42 — Visit by College Friend Otto Winzen
April 1961 Lewisburg, TN

Age 50 — Son Bill's return from Viet Nam
June 1969 St. Louis, Missouri
To resume degree pursuit at St. Louis University

Age 52 — Operation
1970s Maury County, Tennessee, USA - Betty refused anesthetics for this serious operation
WLA Sr's grocery businesses were sold to the father of a doctor in Columbia who later operated upon Betty Early Andrews. The doctor said that Betty was the best patient he had ever had. His son also became a doctor.

Age 52 — Aunt Margaret
1970s Elizabeth Jane Early never met her Aunt Margaret Early. When Margaret was released from a Japanese prison camp in China after World War II, she went straight to Denver, Colorado to work at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital. She left Betty Jane and her other nieces and nephews money when she died in the early 1970s. Betty used this money to enclose the farm's front porch.

Age 52 — Death of mother Jessica Agnes "Ganger" O'Keefe(1885–1971)
30 Jul 1971 At her residence, 1003 Tyne Boulevard, Nashville, Tennessee 10 P.M. Saturday, with her daughter Betty and granddaughters Joan and Susan present.

Age 53 — Death of Mother
1971 Mama & Susan were in the kitchen at Tyne, Joan was with Ganger helping her from the bathroom to her bed. Ganger asked to rest on the couch on the way. Joan said, why not go a little farther & you can rest in bed & not have to get back up. But Ganger said she would really like to rest just for a minute. She lay down on the couch with Joan looking on. Just the next moment Mama & Susan burst into the room, Mama telling of a feeling she had of Ganger. When Joan looked back down at Ganger, she realized she had died

Age 53 — Property
February 1972 Franklin, Williamson Co., Tennessee
Purchase of 2/3 of Old Hillsboro Farm from Forest Homes, Inc. (Joe Dickinson)

Age 54 — Property
December 29, 1972 Franklin, Williamson County, Tennessee Sale of 2/3 of Old Hillsboro Farm to son John as agreed at time of purchase

Age 54 — Occupation
1972
Started back to nursing after husband retired from teaching

Age 56 — Son David's August 1974 Time Capsule found June 4, 2015
August 1974 Lewisburg, Marshall Co., TN USA - Here's what's was inside and some photos of Bill's I figure must be from that time. Danny gave me this old time capsule they'd found inside a wall of the old farm house. In August 1974, I'd written a letter, put it and a poem of Bill's inside an old film canister of Bill's, and dropped it in a mouse hole or sliding door of a wall.

Age 57 — Residence
1975 Lewisburg, Tennessee

Age 59 — Property
January 17, 1978 Franklin, Williamson County, Tennessee
Releases lien on the Old Hillsboro Farm; son John continues to make required payment on $32,000 balance; Peoples & Union Bank is relieved as repository for the payments. John writes post-dated checks a year later b/4 leaving for 4 1/2 years in Saudi Arabia

Age 62 — Retirement
1980 Lewisburg, Marshall County, Tennessee
After her husband retired in 1972 at about 56, Betty went to work as a nurse and retired in 1980, the weekend Bill Lademan visited the farm and proposed to her daughter Joan.

Age 67 — Fortieth Wedding Anniversary
November 25, 1985 Daddy and Mama were going back for a trip to Stuttgart for their 40th wedding anniversary when we children gave them the grandfather clock. They ended up not making the trip. Mama was on crutches at the time after falling a month earlier at the Cathedral
in Nashville while Daddy was going to Electra across the street.

Age 68 — Residence
October 24, 1986 Joan-I am sorry that I was not allowed to have a visit with you, Mama, when you came to the prison with John. But I did have a wonderful visit with John. John and I are so very close and I am so very grateful for this. I hated to see the visit have to end. I tried to look for you, Mama. I was able to see part of the parking lot, but I didn't see the family car, nor you... However... to think of you being only a few yards away. So close. I said my rosary and asked God to give you and John a safe trip home.

Age 68 — Daughter Joan Elizabeth Andrews -Catholic Woman of the Year
April 19, 1987 Outside of the early martyrs not much to compare this to. Is she the 20th century's answer to Joan of Arc or is she just another religious militant with a private theology impenetrable to outsiders? In short, is she a fool, a fanatic, a saint or some entirely original combination of all three? I don't know if that question will be answered in our lifetime. It's not that she is obstreperous or abusive in any way-by her actions she simply announces with a chilling clarity & confidence that I'd rather not

Age 75 — Residence
1993
U.S. Public Records Index, Volume 1 about Elizabeth E Andrews Name: Elizabeth E Andrews Address: 1448 New Columbia Hwy, Lewisburg, TN, 37091-4530 (1993)

Age 76 — 50th Wedding Anniversary
November 25, 1994 • Lewisburg, TN

Age 80 — Property
December 12, 1998 Santa Fe, Maury, Tennessee - Gift of Santa Fe Farm to Daughter Susan
Bill -$18,000 that Mom gifted to [_____] (______ insisting no one else get it) for the damage to [_______'s car (worth under $1,000) has reduced our cash reserves to the point where we will have difficulty now paying taxes on the farm that will be due soon.

Age 81 — Death of sister Joan Mildred Early (1921–1999)
October 31, 1999 Cincinnati, Ohio

Age 81 — Fifty-Fifth Wedding Anniversary
November 25, 1999 Lewisburg, Tennessee
Betty always thought that she would die before her husband and thought she' be in heaven with her hands on her hips saying, see Daddy, I told you so.

Age 85 — Husband's Illness - First Stroke
May 2004 Lewisburg Tennessee -Betty always thought that she would die before her husband and thought she'd be in heaven with her hands on her hips saying, see Daddy, I told you so. Betty told her son John and daughter-in-law Sue that the hardest year in her life was the year she lived at the Chalet before her husband died with visitors there constantly eating at all hours even the night her husband died.

Age 85 — Hardest Year of Mom's Life
May 2004 Lewisburg, Tennessee
year after Dad's first stroke staying at the Chalet due to arguments over finances, gifting, privacy etc., according to Mom, but it's hard to believe this was harder than the early years of her marriage with Aunt Sara and Grandmother Andrews.

Age 85 — Gifting to Children
June 2004 Lewisburg, Tennessee
After husband's stroke - Just after her husband died in June 2005, Betty told her son John that his wife Sue Sullivan in character she's higher than your sisters and your sisters have good character.

Age 86 — Death of husband William Lafayette Andrews Jr.(1916–2005)
June 2, 2005 Lewisburg TN farm Chalet at 1:15 am Thursday with children Joan, Susan, Miriam & David present, Bill having just left.

Age 86 — Husband's Death
June 2005 Lewisburg-5/29/07 Betty told her son John and daughter-in-law Sue that the hardest year in her life was the year she lived at the Chalet with the [______] before her husband died with visitors there constantly eating at all hours even the night her husband died. She immediately returned to her farm house upon her husband's death on June 2, 2005. Although she missed her husband, she could not wait to be back in her own home she loved.

Age 87 — Will
2005 Lewisburg, TN - Will prepared by son Bill's attorney, after Dad's first stroke and shortly before Dad's debilitating stroke, after Dad had declined to sign the will prepared by best estate planning firm in Nashville, thinking his hand-written will leaving everything to Mom was sufficient.

Age 86 — Probate
June 2005 Lewisburg, TN
Son Bill's attorney stated that her husband was providing for her to live after his death in the style to which she was accustomed, to which she replied, "Do I have to". Sue thought the family was so poor because Dad was raised without a father.

Age 87 — Leaving the Farm for the last Time
November 20, 2005 Lewisburg- On Sunday Nov 20, 2005, after Dad's death, Mom left the farm for good, after her children insisted that she not live alone on the farm. Bill drove her to the Airport and she flew from Nashville to BWI to live at Miriam's home in Annapolis. She hated to leave the farm when some of her children insisted because she thought that leaving would be the end of the life she and her husband had had on the farm, but that since moving to Annapolis she feels Daddy is with her every day.

Age 88 — Residence
2006 - 2011 Pleasant Plains Road, Annapolis, Maryland
In the spring of 2006, son-in-law John Lademan noticed Betty kneeling on the hard floor praying and shortly thereafter gave her a kneeler that he had made himself and that had ornate crosses carved out of and into the wood.

Age 89 — Cataract Surgery
2007 Baltimore, Maryland - Johns Hopkins Hospital.
About this time, July 24, 2007, Marion Winsen called Betty and they talked for over two hours. Marion said she thought of Otto every day and that she had never considered remarrying, but they didn't discuss Otto's death.

Age 89 — Automobile Accident
April 1, 2008 Annapolis, Maryland - Mırıam was turnıng across traffıc on hıghway 2 in Annapolis thıs mornıng and a truck was blockıng her vıew of oncomıng traffıc, so the oncomıng traffıc hıt Mama's sıde of the car at about 50 MPH. Mama said she saw the cars coming. Mama was takıng a note ınto Mırıam thıs mornıng to tell her that she would no longer go ınto Mass wıth her Tuesdays & Thursdays when Miriam takes the chıldren to school but went anyway thıs mornıng. She's ın a lot of paın.

Age 89 — Mom Returning to Farm
April 7, 2008 Lewisburg, Tennessee
Mom expressed her desire to return to the farm permanently after the reunion there.

Age 89 — Mom's Injury in Car Accident / Gifting to [_______]
April 2008 Sorry to put you and especially Mama through all of this. She said she's feeling a lot of physical pain this morning in her chest and I'm sure I haven't helped it.
Bill, [_____]'s car was worth $1,500, but [______ ______] just called and she's intent on only {_______] getting the $18,000 and no other family member. You do what you think is fair.

Age 90 — Illness
October 16, 2008 Annapolis-Daughter Susan returned from the Bells when Betty experienced dizziness & nausea on 10/16/08 and again a week later. Betty had called son John at 7 am every morning when he arrived at work during her stay in Annapolis after Fall 2005 but stopped October 23, 2008. This was sad for John knowing his mother was growing weaker.

Age 91 — Daughter Joan re: Nobel Peace Prize
October 2009
Joan and Chris Bell are raising adopted, disabled children while keeping five other homes-Good Counsel homes for pregnant women-in the New York area, providing light in darkness and inspiring hope against despair.

Age 91 — Hospitalization
February 15, 2010 Annapolis, MD
She left the hospital just as I arrived in Annapolis and is doing fine. She had a restricted aeorta and valve problem which medication should remedy.

Age 93 — Eye Surgery
12/20/2011 Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore Maryland - Her eyesight grew worse and worse over the past two years and she had cataract surgery. Blood was removed from her eyes and new lens implanted so that she could see again. Kept longer after surgery due to breathing difficulty. She had a post operation follow-up the next day (Wednesday) and it would be 30 days before they knew the results.

Age 94 — Interviews
2012 Susan said that her mother always told the children that their father was a saint. She also said that her mother told her that the girls were responsible for the boy's souls. In her 90's Mom talked about how she loved languages and that her favorite expression was "Adios", which she said meant "to God!"

Age 94 — Medical
2012 Annapolis, Maryland - by 2012, Mom could see only shadows
and even a couple of inches from her she was unable to reconize her children and grandchildren without being told who they were. She had also lost quite a bit of her hearing, although she could converse with her children & grandchildren & never complained

Age 94 — Near 95th Birthday
June 22, 2013 Annapolis, Maryland - Mama is now living in a world of almost complete darkness and silence. She sees light and shadows and hears sounds but cannot distinguish or decipher them. She asks that things be spelled out on her hand since the sense of touch is almost all she has left. She remains very cheerful and continues to love to tell stories. Her memory was still good, but for the first time she had trouble remembering her great-granddaughter's name. She is strong physically and loves to tell stories.

Age 95 — Hospitalization - Urinary Infection
June 28, 2014 Annapolis, Maryland- She keeps saying Tom Behrens has visited her and it takes an engineer to do something and Bishop Sheen has visited her. When we left the hospital she talked about a rape and how awful a letter was saying that Tom just wanted a mother.
She keeps thinking I'm Tom back to visit her. She said she wishes Susan were here and said that Mrs. Webb predicted what happened to Susan. She said Gampa it looks just like you.

Age 96 — Hospitalizations
May 2015 Annapolis, MD when daughter Miriam was away in May when picking up daughter Cecilia at Steubenville and then in June for Paul Coakley's funeral, Mom's
blood pressure dropped and she wasn't responding to anyone. She was rushed to the hospital and they brought her blood pressure up and she responded and started talking. They think she might have a urinary tract infection and are keeping her overnight.

Age 97 — Injury
November 30, 2015 Sue - Aunt Miriam just called & asked us to pray for Grandma because she had a fall this morning & has a slight lumbar fracture. She is home from the hospital now & it is just slightly swollen & not too painful. She will be able to get up & walk tomorrow. WXA - Miriam says Mom is doing better. The good news is that after being carried to the hospital by ambulance, she came home the same day. She's in some discomfort with the tiny fracture of the lumbar vertebra but pain meds should help her until she recovers

January 10, 2017 Annapolis, Anne Arundel County, Maryland, USA Beth told us yesterday the Mom has either sprained or broken her wrist. Beth says it's all swollen and it's so cold that Miriam is afraid to take Mom out to see the doctor and can't get a doctor to come out.

Age 99 — Approaching 100
May 2018 Annapolis, Maryland
Son Bill -CENTENARIAN 2 B - My mother is just a few weeks shy of her 100th birthday. We will be celebrating in Annapolis MD where she lives with my sister Miriam and her family. The pictures are of my mother and me then and now.

Age 100 — One Hundredth Birthday
August 17, 2018 Annapolis, Maryland
Beth said Mom was not very responsive and didn't say much, but when told it was her 100th birthday, she gave a big smile. Matt Lynch brought Beth home to Colora Sunday on his way back to the Merchant Marine Academy for his last year and saw the 60 acres.

Age 101 — Death
April 13, 2020 Annapolis, Anne Arundel County, Maryland, USA
On July 12, 2007 Betty said to her son John, "at 90, I tell dear God I'm a little scared stepping into something new, but I hope no one grieves over me."

Burial
Berlin ("The Nations"), Marshall County, Tennessee (9 Media)
Andrews-Liggett Cemetery on the farm of her husband's grandfather Nicholas

In-laws
Various Dates
Mother-in-law Stella Viola Simpson Andrews and sister-in-law Sara Josephine Andrews

Letters and Writings
Various Dates
Mom remembers a poem central to her (she has it at home). The gist of it is: Winds blow East Winds blow West The Helm determines which way the boat goes, not the winds. In life it's the soul that decides your goals, not the storms or strifes.

Ancestors
Re: James Sheridan Knowles, Page 22 - It is striking how such traits descend down within a family to later generations, Joan Elizabeth Andrews and her mother Betty displaying the same such attitude toward, and devotion to, the down-trodden.

Number of Children
Just after her husband died in June 2005, Betty told her son John that his wife Sue Sullivan: "in character she's higher than your sisters and your sisters have good character." Seven (7) - Susan said that her mother always told the children that their father was a saint. She also said that her mother told her that the girls were responsible for the boy's souls. Betty said that of all her children, John and Joan were most alike.

Grandchildren
40 in number
Biography
Nashville - Daddy and Mama were going back for a trip to Stuttgart for their 40th wedding anniversary when we children gave them the grandfather clock. They ended up not making the trip. Mama was in crutches at the time after falling a month earlier at the Cathedral in Nashville while Daddy was going to Electra across the street.

Avocation
Lewisburg-She loved construction and building things all her life. She was building bookcases in the farmhouse the morning before she miscarried her son Joel. She tore out the walls between the kitchen and the hall when she first moved to the farm in 1954 and had all of the farm outbuildings moved further away from the house.

Personality
Son Bill - Where my dad is laid back and soft spoken, Mom is a firecracker, a body constantly in motion whose outspoken candor and hardheadedness are perceived by many southerners as emblematic of Yankee assertiveness.

Raising Children
Mom taught us to hate the accumulation of wealth and money but to work hard, save, selflessly care for others and to value education, while Dad loved having money but hated the work ethic and did not consider the children's education important, ether because of the cost demands or his lack of confidence in his children's intellectual abilities, the later unlikely.

Values
Betty's primary concern in life was instilling a strong faith & love of God in her children, teaching them kindness toward others, even those who might have harmed them, teaching them never to touch a drop of alcohol & importance of purity even to the point of giving up life rather than being impure. She sought to give her children a strong education.

Grandparents
Betty said that her grandmother didn't talk much of Dr. O'Keefe's accomplishments but she knew of them because he had become fairly renowned in the medical profession for them and they were commonly known at the time. Betty never knew or saw three of her grandparents. They died well before she was born - John J. Early, Dr. Patrick J. O'Keefe and Mary Brogan. She only knew her grandmother Nannie (Elizabeth Hoeffel), who died while she was at the University of Detroit

Social Security Number: 364-12-3586

26 June 1992

Dear Susan,

The day before yesterday I called Action Properties and placed the Santa Fe farm on the market. I'm hoping that it will sell soon because I believe such would relieve Dad of much anxiety. I have never seen him appear more nervous. He told me the other day that he has had a knot in his stomach since the well drilling began. The state is considering building a 4-1ane expressway from Saturn to 1-40 West which has been surveyed to run right through the Santa Fe farm; however, with the state in such financial straights now, I don't know what will come of this. A planning meeting is scheduled in late July, I am told.

I was really excited when I heard from you that Joan and Chris were coming down and building their home here. I believed that a deposit of $30,000 would make a $30,000 mortgage manageable and I felt that, if things got financially difficult, then we could sell the Santa Fe farm in tracts and in leisure to help them out.

I am concerned with the way things are going - both the lack of information we are getting and the increasing burden on our parents. I realize now that Chris' move to Tennessee is not imminent, that he doesn't have $30,000 for a down payment, that the house costs keep climbing, that Dad has sealed the mortgage with the security of the Lewisburg farm, and that Aunt Sara (she owns 50% of the Lewisburg farm) is upset about being left out of the decision-making. She was in tears the other day when she was talking to Claudia.

Most of all I am concerned about the conspicuous lack of input which the rest of the family has. If you and Dave, Joan and Chris, Miriam and John, or Dave and Judy are not moving down immediately to assume responsibility for the project, our parents are going to be under some real pressure. Our family has expanded and I would really like to know how Dave feels about this project. Judy Condon, Chris Bell, John Lademan, and Claudia are also family members and I think a project of this size ought to be discussed by all members. How do they feel about this? When we used to talk about the possibility of a small cottage for family visits, we were taking about a cottage we the children would build to benefit our parents. I never anticipated building a house for our visits and then handing our parents the bill.

I am also concerned about the haste with which the project is being driven. Do you remember how we bought the Boston farm before we sold Tyne and the problems and anxieties experienced by this haste? We are still seeing the repercussons of that decision. Because Dad is assuming financial responsibility for the new house, he is under pressure to sell the Santa re farm ASAP. When we tried to sell this farm in 1985, we had it on the market for over a year and never got so much as a nibble - until we sold the house alone. The post-Saturn speculation has made things worse today. Farms all over Maury County are up for sale with few buyers.

Most important, I don't want you, Joan and Miriam to delude yourselves into thinking that, in the event none of you move back to Tennessee, Dad and Mom can move into the new home. Daddy told me that if none of us move into the house or couldn't pay the installments, he would rent the house out. For a couple who prides their privacy as much as our parents do, this would be unfortunate.

The bulk of the family has been excluded from the decision-making process and I think we all have some valuable insights to make on plans which will impact on all of us. I hope your husbands are as enthusiastic about the project as you, Joan and Miriam appear to be. I am concerned that the new house might end up being a visitor's "cottage" where the Brindles, the Lademans, the Bells and the Andrews may wish to stay several times during the year when we have family reunions. If this ends up being the case, it would be smarter, cheaper, more convenient, and less stressful to Mom and Dad if we just rented a room at the Henry Horton Inn whenever we visited and then let Mom and Dad foot the bill.

Brother Bill

cc:
John
Joan and Chris
David and Judy
Miriam and John

From: Andrews, William X.
Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2005 9:20 PM
To: Andrews, John (DC); john.lademan; CXBell; djbrin; david andrews
Subject: Mom & Gifting

... On another subject, I do think that we are being negligent in thinking that Mom can take care of herself by living alone in the old farmhouse. I know that this is what she says she wants but the other day I walked in to find that she had climbed onto the dresser in the kitchen to nail some picture hooks on the wall. She is not as robust and agile as she once was and I am concerned that she will have a bad fall one of these days. I am also concerned about strangers knocking at her door while she sleeps. She is so hard of hearing that you can enter the house and slam the door behind you, and she will remain asleep on the couch. It is not a very safe way to live. Even if I visit her once a day, I am only there long enough to take her shopping, or to hang a picture or cut down a tree, or have a chat. You know Mom, when she is tired of chatting, she makes it obvious that she wants you to leave.

Susan and her kids are almost finished moving from the Chalet back to Guadalupe and they make an effort to peek in to make sure Mom is ok. But it is not a good situation. Mom is so concerned about saving money for the estate (ie. for us) that I fear that she will not be taking care of herself properly. Yes I can write checks for her and I can call her periodically (her new phone is a great improvement over the one she insisted on buying for only $16 and I haven't told her the price of the good one I got her from WalMart) but it is not a long term solution. When my teaching begins in late August, it will be even more difficult for me to visit her during the week. I am truly concerned about what will happen to her when Susan and Dave leave for Delaware and when I begin work in the fall. She is so obsessed about saving money that she flatly refused Claudia's suggestion for a security beeper around her neck or my suggestion that I take her to the eye doctor. One of the reasons why Mom didn't want the IV in Dad in his last days was the cost (she is terrified of spending money that will one day go to us). David and I were present to see what an improvement the IV made in Dad's composure and breathing once Susan ignored Mom's objections and called for the IV.

It's my opinion - and it may be too late as it seems that Susan and Dave have made up their minds to move - that we should offer Susan a salary (to be increased when Mom is someday no longer ambulatory) to have at least a couple of Brindles stay at the Chalet where they could check in on Mom on a more regular basis. Mom could still stay at the farmhouse on her own if she truly wishes this - and it seems she does for now - but we could also have a pressure hose that can be activated at the Chalet whenever anyone drives up to the farmhouse. Again, it may be too late after what transpired in the weeks before Dad's death and the days immediately following. For us to say that we should do anything that Mom wants is also to say that we should not give her an IV someday when she really needs it, that we should let her fend for herself with strangers who drive up to the farmhouse with no one around, and that we should let her eyes deteriorate when a doctor could probably really help her. I love Mom to death but I believe her obsession with saving money for us is clouding her judgement. Mom was absolutely opposed to Claudia's suggestion that Dad be sent to the heart doctor when Dad had that fainting spell by his television set several years ago. His pulse was irregular, his face was white, and his lips were darkening. I think most of you will probably agree with me that Dad's trip to Maury Regional Hospital back then probably gave Dad five or six more years of life. If Mom is allowed to risk her life and health to protect our "financial interests," then we are collectively abrogating our moral obligation to intervene for the wellbeing of someone who has lost the judgement to care for herself. Again, this may be too late but I believe that there is sufficient urgency in the matter to call a general family conference. We could all meet, say, at a state park in Virginia and explore options. WillyX

From: John.Andrews
Sent: Mon 6/27/2005 8:31 AM
To: Andrews, William X.; john.lademan; CXBell; djbrin; davidandrews
Subject: Mom & Gifting

Bill, Sue and I have been trying to talk Mama into moving up with us, but I know how much she loves the farmhouse, so this would be hard for her. I know how much she loves Sue and how much Sue loves her, so at least this is an option. We of course would never take any money for anything.

I think it is hard living with teenagers, so I'm not sure this is the best, but maybe it would be better for Mama than moving up with us, but I wish she would.

From: David Andrews
Sent: Monday, April 07, 2008
To: Bill, John, Joan, Susan, Miriam
Subject: Mama and moving back to the farm

I just got off the line with Susan. Susan told me Mama really wants to move back to the farm, that the accident has brought that realization to Mama in earnest. Mama has asked Susan if she & Dave might be willing to move back to the Chalet to live with her starting June 1st. All this is in flux, of course, and no one including Susan or Mama has had time to fully consider or decide.

I want to talk to the family and hear your thoughts, wishes and willingness to help with these considerations. What, for instance, are alternatives? It's so easy to say "Yes! Please!" to Susan as we have so many times in the past...as we have after Daddy's death with Miriam. It's convenient and even necessary to see those willing to take on responsibilities that we by rights we all share as saviors. Susan saved each of us from having to radically change our lives to take care of Daddy when Daddy had a stroke; Miriam freed us from the responsibility of caring for Mama after Daddy died.

Before we ask or assume the same, I want to contribute my willingness to do it differently this last chance we may have to care for our parents. I believe it may not be good to be spared such a life-change as it will take to care for Mama.

Our parents raised six children. We are not just lucky to have such a large family, we have a reason and a way of loving that comes directly from being loved by our parents and siblings. To my way of making sense of our existence, this is the time for us to prove our worth, to Mama, to ourselves, to our own families, and to each other. The money we've received over the past years has allowed us much, but it means so little if it cannot help finance this opportunity to show our care of Mama and each other....

I am willing to contribute two months a year in Lewisburg with Mama. If each of us is able to work the same in some form, dividing our time by weeks or months or even days--as impossible as it may seem to change our work or family life now--I think we'll receive something true and even impossible back: our reason for being a family.

Love to you all,
David

From: "Andrews, William X."
To: "DJ Brindle"
Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2005 11:47 AM
RE: Momma's health and well being
Siblings, Mom living on the farm by herself is something that we cannot permit. Yesterday morning I was on the phone with her for over an hour (albeit six phone calls back and forth) and she says that saying the Hail Mary fifty three times a day is all she needs in life. She is definitely in denial and this is not a good situation. The problem is that Mom declares absolutely and under no condition will she live with anyone. She does not want anyone living in the farmhouse with her. My argument with her yesterday is that now she is even refusing to wear the emergency response device on her. She told me she would throw it away if Claudia gets it for her. The problem, folks, is that to argue with her is exhausting for her and anyone who tries to convince her of the errors of her ways. The only person who she will listen to is John A, so I think it is incumbent on you, John, to get her to agree with the device. It was you who finally broke the logjam about the device several weeks ago but, once Claudia got the info from Sue A, Mom abruptly changed her mind. ...The best case scenario for Mom is that one of us stay at the Chalet to check on her continually. She declares categorically that she will not live with Claudia, me and Claudia's Mom here in Columbia. She also says she doesn't want to be around any teenagers staying up late at night and watching TV. (she really seems to have a thing about teenagers).

The only option available to us at the moment, short of putting her in restraints and bringing her kicking and screaming to one of our homes, is to persuade her - and John you are the only one she will listen to. I am resigning from the head of the history department so I can do nothing more than teach - and this will give me more time during the school year to check in on Mom - hopefully every day (although I'll probably have to get a small used vehicle that is better on gas than my 8 cyl truck). I agree with you Chris that we are in a bad situation. Mom refuses to live with anyone... and she believes that saying prayer alone will solve all her problems. Originally Mom said she wanted to live on her SS alone each month but I am now giving her $200 in two bills each week plus groceries etc. I don't know what she is doing with the $100 bills but I would feel more comfortable if she were spending them on herself - but as we all know she isn't. If she mailing the bills off to priests or friends, that's one thing but I'm nervous with cash laying around the house with no "protector" around. Again, John, you are the only one she will listen to so I am begging you to get her to agree to let Claudia do what she was planning to do about the emergency alert device. I believe in the power of prayer but I also think God has given us a brain to think rationally. I believe He will judge us harshly if we simply say that we need only pray and let all other chips fall where they may. Bill

From: CXBELL
Sent: Monday, July 18, 2005
John,
Please be clear, Joan is not going to go down to live, maybe visit. I can't move as easily as you. You've picked up and gotten new jobs quicker than anyone I've ever known. That's why I thought you were ready to go. Please God, Joan and our family will stay together and that means where we are now, here.

From: John
Chris, I did understand from your email that Joan would only go down temporarily. If you don't want her to go temporarily, I don't think that's necessary. I don't think Mama has lost her facultires yet, so maybe you should talk to her about this. I know how I'd feel if I were older and people were making plans without including me in the process.

John, Chris is coming down tomorrow and he and Joan and their kids will drive back together on Sunday - if I have the right info. The good news is that Mom will not be alone. She is planning on flying into Washington-Baltimore Airport on Sunday (I'll drive her to the airport in Nashville and Miriam says she will pick her up at BWI when she arrives). She will be close enough to you and Sue where she can spend time with you guys whenever you need her for babysitting etc. This takes a lot of worry off my mind. Take care, WillyX

From: David Andrews
Sent: Friday, September 04, 2009 9:21 AM
To: Andrews, John (DC)
Cc: Bill Andrews
Subject: Common land on the farm
Good, John. I can't tell you how much it's meant to me to see your process in the farm division. I've felt a great sense of caring in you for me personally, and also witnessed an inspiring amount of selflessness in you. You want this badly, but I think we need to balance resolution with patience, and I think you may need to step back from it at least for a while. We got so close. I was so hopeful that I could feel peace about the farm and around my siblings.

I've meditated and tried to feel right about the spring going to Joan. I tried to separate my disappointment and impatience at the prospect of losing the excitement, happiness and peace I felt with yesterday's map. I had to actually get beyond my fear of messing that up: I wanted to say, "Okay, whatever anyone else wants is fine now that I've got what I want." But I think my saying, no, to that is my way of caring for my family.

I feel fine talking with Joan about it; I just don't know how to reach her. It's my birthday weekend, and I was going to go camping with the family, but I'll even drive to Lewisburg to talk with Joan, if she'll still be there.

March 28, 2010/Chattanooga

Elizabeth Andrews
c/o Miriam Lademan
1677 Pleasant Plains Rd.
Annapolis, MD 21409

Dear Mama,

Judy has just taken Eli & Lydia to a movie, giving me a chance to thank you for your note (March 7, regarding my letters to Daniel and Susan). Your response was very unexpected and welcome. I appreciate so much the faith and genuine kindness in your asking me to smile and wish well every person I come across. I can't think of anything less complicated or more fundamental in its goodness.

I will try my best to do this and with you in mind too.

Just goes to show how much we still have to learn of each other and how much happiness we can still give in our letters.

I miss and love you.

David.

From: Andrews, John (DC)
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2010 9:25 AM
To: 'David Andrews'
Cc: Bill Andrews; 'Susan Andrews'
Subject: RE: Farm Division

David, you can't imagine how much I gained through this experience with you. I've grown to know you more and respect you more than you can imagine through your integrity, honesty, basic morality, unselfishness and basic logic and practical application of all of this. I've also grown to know our overall family more, and it saddens me.

Thanks David.

June 6, 2011
Dear Mama,

Thank you for the messages you've left about my experience at St. Patrick's church in Askeaton, Wisconsin. It does seem a gift. I think I remember the bell, and I certainly remember the quite of that day. It was powerful seeing our relatives' names on gravestones and on the wall of the church foyer. I think what baffled me was how much in the middle of nowhere the church and graves seemed. By contrast, Lewisburg and the Andrews-Liggett cemetery seem hilly and hospitable. Even on that summer afternoon, I had a feeling how cold winters must be in Wisconsin and how small or transient life might feel in such a flat, exposed landscape.

Isn't Wisconsin where So Big, the movie you and Daddy liked, was set?

The last visit Bill and I made to you, when you were in the hospital, was the real gift, Mama. I felt so close to you and my siblings after. I'll try to keep this short, because I know it's hard to communicate these days, but I hope Miriam can convey to you via this letter how close I feel to my family after seeing her and you and Joan. Bill and I talked about it much of our drive back. Before, I'd been feeling so much separation and difference between siblings that I'd wanted out of the farm and to "get on" with my life. I didn't realize till seeing you and seeing you listening to the music you described to me, how much I miss you and my brothers and sisters. I very much had a change of heart. The farm seems now not only connection to you and Daddy and my past, but my only real connection to brothers and sisters that I too rarely see. Without the farm to physically bring us together, I realized how hard and unlikely it will be to see each other in the future; how easy it can be to lose each other; how much I don't want to lose connection to my brothers and sisters.

I'm so happy these days. I saw Susan and Joan a couple weeks ago with Bill, and we all felt the same desire to keep connection though the farm and through our love for you and Daddy. There seems to be complete agreement on a division of the farm making that not only possible but also generous to all.

I hope you can feel the peace and goodness and blessing that I'm aware of these days regarding our family.

I love you Mama,

David

Sunday October 16, 2011

Beloved Bill, John, Joan, Susan, David and Miriam,

I want you to thank dear Glen Alexander for his blessing to me. I am so grateful and so happy that the surveying of the farm is at last going forward and that each sibling, William Xavier Andrews, John Early Andrews, Joan Andrews Bell, Susan Andrews Brindle, David Edward Andrews and Miriam Andrews Lademan are receiving 39, nearly 40 acres each of the farm. A special blessing is the landmark at the Spring, GESU (Latin for Jesus). It will be a blessing on our whole farm. Everybody will be happy, I know, and anybody wanting to trade their acreage is free to do so.

Daniel, our godson and grandson will make me very happy if he puts three cedar trees in the open gap running along the Lewisburg, New Columbia highway, avoiding the power lines. Helen Ezel Goodman phoned me and said that she and Jack are so happy to have Daniel and Kaitlyn as neighbors and that Daniel has already helped them and they are so grateful and happy. Thank you for the three cedar trees, Daniel. We thank and bless dear Glen Alexander for the farm survey. Send him our love and blessing.

God bless you! Love and prayers, Grandma and Grampa in heaven - Elizabeth Early Andrews.

From: Andrews, William X.
To: Andrews, John (DC)
Sent: Tue Dec 20 22:03:21 2011

Hi John. I got a call from you tonight but we were at a Christmas Party and I couldn't hear the phone ring until too late. I talked to John Lademan and Susan Brindle and they told me that Mom was doing fine and that she has to go back tomorrow for post-op. Apparently they say it will take some time to know for certain whether sight will be completely regained in the eye that they said might be salvageable. We've burned a lot of vigil lights for her in anticipation of the operation. She is sleeping soundly now. We're having the boys, their wives and the girls over for Christmas and the next day we're leaving for St. Louis for Katie Sainz's baby shower and Liz Sainz's wedding reception (Rob's two daughters). We should be back next Wed or Thursday. Are you guys traveling anywhere for the holidays? Love, Claudia and Bill

Dear John, Joan, Susan, David and Miriam: 11 June 2012

It was good seeing Mom this weekend when David, Eli and I drove up. Mom seemed in good spirits and healthy for someone just two-months shy of a 94th birthday. Miriam, John and their children are doing a fantastic job caring for Mom and seeing to all her needs. John, David and I appreciated their warm hospitality when we all visited with Mom and enjoyed a dinner with her on the deck. It was a great weekend visit.

I'm writing this letter to let you know that I am contacting Glen Alexander and giving him the green light to proceed with the internal survey of the Lewisburg Farm based on Susan's map of May 2011 which we all agreed upon. The survey will not record any of the driveways, just the boundaries of our respective tracts. It was a great relief to hear from Miriam that all of us are in agreement on this. The present internal roads will be used by all family members well into the future. There will be no restrictions on their use by family members. The only caveat will be that if I and/or my children decide in the future to sell our land after giving the five of you first option to buy, then we will build an alternate driveway at our own expense along the north and east boundary of our section which is the easement shown on Susan's map to Joan's land in the back woods by the railroad tracks.

It's been one of my greatest worries about the current road cutting my portion into three separate sections. My boys regard this as making any possibility in the future of selling our land impossible. I would hope my children would want to have a permanent presence on the Lewisburg farm but I don't want them to be in a position where they have no ability to sell in they would prefer more and cheaper land elsewhere. I want them to have the ability to sell if circumstances require them to sell. We don't know what the future holds for us but medical emergencies with Will and Bre over the past decade have made me realize the importance of good health insurance and financial flexibility.

Anyway, as I said, it's a great relief to learn that we can proceed with the internal survey without recording the present roadways. All of us will be able to use these current roads for as long as the farm remains whole and unsold. As Susan assured me, we can all build roads, homes, or other improvements on our own parcels as much as we like.

I am enclosing a copy of Susan's map dated May 2011 which shows the partitions agreed upon. This is the map that I will give Glen Alexander to be used for his work. Each of you will receive a survey plat of your 39 acre tract together with a metes and bounds legal description. An additional plat and legal description of each of our tracts will be prepared by Glen so I can place the second set of six plats and legal descriptions in the safety deposit box at First Farmers and Merchants Bank in Lewisburg.

Not only will this final work by Glen Alexander be a relief to us in protecting our individual and collective interests on the Lewisburg Farm, but it will be a great relief to Mom who, I think, has been burdened by anxieties over our past conflicts of interest.

Love, Bill

From: David Andrews
Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2012 08:22 PM
To: Bill Andrews; Andrews, John (DC)
Subject: the story that formed my politics

John's message a little while ago asking Bill to read an National Catholic Register article about Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan, has me thinking about how we are all such avid readers. But we consider great writing, great journalism, great research...that which best supports what we already believe. While I've been surprised over some of the NCR writings that support the LCWR Nuns in the face of Vatican criticism, NCR isn't a source of journalism for me. Harper's and The New Yorker and The Believer are that to me, but maybe not to Bill or John. My point isn't to argue over where the best Journalism can be found, which source is true and objective, etc.. I'm just amazed at how each of us is so earnest and how that authentic and intense desire becomes a kind of knowing. We can't understand why others can't admit what we know they must, deep down, know too.

What we've forgotten is that each of us may have started out being the same, but something made us choose the kernel of truth around which all our knowledge crystallized. I'd love to hear what experience was defining for Bill and John.

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 6:11 AM, David Andrews wrote:

Thank you, John. I hope sharing this question doesn't offend. How we six in such a close family--really eight, because Mama and Daddy were not just our parents, they were models of difference--are so divergent in our beliefs is one of the biggest questions I have in life.

I have this sense our most openly held, outspoken, active positions begin with deeply personal experiences formed in a profound aloneness. But the connection between the personal origin and its outcome in what we profess is not itself a connection. It's our "faith" that there is a connection.

We can experience very similar and formative moments--in our "dark night" of the soul, we are together in being absolutely alone--but meanings we take from there can be vastly different. Our first act of faith I think is to construct a connection between the experience of being utterly alone and who we are now. Problem for most of us, our life becomes a defense of who we imagine we are becoming. The more insistent we become the further away.

My dark night I experienced in Ireland in 1978(?), where I realized I had followed Mama's meanings to find myself completely alone and afraid and clueless. I had to admit, no matter what I pretended, deep down I believed Mama's notions of God and love and that the meaning of life was in marriage and children. But it wasn't working for me. Worst of all, I couldn't love that world because I disliked who I was in it. It put everything wrong and ugly for me. I couldn't keep going in a direction that was basically Mama's and our sisters'. All I could see there were unformed, strong willed, love-sick and angry victims, who were trying to form marriages and families and tell the world how right it was when they couldn't even love themselves. It's harsh, I'm sorry, but that's the way I deep down felt about myself too. Because underneath then there was the lying and judging of others that wasn't just hypocritical. It was sinful because their higher morality seemed to license and sometimes demand it.

What we had to justify everything or to offer as love was the beauty of the farm, our idyllic childhood there, the pictures of tractor rides and acres of play, our professions of love. They were powerful, and this is the odd thing we believed in these things above all else. Even as they were made vane, superficial because they were not truly loving if we could lie and judge others so brutally. Still these compelling images were all I had to offer as love. And they were compelling even to me, but nothing coming close to what I now understand as love: a beauty that comes from listening, accepting, kindness, fairness, respecting yourself by respecting others.

I'll write more when I can. Must get ready for the day.

Brother david

OBITUARY BY OLDEST AND FIRST GRNADSON, MATTHEW ANDREWS

FUNERAL MASS WILL BE LIVE STREAMED VIA FACEBOOK AT 3 PM ON SATURDAY, APRIL 18, 2020.

TO VIEW FUNERAL WEBCAST, VISIT OUR PAGE:
Bills-McGaugh & Hamilton Funeral Home & Crematory
www.facebook.com/BillsMcGaughandHamiltonFH/

My grandmother, Elizabeth Early Andrews, long-time resident of Lewisburg, Tennessee, passed away April 13, 2020, at the age of 101. Born during WWI, she lived through over 40% of US history. She grew up in Detroit, where her father owned Michigan Drilling Company and she said she knew Henry Ford. She was a WWII army nurse (Lieutenant Betty) and deeply religious. She would air-pop popcorn and melt butter on the stove and created a lifelong popcorn addiction in me. She also taught me the Heimlich maneuver, what evaporation was, to eat the end that sticks out of my sandwich, and to help an ant out with a crumb here and there. She encouraged me and my brothers to gallop horses, climb trees, and build zip lines. If we were injured, she would tell us to offer the pain up to God. She showed me The Exorcist at an early age and added her own layer of narration from behind my chair. She let us keep stray animals that wandered onto her farm and named them all Shep. She had a very distinctive siren-like call when we were still out digging for arrowheads and she thought it was getting too dark. She was the mother of 6 and usually called them all David before getting to the right name. She left behind over 40 grandchildren and many, many great grandchildren. Married to my grandfather over 60 years, I've missed her since she moved off the family farm after his death. My family all appreciates the great care my Aunt Miriam, Uncle John and all the Lademan cousins gave her in Annapolis these past 15 years.

She was preceded in death by her husband, William L. Andrews in 2005 and is survived by her children: Dr. William X. Andrews (Claudia), John E. Andrews (Sue), Joan Bell (Chris), Susan Brindle (David), David Andrews (Judy Condon), and Miriam Lademan (John), as well as a host of grandchildren and great grandchildren. Mass and burial will be private due to current pandemic.

Thursday May 14 – 2009
P.S. Bill, I sent a copy of this to
John Andrews & David Andrews
To Beloved Bill aka "Charming Billy"

First off, let me tell you Bill that we constantly pray for dear Willy, Bre & the precious little pre-born – not only our formal prayers at Mass, Stations of the cross & adoration, but our prayers at home – rosary, divine mercy. We think of Willy, Bre & precious baby all the time, asking dear God to enflame them with the Fire of His Live. Amazingly, our deep prayers have inflamed also all in our family and beyond!

From Mama:

Thursday May 14 – 2009
P.S. Bill, I sent a copy of this to
John Andrews & David Andrews
To Beloved Bill aka "Charming Billy"

First off, let me tell you Bill that we constantly pray for dear Willy, Bre & the precious little pre-born – not only our formal prayers at Mass, Stations of the cross & adoration, but our prayers at home – rosary, divine mercy. We think of Willy, Bre & precious baby all the time, asking dear God to enflame them with the Fire of His Live. Amazingly, our deep prayers have inflamed also all in our family and beyond!

I am writing, Bill dear, to tell you that you are like Daddy – you love everybody & every-body loves you. Now he shows his concern for our family through you. Therefore do not ever discount the touching signs he gives you, i.e., rose falling at his grave "from all your children," the tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap of the sparrow inside his back room window at the chalet, no[w] the more than a dream of you & your brothers & sisters sitting on the flat-wagon behind the tractor, and his walking-up & sitting on the flat-wagon too. You said, "You're dead, Daddy?!! "He said, "Yes," nodding his head. Then you asked, "are you in heaven?" Again he nodded his head and said, "Yes." You asked, "Why do you look sad, Daddy?" and he vanished.. You no longer saw him, but the words followed "worried about the cowboys & Indians and the pirates." These words were of the devil – to make a discount of the important vision.

Amazingly, our cries to God & our fervent prayers – prayers for Willy, Bre & the precious pre-born to be inflamed with the ever-lasting fire of God's love, has inflamed also the hearts of our family and beyond!

Daddy's presence in Joan's Connecticut jail-cell was an awesome experience for Joan and a gift for her many, many years of prayerfully fighting abortion.

You are like Daddy, Bill. You have always loved everybody & everybody has always loved you. You have been a great instrument in bringing the fire of love to all our hearts.

God bless Dear Father Davis Chakelekel. The priests from India are such great saints. God bless Glennon, Matthew, Samatha, Sophie. Our love to you, Claudia, Marie and all the family. Mary Immaculate keep us always.

VoiceMail message of June 25, 2009 from Elizabeth Jane Early Andrews to her son John:

Ah, John dear. This is Thursday morning. I just want to tell you I love you very much and not to worry about anything. Everything is going to work out. We'll just pray for the 8th and 9th of July, for the major surgery.

Thank you, thank you for all you do John for this family and for helping me. I sure love you honey. I love you and you have the most wonderful wife and the most wonderful children in the world and maybe even a priest. God bless you. I love you. You know how much I love you.

INTERVIEWS WITH DADDY AND MAMA

May 5, 1987 MAMA AND DADDY [EJEA AND WLA] TALK ABOUT ANCESTRY:

David: I've just come across an old tape. It's a micro-disk and it seems to me like I tried out a little micro recorder, maybe it was even recorded on Daddy's little micro-cassette recorder, the Panasonic. I found it with some tapes that I've had and it said, "Interview with Mama, May 5, 1987." Let's see if it will play back on this little recorder I found of Daddy's.

David: What's 2.4, is that faster, or 1.2, Daddy?

Daddy: Huh?

David: 2.4 is faster or 1.2? Which is the fast speed?

Daddy:

David: Ok, this is Tuesday the, what's the date Daddy? The fifth of May, 1987 and we're about to sit down for an interview with Mrs. William L. Andrews, Betty Andrews. Ok Mama. Tell us starting out when our family arrived from Ireland.

Mama: Well, the Early's, it was during the potato famine in Ireland. We have the dates to that. And the Early's came from Cork, Ireland; Cork County. And they came over and settled in Wisconsin and my father's father was John Early, and, ah, they settled near the parish church in Green Bay. And he met Mary Brogan and they had five children. And he had son Will Early. And he studied medicine, got his medical degree, and then they had Edward Early who is my father, and he studied engineering at Marquette, and then there was Jim who is the youngest brother…

David: How many years apart were they born?

Mama: Well, Will and Ed, the first two oldest, were the closest in age, a little more than a year, but Jim, I think was a couple of years later and then there was Margaret who they called Mame, and she became a nurse. That's Gampa. Ah ha. It takes a long time to recognize him, but Gampa's in front. What's the date? That date was 1904, wasn't it? But anyway…

David: So the three boys were born first?

Mama: The three boys and then there was Mame, and she became a nurse and, as a matter of fact, she did her student nursing in Chicago, even though they were from Wisconsin, at Cook County Hospital, when her brother had graduated in medicine and did his internship at Cook County Hospital, so that was kind of wonderful. And so then she entered the, my father was commissioned in the Army and he went into the ordinance since he was an engineer. And then Mame, the next child, in nursing, she went into the Army, became and Army nurse and went overseas to France. And then the youngest sister, Ella, became a St. Joseph of Chrondelet nun. And so, then the youngest sister was studying at St. Joseph Academy and my father went to visit his youngest sister Ella at St. Joseph Academy and Ella introduced her teacher who was not that many years older. She was graduated from Lawrence University and that was my mother who was teaching at St. Joseph Academy. So she introduced her brother Edward to Jessica. O'Keefe, who is my mother. And so he kept visiting his sister quite frequently and ever the more frequently, and soon they were married, and they were married in the chapel at St. Joseph's Academy and it kind of reminded me of when we saw Sound of Music, all the nuns, the St. Joseph nuns were so excited about, it had been the first wedding in their chapel. They decorated all with flowers when my father and mother were married all the way up the banisters when they came down. The whole convent was decorated for the wedding. … I'm real hungry and want to get dinner so I just told the Early side of the family. John Early married Mary Brogan, they had the five children, Will, Ed and Jim Early and then the two girls, Mame was Margaret and Ella. Mame became the Army nurse in World War I and Sister Mary James became a nun. Sister Mary James entered the order at 16 and was in the St. Joseph order of nuns for over 65 years. She was 86, maybe 87 when she died. And she died in St. Louis when Bill, John, Joan and Susan were at St. Louis University, and the boys had her to a Chinese dinner, cooked a Chinese dinner for her, that night she had a heart attack, it was a very cloistered order, and she said it was the most exciting day of her life.

Mama: Well Now Mame went to China, the one that was in the Army. She was in France during the war and then she stayed in the Army. She never married. And a beautiful girl too. So anyway, the Army sent her to the American Hospital in Shanghi, and she was anxious to go. She's very adventurous and went. And she stayed there till World War II. And when the Japanese took over, she did not leave for the states. She volunteered to remain. And she was taken a Japanese prisoner of war and went through concentration camps under the Japanese. And she became kind of legendary. She had been head of the American Hospital nursing staff and very loved. And so she said in the camp, she made a statement, she said you could always tell a priest that was captured because , not wearing a cassock, you could tell because they could take it more actually. They were kind of other-worldly anyway, but she went through all those years of the beginning of the Japanese taking over Shanghi… until the Japanese took over in World War II, so she stayed until the end of the war and after Daddy and I were married in 1944, in 1945, she was returned on the Gripsholm and my father met the Gripsholm when she was returned from a prisoner of war.

David: Was she ok?

Mama: Very, very thin, she had been captured for all those years, captive all those years.

David: Where had they left her in China during that time or had they brought her to…

Mama: Oh, she was in China, she was in Japanese prison camps...

David: On the mainland? I'm asking because I know they took some to Singapore.

Mama: Yeah, I think it was near Shanghi. See they first took over Shanghi, wherever their prison camp was, she was moved. But she remained a prisoner of war all those years. When she was returned, came to America, for some reason the Gripsholm docked at New York harbor. You'd think coming from the Orient, it would be California, but in those days that wasn't the great, big port. And then at that time, that was just about the time during World War II that Daddy and I married. And Daddy was finishing his second year law at Vanderbilt University and he was the first number called by President Roosevelt in the draft for World War II. And they let him, he finished his second year and then he went in, the first group, before Pearl Harbor and went to Fort Barkley, Texas. It was Camp Barkley, Texas then, it was made a permanent fort during the War and has remained a permanent fort since. And then I, my brother was in the Air Force and flying over Europe, never, not as a bomber but as a, he was very idealistic and …

David: You were one of three children:

Mama: Yeah. And he was a transport, he transported troops, you know.

David: But he was a pilot.

Mama: Oh, yeah. A pilot and through training, they trained on all different…

David: Did you talk to him about that. You mean he wouldn't bomb…

Mama: Oh, he was very grateful, like John always said, he prayed that he'd never have to, you know he said I would not be capable of shooting, killing a man and Ted said that too. He said I hope they utilize me in any way and he really fell to his knees he said when he got this cargo plane. He met this, Kaye, he put her name on the plane. He was the Captain of it, and so he transported troops from America to Europe and through Europe, all through the, it was very dangerous too.

David: Did he do air drops too, do you know?

Mama: No. He, oh, you mean parashoots…

David: Parashoots.

Mama: No, he, most, well, oh yes, for different fields I guess they, different encounters that way. But that was his mission. It wasn't bombing. In matter of fact he said cynically one time, he said we liberated Europe. He said we liberated her so well that we leveled her. But that was the terrible thing of war, but he never participated in that part of it and, of course I was in nursing and didn't participate in that part, and Daddy tried to volunteer for everything, but they…

David: Your Daddy?

Mama: No, my beloved, so William L. Andrews, and that's where we met during the war, my husband…

David: What do you mean, he tried to volunteer for everything.

Mama: Well, he wanted to, even the ski troops that would invade in parts of Germans, and he soloed, he went to the Air Force and soloed and even got all his solo hours in, but they returned him and when we met at Stuttgart Field he was, he did work in Judge Advocates, defense lawyer, Judge Advocates and I'd see him. We met anyway at that time. And so we married nine months later. He was the first one I met and dated. And we just never bothered to go to the Officer's Club or anything else. He would just play the piano every night at the nurses quarters and he was in the bachelor officers quarters attached to the hospital. And so we married at Stuttgart chapel at the, and my brother was flying in Europe at this time and my sister Joan came to the wedding. My father and mother gave us a beautiful wedding there. And Daddy's mother and his sister Sara were there. It was just a small wedding and just those in Stuttgart that were remaining. We were … the Third Air Force had taken over and I was at the time head surgical nurse, and so I remained when the Third Air Force took over. And Daddy was still there, and so very few of the…

David: Didn't Daddy's position change. I remember he was the commanding…Medical Detachment

Mama: Right. He had to leave and he was transferred to Esler Field and then to Alexandria Louisiana. It was right after that, so but at least we were married then. And so then, let me see, we married in November, and December, January, February, March in April I was mustered out of the Army because I was expecting our first child. And so the next November, we were married November 1944, and then our first child born November 1945, Bill. And so I was mustered out. And so I was able, I was not able, I did not see him at Esler Field. He didn't know where he'd be transferred, so I went home to my parents on Oakman Boulevard in Detroit and then he was transferred to Louisiana, Alexandria Louisiana. And then I joined him there, you know. But that's a rough skeleton of the family, the Early side.

David: Give me just a little more now. You, after Louisiana, how long did you stay in Louisiana. You moved to Knoxville.

Mama: No, no. Bill was born you see in our family home in Detroit because Daddy, Andy, everybody in the Army called him Andy and the dearest soul in the world. And so Andy came to Detroit and he… honey, Daddy, when you came to Detroit for Bill, when you got there, that was terminal leave wasn't it?

Daddy: [Can't hear.]
Mama: Ah ha. He was on terminal leave.
David: Why don't you come up here, Daddy? It's a recorder.
Mama: So he …
Daddy: Not yet.

MAMA; We'll let him give his side of it. It will be interesting to let him give his family line. And so anyway, Bill was born and it was really a wonderful thing. Remembered one thing, his big eyes.

Mama: Say hi, Papa. So anyway, at the hospital they all talked about, from the moment he was born those great, big eyes. The nurses all said we'll spoil him before he comes home… a very sweet disposition. He always was sweet dispositioned and is still a sweet dispositioned boy. Bill. Very sweet dispositioned. But anyway, then… Did you want to hear about the O'Keefes.

David: Well, I would, but tell me real quickly after, when did you move to Knoxville.

Mama. Well, then, Daddy had to finish his last year of law, and any private schools were closed during the war, all the men were conscripted, so he went to Tennessee.

Daddy: Vanderbilt hadn't started … I had to go to Tennessee. I didn't have to, but I wanted to since I though I'd practice law in Tennessee.

Mama: So he went to the University of Tennessee.
Daddy: The only accredited school open was Tennessee.
Mama: So we went to Knoxville and had a room on a farm.
David: Where was it? Do you remember the number or anything?
Mama: It was all farmland then.

Daddy: It was in a Catholic rest home we lived in. Some farm family had bought it and they made the upstairs into apartments for students. There were about four different apartments.

David: How old were you and Mama then?
Daddy: How old? I was 29, let me see..
Mama: He had just turned 29 and I was 28 when we were married, I was 27.
Daddy: I was 29. I graduated when I was 29.
David: This was at Powell Station?
Daddy: Powell Station.
Mama: All farm land.

Daddy: Couldn't find it now, but I looked for a place to live up there for almost two months. It was February 24th when I found it. Betty came down with Bill on February 24th. Met her at the airport there at Maryville. Then I graduated in August 1946. Same year.

Mama: And he passed his bar exam on first try. And he took his bar exam on Thursday and Friday and John was born on the morning

Daddy: Friday morning at 9:00.
Mama: … on the morning when he took the second day of his bar exam.
Daddy: I was taking the bar exam when they notified me.
Mama: They brought a note into him saying, baby boy…

Daddy: It was on the seventeenth of January. The bar exam was six hours. Three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon. Of each day on the sixteenth and seventeenth. And I just started.. I took Mama to the hospital, what time was it? Early morning about midnight or a little after.

Mama: Midnight. And he …
Daddy: You know, I didn't know. I had the Bar exam. I had to go on and take it.
Mama: When they brought in the note and that was when John was born.
David: So how long did you stay in Knoxville then?
Daddy: Well, back then about three days.
Mama: Yeah. He graduated.
Daddy: You said hospital didn't you?
Mama. Well…

Daddy. Oh, Knoxville. I thought you said hospital. Oh, I graduated in August 1946, I forget the exact date, the end of the summer term.

David: And then did you go to Georgia?

Daddy: And then I went back to Nashville and I went to work with, let's see, oh, I went back to Vanderbilt because there were a lot of courses I didn't get that I thought I could use while studying for the bar exam. See, the bar exam was in January and this was in August so I went back to Vanderbilt and audited, sat in law courses just to get them. I wasn't getting any credit for them.

Mama: I'll let Daddy talk now. I'll get dinner.

Daddy: And then I, we bought our house in November on Stokes Lane and, of course, we didn't get possession until the next March. We had a legal problem over it. And so I took the bar exam in January and Ii went with the telephone company in, I don't know what the date was but it was soon. It was probably the latter part of March, wasn't it. Yes, because the telephone strike was in April and I went and I had been with them only about 5 or 6 weeks, and then we got possession of the house in March and I was already with the Telephone company. I don't know, I must have gone with them in early February. I know, it was right after the Bar exam. See I went

Mama: Daddy paid an extravagant price for our house, stone home with a basement and it was a beautiful little home. Eleven thousand dollars. A big price then.

Daddy: Eleven five.
Mama: One thousand dollar down payment.

Daddy: No, no. I paid.. I forget now. Maybe you're right. I guess it was. I guess it was.
David: How long did you stay in Nashville? When did you move back to the farm.
Daddy: We were there three years and then I was transferred to Atlanta and then down there a year.
Mama: Kind of deciding to come back to the farm.

Daddy: Joan was born in 1948 and Susan in '49 and we had four children and the farm was in the family so I wasn't real happy with my work there so mostly, I just wanted to come back to the farm.

Mama: well, that was kind of a dream to come back to the farm, Lewisburg.

Daddy: So I left there in April. I came back here in April 1951. And we got the house ready for Mama and the kids.

Mama: And they started school, first grade, and Bill and John, Bill, Bill and John started St. Catherine's together and Joan and Susan started first grade together.

David: At Belfast.
Mama: No, no. At St. Catherine's in Columbia.

Daddy. And, ah, Bill and John went through the fifth grade at St. Catherine's and Joan and Susan through the third grade at St. Catherine's. They started the fourth grade out there.

Mama: Daddy started teaching school at Belfast and I thought, oh, those children should have their dear father as teacher [JEA note while transcribing; best teacher we ever had] and it was a most wonderful experience to have your own father. So each one of them had him and he was principal of the school, but they actually had him in class at Belfast.

David: Mama was telling me that during the Army you had volunteered for the ski core?
Daddy: My major MOS was medical supplies…
Mama: He wanted to get into some action.

Daddy: I was at Stuttgart at the time and I just wanted to do something I enjoyed more, so it was kind of crazy, I volunteered for the ski troops, and then of course I did take pilot training.

Mama: And he went through and got his pilot's license. He was licensed, he did all his solo work.

David: You mean you became what medical officer?

Daddy: You see I went to OCS at Carlyle Barracks. In 1942 I graduated from there and got my second lieutenant there, graduated from OCS as a second lieutenant in the medics, in not medical supply but the medical administrative corps is what it was then. Now they call it medical service corps. That was at Carlyle Barracks, Pennsylvania. I was stationed at Camp Barkley when I went to OCS. I went to OCS from Camp Barkley. And then, from that time, I was in the Air Corps.

Mama: That's right. You were an enlisted man at Camp Barkley...
Mama: That little act of faith is how we happened to met.

Daddy: I was with the Air Corps all the time then, I was stationed at the hospital at Stuttgart and then I was with the three hundred and seventy second, well, first I went to Lockburn, Ohio. I was up there, it was a glider school, and I was at the hospital and opened it up up there and we were getting it ready for…I was there about three months.

Mama: He was at the hospital there and then he opened the hospital at Stuttgart.

Daddy: I was there about three months and then I went to Stuttgart to open, in matter of fact they transferred the whole base at the glider school to Stuttgart. That's the reason we went. They split us. Half of us stayed with the First Air Corps and the others to the Eastern Flying Training Command at Maxwell Field, the headquarters, and then I went to Stuttgart, I and four others went to Stuttgart at that time, three of us maybe. And that hospital was just being set up too, the whole base was being set up. And we had to live and eat in town. They didn't even have quarters for us for two or three months. And then I was there overall two and one-half years. I was there and then I went to San Antonio for pilot training…

Mama: I'm proud about that pilot training. Tell some of the things that happened there. That's real cute, Daddy. Why they decided…

Daddy: [Hesitation] I, ah, one thing, I was, see we were flying Fairchild TT nineteen eight they called them. They were model plains and one wing and sat on open cockpits. The cushion of the seat was the parachute and the harness went around you. The instructor sat behind and you sat in front. And you solo after about 8 hours. And then you still fly with your instructor some but you have an hour or two, at least one period of solo everyday. I think it was after I made the solo that we were flying one day and you have to continually search the sky with your eyes for other planes because you have 45 minute periods, you have five periods in the morning and five in the afternoon. You're either in classes, one or the other either all morning and then flying in the afternoon or you alternate. And all these times you have all these planes all coming down to land at the end of the period and taking off again. It's real crowded so you just have to watch when you come into a pattern, down one leg and all. So one day, we were up there flying. This wasn't near the airfield. I saw a plane coming and my instructor was flying, and he was talking and doing like this, and he has earphones on. Let me see how it is, no I had the earphones I guess. He talks to me but I can't talk back to him. And that's the way it was, and so I saw this plane coming and I thought he saw it, but I kind of pointed to it. About that time it swooshed by you know. And he really ate me out. He said anytime you see a plane there, you grab the stick and take over. He's a little bit behind you so his ____ can kind of block his view. That's the reason he didn't see it. And another time we were flying 180 degree landings, which means you just take off and go around the field, box, come back around and land. We had several planes You just practice that all- you don't actually touch the down, you come down just as though you are, in what you call stall landings, that's where you've got the plane to come down and then you watch your air speed and when you get down to about, we used to land at about 45 miles per hour, and as you get down, what you do is you see is you slow just a couple inches off the ground until you lose flying speed and then the plane kind of quivers and buffets and it drops and that's what's called a stall landing. What you do is stall and land. There are two kinds of landings, a stall one and a power. A power is where you actually fly down. And your wheels touch and you usually do that later. The first landing you do is a stall landing. And in a stall landing of course you have to watch because if you pull your stick back too fast before you lose speed you'll blossom back up again. See a lot of them fall about twenty feet and some of them break the landing gear. But if you do blossom up, what you do you're supposed to give it some throttle. Then you give it more flying speed and come down again. But this time we just came down and simulated a stall then you take off again and go up again, just practicing. But the one thing they warn you about and you have to watch because propeller planes always cause a little turbulence like a little cyclone or whirlwind and if you fly into one of those, they could turn you upside down.

Mama: They were all propellers in those days.

Daddy: Oh, yeah, you didn't have jets then. These were all propeller. And usually on certain days where it's a very still day, that turbulence will just spin there a long time until it dies down and if you run into it, if your not careful, it will flip you over. Well, I got into one of those things and a plane in front of me and of course everybody's landing so there are always planes in front of you so you just keep your distance, but this one I just hit this little whirlwind up there and if it had flipped me over I probably wouldn't had made it out because I hadn't had that much practice flying really upside down you see, but I brought it down anyway, got out of there. But those are the only two real bad things we involved. A lot of students and instructors both were killed during that time because they had to get up so fast.

Mama: The greatest real joy….

Daddy: See you had to go in, you had to a lot of those, all of your real, I can't, single engine, just one engine and most of your what you might call your daredevil stuff, you do, your spins and your loops, now I didn't get into many loops, but spins you go along and you throw it into a stall and then it spins down and then you have to kick it out, you kick the opposite rudder, pull your stick back all the way until you stall then kick your right rudder and that throws you into a spin and then you do the opposite to get out of it; when your spinning you do that to get out of it. And so you fall usually about 10,000 feet if I remember when you stall and you fall maybe two to three thousand feet before you kick it out. And you just had to practice at it and you do it deliberately you know and I never had any trouble that way. But my instructor and I went out one day and he accidentally got stalled and went into a spin, but boy, and when you do that the ground just flies up at you, you know. But he was a good pilot. But several of them did get killed that way.

Mama: Oh yeah. And in Stuttgart too so many were killed even before they went overseas.

Daddy: The danger in flying is when your at about 500 feet you're too low to use your parachute. If your high enough you can use a parachute.

Mama: One great memory that Daddy and I have together, I was on call on surgery this night. I had to stay very close to the hospital, so we were both on bikes and would just take me a minute to get in, get scrubbed for surgery, but we were do close. And they'd rang a bell for me. When that bell rang, that would be for me. An so we were just, and a plane came down and a crash. So many crashes in Stuttgart and every field like that. And so we saw this plane and I said, Andy! And this plane came down and crashed. We rang the alarm bell and the little, you know you see those Red Cross trucks. They picked me up and Daddy jumped in too and we rushed over there and they had landed in a soft … and they were sitting on their plane like this, the boys, the pilots. They were awfully nice. They should have been killed. But they were just waiting like this and grinning you know. It was the happiest moment of my life to see those two pilots sitting there. And they took a pose deliberately, you know. They saw, they heard the sirens, the ambulance and they were just grinning and sitting there.

David: Mama, why don't you tell me about the O'Keefe side now.
Mama: Oh, honey, lookit, don't you just want to eat.

Mama: well, OK, now the O'Keefe's came from County Claire, Ireland. And they went to Canada during the potato famine time. But they had a different incentive to come over. They were what you call "lace-curtain" Irish. On the Early side they were all priests and nuns and so forth, but on the O'Keefe side as I say they were the "lace-curtain type. And so at the time in Ireland, you couldn't go to the university, you couldn't get a university degree or serve in parliament or anything if you were Catholic. And the O'Keefe's had a crystal works in County Claire, so they were able to get over to and decided to go to Canada.

David: The O'Keefe's had a crystal works?

Mama: Um ha. Lead crystal. I have some crystal from the family. So anyway, they went to Chatham. And their boys, both Patrick and John both went to medical school in Toronto, at McGill University and they were both graduated one after another. And Dr. O'Keefe was very interested in surgery. It was kind of a real, a very exciting time in surgery then, and in America when he came over from Canada to America, he was written up with some of the brain surgery he did and laparodamies, abdominal laparodamies were some of the first, most innovative surgeries done in the country. And he went from Canada, went to Wisconsin and there's where the story gets together, the Early's and the O'Keefe's. He went to Wisconsin because the big paper mills were opening there, the logging industries, and there were so many accidents they needed a surgeon as well as a general practitioner.

David: Did you say something like that's the way he paid for his brother's med school, that he worked or something?

Mama: He helped his brother through, yes, from there. His brother had started in med school and wasn't that far behind him, but he helped, sent back money to his brother as he got, his last year.

So, anyway, he went to Oconto, Wisconsin, this big logging town, and all these big paper mills were there; Northern Paper, Klenex you know, all of those big paper mills you hear of now – Kimberly Clark.And so, he settled near Oconto. No doctor there. So he was called to my grandmother's home, and her mother had come from Ireland and was a very interesting person.
She had come from Ireland long before the Civil War.

David: What was her name?

Mama: Frances Catherine Knowles. K N O W L E S. As a matter of fact, her, ah, she was Sheridan Knowles' family, playwright, you know. To get his education, he had to kind of renounce what you call any papist tendencies. He got his education and became a, quite a famous playwright. Was in the Britannica and everything, written up in the encyclopedia. But he died a very good Catholic, a very great Catholic.

David: You're talking about Sheridan Knowles?

Mama: Ah ha. And it was not only a death bed conversion, he just really… but um, but anyway, her family had come over and her mother and father sent my great grandmother over with her sister and her new Irish husband. They married in Ireland, and so the mother and father sent their little sister over with them really on their wedding trip. They were married in Ireland and came over and they took this little daughter because they said she would make a good marriage in America.

David: What was her name?

Mama: That was Frances, Catherine Frances Knowles. And so then, the first thing that happened to her on her way to Wisconsin, she met a young German man from Alsace Loraine and he fell very much in love with her, and his family followed on to Wisconsin. He was so taken

David: What was his name?

Mama: Joseph Hoeffel. And he went on to Wisconsin and asked her to marry him. He was a very educated, an architect. And that was almost in the wilderness to go up there. But he designed logging and paper mills, some of them were standing a hundred years later. And so, but he, they had a big family of children. That was my grandmother's family. And then my grandmother…

David: What was her name?

Mama: Elizabeth Hoeffel. And she met Dr. O'Keefe. And Dr. O'Keefe when he first came to Wisconsin, was called to their home, my grandmother's home. As I say, she was teaching. She was one of the earliest graduates of St. Mary's of Notre Dame.

David: Co-ed graduate?

Mama: No, she was a, they had opened up to women. Women didn't have much of an education in those days, higher education. So she was teaching school and came home and found her mother real, real sick with cold. And her father said, Elizabeth, we'd better call the new doctor. And in those days you never called a doctor unless you were really sick and they always came to the home. So the doctor's horse and buggy drove up and he got out with his medical case and came to the door, and he just stood there. And her brother Frank looking at my, my uncle Frank told me this story, looking at Elizabeth my grandmother, and she said, doctor the patient is upstairs, my mother. And he said, oh yes. Thank you. And so he went upstairs to the mother. And so he started coming everyday treating her for her cold. So finally the mother, they had the four boys, and Elizabeth and her sister Agnes. And so she said to the brother Sil, she said, Sil you better talk to Doctor O'Keefe. Tell him I'm feeling fine now. So Sil went to the door with Doctor as he left and he said, doctor my mother said you won't have to come to the house any more. She's feeling fine. And he said, well, he said I wonder if I could talk to her father and ask if I could come and see Elizabeth. He said that's what I've been doing for a couple of days. I wonder if I could have his permission to see her. So starting the very next day he would come by and so they were married. And that's my mother and her brothers Horace...

David: Who was married there. That was…
Mama: That was Ganger's mother.
David: And what was their names?
Mama: That was Horace and Carol. Neither of them entered medicine like their father.
David: And their was Gertrude you mean?
Mama: And then there was Gertrude and my mother Jessica O'Keefe.
David: Now, these are the children of that marriage? Now, who were the two?
Mama: Dr. Patrick O'Keefe and Elizabeth O'Keefe.
David: Elizabeth Hoeffel.
Mama: Hoeffel, O'Keefe. Ah ha. And they were, they had…
David: And they had
Mama: Four children.
David: And what were they in order?

Mama: ell, the two boys were Horace. You met Uncle Horace. He lived to 86, 87. And Carrol. But neither of the boys studied medicine. They had the Jesuits out St. Mary's, Gonzaga. But neither of them took over for the father. And then their was my mother Jessica and she went to Lawrence in enta.

David: And she was a math major.

Mama: Yeah, and chemistry. She liked it. And then Gertrude studied music. She had always played the piano and violin quite young. But she went away to Chicago; they sent her to Chicago. And my grandfather, Dr. Patrick O'Keefe, had just died, and so the family went to Chicago so the children could finish their education and Gertrude could get her musical education. And my mother had visited her relatives from Canada, from Chatham, you know I told you that the O'Keefe's came to Chatham and that's how her father went to the Toronto University medical school. So she crossed into America by Detroit and Detroit was a beautiful, gracious city then, Belle Isle and kind of wide grand boulevards and everything. So when she and her husband married…

David How did they meet?

Mama: They met, as I told you, his sister was a senior at St. Joseph Academy in Green Bay and Ganger, my mother, was teaching at St. Joseph's Academy at the time. And Ella introduced her. She knew that she was just a young teacher, just out of school. And then, as I say, my father started coming to see his sister all the more. And would meet Jessica O'Keefe and see her. And they were married as I say at St. Joseph's Academy. This was just before the war. Not just before the war. They married in about 1913. And then they had a little boy John that died, just a couple weeks old. Caught pneumonia. In those days they didn't have antibiotics. Then my brother Ted, then I and then my sister Joan. Then after the war, when my father returned from France they moved from Washington, D.C., that's where I was born and then they moved to Detroit because Detroit was a great engineering capital with all the new automobiles being made. And my father kind of got to know all these engineering pioneers. He knew Henry Ford, visited his home, and Thomas Edison and, by the way Ford and Edison were great friends. So that's how Detroit, we came to Detroit, but I wanted Daddy to go into his family first before we got into…I wanted to make it more skeletal. Ok, and I think I'd better get dinner.

David: Well, thank you very much Mrs. Andrews. We appreciate it.
Mama: Thank you, David, dear boy.
David: Ok, thank you, Papa.
Daddy: Ok, thank you.
David: And we'll talk to you again real soon.
Daddy: Ok. Bye Bye.

Emails about Daddy's side of family:

From: David Andrews
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2007 1:10 PM
To: Andrews, John (DC)
Cc: Bill Andrews
Subject: EJEA-WLA Ancestry.doc

Mama was always wanting to wrap, so it may have just been that I intended to come back to Daddy, but didn't.

You know, I don't think I ever really asked Daddy about his side, at least not back in the '80s. He never talked with interest about his family with me--not the way Mama did of her side. And I don't think I was as interested as a result. Especially after my stays in Ireland, I think I assumed Daddy's family were simply country folk without occasion or inclination to reflect on where they came from or came to be where they were.

I didn't think it out, honestly. I loved Daddy very much, so I don't see it as a lack of interest in me. I just assumed that all his ancestors were like Grandmother or Aunt Sara. And since Daddy didn't even talk with me about his mother or sister, questions never occurred to me to ask.

It's sad really. That's why I was asking you and Bill if Daddy ever talked about his father or Grandfather...the men who raised him. I never heard more than, "My father died when I was eight." There's much about Daddy that I'm just now learning from you and Bill. My questions prompted by snippets of what I pick up since his death. Ironic that I always found Daddy so accessible, but now can't ask so many question that matter to me now that I too am a father.

David Andrews
1637 Berkley Cir.
Chattanooga, TN 37405
423-266-0037

From: Andrews, John (DC)
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2007 1:31 PM
To: David Andrews
Cc: Bill Andrews; jandrewsfamily-dol.net
Subject: EJEA-WLA Ancestry.doc

Yes, I always thought that about Daddy's side of the family also and I guess this was confirmed by the fact that farmers were straight up his ancestry line. But they were also pretty successful farmers in that they appear to all have been fairly wealthy, maybe not as willing to forgo riches as you might like and tended to follow society in that they held many slaves. But then if you go back further in England, there was our relative Lancelot Andrews who never married but spearheaded the protestant reformation in England as probably the most prominent and bright bishop in England, even more so than the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time. Interestingly, he is primarily responsible for ensuring that the Episcopal Church [Church of England] adhered as closely as possible to the theology of the Catholic Church without recognizing the Pope and this is why they still call their service Mass and have the holy Eucharist. He appeared devoted to the passion of Christ and all of the sacraments Christ left behind [I wonder how he really felt about the divorce of Henry III].

Then when you go down different branches of Daddy's family, you find several Andrews doctors and then you find General Frank Maxwell Andrews from Nashville of Andrews Air force base fame. You also have Tennessee Williams and all of the accomplished Lanier musicians. Daddy's father must have been unusually bright to have been a bank director as such a young age and to have had the financial success he had.

I think Daddy just didn't know much about his side of the family. He was close to his grandfather Andrews, but seemed even closer to the Simpson's, which is natural since his mother probably talked a lot about them through the years and he probably saw a lot of them. In later years though, Daddy seems very interested in his family history. He drew up the family tree on his own and talked about the Tuckers a lot.

It is sad that we didn't get more information from Daddy.

Phenomenological Interview with Daddy 1987ish:

David: What follows is a microcasette and it's got no date on it but it's labeled Daddy's interview and I just listened to a snippet of it, the beginning of it, and it sounds as if it's a phenomenological interview and I probably did this in connection to Howard Polio's seminar on existential phenomenology where we had to interview and practice phenomenological technique, methodology.

David: Let's start out with mythology. Are there times in your life, Daddy, when you've been aware of methodology?

Daddy: No, not that I, I've been aware of it, but I haven't been a believer in it. [Laughs by both]. I was thinking of astrology.

David: How so?

Daddy: Oh, you're talking about mythology. I thought you said astrology [booth still laughing]. Yes, I've been aware of it.

David: You've been aware of it?

Daddy: Sure.

David: Can you tell me a bit about specific instances when you've been aware of it. Can you remember when?

Daddy: [laughing] No. I can't remember when.

David: Think back. Just take your time.

Daddy: Well, you know, every time I see some constellations and things like that I think of some methodology connected with them.

David: When you were teaching about constellations.

Daddy: No, not when I was teaching. I never did teach constellations, astronomy or anything, but just when you look up at the sky. When you look at the stars and see the constellations there, you kind of put yourself back when early men looked up and saw the configurations and I always wondered how they came up with what they did though, mythological figures and all. Because if the lines aren't drawn connecting them , I don't know. I was puzzled. Just the fact that early man. I was putting myself back in their shoes when they were looking at the stars and all, kind of imagining how they looked at it, what they were thinking and so fourth. And, of course, a lot of the stories that you used to read when you were young were based on some of the mythological stories. I used to read about the stories of Thor and the hammer when he threw it you know and how it made the thunder, and ah, I don't know. Got a pause on there?

David: Oh, no, that's fine. Don't worry about that. I've got plenty of film.

Daddy: And ah, I don't know, really, of course, that was just, more, usually when I was looking at them I was doing it more with a homemade telescope, and I wasn't rally thinking anything about mythology so much then, I was thinking more, wondering, you know, whether there was life on certain planets, and back then that was before we knew for sure that there wasn't life on Mars, and you wondered about the others. And I was always fascinated with the fact that you are looking back in time. Anytime you look out in space especially at night and see the stars you know you are looking back in time. I remember especially use to… I happened to think of that and I looked for the first time at the North Star for example, I was looking at it as it was at the time Columbus was sailing to America, or the West Indies. And you know, you feel kind of funny that you are really looking back at something that's been gone 400 years or so, you see. It's not in the same position. So all of those time things fascinated me a lot more than mythology of course. Because it's real. And, of course, when you looks at some of the galaxies, they go back millions of years. The light left that long ago. In some cases before the earth was even formed. Makes you take notes and wonder. So philosophic. I can't think of any specific time or period in my life when I, especially in my I, let's see, in my sophomore year in high school I joined the astronomical club at that time Hume Fogg High School in Nashville and we that year we were grinding a telescope. It wasn't a very big one, about a 6 inch reflector and of course we were all interested in that same time element there too, although most of the things we looked at were probably the planets which didn't involve much time, but the galaxy, and the, what do you call it, horse head galaxy, I forget what you call it now, but anyway it had a question of whether it was just black space there or whether it was cosmic dust. It was blotting it out. Maybe it was something like a black hole. But at that time I don't think they were sure what it was. Since then, I think they have decided part of that is cosmic dust blocking out light from the other side. But it was fascinating, and I always, in fact at time when I was real, well even younger than that, I thought wouldn't it be wonderful to be an astronomer and be in an observatory and work in one of those things.

David: Can you think of another time, say other times, when you were aware of mythology?

Daddy: I never thought too much about mythology really. I was never, you know, I mean I just, I always thought of it as kind of a , kind of a, something coming out of paganism then. That's the way I thought of it then. I don't know. It's kind of hard to … [loud train whistle in background on the farm]

David: Take your time.

Daddy: Huh?

David: Take your time and think about it. Get down Shep!

Daddy: I just… get down Shep! Get down, Shep! That's a boy. That's a boy. Now get down! Get down. Get down.

David: {After long pause] Can't think of any other examples.
Daddy: I can't really. I never gave mythology an awful lot of thought.

David: … Not just mythology. What about myths?

Daddy: Well? That's what I mean. I never even, even those I you know I always, I think there's a lot of mythology or myths in almost all religions; they pick up some you know. I mean I think a lot of, the early man or at least he incorporated some of the mythology in with his religion because I guess the early myths were religious in nature. They thought of them that way. And then I guess they gradually were incorporated in their religions, some of it. Doesn't mean that it's not true. Doesn't mean that scriptures aren't true. I think sometimes they do explain it with a mythological overtone maybe. I don't know. I don't think I'm making any sense to tell you the truth.

Daddy: [something skipped apparently]… barbed wire a fence across there, kind of a temporary one. I assume latter on they'll put a gate of some kind in. I imagine they'll be a good many hunters come in that way too. What do you want me to do with this now?

Daddy: I can't tell you who's over there. I don't know. I guess it's just part of a tree that fell off, isn't it?

David: Unintelligible.

Daddy: Well, it might be. It doesn't look. See these others posts though are, I never noticed that. Did you walk that lane? Well it's right pretty here on this side, so many rocks on the other side. They haven't finished working on it really. They have to do some more bulldozing I think. There are some huge rocks down there. John and Miriam were going to try to ride it but there's a, when you get to the end of John Ezel's property they put up…

David: Ok what about, let's try another topic.
Daddy: Ok, that's a good idea.
David: Family.
Daddy: All right.
David: Are there times in your life when you've been more aware of family?

Daddy: You're talking about after I was married or my o…
David: Just any …Unintelligible.

Daddy: I've always had pretty strong feelings of family I think. Both grandparents lived on farms and I felt very close to them. And I always looked forward to spending my summers or part of my summers on the farm. And ah, I don't know, see relatives and all. You know, back when I was young we visited a lot more. Families just were closer then. You always hear of the extended family and back then you certainly were closer to grandparents I think. Your saw them, I don't know if you saw them more so much, but very often then they lived with some of their children when they retired or got older they very often had to move in with them. They didn't have the, that was before social security and Medicare and things like that, and so they kind of depended on the children to take care of them and in turn they were taken care of by their children when they got older. That's the reason you used to see two or three, I mean three or even sometimes more generations either living in the same house. You could have a grandfather or grandmother or sometimes both living with the parents and the children and sometimes the great grandchildren.

David: Unintelligible.

Daddy. Well, you remember, one thing that I remember very much in mind, my cousin and I were both visiting my grandfather's farm, living there during the summer, just for maybe two or three weeks, and we got into an argument as kids do. We got mad about something and we both had jelly biscuits I think. And we ended up, I threw a jelly biscuit at my cousin. Hit the wall. Smeared jelly on the wall. And my grandfather made me go out and get a little hickory, I guess it was hickory, some kind of little limb, that they used to switch you with a little limb you know, that made you sting. He was very stern and made me go get it, bring it back to him. And of course, I was, felt I had been kind of, at the time at least, I thought that I was more innocent than my cousin. And see my cousin, he didn't, my grandfather didn't punish him then because my cousin's mother was there and it was naturally for her to do that, so he was just taking care of me because my parents weren't there. So anyway when I brought the little switch back to him, he took it and said I wouldn't whip you for anything in the world. And it was at that time that I really burst out crying, because at that time I had kept a stiff upper lip and I just knew I was going to get a whipping and I didn't want to cry . But when he said that, that kind of undid me. I always loved both my grandfathers and grandmothers.

David: What were you aware of back then.

Daddy: I don't know. Just a, some sense of love and tenderness toward him at that particular time, if your talking about that incident?

David: Yeah.

Daddy: Just as though he knew he had to do it but he hated to and then when it came down to it, he was just making me aware of it but he wasn't really going to, he knew along he wasn't going to whip me I think.

Daddy: But ah…

David: But what does that feel like?

Daddy: Looking back now it feels kind of sad. But ah, it makes you feel kind of sad and nostalgic of course. I used to tease my grandmother a good bit. In her last years she was kind of an invalid. She had a wheel chair and was in that. I would tease her an awful lot and pretend I , you know, was going to do something she wouldn't want me to do and just kind of see how far I could go that way. But she was a real wonderful woman. Well right now, it may, it's kind of an empty feeling for you now, but at the time it was, you just knew you were loved. It gives you a real good feeling, a feeling of belonging, to know that people care about you.

David: Now you're aware of…

Daddy: I mean, anytime you look back to your parents or grandparents who are no longer with you, you realize, you wish at the time you stopped and thought more about that, that they wouldn't be there always, that you'd miss them someday, that you could have behaved maybe a little better then if you had known, if you had thought about that. I'm sure parents feel the same way, parents more than children, because parents often feel guilty later on when they've loose their tempers or disciplined for something they didn't understand, or didn't stop long enough to find out why a child did it or something. Later on it makes you feel real remorseful that way. I remember back when we were first married or early on in our marriage, your mother told me, well it was an accident, a little child, children were playing in a yard someplace and I've forgotten where it was, and this little girl fell in an old abandoned well. It was just a narrow well, probably, I don't know how she , it was so narrow that, I guess it was a pipe or something going, anyway she fell down in that old well, and they tried to get her out. They dug a shaft next to it to go over to it. And they finally did get it, but she had died. And then I remember Mama telling us, your mother telling us, that the parents would really feel it when they'd go around and see a little ring or something that she'd put on a window you know, just like when, now when Miriam leaves and Margie and Mary would go up and see a little toy or something that they stuck to a little place or something they twisted around, and I'm sure that happened there. Maybe several days after the funeral they'd be cleaning up and they saw a little toy or a little something she marked on, a wall maybe, something they would have chastised her at the time if they had caught her at the time, but of course a completely different thing when they see it then, something they'd probably want to cut out and keep, you know what I mean. I know, even here, walking out here, I, it's where you used to camp over there, I kind of think of your camp ground. I'll never forget that time that you kind of ran away and came out here and spent the night and how I kind of worried about that. Oh, boy. We didn't know where you were. And when you came back, the next afternoon Mama and I were talking and you had come up to the window I think and we heard it and you came, I think you said something and then of course we ran around to the back door and you ran around the house and we embraced, and well I really felt that. That was such a great feeling to know that you were back. You know I didn't know where you had gone. I lost my temper and did something I had no right to do. There was no excuse, but at that time it was because you had gone back with Carl Johnson some down to the farm there, and it was late at night, 10:00 or so, but when you think about it, you had no way of getting back until he brought you back. anyway, and there was no reason for me to get upset about it, but Mama was kind of worried about you too. But you rode back with him I think on the tractor or wagon or something. But when you came back I got on you pretty bad. But anyway. And of course, the same is true of all of you children. There are times, I remember John and Bill rolled the tractor out of the tractor shed one night. I don't know why they were doing it. They just rolled it back and I got upset about that and paddled them. John ran out here into the woods, climbed up into a tree and stayed up there a good while. It wasn't that big a deal, but of course they could have hurt each other, especially if there had been another child behind them or something because those tractors are heavy. But I think frankly the reason I did it is because they should have known better and it was kind of like disobedience.

Daddy: Well, almost all of these are cases where I did something I was ashamed of later, or at least I regretted later. Joan one time when Mama was in Europe and I was out talking to Milton about something and Joan came out full of life and she jumped around and you know how, we couldn't talk, she was jumping around and I scolded her for that. And I felt real bad about that. She was so enthusiastic about everything. Of course the same thing happened with Susan a couple of times. Because they were always so enthusiastic about everything.

David: Where you aware…

Daddy: Well, I suppose right at the time I wasn't aware of the guilt. It was only later when I you know thought about it that I felt guilty about it and all. At the time I thought I felt completely justified for here I was trying to have a conversation and here she was jumping around. And I think I, she might have jumped up and down on my foot or something. You know what I mean. Like John. John used to do that. He used to have those boots that he used to ware when he was up there at Lake House and he'd stand around and stomp your foot. He was only what six years old I believe. Six years old. Bill was seven. …how that was

David: John had big boots?

Daddy. Yeah. He had some black boots. They were kind of like these except they were kind of like those Russian boots, they look like, the commissars wear, whatever. Not commissars, what am I talking about? They won't … poison ivy. I don't think that is. No. I don't know if I can get up again. Now get away Shep. That's a boy. That's a boy. That's a boy. I didn't know we've been gone about an hour. I bet this is on the wrong sped. Yea, it's on the faster speed. A loving dog.

JUNE 16, 1996 INTERVIEW OF WILLIAM L. ANDREWS BY SON DAVID WITH MOTHER PRESENT RE: GRANDFATHER NICHOLAS

I'm not sure about what year this was. My grandmother I think she had
already died so it was after 1938. She died in 1928. But , ah, my Aunt
Myrtle and her son Paul, my first cousin, were living with my
grandfather and, ah, my Uncle Bryant was there. I'm not sure about
where Palen Was. Palen was the adopted girl who lived with them for
awhile; she cooked and did things like that. But Paul and I had gotten
into a little scrap, an argument. But it seems to me that we were
younger than that though. But anyway, I remember, I don't know what it
was about but he did something that made me mad and I was eating a
jelly biscuit, you know, a biscuit with jelly on it, and I remember
throwing it at him and missing completely and hitting the wall. You
can imagine what a mess that made, but so my grandfather, I don't
think he saw it, but I think my Aunt Myrtle probably told him what
had happened. I'm not sure now how he knew it. But he and Mr. Matt
Miller, a neighbor, someone who was very fond of all the family was
there. He lived just this side of the farm. In matter of fact I think
he lived on the farm. I think he was a tenant farmer, but I didn't
think of him that way. But he [grandfather Nicholas] had me come out
and he was very stern and I was stubborn and wasn't going to cry and
obeyed everything he said. And he had me go out and get a peach limb.
There was a little peach tree and he wanted me to go out there and get
a peach tree limb and bring it back to him. So I did it but kind of
slowly - my legs... I think he probably suspected, I don't know how,
that maybe I had reason to be upset enough to throw the biscuit. I'm
just surmising. He said, "I wouldn't whip you for anything in the
world." It's just something that overcomes you when it turns out that
way when you expect a real whipping...

Later Mama asks Daddy to tell about his grandfather's death.

My grandfather had gone out to the back lot [on his son William L.
Andrews, Sr.'s farm] or had been there and came back and saddled up
his pony to go to town, but I heard it second hand, from Paul. He got
sick and laid down and died. He was 80 years old in 1934, in the
middle of the depression. But I don't remember too much other than
that. Maybe if I had some prompting.

But he was a fairly progressive farmer for those times. He was the first one to have a car down that way. It was a T-Model Ford, but he was one of the first ones. That was long before rural electrification came along in the mid-1930s. We got electricity here [WLA's father's farm] in 1937. But long before that down there, he [Nicholas] had Carbide lights. And I remember there was a great big tank, cylindrical shaped buried down in the ground – the top of it you could see. Then there was carbide, was put down in there – I don't know how often you had to do it. Then there was water dripped on it and it foamed and made gas. Remember how miners used to have carbide lights. Then there would be lines that went into the house and there would be gas fixtures just for lighting. That's all you could do with it back then.

That was a beautiful place down there back then compared to what it is now because the road was way down and the house was on a hill side and there was a gully or ditch where the water would run when it rained. And we took a ride over the culvert and then up. It was quite a bit further from the road. When they built the road, they built it up and moved it over and of course they widened the whole thing. The road now is where the fence to the yard used to be but back then it was on a hill. He kept things up to date, painted, two barns, sheds. He died in 1934 and they sold the place. Since my father had died - he had been dead 10 years when my grandfather died – when the farm was sold, Sara and I had my father's part. I think it sold for $4,000 and I got $400. 1938. I bought an electric guitar with part of it. I was 22 . Carter McClellen who was killed in World War II, was a very good musician. He and two other medical students – he was a medical student too – a young fella played the drums, Carter played the piano and saxophone and trombone, clarinet. We got a contract in 1938 before World War II, even before Hitler invaded Poland and a year after Czechoslovakia. And we got passage on the Europa to Europe and we were going to play on board and you know I wasn't much of a musician, I still can't read music, but I played the piano a little bit and the electric guitar, kind of a fill-in back in those days. We were going over on the Europa. Then we'd be on our own over there for a month, a couple of months. And then we'd come back on the Dorsa, both white-star steamers. We'd get passage both ways for playing and then little jobs while over there. But it all fell through because Carter got a job with the Francis Craig orchestra, pretty well known band back then. Francis Craig wrote "Red Rose" which was his theme song and we didn't go. But it would have been a nice experience.

JUNE 20, 1997 INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM LAFAYETTE ANDREWS, JR.:
JEA: So, Daddy, when did you move to Pulaski?
WLA: In the fall of 1925, I guess.
JEA: So about 8 months, 9 months after your father's death.
WLA: I guess in the summer.

JEA: Why did you move to Pulaski, you had no contacts there?
WLA: See the school burned over here.
JEA: You mean where Connelly School used to be?
WLA: It was where Connelly School used to be, and so Price Webb School, a private school. It was a boys school. A boys boarding school; a local girls school. It was kind of like Sonny Webb School now. Of course under the Constitution now you couldn't do that – have a boys school and a girls school separate. Dumbest thing I've ever heard of.

JEA: Where is Red Boiling Springs?
WLA: In southern Kentucky north of Nashville. Place where people went in the old days to drink the water.

JEA: Would your father go up there alone.
WLA: As far as I know. The family didn't go. He'd just go up there for one day maybe, not all the time. I'm not sure how long. He had to settle his business you know, early '24 I believe.

JEA: You mean before he died?
WLA: When he got in ill health.

JEA: Who did he sell it to? Do you know?
WLA: Valton Harwell. Dr. Valton Harwell's father.

JEA: That must have been kind of hard for him to do. He really liked it didn't he? So how long were you in Pulaski? When did you leave?
WLA: A year. Sara went to Ward Belmont in Nashville.

JEA: Oh, that's why you moved? And then you just stayed in Nashville indefinitely.
WLA. I started out at Peabody Demonstration School.

JEA: Oh, that's the first school you went to?
WLA: I went there two years. We moved out on Oakland. We moved when I was eleven in 1928. We lived there for two years, 1926. We lived in a little place just for the summer before we moved over to Belmont. It was a pretty place out there. It's not there anymore - Belview. You remember where the overpass is for 440 on Hillsboro Road? It was a block away toward town.

JEA: So how did Aunt Sara happen to go to Ward Belmont?
WLA: She just wanted to. It's a good school.

JEA: Did you and Aunt Sara have many mutual friends?
WLA: No.
JEA: Did you play together much?
WLA: No, she was an adult as far as I was concerned at that age.

JEA: Did your father have a car or did he just use horse and buggy?
WLA: He had a car, I don't know. Probably a Ford. He had one delivery truck and I think he still used the team too.

JEA: When did he move to that house next to the store, the same time he opened the store there?
WLA: I think he rented the store. He rented the house too, but I don't think he was there that long. The house was build by blind David, a relative, but not a relative on that side.

WLA: My great grandfather Bryant looked like one of the poets, my grandmother's father. He looked like William Cullen Bryant. There's no relation. I think he had a beard. There used to be a picture of him over my grandfather's and grandmother's bed, hanging on the wall there. There's a picture of my grandfather's father. He had more of a narrow face like my grandfather. I don't know where they came from. I think North Carolina, before they moved into Tennessee, but of course that wouldn't be for all of them on both sides. My grandmother was right nice [Nicholas' wife]. She was an invalid all of the time I knew her. Just about. I'm sure when I was little she was alright. She died in 1928. I was eleven years old I guess.

JEA: Did you have big family reunions?

WLA: They had their golden wedding anniversary in 1928 shortly before she died. But I remember that. We have a family reunion then. But the family all lived pretty close. That is the ones down here. My mother people up there – they all lived pretty close to Fairfield except my mother's sister, her name was Mertyl too, and they lived up in Paris, Illinois, between Fairfield and Chicago, quite a bit further up north, right near Terra Hote, about 15 or 20 miles for Terra Hote, Indiana. They lived on a farm up there. A lot of cherry trees. The boys all farmed.

JEA: So how did you like Peabody Demonstration School?

WLA: Just fine. Almost all of the boys in the class went to Duncan. When I went back to Duncan, most of them were there. Stevens, David Ackinson, Billy Sumpter; those were the names of the boys in the class there and almost all of them went on to Duncan. I transferred to Hume Fogg and was there a year and a half and then transferred to Duncan the second year. Duncan was smaller.

JEA: How did you happen to transfer to Duncan.

WLA: Hume Fogg was so big. Duncan was more of a prep school for Vanderbilt. Then there was MBA which is still around. They were both good schools. Then you had Peabody, but most of the boys at Peabody with me went on to Duncan. They didn't go back to Peabody. Peabody was where they trained teachers, so it was a good school.

JEA: Did you have two years of Latin there?

WLA: I had two years and then Spanish the other two years. I took both at the same time.

JEA: So what did you think you were going to do for a living back then. Did you have any idea? Did you always think about law?

WLA: No, I was more interested in law not because of the profession, but more on the philosophical part of it.

JEA; When did that happen.

WLA: I took a lot of law courses in college. My major was international law, international relations at Vanderbilt, and I went on to law school there. There were 22 in my law school class at Vanderbilt if I remember correctly. There were only about fifty in the entire law school.

JEA; You could practice law in Tennessee back then without going to law school couldn't you?

WLA: No, I think you had to go to law school. Then Cumberland had only two years of law. A lot went there. John Wallace went there. It didn't matter much where you went. At Vanderbilt back then you only had to have two years of pre-law, so you could get your law degree in five years rather than seven. Now it requires seven. You have to have a degree.

JEA: Did you read a lot when you were little?

WLA: Yeah, I just read all the time. When I was eleven and got out there I just read voraciously. Boys books, you know, like Rover Boys, Tom Swift. All of the Tom Swift books were inventions. The Rover Boys, their sons came on and they had a second generation. Oh boy, I couldn't get enough of those books. Law school changed my reading, slowed you down so much.

JEA; Was Vanderbilt ever a boys school?

WLA: I don't think so. Vanderbilt started out as a church school like most schools, like Harvard. Harvard was a Unitarian school back in those days. Jefferson and all those were Unitarians, Deists. I don't think he was an active church member but his thinking was along those lines. They weren't anti-anything, just… the poets were – Wadsworth, Longfellow – all those were Unitarians. It was based on reason.

JEA: Did you at one point just get real interested in philosophy and just start reading on your own? How old were you then?

WLA: My freshman year of college I remember I had pretty definite opinions about things. It just seemed more reasonable to me than anything else.

JEA: Do you remember who your first date was? When did you start dating?

WLA: I guess Ruth King was my first date. That was before college. We lived on Belcourt, and her family moved across the street from us there. My first date I took her to a movie, solo. I don't remember the movie. I was about 15 or 16 I guess. We started out at the League which is a Methodist, they met on a Sunday evening, almost every Sunday we'd go to someone's home, one of the girl's homes. Leo Bolster was in that group too, but he went to Father Ryan. He was a Catholic. He dated Ruth after. I didn't date her very long, a date or two, I always liked her. She met a doctor from Texas. He was in school. But she lived across the street from us and we moved shortly after they moved. Then we moved out to ___. In about 1932, her last name was Penny. We called her Penny. Her father was the minister back then. He was in Lewisburg when we moved back to the farm. John Sawyer, one my best friends in Nashville was her cousin. They were first cousins.

JEA: You mentioned that when you got back from Davidson, you got together with some of your friends and they set you up with a blind date – what was it?

WLA: Oh, my roommate came home with me. I got him a date with Kitty Thompson. Dick had dated Kitty. He liked her and wrote to her a good while after that. My roommate was Bill Houston, William Marshall Houston. I kept in touch with him. He was a wing commander during World War II, and he was stationed in Hawaii after the war, as I say he was a wing commander but had to get so many hours flying every month . And he went out and the plane was lost and he wasn't heard from again. I was living on the farm then and just happened to see it in the Alumnus. This was way after the war. It wasn't too long after the war. It was in the 50s I guess. Could have been the 60s when he was lost. I had another roommate. He was my immediate roommate. What we had is two of us in a room but four rooms, so you have eight, so they were kind of like roommates but not as close. Clyde Brinkley was another one. He was from Brinkley Arkansas. Clyde came down to see me at Stuttgart and brought his – he used to stop by on his way back after I stopped Davidson. He went on and finished Davidson. In fact he was a year ahead of me at Davidson. He'd always stop by and spend the night on his way back. And Clyde brought his girlfriend down; they were engaged to be married. He was a navigator and just before he went out on his first assignment after graduating from navigation school and it was not more than a month later that his plane was lost over the English Channel and I'm sure he didn't marry but planned to. It was Christmas when he came down to see me.

Dick Sinclair also died during the war on Iwo Jima. He went in two or three years after I did. His grandfather lived on the corner there on Oakland. He was one of Jack Lee, Dick Sinclair, Coup Sinclair was his older brother. Coup was the one used to come out to Stokes Lane. He worked for the telephone company too. He was an engineer. He and his wife visited us out on Stokes Lane when we lived in Nashville. Kitty and Martin Gilmore, you know.

JEA: Were you ever envious of the people who were overseas; friends who were overseas?

WLA: Yea. I was trying to get over. I just didn't like, could not - I was trained primarily in medical – replacement medical center in supply and that was kind of boring. Of course you had a lot of other duties too. And that's the reason I got in the Air Force really. Because I was older than most of the kids that got in then. I was just within a year of being too old to get in; had to get in before you were 27. A lot of kids in my group were 17 or 18, just out of high school. And that's the best time to learn to fly. But we just had four in each group. But all three of the others were real young, just out of high school. But I thought, well, I'll get out of Stutgart, and they sent me right back to Stutgart when I finished. In other words, it was just a temporary thing. If I had gone on and finished, of course...

JEA: Did Mama talk much about Uncle Ted during the war? What he was doing?

WLA: Yea, a good bit. I remember her telling me that he had flown Cardinal Spellman to Rome and that's about all I know about that.

JEA; Did he actually fly bombing missions over Germany?

WLA: I don't know. I don't think so. I don't know for sure. I don't know whether he was in combat or not. He could have been.

JEA: Did Mama tell you how he got into flying? He was just a private wasn't he?

WLA: He was just in the service. I think he went to flying school after he finished basic training.

JEA: So he decided to go in rather then them selecting certain people.

WLA: I think I'm right about that.

JEA: Did he quit college and volunteer for the service? Wasn't he at U of D?

WLA: I think he was through college. See I was second year of law. I finished my second year before I went in, and then I went in before he did I guess. Well, I'm not sure about that. I went in before Pearl Harbor.

JEA: Was he your age?

WLA: I think he was about my age. Yea, he was older than Mama by a couple of years. I think he and I are about the same age. So I imagine he was through when he went in.

JEA: He had a nice personality, but was he as head-strong as Mama?

WLA: I don't know about that. I don't think so.

JEA: I remember him fairly well. He had an outgoing, jovial personality. But he had a temper though too, didn't he?

WLA: I don't know about that.

JEA: Like when we burned the bus down. He was looking for us, but Gampa protected us. Gampa wouldn't let him spank us.

WLA: -Laugh- You probably needed a spanking.

JEA: Yea, we did. But it was completely innocent.

WLA: Yea, I know it was.

JEA: They started burning the field and we started playing in the bus and we noticed that all of the grass under the bus wasn't burning, so we got some matches and started burning that grass. We got back in the bus and noticed smoke coming in, and then we ran into the house and I hid behind the couch and all of a sudden I heard all of these fire engines coming. I thought, oh, oh, We're in for it now. But I have never heard so much commotion in my life. You wouldn't believe it. All the fire trucks and people gathering.

WLA: Laughing. And all the time I was down on the farm.

JEA: I remember when Gampa died we kids were all playing in the living room while everyone was trying to pray and Uncle Ted really got upset. I wonder what ever happened to Jamie and Jessica?

WLA: Didn't Jamie come down and visit Ganger while we were still at Tyne?

JEA: If he did, we never saw him. He may have done it while we were off at college or something.

WLA: If he did, you may have been at St. Louis. I don't think I saw him.

JEA: The last time I saw him I was seven or eight years old. Daddy, did you have any long lost cousins that you hadn't seen for years.

WLA: Oh, yea, gosh everyplace. In Illinois. I never had many cousins down here. Well I had some, like Louise Gillespie. Paul was the one I was closest to always.

JEA: Was he kind of like a brother to you?

WLA: I guess. I mean during the summers I'd be over here, going back before I was 16. I have a picture someplace of him and me down at the spring. I was real toeheaded.

JEA: He was taller than you wasn't he?

WLA: I think he was then. He was more dark complected.

JEA: It's amaizing how much alike you and Matthew were as kids.

WLA: You mean that picture of me sitting on the piano bench?

JEA: The other day when your priest was out here, I meet him in the truck and said, hi, I'm John Andrews, and he said you don't have to introduce yourself, you're a chip off the old block.

WLA: Laughing. A lot of times when you can't see your face, you're on the tractor, if I don't see Joseph, I think Betty's taking a picture of me driving off. It's the hair.

JEA: I told you about going to the post office there and the mail something about twenty years ago and the guy said, are you Willy's son? I said I'm William Andrews' son. He said yea, you look just like him.

WLA: Well, it was David – I took David over to the coop and David had a little gun and pointed the gun at me, and he said, don't shoot your grandpaw. Well, it's the price of grey hair I think. I began getting grey right here at first (rubbing his sideburn area) and it just kept on going up, but in those old pictures at Belfast, I still had a little dark hair. You changed fairly fast, but I was more gradual I think.

JEA: How did you happen to decide to take the train all the way up to St. Louis when I got my draft notice?

WLA: People took the trains then. You could fly I guess.

JEA: But did you think I'd be devastated? Is that why you came up?

WLA: Yea, I guess.

JEA: Well, I really enjoyed that trip. What time did you get in, 5:00 in the morning – we were sleeping (Saturday morning)?

WLA: The train broke down you know. We had to – it broke down in Belleville and they put us on buses to bring us into St. Louis. And then when we were ready to go, I left you, we were supposed to leave at five or something in the afternoon, we got there and I waited four or five hours to get a new train.

JEA: Really!! I remember you getting in the taxi in front of the church there [St. Francis Xavier on campus] to go to the – why didn't we go with you, that's crazy, to the train station.

WLA: I thought maybe you did.

JEA: No, we said goodbye in front of the church.

WLA: Well, you see, I thought I'd just barely make it, but because of that breakdown in Belleville.

JEA: Had you kind of wished we had gone to Vanderbilt, or some school down here?

WLA: Well, I think it would have been nice in a way.

JEA: But you remember when I started Vanderbilt, after I got out of the Army, I got accepted to Vanderbilt, the engineering school there. I started engineering there.

WLA: You did hugh.

JEA: For a couple weeks. Everyone else was at St. Louis U., and it was hard getting back into engineering so I just saw if I could get back into St. Louis U. [the engineering school there had been shut down during the Viet Nam period].

WLA: Did you go back?

JEA: I went back to St. Louis U. and Arts and Sciences majoring in economics and I just forgot engineering at that time.

WLA: That's right, you went in right after your freshman year.

JEA: During the sophomore year.

WLA: '66.

JEA: Yea. In November, right after Thanksgiving, of my sophomore year I went in. And I had forgotten the chemistry, all of the math, calculus, so forth, but you know, I guess I worry too much. I was in engineering school at Vanderbilt, that old engineering school building, and I can remember…

WLA: By Kirkland Hall?

JEA: No, no, it's that arched building. Remember, the two story building with all the arches.

WLA: Down near that east entrance I guess you call it, but they build a new engineering school there.

WLA: When I was there we had the law school on the third floor. Second floor was the Vanderbilt library, and the engineering school was in the basement.

JEA: But it's hard getting back into a curriculum after you've been away.

WLA: Well, see I went back to UT for law school. But then I went back to Vanderbilt, just audit. I had already gotten my degree, but I wanted to study for the bar exam and go into real estate, which didn't work out very well, but when I got back, those freshmen, they had been working in law offices too. I think they were all first year, second year. It was after I got back from UT, so they would be second year students or third. See Tennessee didn't offer, they had to give me credit for working on the law review. I liked one hour, I only needed eleven year hours to graduate instead of fifteen. I lacked eleven, so they gave me one of those year hours for working on the law review.

JEA: So did you enjoy working on the law review?

WLA: Oh I did. It was nice. I remember David found that article you know.

JEA: But I was going to say, remember when I started UT that summer after undergraduate school and I took four law courses and I think it was a six-week program or something, and the first week, the first few days I was really into it...

WLA: Law school.

JEA; Yah. UT Law school, and I really enjoyed it, contracts, I remember was one of the courses I was taking [contracts, torts, remedies and legal bibliography] but then I got so homesick, it was unbelievable, and all of these courses…

WLA: And this was after you finished up at St. Louis.

JEA: I graduated at St. Louis on Saturday and then that Monday I had to be at UT.

WLA: You probably should have taken more time off before you started.

JEA: I remember that following Sunday after I started I went on a long walk. I knew that George Frazer had been in the seminary and was at a church there, so I walked all the way around a lake to where George was and he was back home in Nashville. But did you ever get homesick and overwhelmed? Is that why you left Davidson?

WLA: Well yea. That was a big reason. I didn't know anyone at Davidson. This Hugh Gracy, I just met him, just before I went there, but he lived next door to my cousin Sam in Franklin. And you remember the boy just behind us on Tyne, Alan Steele, president of Life and Casualty Insurance Company, he was up there too, but I didn't know him, I mean we met there and that's the reason we knew each other all those years. I never was a close friend or anything. And most of my friends, Dap, didn't go to college, now Earl did and eventually got his degree. He was brilliant, but he didn't like school that much. He's a little bit like Bill in some ways. Not like Bill is, but you know how Bill is. You can't count on him. Something always comes up. He's a little bit that way.

JEA: You and Bill used to talk a lot when he was little about law and stuff like that, so Bill was real interested in law. Bill was pretty bright for a little boy wasn't he?

WLA: Oh, yea.

JEA: Would you say he was extremely bright?

WLA: I guess. He started writing those letters to the paper you know. They published everyone and gave him three stars.

JEA: And they didn't know he was a little boy.

WLA: Well, he was 15 or 16 I guess.

JEA: But he was only a freshman or sophomore. And remember he went to that banquet and they put his picture in the paper.

WLA: Didn't he go to that twice?

JEA: Every time he sent an article in it got three stars.

WLA: Maybe the paper was liberal back then. Was that the Tennessean or Banner?

JEA: Yea, the Tennessean. But remember I always wanted to be like Bill. I wrote this article, sent it in, and they never published it.

WLA: They didn't?

JEA: Did you ever write anything and send it in?

WLA: No, I don't think I ever wrote anything for the newspaper.

JEA; How did you happen to write that article that appeared in the Tennessee Law Review?

WLA: Oh, that was part of my, I was getting credit for it.

JEA: Did you know that you can go into any law school or law library around the county and find your article?

WLA: No, well I knew what year and that's how David found it. See, I was surprised in a way. Vanderbilt didn't even have a law review until – remember Hershal Barnes? No, you wouldn't know him. But he came back from UT when I did and he went over to Vanderbilt because Vanderbilt didn't reopen until the fall of 1946. So he was a freshman at UT when I was there and he'd come out where we lived in the country in Knoxville and visit. So he came back and was president of the law review at Vanderbilt. He was smart too, boy. That was the first time they had a law review. He was kind of a funny fella in a way. I think his mother had been a teacher.

JEA: Who was that doctor that Miriam and Joan were involved with with a horse in Franklin and he was with Vanderbilt Medical School?

WLA: I know who you're talking about. I think he was dean of the medical school. I always liked that place, right on the Harpeth River. Now he had a daughter I knew, very popular too, very attractive and it was a very tragic thing. Her son got on drugs or something and killed her. I don't know whether it was accidental. It was in Alabama I think. But that was the farm. I remember going down and picking up the horses there.

JEA: I don't know but I think someone said that Bill had scarlet fever when he was little. Did he?

WLA: Not that I know of.

JEA: So how did you get interested in electronics?

WLA: I don't remember exactly. Well, I guess I've always been a little interested, not like Coup Sinclair. Coup Sinclair was always on short wave in high school. He had a short wave transmitter and talked to people all over the world. Had it down in his basement. I wasn't interested in getting into that, but I was always, music for one thing. Out on Stokes Lane I took a radio and I had a separate turntable. I fooled around and figured out how to hook it to the volume control you know so I could play it through that. At Belfast when I found out through Popular Electronics how to make a transmitter, a current oscillator is what you call it. It had a 50L6 tube, those old 12SQ7s. I remember those tubes. But once they switched to transistors .. But they were selling those tubes at Radio Shack and I had two of them. And then they stopped making them because the FCC made them stop. And Mama cleaned out that closet at Tyne and threw them away. And that was FM too, they were FM. You could play music and pick it up all over the farm. But the old one was AM and I used to pick it up all the way down to Berlin and then the other side of Belfast. As long as you were near a power line you could pick it up. If you had a transformer, that would block it, but it didn't seem to do it there. Either that or there weren't any transformers between here and Berlin. I can't believe that. There were two or three places where the wire went over the road and you could pick it up under that.

JEA: Do you remember television coming in? The first televisions?
WLA: Well, we were in Atlanta. We got our first television in Atlanta. They didn't even have it in Nashville until we got back. It got to Nashville in '51. Sometime during the year in '51 because when I came back, well I came back in April of '51. They got it in the latter part of '50, because we moved to Atlanta in early '50, and it had a little 12 inch screen and a great big box.

JEA: I remember when I was little and it must have been Stokes Lane, but I remember it seems to me it was a Saturday and you were going off to work and you had your hat on and your coat, but you were looking at a baseball game on television.

WLA: I never wore a hat. Was it raining or something? The only thing John Dean and I had in common, we never wore hats. I always felt stupid in a hat. The only hat I ever wore was a rain hat. Even in the Army, I felt stupid in those Army hats.

JEA: What was basic training like in the Army for you? Did you go through just regular basic training?

WLA: At that time we had 16, it was a little longer. They cut it down later to 13 I think. I had 16 weeks of basic training. There were two schools at Camp Lee. They had the quartermaster school and the medical administrative school.

JEA: But did you like the Army?

WLA: Yea, I liked it all right. I mean back then everybody was in. It wasn't like later on in Viet Nam.

JEA: I really hated the Army. I couldn't believe it.

WLA: But everybody was in and we were lucky because all of us came form the same area. We had a whole train load of people from Nashville. And I'm sure half of us went on to Fort Eustus. And all kinds of friends I had known at school, all of us were there. And then most of us, so many of us went on to Camp Barkley because the head of our battalion, our battalion commander was a doctor and he was the head of the medical school at, he wasn't the dean, but was head of the military medical school at Vanderbilt. So he took us with him. Took us to Camp Barkley. And then he put me up in the office with him as a clerk you know. And I was a clerk there until I applied for OCS. If it hadn't been for that, I would have gone to Italy with him because they made it into the 300th general hospital. And Dap's brother went. He was a dentist. He was head of the dentistry department there in Italy. Col. Ryer. I had a Col Ryer and Col. Ryan. I had a Col. Ryan at Stutgart.

INTERVIEW WITH DADDY 8/5/99
JEA: Did you ever ride horses when you were little?
WLA: Not much. Paul Did. But they had work teams too you know.
JEA: So when you were a boy they didn't have mechanical tractors around the farm.

WLA: I'm trying to remember. I don't believe they did. You know the first tractors came out with metal wheels. You know, I'd like to have one. You wouldn't have to worry about flat tires.

JEA: Do you know how your father bought the land by the railroad?
WLA: That land back there is not marked very well. There is one field in back that borders the railroad. That track was back in what they called Whitehead then. The Beckhams come in quite a ways on the back of ours. That was William Beckham. This is Ross Beckham. There were three Beckham boys, one girl. The other two boys, one of them died and the other had health problems or something; in a nursing home or something.

JEA: The kids are watching The Wizard of Oz. At 5 or six years old, do you think they'll be able to make much sense of it?

WLA: I was never able to make much sense of it. I didn't quite see the tin man.

Willy: Matt and Glennon are both about 5'9". My Dad's about 5'8", 5'8 ½. I think Matt might be a ½ inch taller than Dad and Glennon a little taller than Matt.

JEA: I guess people didn't ride horses for recreation when you were little.

WLA: Not much. Boys did more than girls.

JEA to Aunt Sara: Did you ever ride horses?

WLA: She had a pony. I have a picture with my Dad and Mom, I guess that was before I was born, she was in a little cart or wagon, buggy and they were standing.

WLA: I remember when we came back from Mobile, Miriam was about that age (Bridget's age) riding a little pony here.

WLA: … then after he died (Nicholas), Aunt Myrtle moved in (to the farm). Elgie, the boys, were not quite grown then. But I remember Aunt Myrtle moved down with my grandfather and helped him after my grandmother died. She died at 68. She died in 28, four years after my father. And then the [Myrtle Harris] family went and lived there. And then when I came back down here, see David and Evelyn, David had married Evelyn Hill here. Elgie and Mary lived here for awhile when they first married if I remember correctly. Then they bought another place. And then Aunt Myrtle and the boys moved here. I remember Paul and I painted this house in 1928 I think. And then my grandfather moved up here and died here. He died in that middle bedroom. He had a stroke and died in 1934. But before he died, Aunt Myrtle had moved down there to, Paul and I were about the same age and we played together down there. The farm down there was sold for about $3,500 or $4,000 during the depression, not much for a farm back then. I don't think the family could keep it. Nobody had much money back then. I got about $300 or $400 from the sale and bought that electric guitar. Because when we came back to the farm, this farm would have been about $25,000 in 1950 or 51. Because when I came out, a family had owned that Hickerson place. That pretty place on the left side of the road going toward the airport, before you get down to the curve. A little boy, some friend of David's lived there. But they sold that in '51 and bought a place near Cornersville. They were dissatisfied, and they thought I might be dissatisfied never having lived on a farm, I had visited on a farm, but never lived there before. But they thought by the time I was out here, it wasn't ever a year, and they thought I'd be dissatisfied. Then Paul, when we took this place David moved down to, rented that house on the curve down by the airport on the other side for a short time, not more than a year. And then the next year Paul and Barbara were living at the old home place and Paul and Barbara bought that next place adjacent.

WLA: William Tucker had all those children. Three doctors in the group I think. William Vaughn Andrews' father-in-law, William Tucker. He married Tennessee Tucker. Tennessee Tucker was the daughter, and then there were a whole bunch of boys, he had about 4 girls and five boys or something. Mrs. Beckham was one of the girls. Ross Beckham's mother or grandmother. Most of those are probably buried in Williamson County.

JEA: Did your grandfather walk around our farm much while he was staying here?
WLA: I don't know. See, I wasn't here then.
JEA: Did he like this farm.
WLA: I don't know.
JEA How old was he when he died?
WLA: He was 80 when he died.
JEA: So you're older.
WLA: I quit eating meats you see. They probably didn't.
JEA: You don't eat meat any more?

WLA: Hardly ever. I have a strip of bacon every now and then, but it's not any religious or environmental thing. I didn't care as much for steaks and things like that. I had, I think, a locked mouth in a sense because my teeth didn't have lateral motion. I liked things, but you couldn't chew them very well. I didn't know that but when Dap Neil's brother did my dental work, he corrected all that. He moved one tooth from one side over to the other one. He put wire on it and gradually put pressure on it. It was about four teeth wide. He just pulled it behind the other teeth. I was one of his experimental patients. He became the dental surgeon for the 300th General Hospital in Italy under Col. Ryan. Col. Ryan was my commanding officer at Camp Barkley. He was pretty good.

JEA: That's what Dr. Elkin tried to do to me but he killed the tooth. He must have done it too fast. Remember John Frazer's wife worked for him, Becky Flynn, Murray Flynn's sister?

WLA; [Talking about shyness] I've got an old picture of John when you were in high school running across the fence into the field because you didn't want to be in the picture. Probably the first year at Father Ryan. Joan might have been the shyest of all the kids.

NOVEMBER 2000 AND JANUARY 2001 MINIDISC RECORDING

David: Ends January 14, 2001. Judy talks expecting Elijah. Mama and Daddy and Bill talk about paths on the farm. This is kind of an amber mini-disk, Sony 74 and it's already been transferred .

You can hear Mama washing dishes and humming to herself.

Mama: No I think, well why don't we play both. It doesn't take long. Do you have the interview first or the movie? That will be fun.

Mama continues washing dishes and humming.

David: It's Sunday morning very early and I just packed up the car and I see Mama has gotten up.

Mama: Be sure to take the chair for me won't you? It means a lot. Where's the chair, in you room.

David: Yeah I'll get it.
Mama: Good. That means a lot.
David: The good thing about getting up so early is that the stomach isn't awake yet.
Mama: Oh, take a little bit of orange juice.
David: It's 3:00 o'clock.
Mama: What, honey?
David: it's about 3:20 isn't it?
Mama: Twenty after four our time.
David: It's Sunday the nineteenth of November, 2000.
Mama: After Bill's birthday and just before Claudia's birthday.
David: And your anniversary.
Mama: And our anniversary. Fifty-six.
David: Fifty-six years?

Mama: (Talking about am movie they has seen) … it's like a gita mo physant. You don't know which way they turn at the end of the story.
Mama: He is a French writer. Gita mo physant. I remember that. Why didn't they figure it out if they were writing the story.

Mama: May the blessing of Almighty God, Father Son and Holy Spirit… and the baby.
David: I'll tell you the baby's name when I get home. … This so far it's Elijah.
Mama: Oh, wow!
David: It might change.

Mama: it's beautiful. Elijah. I remember how he was carried up to heaven in the fiery chariot and his robe came down and landed on Elicias. And that's how he knew he was to be the next profit after Elijah. I love that. And Elijah did many miracles like the widow's daughter, the widow's son who died, he just breathed on him and he came to life. And our Lord has worked a lot of miracles …

Mama: But listen, honey, I wanted to ask you something. I'm kind of sorry that I'm not as charitable as I have to be.

David: Oh, you're great, Mama. It was really nice of Susan to stop by last night.

Mama: I wish she took her bread. But tell her I appreciate her stopping buy. That was really sweet.

Mama: But I sure love you, honey.
David: I love you, Mama.
Mama: Give my love to Judy.
David: Don't worry…
Mama: You know, I'm really thrilled about the name.
David: An we might change, but that's what we're thinking of now.
David: Hey, Papa.
Daddy: You're going?
David: Yeah.
Mama: All packed up.

David: No, I usually get up at this time. I usually get up at 4 o'clock and I go running, and then I…

Daddy: I thought it was three.

David: I go to bed at 9:00 and I get up at four and then I leave for work between 5 and 6. But that will change.

Mama: We'll tell you what Bill got with the car. I'm awfully glad you're taking the play-pen, because you're one person who will really, it's a wonderful thing because you can go, whatever room your in you can go through any door and the baby can be with you with your cookie in the kitchen. When Judy is cooking and you are, there's the babies right with you. It gives a very secure feeling to a baby. I believe in playpens.

David: Mr. Wakefield made that?
Mama: Yes, ah huh.
David: What year did he make that?
Mama: It had to be in 1957.
David: So he built it when I was born?
Mama: Before you were born. It had to be because it was here at the farm. You were the baby.
David: Well, I sure love you guys. I guess I'm all packed.
Daddy: Are you sure we can't get you something to eat?

David: I was telling Mama, my stomach's not yet awake so that's good though…
Mama: He won't even take the banana. Eat a lot of bananas. There's a lot of phosphorus in bananas.
David: Potassium you mean?
Daddy: You've got everything? There's a microphone over there.
David: So you're car is not running very well?
Daddy: It's running.
David: needs a lot of work?
Daddy: Probably.
David: Well, I'll start scoping out used cars.
Mama: The odometer doesn't work in it. It doesn't bother us.
David: It's hard because you guys speed so much.
Daddy: Danny came out to get it to use it for his drivers test.

Mama: Rather than to take their big van, they said, no way. First thing they examine your car

Daddy: Aunt Sara's license had run out, so she didn't have car tags.
David: That car is awful to drive.
Mama: We can't stand it, after being in a small car.
Mama: 3:30 am, 4:30 your time.
Mama: What are you going to have the baby call you, Papa or Daddy?
David: I don't know, it will probably be whatever Judy calls me. She'll probably call me Dummy.
Mama: Thank you for the Vacuum Cleaner.
David: I hope it works.
Mama: Oh, it will and we'll take good care of it.
David: Now you guys go to sleep again. Are you going to Mass this morning?
Mama: Yes, we always go in the morning. They go at night.
David: No, you guys stay in here since you don't have your shoes on.
Mama: Via con Dios.
David: Via con Dios. I love you. It's a Toyota Corolla, same as yours.

David: Train whistle in background. They put the street lights up all along the front of the road. Daddy and Mama are in the window waiving with their stocking caps on. I can just make out the milk shed. Turning right. It's 33 degrees outside at 4:37 Knoxville time. Making a left rather than going buy the airport, down 50 toward the highway, west 50 to north 65. It was a nice visit. I saw Ganger's grave for the first time since 1974 I think, when she died, the funeral. That's the last time I saw her grave at Calvary Cemetery. Mama said that when she first came to the farm, this Franklin Road, this bypass didn't exist certainly, but she said that was a gravel road. Franklin Road was a gravel road. Hard to imagine.

MARCH 30, 2001 TAPE RECORDING (Email from David 11/12/07)

These excerpts I found at the beginning of a mini disc completed just after Eli was born.
There's lots of half-told stories in this. Can you tell me who Bobby Mayberry is?

TAPE BEGINS:
David: What follows is a kind of a transparent peal mini disk and it's got a label on it that says "this ends March 30, 2001."

Bill: I'll spank you
Mama: Oh, I remember that.

Bill: And I didn't, my friend, Fr. Haas, and he really whacked me. But anyway, he was the biology teacher and he gave me … but anyway, we bought, you ordered this and it came in the mail, it was an extension tube that you hooked on to the microscope and then we put the camera, a 35 mm camera into that and we could look down , but I didn't know anything about cameras, settings and they all came out pretty badly. You couldn't see anything, but he still gave me a good grade, I don't know what it was, because he knew how much work I put into it. And I asked him to show me how to work it and he tried to but it was just too complicated for me because it had shutter control and also aperture control, shutter speed….

Daddy and David: Bobby Mayberry

Daddy: He was a black boy we were talking about. Well, he was at the nursing home two years ago and he came up and he was nice and talked a few minutes to all of us, the three of us. And then when we went out the door that's when he came up and said, "do you remember me?" Something like that. And he said I'm Bobby Mayberry.

David: was he really badly hurt. Was that why he was at the nursing home. He would have been about my age.

Daddy: He had a crutch or something. He hurt his foot.
Mama: Well he was poor and couldn't take care of himself.

Bill: Is he still over there. I'd love to interview him to see if he is the one.
David: Bill, do you have the tape about the lynching?

Bill: No it's up in the attic somewhere and it really gets hot up there. But I have the interview about Tom transcribed somewhere. And guess what. I went up to the Santa Fe farm about a week ago or two weeks ago and I went in there, and Claudia was looking for some tiles. Remember we had some tiles in the old shed up there. Guess what I found. I had all these letters, all these letters were on the floor, wet and I picked them up. This was a letter I wrote in 1868 when I was in the army to Al Gore's father telling him how much I supported and appreciated his work on the Foreign Relations Committee, and how, I told him about Viet Nam, and I was so glad he was taking a stand in favor of democracy in Latin America and against these right-wing, military dictators , but I had that written down and I found that and it was wet, David, and I picked it up and sort of dried it out and I have it now at home. And do you remember Clayborn Pell, Daddy. He was on the Senate Foreign Relations

INTERVIEW WITH ELIZABETH JANE EARLY ANDREWS AUGUST 3, 2013
ANNAPOLIS

[Note: her sequence of events and some facts has suffered over the past year but it appears that she is still accurate with a lot of facts]

EJEA: Is this Sue?
Sue: Yes.

EJEA: The day I left Atlanta with the four children I was going home so Daddy could fix the farm house and put the inside bathroom in. You knew that.

JEA: Yes, but why did it take three years to put the bathroom in?
EJEA: Oh [laughing], that was Daddy.

JEA: It had just been put in before we arrived.
EJEA; I think so. Pretty soon before. But that's all right John.
JEA: What month did we leave Atlanta.

EJEA: Honey, I don't know those things. I'm just so happy to see you.

JEA: What do you remember about Gampa?

EJEA: You know, Gampa was very close to me and when I saw him at night when I woke up at midnight, I said Daddy. He always called me Betty. I was always called Betty. At U of D it was Betty Early.

JEA: So you thought he had taken the midnight train down?
Sue: John!

EJEA: The phone rang at 5:30 or 6:00 and it was Ganger. She said, oh Betty! I can hardly tell you. And she took some time to swallow. She said he died last night, at midnight. Exactly at midnight. So I knew that when Daddy died, the first place he come was to the farm there in the front room and he knew where I was.

JEA: Did Gampa like Daddy?

EJEA: Oh yea. He worried about our marriage. He said I pray more for your and Andy's marriage, who is not Catholic, more that I do for my father's sister Mame in a Japanese prison.

JEA: Did he try to keep you from seeing Daddy thought?

EJEA: When I saw the priest, the priest said I don't know whether I can let you go back. He said, I'm not worried about your faith but he can break your child's faith for life. Gampa worried. But Gampa just did what the priest said. He didn't try to keep Daddy from seeing me.

JEA; Did Daddy ever write to you, or call you or see you?

EJEA: Daddy changed. At first when I first saw Andy that night, he was planning to come back to the farm and he thought Betty and her Catholic faith. And one night he took Bill with his crucifix and he said…

EJEA; He knew he couldn't see me. The priest said .. The movie "San Francisco" was exactly like it. Daddy said to Bill when Bill said this is Jesus, "Maybe it is, maybe it isn't."

JEA: But why didn't Daddy ever write you a letter?

EJEA; Daddy told me when he finally got permission to see me, Daddy told me, my only consolation was sitting in back of a Catholic church.

JEA: But who did Daddy get permission from to see you?
EJEA: Well, finally he went to see our priest.
JEA: But when Daddy would call Gampa and Ganger's house, they wouldn't let him talk to you?

EJEA: Well, he wasn't calling every day. He knew that, there was no animosity at that time.

JEA: I'm just wondering why he never called or wrote you a letter.

EJEA: Because he knew he tried to break… When he married me he made a solemn vow.

JEA: But when he called would Gampa and Ganger not let him talk to you.

EJEA: No, it was nothing like that. Daddy tried to finally call. He knew that he had done wrong and tried to break his son's faith like that, so he didn't think ...

JEA: So did he think, ell this marriage is over so I'll never see them?

EJEA: He knew he was going to change.

JEA: But why did it take him three years and why did he not write or call? You didn't get any letter from him, right?

EJEA: No, I didn't write and he didn't write but he corresponded with the parish priest in Detroit.

JEA: So why did he think he couldn't correspond with you directly?

EJEA: He knew he had broken a vow with me, that I never would have married and also it affects a child.

JEA: So he just didn't even try. So you never even heard from him or talked to him in those three years. Did you think about him at all?

EJEA: Was it three years?

JEA: It was a little less than three years.

EJEA: Yea, a little less. When I saw him, when the priest said that he could see me with the priest at St. Bridgets in Detroit, what Daddy did was he said I don't know, but they made mighty sure this was for real. He said my only consolation was sitting in back of a Catholic church hoping to see Betty.

JEA: So did you hope he would call or hope he would see you during those three years or did you think about him during those three years?

EJEA: I didn't, I just, I was working very hard. I …
JEA: So did you think you'd ever see him again?

EJEA: Oh, when you pray, you think things are going to turn out, but I thought he had to know that this was not going to be easy for him to get back or it could happen again.

JEA: But you didn't try to get in touch with him did you?

EJEA; I got, Daddy got me a home, in, he started to buy me a home in the city, and it was, that wouldn't do. The priest knew. So Daddy [Gampa] bought…

JEA: But why wouldn't that do and why did the priest get involved?

EJEA: Because he would just, it was just like Spencer Tracy and that show.

JEA: But I never saw the show. Could you tell me how it was? Just tell me why it wouldn't work for you to have a house in Detroit.

EJEA: I bought a bicycle and I would drive Bill to school and one day a car hit me and didn't even know he hit me and knocked me into a ditch. He heard me. This was in Canada. And I got out of the bridge and I said to myself, that car didn't know he hit me. He was speeding zeeeeeeeer. And he heard something. So what I did I started driving Bill to Mass, to school every day. Gampa bought the car.

JEA: But can I go back to why you couldn't buy a house in Detroit?

EJEA: Because it was right, you know, I'm kind of, I'm a little bit dizzy. Is there a pill I'm supposed to take.

JEA: Sue knows what you're supposed to take.
Sue: Yes, is a milk shake ok and a pill?

EJEA: … Marquette University and Spencer Tracy was his roommate. And Daddy said, my father said Spencer Tracy was the most devote and religious, deeply religious boy he ever knew. They were the same age. But Spencer would get up beside his bed and kneel usually about 15 minutes or so and then he's leave for mass at Jesu, meaning Jesus.

JEA: But we were talking, why wouldn't a house in Detroit work?

EJEA: Well, I dated, so if I say this, I mean it just, but I dated one boy, Wesley McLain, and he was a senior, he graduated in aeronautical engineering the year that we're talking about, 1938. And Wesley was just very devote, let's put it that way.

JEA: So while you were in Detroit after leaving Atlanta did Wesley try to date you or something?

EJEA: Well, he of course wanted to marry me because I just accepted every date.
JEA: But even after he knew you were married he wanted to marry you?
EJEA: No, not after I, what I meant, I'm going back.

JEA: Oh, but I'm wondering why Gampa couldn't buy you a house in Detroit.

EJEA: Well, because, I don't know why.It seems that every time he asked me out I'd just get another date. And he'd say, "it was just announced. How does this happen?" I'd say, remember, the professor was called out of the room for 10 minutes. I stepped out in the hall to take a sip of water at the water fountain and I said, he asked me. It would happen all the time.

EJEA: And Daddy said there's only one way that once you're serious or want to be serious I went into nursing and …

JEA: But Grandmama, I'm talking about years later in Detroit after you left Atlanta.

EJEA: But let me say it. In nursing you could only have a date three hours on a Friday night, Friday, Saturday, Sunday for three hours. You had to eat at the nurses home. And you could only have a date on Friday from 7:00 and they had to be back exactly at 10:00.I'll say this fast. So the only thing he could think of doing was going to a movie at Fisher Building and stopping by to get some meatless, I asked him to not eat again. But every Friday going to this Fisher building.

JEA: So who are you talking about now?

EJEA: I'm talking about before I was married. I'm talking about this Jim Schields. He's a very good boy…

Oh, I thought you were talking about Wesley McLain.

EJEA: He's in Detroit. He's an aeronautical engineer and his brother is a priest.

JEA: So did he try to date you after you were married when you were separated for three years.

EJEA: No, no.

JEA: Well, I'm wondering why we are talking about this because I was just wondering why you couldn't get a house in Detroit.

EJEA: I'm just telling you how I would get dates. For some reason I would step out some place and get, I don't know [laughing].

JEA: I know, I'm sorry.

EJEA: But anyway, my father got this house in Canada, you remember Lake House, and then he bought me a little car, tin-lizzie car. He didn't want people to think I was a rich man's daughter. My father in essence was not a rich person. He owned and founded Michigan Drilling Company but he didn't , I don't know, but anyway he wanted me to .. I don't know why I'm bothering talking, but anyway he said that

EJEA: Anyway, my father in his wisdom thought it was better…

JEA: So did you miss Daddy during those three years? Did you ever wish he'd call or anything?

EJEA: It wasn't three years.
JEA: Two and ½ then.
EJEA: It was more like two years.

JEA: That's why I was wondering when you left Atlanta, what month if you can remember.

EJEA: Daddy knew he broke a very solemn vow to me, so Daddy, the priest wasn't letting it go lightly. So he said, Daddy said, he took Bill. Bill was a very religious little boy. Everybody he talked to, the garbage man, he'd run out and "you're going to see God."

… Anyway, he thought I should have a home in Canada because so many friends would, you know what I'm trying to say Sue?

JEA: Try to date you?

Sue. No, not try to date her. It was just awkward, all these old boyfriends.

EJEA: No so much date me as, date me. [laughing]

Sue: Oh really? [laughing]

EJEA: I don't mean date. They would, they were Catholics, but they would...

Sue: Yea, they're always hanging around.

EJEA: If they'd see me in the street, they'd, you know..

JEA: Was Michael Hand married by that time?

EJEA: Michael Hand who dated me married the bishop's brother's youngest daughter and Jim Schields whose brother was a diocesan priest two years younger than himself, he married the oldest daughter. Isn't that funny.

EJEA: In other words, my father knew that it wasn't good to live in Detroit where I would be, you know, and so he bought me this home, Lake House. And my father took care of you children's schooling, St. Louis University, Father Ryan High School when it was all priests faculty and all boys school.

EJEA: Bill was quoting the bible all the time and he'd preach it to everybody. I'm sorry I bored you with all this.

JEA: Oh no, you didn't bore us.

JEA: Let me ask you one last question. What were you thinking in Detroit – that you'd never get back together again?

EJEA: I thought that, I kept my ring on and I thought that where Daddy is buried that's where I am still. And what I did was I prayed. Fr. Kuhn, Fr, Benson and Fr. Dearson, each told me that I was their dearest friend… what they told me is to say the heroic act of charity. And I would say, "William.., you name the person, and I would name Daddy. William L Andrews, I'd say and their children… so hard for me to talk …

EJEA: I can't tell you. For instance, Fr, Kuhn said we have the Henry Ford of Germany's son here. Christian Otto Winzen is Otto's father.

JEA: So, Gampa knew you should not be in Detroit because of all of these people from U of D that you knew?

EJEA: Fr. Kuhn didn't introduce me to these people. He'd see me at mass every morning..

EJEA: But Gampa knew that it was safer to be in Canada having nuns, French nuns, we were only gone from Daddy two years.

JEA: I think you left on the train in January of 1951 and all the way through August of 1953, so that was almost three years. It was 2 and ¾ years I think that you were away from Daddy. But that's why I was trying to get you to remember when you left. I think it was January. Because Daddy went back to the farm in April he said, but he said you left a few months earlier.

EJEA: When he left Atlanta..

JEA; Did he live with Aunt Sara and Grandmother? What did he do for those three years? Where did he live? Did he ever tell you once you got back together what he did those three years?

EJEA: No, he, when we left Atlanta, he asked me to be home a month. He said, stay a month so I can put a bath room in at the farm. And just that night as I was putting the children to bed, I was carrying my gold amethyst rosary, it was my grandmother's, it was blessed by Pope ________ and I didn't suspect anything like Daddy saying something, but a lot of things happened because Andy was brought up this way. I told him one day in the bathroom, we're going to have a baby, and a few minutes later he bumped me accidentally. Accidentally I thought. And it knocked me in the bathtub. There was no water in it. But I'm telling you thin because you want to know and he was brought up by Grandmother and Aunt Sara who believed that way. I didn't know then until I heard him this one night, and Aunt Sara and Grandmother knew ways not to have a baby, that's a good way to put it. All good protestants do they said.

JEA: So, did you loose a baby in Atlanta.

EJEA: Oh, of course. [I'm not sure she heard what I said and answered correctly.] How could he help but grow up like that. A big family. I was hoping for at least 12, 15 children, whatever. A Catholic girl, you just can't have enough.

JEA: Was this in Nashville or Atlanta? Because I didn't think you were expecting any children in Atlanta.

EJEA: Every Catholic girl I would say wants to have as many children and as many priests and as many holy children, but what I was going to say is one time Aunt Sara said to me, I hope you never try to make William a Catholic. I said, "Oh, he could never become a Catholic. He doesn't even believe in Jesus Christ." And she said, "oh well, that's his education." He went to school in the east where all of those, you know whom I'm talking about, Emerson, all those people, you know, but anyway, this is my last talking. I'm getting this over with, I'm glad. And I said that to her. And so I think she knew what I was talking about. She believed me.

Susan recalls in Detroit brother Bill came out and said, "Our Daddy is here." Susan replied," Of course he's here." Bill said, "No, our real Daddy." Susan said, "Gampa is our real daddy." Right after this a tall, skinny man came out and hugged her and Susan was stiff and didn't know what to think. This is the first she remembers of her father, who nicknamed her, "Squeezems".

INTERVIEW OF JOAN
NOVEMBER 29, 2013
Annapolis Maryland

JEA: So Aunt Joan, Uncle Chris and I were talking about what we ate growing up.

Joan: Remember we had that big garden and we used to eat asparagus and I hated it, but now I love asparagus, but it's so expensive to buy.

JEA: Remember Mom used to grow rhubarb also. She must have gotten her tastes from Ganger.

Joan: And remember the beats. I hated beats, but we had corn too and other things.

Chris: But she told me that she took a vow at eight years old, she wanted to give something back to God, not to eat candy. So you think that's why you didn't have candy in the house.

Joan: Oh, it may have been because of poorness too. She didn't give up meat and we didn't have meat either. We had it for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter I think, right?

John: Daddy would win turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas at the Belfast School Lions Club turkey shoots and I think Milton and Sally would pluck them and fix them.

John: Remember Mama would hide cookies, candy, etc. in Daddy's closet so Daddy would have it.

Joan: I remember he loved his hot chocolate. No one touched it. I think he called it his medicine, or maybe it's cigarettes. She told us cigarettes were bad because we used to throw them away, out the window, remember.

John: Isn't it funny that he gave them up as soon as we got back together again?

Joan: Yea, and never smoked again. We did throw them out a few times. Remember Mr. Do Do?

INTERVIEW WITH ELIZABETH "BETTY" JANE EARLY ANDREWS
November 29, 2013
Annapolis, Maryland

I made friends I kept - at U of D every time you stepped out of a building there would be really nice boys, smart. U of D was practically all boys.

In grade school and High School I studied. I just naturally liked Latin and Spanish and I had a gift for it. When I got to U of D I didn't study at all. It was just wonderful. I had the dearest life-Long friends on the faculty. One time Father Kuhn told me, "you know, the son of the Henry Ford of Germany is going to school here. That's all he told me. And all of a sudden, I knew him better than Fr. Kuhn did. I'd go to Mass and he would see me at Mass. He went to Mass every morning. All of a sudden it was Otto. He had me call him Schmall. That meant the younder of the father. They never call a boy Jr. in Germany. They call the son named after the father – Otto's name was Otto Christian Winzen and his father was Christian Otto Winzen. So he named his son just backwards. So all of a sudden this boy would come up to me every day and we became very close friends, and he said to call him Schmall. And he said, I'll call you Schatzie. And his brother came to America right after he did. Hitler was the devil incarnate. When they said, "Hiel Hitler", they were giving adoration to the devil incarnate. But Otto and his family were deeply, deeply religious. His mother's father was Von Poppen, and that was the Prime Minister of Germany. And Otto said he stayed Prime Minster as asked by the Pope. That way he knew what was happening. And Otto, when his brother came over from German – I loved the mother – Lilly Von Poppen, her maiden name.

I have a picture taken as a girl and Otto Winzen is holding my arm with both his hands and my brother took the picture. He began walking over to my house every day. Anyway, when his brother came to America, he became my brother's best friend. But Otto called me Schatzie. Otto was the most deeply religious boy I have ever known. Otto was brilliant. He spoke English with his beautiful addiction as well as any Harvard or Yale graduate. They came to Detroit because of automobile engineering. Otto was my best friend and I dated him.

[In response to question about how she felt about Otto] Otto Winzen would have married me. I wasn't… we were terribly good friends. Otto was taken into custody by the United States because Hitler had used the name Winzen. I never saw Otto after I went into nursing until the farm. I liked someone else better at U of D. His name was Westley McLain. His family came to this country from Scotland I think. I liked Otto very much as a friend. Westley McLaine was the holiest boy I had ever known. He wasn't an American Citizen. He came to American with his father and mother and three sisters. Was it Finland? Westley was the smartest person. He took aeronautical engineering at the University of Detroit. He worked for Continental Motors in Detroit. So that's Pearl McLain's brother. I stayed in touch with her. The Executive Vice President of Continental Motors is Jimmy Canucan, a very devout Catholic. When he came across the name Westley McLain, he didn't hire him. He didn't like the protestant sound of Westley. And what he did was send him over to D J Healey in Detroit and Healey took people that Continental wouldn't take. Pearl married a Catholic, Don Chamberlain. Wesley's two sons, one son died. He joined the Navy and got in an accident travelling from Detroit to Chicago. The other son was hired by D J Healey – they used him for the cover picture of Irish Spring soap.

My father asked me one thing in my life. My Aunt Gertrude was getting the fad that women could drink and Daddy said, "Betty, there's only one promise I want you to make me – that you never smoke or drink." I said Daddy I'll make it a vow. The only wine I've ever tasted is the Holy Eucharist.

I remember Henry Belemy. He was the founder and owner of Detroit Tube Products, a millionaire. And he said to me that your father is recognized as a saint. Pep Belemy his son was named Henry maybe a different middle name. My father would never spell his name for anybody. He's say Early, early in the morning. Mary Belemy was my friend and she was very talented pianist, played with the Detroit Symphony orchestra. Not a beautiful girl. She was possessive of her brother Pep Belemy. They called him Pep because as a little boy he was so energetic. But he was named after his father Henry. He through the grace of God, and it was through me, Pep took me out one night when he never dated or anything. Pep was very shy, but he was an engineer, and he went to U of D, and one day his mother and I, I went over to his home, and he said to his mother, I'd take Betty out if you two ever got through talking. Well, the mother was so happy. I said, well you come with us. She said, oh no, I have to call my sister. His father and his mother wanted him to marry me more than anything in the world. One night I went over to the Belemy's house and they lived in a large lovely old home, in the early part of Detroit on Hubbard Avenue. Pep said this night, I'd take Betty to a movie if you two ever stop talking. I said to the mother, oh, you go too. She said, no, no. We went and we never went to a movie. He took me to Grosse Point Drive. The first thing he said, was oh Mary can play the piano and he said my brother Jim is an artist, I have nothing to offer. I said, oh Pep, you have so much. He just shook. Before he did that, he said, I'd like to build my home here, Grosse Point at this lot. As soon as you enter Grosse Point. He was a very smart engineer, graduating from U of D. He pressed on the gas and drove out. And I know when he said he had nothing to offer me... He started on East Grand Boulevard toward my home. I said, oh Pep, I'm due back at the hospital tonight. He turned around on one of those islands and parked right in front of the nurses home across from St. Joseph's hospital. We said goodnight and pressed a little bell and we walked up the white marble steps. When I went to that hospital, the nuns gave me the best room because of U of D. I got good grades at U of D even though I didn't study. i was gifted that way. I lived with this Mary Bender and across the hall from me in the other beautiful room, the daughter of the owner and editor-in-chief of the Detroit news. But I know Pep Belemy was going to ask me to marry him that night. His sister was so possessive. About three nights later I got on the bus and I went to Mary Belemy's home and I knew Pep wanted to ask me to marry him. And so I had an experience some years before that that a boy… but I went to mary Belemy's home and Mary was home alone and it was afternoon. I said Mary, I'm really in love with pep. And she said, oh, I could just club him over the head. She said he said you were too small. He's about six 2 or 3. She said you're too small for him. So when she said that, it just seemed too gross, and I just broke down and sobbed. That disgusted me so and she got frightened. And she got real nervous and she took me by the hand and went upstairs to the bathroom so we could wash my face. She was scared to death her brother would come home. She said well come down stairs, we'll …

[Pep] asked me out at 10:00 am one morning. He wanted to ask me to marry him at the highest point in Detroit. So he asked me out and we rode and we rode in a brand new beautiful car. He got to the top and [Pep] is brilliant, but he was so excited that he forgot to put gas in the car. So we got to [near] the top of the hill and he had to walk all the way to the top of the hill and there were no gas stations and then down the hill to the first gas station. He was so exhausted, he said he was sick he was so exhausted. It turned out to be just a plain old place; not beautiful as he expected. He went to a restaurant for water and was given Hungarian goulash. He got up went outside and I could hear him throw up. We went back to his home and he said he was going to ask me the most important question.

Even though I had wonderful friends, I loved my husband more than anyone. I just wanted to tell you that.

I would kind of like to live on this earth until my 100th year, but whatever God wants. But when we get past this life to the next, it's an amazing thing.

Granddaughter Beth Andrews:
Question: Was there a defining moment in your life that made you want to pursue a nursing career?

Although there have been many experiences in my life that have encouraged and inspired me to pursue a career in nursing, the most memorable and impactful experience was one I shared with my grandmother. She loved to tell stories, and I remember being especially captivated by her memories of working as a nurse, both in the army during World War II and in civilian life. It was during one of our usual summer visits to see my grandparents that I first began to think about becoming a nurse.
Through my grandmother, I began to see the life-changing roles nurses can play within the lives of their patients. Being a deeply compassionate person, my grandmother loved to care for the dying, especially those who had no family. She felt a responsibility to be there for those close to death, to bring them reassurance and comfort. Not only did she care for her patients' physical needs, but for their emotional needs as well. She loved to get to know her patients and to spend time with them. She recognized the dignity and value of her patients regardless of their background and went out of her way to let them know they were cared for. Hearing her speak of the different ways she brought healing and joy into the lives of her patients instilled in me a desire to help people just as she had, with cheerfulness and joy.

In large part because of her, it is my dream and my goal to become a nurse. Like her, I want to be someone who can always be attentive to the wounds of others, whether physical or emotional, and to fight on their side for healing and recovery. Family has always been important to me, which is perhaps another reason I am so attracted to the field of nursing. As a nurse, I will be even more capable of caring for my family and perhaps a future family someday. At a young age I discovered this valuable aspect of nursing by simply listening to my grandmother speak of the different ways she was able to care for her own children so excellently due to the training she received as a nurse. Although one of the most difficult of professions, I am extremely motivated to work towards nursing since I have seen just how rewarding and fruitful it can be in the life of the nurse as well as in the lives of her friends, family, and of course, her patients.

Memories of his Parents by David Andrews, Saturday, September 08, 2012

After Aunt Joan died, I had a brief flurry of correspondence with a couple of [our Watts cousins-I think it was an oldest and youngest of the daughters, and I can't even remember their names]. Both asked me if I had any knowledge or pictures of Aunt Joan's painting. I didn't say it, but I have a sad feeling Susan painted over it. I remember it being altered (rosary added) and then I never saw it again after the early- or mid-70s, when Susan was doing a lot of painting at the farm.

Got your link to the "Democratic Convention in a Nutshell," John. I couldn't bring myself to open it. The website/blog it was on seemed so much about being CATHOLIC in ways I find off-putting. I hope I can be honest with you about this. But I'd rather not get those kinds of links. Like the ad made by the Catholic Bishops, you sent earlier: both aesthetically and politically, I found them manipulative and offensive.

I thought about just not responding. But I value our relationship. I don't want to disconnect politically or socially to the degree I feel I've had to do with my sisters. I hope what I've sent so far (Ayn Rand discussion, etc.) has been far from cant. Maybe it wasn't, and if not, please let me know.

While it's clear we have strong views and hold considered values close to us that are different, I don't want to oppose our being close.

I am writing on a couple other things you'd asked me to. I haven't finished enough to send anything on the experience that formed my politics, but here's my first response to your question about memories of Mama and Daddy. I hope you will do the same, John. I've tried to be as self-honest by taking responsibility for how I remember and put these memories together.

Gosh, John. I think that would have to be my life's project. Maybe it is each of our life's project.

I don't know how to manage memory in an other way than I'm doing, through my photography, my marriage, my parenting, being a sibling.... Or trying to answer questions as they arise in context. There's just too much otherwise.

The way I remember Mama and Daddy most objectively is in my gut. I know Mama is in me every time I have an argument with Eli, Lydia or Judy. I have this need to control the argument even if it ends in out-shouting the person I perceive not letting me say what I need to say. It never works and is absolutely the opposite of what I believe parenting, caring and spirituality are about. In the aftermath, I know the way I argue emotionally comes from arguments I witnessed between Mama and others or experienced directly, where she would settle everything by screaming. I don't just have a memory in my head; I have our relationship in me. I can't remember Mama ever losing an argument. Until later in our lives, I can't remember Mama ever showing us how to change our minds or how to compromise.

I remember Daddy now mostly for his saying less on things that matter to me. He never said anything bad about Grandmother or Aunt Sara, but he never said anything good either. He didn't demonstrate his love for them in any defense or in any other verbal way . Sometimes it seemed more a sense of responsibility than favor. Though I know--just as my family is to me--Grandmother and Aunt Sara are part of who he was. His lack of connection to them outside of the most nominal now seems a failure to connect his past to my past. So it's as though Daddy didn't show us how to love himself any more than Mama did. At least he didn't show us how to live with parts of our life that didn't fit easily. If Mama's response to conflict was to kill it; Daddy's was to surrender. He modeled more resignation. Mama seemed much more about confronting and even destroying the things that didn't fit within her idea of what was right. On this, I know I differ more with Mama in my head. But in the pit of my stomach and in my behavior, turns out I'm much more like her than I am like Daddy. And I appreciate this most in his not judging or talking negatively about anyone, especially me.

Daddy had a strange relationship to money. Maybe finances in a family is where the ideals meet with practicality. Just as with Susan and her family, where I see just how much money she requires to underpin her idea that "God will provide." I think Daddy's fear (which is not love) most often came in with what we've called frugality or even stinginess. I know Mama had money, but her wishes for education and good marriages, etc., were not as directly connect to their monthly incomes as I think Daddy's worries were. I hope you don't mind my admitting I think you have more of Daddy in you in this way than Mama. You may have Daddy in your gut and in your fears the way I have Mama. And of course it's what we have within that brings out our greatest opposition when we encounter it in others.

Realizing that Mama and Daddy are in me, not just as memories, allows me to forgive. I understand how powerless they were. They must have their parents in them too. They must have had the same struggle, and with fewer tools to understand the way memories are passed down just as genes are.

Got to go. I'll write more when I can.

david

John's response to David, Saturday, September 08, 2012

David, thank you very much for your email and your memories of Daddy and Mama. I hope you write more.

I think you might be right about Aunt Joan's paintings and that's sad. I think the girls treated photograph books the same way - destroying them so they could use pictures elsewhere or ripping out pictures of old girlfriends or boyfriends.

I understand completely your attitude toward the links Sue sent me that I forwarded and your feelings about Cathoicism. Although I have learned to differentiate between the people in religion and the basic teachings of the church, I can understand how it might be hard to do. A lot of the priests I have run across are not very admirable people and it's a struggle not to have that bias me. I guess I can understand your feelings because my attitudes in life have taken two 180 degree turns and Sue tells me she was a communist in college. I get the impression that Willy also has some issues with religion and I've often wondered what might have caused that - hopefully it wasn't Mama.

Don't ever worry about our differences hurting our friendship. Unfortunately, I can't say this about my relationship with the girls.

My take on Daddy is a little different. It did seem that Daddy put Aunt Sara and Grandmother before our family and the religious differences between Daddy and Mama may have helped that along. But I got the impression that the allegance Daddy seemed to have for them came more from fear than love. Interestingly, they and Mama seemed quite a bit alike in their attachment to their ideas and being unable to compromise and be understanding.

Up until I got out of high school I always had a hard time associating with Daddy partly I guess because when I first knew him at six years old he was a perfect stranger and unlike Mama, who always seemed interested in my dreams and what I wanted to do, Daddy always seemed to discourage them and my ambitions. I think that had mostly to do with money because my little projects involved blowing fuses and loosing tools. Also I think Daddy's lack of a desire to have a good job probably drove me in the opposite direction, but even more than that, Mama and the girls' lack of responsibility drove me even more in that diretion. When I was little I always thought that someday I'd have to bring financial security to the family since everyone else seemed so irresponsible that way.

Oh well! It's interesting to reflect back on things. I do think in latter years Daddy was the most interesting person I ever had conversations with and being with him was the most enjoyable thing in my life. Now, my Sue is so intelligent and good, I feel that way about her.

The way the girls seem to have a cavalier attitude toward truth has made me value truth and seeing all of the dishonesty in politics on both sides of the political spectrum is very disturbing. Sue sends me these interesting clips and I thought that last one was interesting because it involved a 2/3s voice vote to change a plank in the platform. The vote obviously went one way and after three unsuccerssful attempts in the hopes the people would go the opposite way, the podium, against the obvious, stated that the vote went the other way.

Bill's response, Saturday, September 08, 2012

Fun reading what you guys have to say. Daddy was a stranger to me too but I never got the impression that he didn't have a good job. I just don't think Daddy liked the law and that this was something that Aunt Sarah and Grandmother wanted him to be for the status. I don't think they really knew Daddy very well because they always blamed Mom and having so many children for forcing Daddy out of law - but Dad himself didn't like the adversarial relationships that often are at the heart of the legal profession. I know he loved legal theory and I can remember when he took you (John) and me to the Marshall County courthouse in that case where the father of our piano teacher (Ms Coffee?) was robbed. He loved the law but probably lacked the self-confidence to make a success of it with a jury. I can remember how shy he seemed at times - especially around strangers. Anyway, even though he was a stranger to me in Feb of 1953 when I saw him on my return from Florida with Ganger, it didn't take long for me to warm up to him. Remember his conversations with Mr McGoo who lived under the hood of the car? And I loved the talks we had about astronomy and the cosmos. He once told me about his idea of God (the Jeffersonian view of Deism) and I made the mistake of telling the girls who told Mom and I can remember another round of yelling and arguing. I felt bad at the time because I thought I was the cause of it. I think it was around that time that Mom decided that she wanted us going to Catholic schools. As far was Willy goes, he's like all of my boys. He goes to church occasionally but none of them are what I would call devout. They're more like me and I'm more like Dad that way. I'm a Catholic because I want to be and hope that the church has the truth - but, like Unamuno the Christian existentialist, my heart tells me to believe in Christ but my mind tells me that there's probably no life after death - unless God makes no exception for animals and plant life in heaven. I want my boys to have faith and to be practicing Catholics but I'm a terrible role model for them. I go to church to keep peace with Claudia. willyx

February 2007 Emails re Reminiscences about Daddy and Mama's Separation

From David -
Your questions and Daddy's answers are so interesting. Thanks John.

You know, I'm just scanning as an album a lot of loose picture pages that seem to be from the same three-ring binder album. They are separate from any binder; I don't know how many pages are missing; And there are certainly some individual pictures missing, taken out. But the album appears to be all from a fairly few years: Lake House, Detroit, Gethsemani Monastery...and then just a few shots of the earliest days at the farm. It seems to be an album of the separation and reparation time.

These days it seems to me that I'm hearing for the first time about the marriage that Miriam and I came from, while you guys came from an earlier relationship. The same couple, but a different idea of their marriage.

Mama is telling (somewhat tentatively and with some revision) things that you may have heard before, but that I never considered. I always thought for instance that Lake House was one summer and the separation--once I realized it was that--a part of that summer. Two years seems a pretty serious separation in comparison.

I never heard Daddy talk about his life during the separation; What he thought and how he came to the new understanding. It had to be a re-defining time, and he must have had to basically tell his mother and sister that they would be excluded from his new life for the most part. I have a sense that Daddy knew Aunt Sara had serious failings, at least in our eyes, and he never tried to alter my impressions, many that I inferred from Mama's behavior or from what she said outright.

When I went to UTK in the Fall of '77, I asked Daddy for books to read that he had liked, and the only one he could find was If Winter Comes. The protagonist right away struck me as like Daddy. The antagonist was the wife in the book, and I saw her as more like Aunt Sara than Mama, but Mama didn't fit the heroine for me either. I saw it as an odd, incomplete and idealized identification for Daddy with some of his life and maybe the separation, and it was the closest thing to an explanation I ever got from Daddy.

Did Daddy ever talk with you guys about it?

David Andrews
1637 Berkley Cir.
Chattanooga, TN 37405

From: Andrews, John (DC)
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2007 11:20 AM
To: 'David Andrews'
Cc: 'Andrews, William X.'; ' Susan Andrews'
Subject: RE: interview with Daddy

Boy, David. Thanks for these thoughts. No, Daddy never talked to me about his feelings during the separation or anything related to it. In matter of fact, when I tried to draw this out of him in recent years, maybe because he was embarrassed about it, he seemed to pretend that it wasn't a separation, that Mama and he had decided that the family would return to the farm and that while Daddy was putting in the bathroom and getting things ready, Mama would return to Detroit. We never discussed the two or three year period it took Daddy to get the farm ready, because I didn't want to put him on the spot of having to explain.

I really want to read If Winter Comes.

I'm going to try to get these interviews copied on to DVDs for you and Bill as soon as possible.

From: "Andrews, William X."
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2007 09:50:55 -0600
Subject: photo

David, thanks for sending me the interview you had with Mom about the "Gloria" and my homecoming. I really enjoyed it. I'm amazed at how well Mom remembers dates - not only the year I got out of Viet Nam but the birthdays of all her grandchildren. She has an incredible memory. I have a photo of the night of my homecoming. I'm sure you already have it but, because your server has limited power to accept high resolution photos, I'll send the photo to you in the next transmission - a minute from now. Bill

From: David
Sent: Mon 2/5/2007 11:48 AM
To: Andrews, William X.
Subject: Re: photo

Tell me, when you have a chance, your memory of that homecoming.

David Andrews

From: "Andrews, William X."
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2007 13:23:35 -0600
To: "David"
Subject: RE: photo

It was pretty much the way Mom describes it. Flying from Oakland California to St. Louis, we passed a pretty scary lightning storm over Kansas City and I thought it would be crazy to die in a plane crash a few hundred miles from home on the way back from Vietnam. I was locked out of the apartment at Grand Towers when I got off the bus from the airport so I went to mass at St. Francis X college church to kill time and that's where I saw Mom and the family. It was a great reunion. I don't remember the Gloria but I do remember that lightning knocked out the lights and the church service was conducted only in candlelight when I walked in. The lights went on later. The photo I tried to send you earlier (the one with Joan with her arms around you) was taken that night at Grand Towers Apt with Griezedick Hall in the background. That hall is where John and I lived for my first two years at St. Louis U.

From: David
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2007 11:45 AM
To: Andrews, John (DC)
Cc: Bill Andrews
Subject: letter from Mama

Mama asked me to send this to you.

I was telling Mama that I remembered a time when Miriam and I were very small and at the Farm. One day, when Daddy and you older children must have been at school (St. Catherine's or Belfast?), Mama took Miriam and me for a "picnic." I was allowed to bring a baby bottle like Miriam had, though I was normally told I was a big boy and too old for the bottle. But it was a kind of special day, it seemed, and I was allowed to play baby along with Miriam, who mustn't have been pretending at all. This is one of my earliest memories.

We went to the Spring, and had our picnic, and I guess Mama was pretty quiet during the playtime there. The Farm then of course was very quiet too, or only alive with natural sounds, not cars and trucks. I must have been aware that Mama was occupied too with thoughts or memories, and I asked her about Gampa. I don't remember what exactly I asked, but I guess it was pretty specific and close to what Mama was wondering about.

Mama told me then that I asked her exactly what she was asking herself or what she was thinking about Gampa, and she went on to say this wasn't the first time I'd voiced thoughts she was having, that it was something special or mystical even to her.

I just remember Mama's quiet, looking into distances during those days as we played close to her. And I remember the Farm days as being long and quiet against great ruckus of insects, birds (especially Bob Whites) and even dry, grassy breezes. Mama seemed in her moods a kind of preoccupied and open presence, very much a part of the days and the Farm itself.

Brother Dave

Saturday Night
Jan. 13, 2007
Annapolis, Maryland

Dear David - You & I just talked on the phone tonight abt. Bill, Claudia & Glennon's purchase of the Lealand House. They are so happy about it.

Then on the phone, you & I got to reminiscing, I spoke of your gift of almost reading a person's mind when you were a little boy. I remember it especially one time down at the spring on the farm. I was thinking about Gampa. You not only asked about Gampa, but about the very event I was thinking about at that very moment. You did this quite often when you were young.

I remember in your very early years at Christ the King School (maybe 1st or 2nd grade) you asked me one night if I always remembered to say an Act of Contrition before going to sleep at night. I admitted to you that "I rarely think of that." And you said, "You should, Mama, God takes most of us to himself in our sleep at night." The strange thing when you asked me that questions, I was being very quiet as I tucked everyone into bed. I was thinking of the night Gampa finished his last Manresa retreat & was called that night to God in his sleep.

You told me, "Eli has done this at times." Little children are wonderful!!! You once told me that Elijah once said lately: "I saw Nigel last night." He didn't say: "I dreamed of Nigel last night." Angels can take any or no visible shape.

Well, I just want to say I love you & God bless you, Dear, Dear David and Judy, Elijah & Lydia May.

Love "Grandma-Grampa"

Also give my love and prayers to "Grandmma-Cookie"

P.S. You asked me to write-down this little incident at the spring at the farm - so there it is briefly, Dear David!

Grandmother Stella's Reaction to expecting grandson John

On October 11, 2006, Stella's daughter-in-law Elizabeth Jane Early Andrews told her son John that when she found out that she was expecting John, she told Stella and Stella started screaming at her. She said that it's awful to say but unfortunately she was happy to tell her this because she knew what her reaction would be and she said that God punished her for it later.

Returning from Knoxville to Nashville after receiving law Degree:

Mama: And he passed his bar exam on first try. And he took his bar exam on Thursday and Friday and John was born on the morning

Daddy: Friday morning at 9:00.

Mama: … on the morning when he took the second day of his bar exam.

Daddy: I was taking the bar exam when they notified me.

Mama: They brought a note into him saying, baby boy…

Daddy: It was on the seventeenth of January. The bar exam was six hours. Three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon. Of each day on the sixteenth and seventeenth. And I just started.. I took Mama to the hospital, what time was it? Early morning about midnight or a little after.

Mama: Midnight. And he …

Daddy: You know, I didn't know. I had the Bar exam. I had to go on and take it.

Mama: When they brought in the note and that was when John was born.

David: So how long did you stay in Knoxville then?

Daddy: Well, back then about three days.

Daddy. Oh, Knoxville. I thought you said hospital. Oh, I graduated in August 1946, I forget the exact date, the end of the summer term.

David: And then did you go to Georgia?

Daddy: And then I went back to Nashville and I went to work with, let's see, oh, I went back to Vanderbilt because there were a lot of courses I didn't get that I thought I could use while studying for the bar exam. See, the bar exam was in January and this was in August so I went back to Vanderbilt and audited, sat in law courses just to get them. I wasn't getting any credit for them.

Mama: I'll let Daddy talk now. I'll get dinner.

Daddy: And then I, we bought our house in November on Stokes Lane and, of course, we didn't get possession until the next March. We had a legal problem over it. And so I took the bar exam in January and Ii went with the telephone company in, I don't know what the date was but it was soon. It was probably the latter part of March, wasn't it. Yes, because the telephone strike was in April and I went and I had been with them only about 5 or 6 weeks, and then we got possession of the house in March and I was already with the Telephone company. I don't know, I must have gone with them in early February. I know, it was right after the Bar exam. See I went

Mama: Daddy paid an extravagant price for our house, stone home with a basement and it was a beautiful little home. Eleven thousand dollars. A big price then.

Daddy: Eleven five.

Mama: One thousand dollar down payment.

Daddy: No, no. I paid.. I forget now. Maybe you're right. I guess it was. I guess it was.

David: How long did you stay in Nashville? When did you move back to the farm.

Daddy: We were there three years and then I was transferred to Atlanta and then down there a year.

Mama: Kind of deciding to come back to the farm.

Daddy: Joan was born in 1948 and Susan in '49 and we had four children and the farm was in the family so I wasn't real happy with my work there so mostly, I just wanted to come back to the farm.

Mama: well, that was kind of a dream to come back to the farm, Lewisburg.

Daddy: So I left there in April. I came back here in April 1951. And we got the house ready for Mama and the kids.

Dad's attachment to his mother and sister

Betty felt that he had an obsession about his mother and sister and was crazy about them. After he died she began top realize that this obsession was probably the result of a need for security and he saw them as his security in life. But then Betty felt that when his mother died and again later when his sister died, he for the first time looked upon Betty as his wife.

His Aunt Lou told W.L Andrews' wife Betty that when he was little, his mother always wanted him on her lap and was constantly hugging him. He had to sit in the front seat of the car with her.

His son John could see this insecurity in his father in that he almost always discouraged him from endeavors he was enthusiastic about and, although he loved people, he just preferred everyone staying on the farm contentedly. When his sons went out to get jobs bailing hay during high school he offered to pay them not to work, probably encouraged by his wife who wanted her children to enjoy childhood as much as possible without working. John detected a fear of the world in his father and a need for the security of the farm his father left him. He worried so much about finances that he would turn off the hot water to cut his children's showers short.

A HIGHER PLACE IN HEAVEN by son Bill - The first instance in which I can recall learning about the race issue was when I was five and when we had just moved from Tennessee to Georgia when my father took a job as a legal consultant with Bell Telephone. The first week at our new home I saw a garbage truck pull up and two African-American city workers emptied our trash can. I asked my mother why they looked so different from everyone else living in our post-World War II Edward Scissorhands-like middle class subdivision with uniform one-story ranch-style homes with manicured lawns.

I remember Mom explaining the difference by saying that God made 'colored people" that way because it was part of his plan, that they were made in his image and likeness, and that we should always treat them with love and respect. My first thought was that, if God were an African-American, then whose image was I made in. Before I asked Mom to explain this conundrum, she said that they led difficult lives because people treated them badly because of their race. When she saw that I was having trouble processing this, she added something I will never forget.She said that when we all die someday and go to Heaven (she's always been an optimist), we will probably find that these people will have a higher place in Heaven because of the way they have been suffering from hate and injustice.

A few years later we were back in Tennessee and living on our 236 acre family farm which Dad had inherited from his father who had been a founder of the People's and Union Bank in town. We lived in a kind of cocoon, protected from the outside world and its racial ills. We went to an all-white Catholic elementary school in nearby Columbia and Dad would drop us off and pick us up. On our farm we had neighbors just two hundred yards from our house. They were a black sharecropping family living in the oldest house in the county. Milton Evans looked elderly but I'm sure his appearance came from a life of hard work. Dad bought all the milk cows and sheep and Milton and his two older sons - Howard and Harvey - would do the milking and shearing and split the profits. As they didn't have running water, Sally and her two oldest girls - Mamie and Maddie - would get their water in buckets from our outdoor faucet on our back porch. We got to know the four older children well because, well, they were our only real neighbors.

When I finished fifth grade at St. Catherines, Dad was offered a job as a principal of a public school in the Belfast community of our county. Mom agreed to let us kids attend that school because she understood the burden it was for my father to do all this driving each day to Columbia. Going to the public school constituted real culture shock for me and my siblings. It was the first time we ever heard the N-word or the F-word and we heard this incessantly. I was in 8th grade six years after the Brown v Topeka Board of Education ruling by the high court but our school was still all white. Integration was neither deliberate nor speedy. I can remember a pretty redhead toward the end of the school day looking out the window and, seeing a yellow school bus approaching, making the grievous mistake of calling out "Our Bus is Here." The classroom broke out in howling laughter because it turned out that the bus in question had shortly before left the black school with its cargo of black children. The girl's complexion seemed to be a darker red than her hair and tears began to well up in her eyes as the insults were hurled at her with a liberal sprinkling of the N-word.

Stories like this became a routine part of my life. I saw the segregated water fountains at the Marshall County courthouse where there were three bathrooms - Men, Women and Colored. I heard the N-word used often when as a freshman I attended the local still-segregated public high school and I was shocked when one of my good friends used the N-word in casual conversation. When I told my mother, she was livid. I suspect that this was one of the reasons why she worked to have me attend Father Ryan High School in Nashville for my next three years. Ryan was integrated and I had African-American students in nearly all my classes. Moreover, the teachers there were committed to the Civil Rights agenda and several had been involved in the sit-ins. I can remember when as a sophomore I had a piece published in the Tennessean newspaper advocating Civil Rights, the teachers all came up to me to congratulate me.

Looking back to that day in Georgia when my mother first told me about racial injustice, I think of what she said about blacks receiving a higher place in heaven than those of us who lived charmed, privileged and comfortable lives. Mom will be 101 years-old in August. Were her hearing better, I'd love to talk to her about that day and ask her why she was so acutely aware of racial injustice when she herself lived a very sheltered and comfortable life.

(In the photograph of us on the couch, from left are my brother John, my sister Joan, I and my sister Susan. The other shot is of us gathering bales of hay in the Arrowhead Field. I'm driving the tractor and Dad stands in front and our black neighbors Harvey and Howard Evans are on the far left, Harvey facing the camera and Howard with his back to the camera. Mom took the shot).

##########
Betty said that of all her children, John and Joan were most alike.

Andrews-Early Marriage Newspaper Article

Nashvillian Is Married in Stuttgart, Ark.

Stuttgart, Ark., Dec. 9--(Special)--

Miss Elizabeth Jane Early, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Edward James Early of Detroit, Mich., became the bride of William LaFayette Andrews, Jr., Lieutenant, United States Army Air Forces, stationed at Stuttgart Army Air Base, son of Mrs. William L. Andrews of Nashville, Tenn., and the late Mr. Andrews, at a ceremony which was solemnized on Saturday, November 25, at the Post Chapel here.

The Rev. James Evans officiated in the presence of a limited guest company.

The bride, who was given in marriage by her father, Mr. Early, wore a flight blue velveteen dress with a black felt hat and black accessories. She carried a prayer book and wore a shoulder bouquet of white chrysanthemums.

Mrs. Ray Watts of Houston, Texas, who was her sister's only attendant, wore a navy blue crepe model with a fuchsia felt hat and navy accessories. A shoulder bouquet of pink roses accented her costume.

Emil Mascia, Lieutenant, United States Army Air Forces, was best man.

Following the ceremony, Mr. and Mrs. Early, parents of the bride, entertained at a wedding breakfast at the Riceland Hotel. The guest list was restricted to members of the bridal party and those who had come from other cities to attend the wedding.

Later in the day, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews left for a short trip.

The bride attended the University of Detroit in Detroit and was graduated from Mercy College there.

Mr. Andrews was graduated from Duncan Preparatory School and from Vanderbilt University, both in Nashville. He was a member of the Sigma Un Fraternity and the Phi Delta Phi legal fraternity.

_________

"THE ARROWHEAD FIELD"

…Mom was in Europe at the time. She and my grandmother had left the week before on the Queen Mary to tour Europe and, the highlight for her, to have an audience with the Pope. The occasion was the canonization of Pope Pius X. My parents could not have been more different where religion was concerned. …My mother is a devout Irish Catholic of the pre-Vatican II school, believing in the efficacy of Lourdes water, festooning the old farmhouse walls with reproduced Renaissance iconography of Jesus and Mary, and lamenting the absence of a resident priest in Lewisburg so she can attend daily mass.

In fact, it was primarily the religious conflict between them that occasioned my parents' two-year separation and it was Dad's willingness to tactfully live with what he regarded as Mom's religious eccentricities that led to their reconciliation. It is one of the curious ironies in my family's life that Dad attends Sunday mass with Mom while my mother proudly considers him a convert to the faith, ignoring the fact that he has yet to embrace wholeheartedly the idea of Christ's divinity. To see them today holding hands and laughing together through sixty years of marriage is somewhat miraculous in itself. As the oldest of six children, I am the only one who can remember the traumatic and contentious early years when my parents fought their religious wars without taking prisoners.

Where my dad is laid back and soft spoken, Mom is a firecracker, a body constantly in motion whose outspoken candor and hardheadedness are perceived by many southerners as emblematic of Yankee assertiveness. She too came from a conservative background. She was the daughter of Edward Early and Jessica O'Keefe, themselves both grandchildren of Irish immigrants who settled in Wisconsin. To us children, they were Gampa and Ganger. Gampa was born in 1885 and graduated with a civil engineering degree from Marquette University around 1907. One of his sisters became a nun and the other, a missionary nurse living in China, survived a grueling four years in a Japanese prison during the Second World War.

Mom's mother, Ganger, was the daughter of Patrick O'Keefe, a physician who graduated from Montreal's McGill University Medical School and set up practice in the small Wisconsin lumber town of Oconto. Ganger was teaching at St. Joseph Academy, a girls finishing school in Green Bay, when she met my grandfather. There must have been in those days a social pecking order and some latent class-consciousness among the late 19th century immigrants from Erin because the O'Keefes regarded themselves as "lace-curtain" Irish and the Earlys as "shanty" Irish. Gampa and Ganger married in their late twenties and raised three children into adulthood. Their first child died when he was two weeks old from a pneumonia picked up in the Green Bay hospital at the time of his birth. My Uncle Ted was born in 1916, the year before the United States entered the Great War. In 1918 Gampa was serving in France as a captain in army ordnance when Ganger gave birth to my mother, Betty Jane Early. Mom was born in Washington DC, during the opening phase of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive that ended the Great War. Reunited at war's end and anticipating economic opportunities in the bourgeoning automobile Mecca of southeast Michigan, Gampa and Ganger moved their young family from Green Bay to Detroit. Two years later their third surviving child, my Aunt Joan, was born. There my grandfather founded the Michigan Drilling Company, an engineering firm that drilled and analyzed core soil samples to determine foundation strengths for the skyscrapers being built during the boom years of the Roaring Twenties. Gampa's rigorous work ethic built wealth for his family and his savvy investment sense spared him the great economic losses visited on so many other families during the depression.

During the late 1930's, Uncle Ted and Mom attended the University of Detroit, a Jesuit institution similar to Gampa's alma mater. Uncle Ted followed in Gampa's engineering footsteps and Mom majored in the liberal arts as had her mother. Although later there was some embarrassment in the revelation, it appears that Uncle Ted during his college days was something of a supporter of the controversial Father Charles Coughlin who, like Huey Long and Francis Townsend, helped organize the Union Party which threatened Roosevelt's New Deal agenda. If Gampa and Ganger liked to refer to FDR [derisively] because of his efforts to tax the rich, they were also turned off by Caughlin's anti-Semitic rhetoric. Mom was enjoying an active social life at UD where she was a popular coed, a class officer, and a sorority sister in --- ---. Twice her peers elected her Snowball Queen for the university's biggest social gala. In old black and white photos and newspaper clippings collected by Ganger, Mom is always shown with a coterie of young men flocking about. In these time-capsule portraitures, she reminds me of Vivian Leigh's rendition of Scarlett O'Hara in the opening scenes of Gone with the Wind, with potential beaus flittering around her, solicitous to the point of sycophancy. One of Mom's beaus was Otto Winson, an anti-Nazi German student who remained in the United States during the war, became an American citizen, and later gained renown as the inventor of high altitude balloons for scientific exploration of the ionosphere.

In September of 1939 when World War II erupted in Europe, Mom was enjoying an active social life at UD and Dad was in law school at Vanderbilt. A year later, as part of a preparedness program, Franklin Roosevelt inaugurated the first peacetime draft in American History and Dad was the first young man conscripted from Vanderbilt. The army permitted him to finish out the academic year before entering military service. He was one year shy of finishing law school when he entered the army.

Unlike many of their generation, neither of my parents was much affected in the quality of their lives by the Great Depression. It was Pearl Harbor that transformed frivolous and carefree youngsters into serious and responsible adults. Uncle Ted, Mom's brother, joined the Army Air Corps and after training piloted a B-24 Mitchell bomber in the European Theatre. He fell for an English girl, Katherine Thomas, and named his plane "Kate." Eventually he married her and brought her back to Detroit where my grandmother, long an aficionada of English manners and customs, treated her like royalty. Mom dropped out of the University of Detroit at the end of the spring semester in 1942 and entered St. Joseph Hospital's nursing school where enrollment soared due to the war's demand for medical personnel. She was recruited by the army at her graduation in the summer of 1943 and began basic training at Montgomery Field in Alabama in January of 1944. Her first duty assignment in March of 1944 was to the main hospital at Stutgartt Army Air Corps Base in Arkansas' rice and duck hunting country.

Mom was still a college student in Detroit when Dad entered the service. Dad trained in an old Fairchild biplane and was already flying solo when he experienced a near collision one day. …. I find it interesting to speculate that if my father had not washed out in February of 1944, he never would have returned to Stuttgart to meet my mother and to father the child who would be I.

It was at Stuttgart that my parents met in the spring of 1944 when Mom was assigned to the post hospital as a surgical nurse caring for the medical needs of young soldiers wounded in the Pacific Theatre. They met under circumstances not uncommon for men and women far from home in the midst of a global war. On the evening of her arrival at Stuttgart, she ate with the other base nurses in the Officer's mess where she was introduced to Dad and the other male officers at the hospital. The next day after work, she was walking around the base looking for the post office where she planned to mail letters home. She got lost because nearly all the buildings looked alike – the long, white, wood-framed one story structures characteristic of military structures during that war. At one point she noticed a large group of men in overalls on the other side of a fence and she approached them to ask for directions. They enthusiastically offered assistance, although in such heavy accents that she had trouble understanding them. About this time an officer approached her in a jeep and asked her if she needed assistance. The first lieutenant in the jeep was my Dad and he took her to her destination. He also explained to her that the group of men with whom she was fraternizing was a detachment of German prisoners-of-war. My mother was unaware that Stuttgart was not only an army air base but also a large POW facility. She was immediately struck by my Dad's easy, soft-spoken ways, his intelligence and his sense of humor. They were an attractive couple.

Not long after they began dating, an assembly was called for all hospital personnel where the commanding officer, Colonel Ryan, notified everyone that large crates of oranges were disappearing from the hospital at a prodigious rate. Dad informed on my mother, explaining that his girlfriend was manually squeezing the oranges into pulpy juice and serving the patients. She was a big believer in the efficacy of vitamins and none of the recovering patients on her ward lacked for Vitamin C. When Dad told me this story I was not surprised.

Throughout the childhood of me and my siblings, Mom had a propensity for filling our glasses to the brim with orange juice. For as long as I can remember, she force fed us this juice and justified the routine by citing health benefits. Interestingly she was doing the same thing in 1944 for those seriously wounded soldiers of the Pacific Theatre.

Photographs I have of my parents during their courtship at Stuttgart reveal of couple smitten by love. They met in March of 1944 and were married the following November at the Riceland Hotel in Stuttgart, in a private ceremony whose simplicity was in keeping with wartime restraint. When in February of 1945 Mom learned that she was pregnant, she applied for separation from the army. It took a month for her papers to be processed and in March she left for Detroit to live with her parents, to prepare for my birth, and to await my father's separation from the military. While my parents wrote love letters to each other and spoke of a bright future devoid of kaki and regimentation, world events were moving with inexorable momentum toward the conflict's finale. By the time Mom reached Detroit, American soldiers had just crossed the Rhine and were racing into the heart of Germany while Soviet troops were smashing into Germany from the East. Within weeks Franklin Roosevelt would be dead and two weeks later, at the end of May, Mussolini and Hitler would be history.

Soon after Mom left for Detroit, Dad was transferred to Exler Field outside of Alexandria, Louisiana, his final duty station. He was still in medical administration under the command of Major Ghatti, an army officer and a physician. Dad lived on base in a canvass-roofed hooch for about a month until Mom arrived by train from Detroit after which time they rented a room in a private home in nearby Alexandria and took their meals together in town. By the time she returned to Detroit a few months later, war news was bright and Dad could sense that he would soon be out of uniform. The war in Europe was already over and the conflict in the Pacific was nearing its conclusion. Dad knew that because he had been in service since July of 1941 – five months before Pearl Harbor, he would benefit from an expeditious demobilization.

I was born at Grace Hospital in Detroit on 14 November 1945, three months after the end of World War II. Dad was visiting Mom in Detroit at the time of the birth and, while on leave, helped my maternal grandparents move into their new and imposing home on Oakman Blvd. Their previous dwelling on Monica, two blocks away, had been my grand-parents' residence since 1926. The new home was a large structure, a mix of Tudor and Gothic in architectural style, with a large garage that Gampa converted into an office for his Michigan Drilling Company. At the time of my birth, Dad had only one more month left in the army.

...With a law degree under his belt in September of 1946, Dad moved Mom and me to Nashville where he planned to study for the bar exam and look for a house. As was typical across the country, housing was in short supply after the war and we were forced to live with Grandmother Andrews and Aunt Sara for several months. Dad could not practice law until after he took the bar exam so he worked in management for Southern Bell at the company's Nashville office. Mom was pregnant with a second child, Dad was studying and working, and tensions began to grow between Mom and her in-laws.

Aunt Sara and Grandmother to an extent exhibited the stereotypical Southern WASP prejudice against Catholics. To make matters worse, Mom was a strong-willed Northerner who seldom let slights or barbs go unanswered. Aunt Sara and Grandmother let Mom know that they disapproved of her being pregnant again when Dad had not yet obtained a position in a Nashville law firm. They not only communicated their dissatisfactions to Dad, but in the subsequent decades they would also tell me and my siblings repeatedly that it was my mother who stifled Dad's ambitions and saddled him with too many children. The friction never ended. My earliest memories of Aunt Sara coalesced around the toy drawer she opened for me and her animated denunciations of my mother. Into adulthood I got along well with my aunt and grandmother because I generally didn't come to Mom's defense and simply remained silent during their denuncations. My more undiplomatic sisters, however, were much more willing to defend Mom and, in consequence, always remained emotionally at arms length from Aunt Sara and Grandmother.

__________

David Andrews

1637 Berkley Circle

Chattanooga, TN 37405

Elizabeth Andrews

c/o Miriam Lademan

1677 Pleasant Plains Rd.

Annapolis, MD 21409

March 28, 2010/Chattanooga

Dear Mama,

Judy has just taken Eli & Lydia to a movie, giving me a chance to thank you for your note (March 7, regarding my letters to Daniel and Susan). Your response was very unexpected and welcome. I appreciate so much the faith and genuine kindness in your asking me to smile and wish well every person I come across. I can't think of anything less complicated or more fundamental in its goodness.

I will try my best to do this and with you in mind too.

Just goes to show how much we still have to learn of each other and how much happiness we can still give in our letters.

I miss and love you.

David.

__________

Annapolis, Maryland

Moday-December 8, 2008

Imaculate Conception

Beloved Matthew and Samantha -

You both, with Sophie, are coming soon to Annapolis with your dear, dear Dad, Willy X. This deeply touches me. Thank you so very much.

You are coming precisely at the very time I am offering deep prayers for God to send a sibling for Spohie in September 2009. A sibling for Sophie is not only the greatest life-long gift to Sophie - but the greatest life-long gift to both of you, beloved Matthew and Samantha.

My Dearest Samantha, in September after a 2 week maternity leave, you will return to work with renewed strength, energy and joy. Siblings are not only easier to raise than an "only" child, but the mental and spiritual insights of siblings are greatly strengthened.

God bless you, Father, Son & Holy Spirit. Jesus and His immaculate mother Mary tenderly hold you & yours always.

Love & prayers.

Gramma Andrews (and Grandpa in Heaven)

We have all loved you Matthew dear from the day you were born.

_______________

INTERVIEW WITH MAMA 5/31/07 COLORA:

EJEA: On that day on the University of Detroit Campus I was registering for my junior year and I had never thought of nursing and on that morning I left home and never thought of nursing but I was on the campus and I thought do I want tea and crumpets the rest of my life. You marry a wealthy man and that's what life is. But I didn't have anybody in mind. But the thing is I said, well, is this what I want all of a sudden. And I walked off the campus right at the Chemistry Building where I was to go in to register. And I walked a couple miles to St. Joseph Mercy Mt. Carmel Hospital. I guess I said can I speak to the mother superior and I said I'd like to enter nursing. She told me how to get to Mt. Carmel St. Joseph Hospital in Hamtramic. I had never been there in my life. But I took the bus and she must have phoned the mother superior at St. Joseph and right away they registered me. It was almost as if it was meant by God. But from that moment on I always thought that death...

All the people I went with at the University of Detroit were very idealistic, like Otto Winzen. The father was the Henry Ford of Germany. Her mother's brother the Prime Minister of Germany, Von Poppen. But the thing is I loved everyone at the University of Detroit. At U of D I didn't crack a book. It was just fun. It was a wonderful time. But nursing, for some reason it was an inspiration by God. But I registered in nursing that day, by mother superior herself, and my father and mother brought over a few belongings that night. I never even told them until I phoned. I started in nursing. She said classes are starting in two days.

_____________

To the Editor

May 15, 1961

CONQUEST AND THE COST

On May 9th I had the opportunity of speaking to Otto C. Winzen, owner and designer of the world's largest balloons. He told me of several major incidents which have occurred concerning his balloons. The one he emphasized more than any was the latest event, Thursday May 4th, the launching of the two man gondola to reach the highest altitude ever reached by man in a balloon.

Mr. Winzen was on the deck of the carrier Antietam when the balloonists were placed in the open gondola. Mr. Winzen designed the blinds in the gondola which can control temperatures from plus 120 degrees to minus 120 degrees, as well as designing and perfecting many other delicate instruments used aboard.

Lt. Commander V. G. Prather and Commander Malcalm Ross left the deck of the Antietam as the balloon made the ascent, the operation alone costing $10,000. Two and one half hours later the gigantic balloon reached the altitude of 115, 500 ft. and made history in science.

Back on the deck reports were flowing in to Mr. Winzen as he watched the preparations for landing. At a certain height, the gondola separated from balloon and produced a parachute. Mr. Winzen saw the landing and the dye-markers from the carrier.

These two men went up 21 miles, a perfect operation except for a needless accident.

In the plans of this operation a special craft of the Winzen Research Corporation was to meet the gondola at the dye-markers. As the craft headed out to the rendezvous, a helicopter also went out to the dye-markers, and let down its gear to pick up the men. Ross got into the helicopter safely, but as Prather was going up, he slipped from the sling and landed in the water. He twisted and turned trying to swim but the suit was too heavy, and he went down. An hour later Prather died aboard the Antietam. Prather was buried in Arlington national Cemetery on the 10th with full military honors.

Mr. Winzen said that this operation could have been prevented if Prather did one of two things. They are:

(1) He should have waited for the barge to take him back to the carrier, as this was part of the operational procedure. This vehicle was designed for the purpose of bringing the balloonists to safety.

(2) When Prather hit the water after he slipped, his helmet was still on. The helmet had a valve to shut out any water. If he had pulled back the valve, he could have lived under the water for 15 minutes. He had been trained to do this, but he probably panicked.

The Conquest was great but it carried a cost.

Bill Early Andrews

Rt. 2

Lewisburg, Tennessee

______________

From: Andrews, William X.

Sent: Monday, September 12, 2011 9:44 PM

To: Andrews, John (DC)

Subject: RE: Bill, do you remember this?

No, I have absolutely no memory of this. Wow. Thanks for sending it to me. I wonder if it ever got into The Tennessean. If so, it may have been my very first venture in newspaper writing because I can remember the one I wrote about the Bay of Pigs invasion which was published in The Tennessean in 1961. Thanks much for this and also the story written by Otto Winson. willyx

_________________

To Marion G. Winzen Fund: To Cathedral of St. Paul Otto C. Winzen & The Grzyll Family

c/o Rev. Father Joseph

R. Johnson

Cathedral St. Paul

St. Paul, MN

Sketched copy of Letter:

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Dear Mary Ann –

It is many years since you & Otto visited us at our farm in Tennessee in 1960! That was a very momentous & unforgettable event. From the great conversation that night I knew what a genuine & deeply religious person you are, Mary Ann. I was so grateful to God for giving him such a gift as you!

You told me that evening that on a business trip Otto still went to early morning masses. Yes, even at the Jesuit University of Detroit where Otto was in Engineering, he always was either at 6 am mass in the chapel in the chemistry building or at 6:30 am mass daily at the university church – Gesu Church.

Otto got his father & mother, brother Hanns & sister Elsbeth out of Germany, where Otto told me not a convent still stood under Hitler! My European History teacher, Fr. Kuhn, S.J., told me that otto's father, Christian Otto Winzen was the Henry Ford of Germany. Otto's father sold Volks-wagan to porsch in France to get his family out of Germany. Otto was in America (Detroit) a year before his father, mother, sister & brother got here. Otto's mother, "Lilly" Winzen's brother was Prime-Minister of Germany before Hitler came to power. Her brother Von Popin, was retained as prime Minister by Hitler. And at the Neurenburg was crimes trials Pope Pius the XII declared that Von Popin served under-cover for the Vatican for his whole tenure of office – a saint!

Lilly Winzen (Otto's mother too was a saintly, beautiful & wonderful person. I loved her dearly. We were always running into each other coming in or leaving Mary Repartrix convent (a wonderful cloister for retreats adjacent to the University of Detroit campus). She was as deeply religious as Otto was.

By telephone, just a month or so before you & Otto visited us at our farm, Otto said what a magnificent soul you are, "Too magnificent to Loose" were his words.

Otto said at the time, "Betty, if you ever hear of my sudden accidental death or suicide, it will be neither! Otto was too profoundly religious to commit suicide!

Love & prayers,

Betty

_________________

Otto WINZEN

Birth Date: 24 Oct 1917

Death Date: Nov 1979

Social Security Number: 374-14-9862

State or Territory Where Number Was Issued: Michigan

Death Benefit Localities

Zip Code: 55402

Localities: Minneapolis, Hennepin, Minnesota

______________

JEA: When did you decide to go to the University of Detroit.

EJEA: It was always planned. I was going to some college, but the Jesuits were right in the city. It was the greatest university I could consider. I thought of southern colleges for awhile.

JEA; How did you meet some of these people at the University of Detroit?

EJEA: I remember I went to a Legion of Mary breakfast and Otto came up and talked to me. And he got up to give this talk. And he said well Hitler this and that. And he said, wait a minute. No, this is the way it is. There's not a convent standing in Germany now. And he went on and told, and he knew he was on dangerous ground in America because people weren't getting out of Germany except through his uncle, Von Poppen, things like that. And Otto's father had to sell Volks Wagen to Porche in France to get over. It was a big thing to come to America. And then that day he asked if he might see me. Come over, which he did. He was very close friends with our family. Very dear friend. The first thing when his father came to America, they came to our house. The first thing his brother Hans .. very close. But that doesn't matter. Otto lived on campus and they didn't have big dorms on campus. But he had, he told me he lived on five cents a day – you know those little Crystal hamburgers were five cents. They lost everything. They didn't have a penny. And on his own he became a millionaire. And he got a very nice home for his parents on LaSalle Boulevard. And he got a job very soon with going to the University of Detroit and working too and he was recognized right away, his schooling had been so advanced. But the first time he got this real big job in Detroit, he called me and said, Betty would you ever come down town to Detroit, and he showed me his first check, many thousands. He was so proud of that. He was just my age. He probably had only the first year of college or so, and then he got out to get here. He lived in Cologne Germany.

I met Roy Chapin through the airlines. I was working with the airlines. That was years later. I didn't meet him at the University of Detroit. Honey, I don't want to talk about this. He's just a wonderful person. I was working for Pennsylvania Central Airline [Pennsylvania-Central Airline traces its routes back to 1927, became Capital Airlines in 1949 and later United Airlines]. I got a job with the airline through Jim Shields. These were all friends. When I'd go out on a date, we'd talk. We'd talk for eight or ten hours, really. And we were friends. I told you what Otto said. I told Otto we'd always be friends. He said that is the saddest thing anyone has ever said to me. But we stayed friends. You know, he came to the farm. We were friends. There's nothing that Daddy, when I married my beloved husband, where I couldn't have him come to the farm just as a friend. And Daddy was thrilled to death. Otto was in all the papers. The very day he was at the farm, I told Sue the other day, he, his company had the highest altitude record of anybody anywhere in the world in space - His company, Winzen Research. And he was still just a young boy. A young man.

JEA: Who was Michael Hand?

EJEA: He was a lawyer. I met him at U of D. He was a very holy boy and he was a very dear friend and I don't want to talk anything more about that. They are all wonderful friends. And we'd go out on a date, and we'd sit there and visit until two or three in the morning.

JEA: Well, tell about when you saw Roy Chapin on the television.

EJEA: Oh, it was about 40 years ago. And I said Roy Chapin!!! And I advise everyone to get rid of their Packards and Catallacs and Lincolns, and here his father was President of Packard Motor. He said, get small cars, use little gas. He said you don't need all that austentation. [He was president of American Motor Company at the time he went on National Television and the Andrews children remember the ads.] He was a very brilliant person, and a very nice person. And they were all Catholics.

Honey, but what I'm talking about is that I left U of D and all that because I knew there was something else. All of a sudden. Oh, they all loved Gampa. All these boys would work for Michigan Drilling Company. Otto worked for Michigan Drilling. They'd all go into Dad's lab and work with him. They loved Gampa. Gampa was very religious and he… [Sue answering phone – Hello Joseph]. Honey, you're asking me questions and I'm not talking about what I wanted. I want to talk about nursing. I'm not going to talk a long, long timer, honey. The university was the most wonderful experience, golden experience, especially marvelous Jesuits and wonderful friends for life. You met Father Benson, Father Kuhn, 20 and 30 years after.

JEA: Grandmama, there's one thing I don't understand. When did you work for the airlines? Was that before College, or after College?

EJEA: It was before I finished nursing. I had two years of nursing and then I got this offer to go with the airlines and I left nursing for one year and I took the airline job and it was wonderful you know and all that. But I wanted nursing, so I went back. In other words I picked up in the fall and finished nursing in 1943. I was going to go with Delta Airlines, but decided to go back to nursing. Jim Shields got me the job at Pennsylvania Central and Jimmy Canookin was president of Continental Motors and they offered it, it sounded wonderful and I took it and it was interesting and everything. But I continued nursing right where I left off. So I graduated in nursing. And in nursing I studied. Our exams came from Geneva and they were tow days and I really studied. I loved it. And I think I came through the exam with 98.8 I think. Just as I was graduating they came by recruiting because war was at fever pitch in '43. Then all of a sudden again I signed up and I went with the air force because my brother was in the air force. And the first person I really met was, I had gotten a ride with somebody from the hospital, and I was looking for the post office. I had a letter to mail to my parents. And I was looking around and I came up to a bunch of soldiers working and I said, can you tell me where the post office is, and they were German prisoners of war, and just as I was trying to talk to them, a jeep drove up and Daddy was in the jeep with some people from the hospital, and so he took me to the post office. I met Daddy and it was different - it wasn't like friendship any more. Everyone else I knew, her was a wonderful boy and I didn't date anyone else. And that was in January or February, and six months later we were married. Well, it wasn't quite that. After he asked me to marry him, we went to see the priest and he had to take instructions for six months. That's why we waited six months. He gave me a diamond, but let me tell you, it was a funny story and I might as well diverse. I went home and met his family. His mother came to Stuttgart and I said, Mrs. Andrews, Andy and I are serious about each other. She said, I'm not worried about you. That kind of put up a red flag for me. But anyway, right after that we went to his home. I met his mother and his sister. Stayed three days on the weekend. And I came back to Stuttgart and then Andy stayed on for a week or two at his home. When he came back he brought a diamond. So anyway he had it in a little box in his pocket and a safety pin so nothing would happen to it. It was a little diamond box. So anyway, I saw this lump and said, right in the train station, when he got off, I fought with him and got the box and there was a diamond in the box and I said I can't accept it. I had met his family, we weren't the same religion, and I had enough things said that I knew Catholic was anathema, the worst at their house, and so I just wasn't, I just said absolutely no. So then he said would you just wear it for awhile. So I put on the ring and mid-morning, right from duty at the hospital I was called into Col. Ryan's office, our commanding officer, and I walked in and I wanted to get to the Pacific so badly. And he said, well, you got your wish. I have your papers here for shipping out very soon, within days. I said, Oh. He said, a diamond? Andy? And he took the papers and tore them right in front of me. And here I had said I'd just wear it, so it shows that God has a hand. And so we married at Thanksgiving time. We were going to marry at Christmas time, but we married at Thanksgiving instead. My father and mother came back down and my brother was overseas, and my sister came to the wedding. Uncle Ray was stationed in Texas and she was visiting in Texas. They were just married, but I was really worried on my wedding day. I was real worried. It took me a long time to repeat my vows where I could say "I do". I was worried about a mixed marriage like this, even though he had taken instructions, and he signed papers that the children, that he wouldn't undermine their faith or anything. But I was worried. It was very hard at first. I thought everybody wanted a dozen children and his family was different. It was just a few hard years. But anyway, enough of that. With the vows, it was something funny. I was crying all through my wedding. I couldn't say "I do." I took a long time and the priest, my mother asked, would their be a marriage if she can't say her vows, and the priest said no. So I was crying and my sister handed me, I didn't even have a handkerchief, and my sister handed me a handkerchief. And she had a life-saver, so I put it to my eye, a sticky life-saver, stuck on, and I laughed. So that broke the tension and I could say my vows. Uncle Ray wasn't there. He was in Texas in the Army. Ted was flying overseas. He wrote, "what about this Andy Andrews?" Anyway, he's a wonderful, wonderful person, and it took a few years of hard, hard time, but we pulled through it, and the rest, the sixty-one years, except for those first years where he kind of, well it all turned out wonderful. The 61 years on our farm were like heaven. It was like heaven to me living on the farm. It was like heaven. And I went back to nursing when the children, were the youngest child was able to be, well when they were out of grade school. And Daddy retired, he retired very young, and I went back to nursing. So I was in nursing at night. And I was happy. I loved nursing, but something happened.

JEA: How did Nanny know Katherine Drexel?

EJEA: Katherine Drexel was from one of the wealthy, wealthy families of the country. Philadelphia. And she was in school, Our Lady of Norte Dame in Milwaukee, with my grandmother. My grandmother had kind of an aristocratic family, the O'Keefe's and Hoeffels. Nanny told me all this.

INTERVIEW WITH MAMA 6/2/07 COLORA:

JEA; Tell us about Washington, DC; what Gampa was doing there. Was Ganger living in Washington while Gampa was at Aberdeen?

EJEA: Yes, they were in Washington; both of them. On Irving Street [Ewing?].

JEA: Where was Gampa working?

EJEA: At Aberdeen Proving Grounds and we were in Washington.

JEA; How long were Gampa and Ganger apart then? Did Ganger ever move up to Aberdeen.

EJEA: Honey, all I know sell lived all the time when they were near Washington. All the time that Ganger was in Washington that I know about they were on Irving Street in Washington, DC. And Daddy was at Aberdeen Proving Grounds near Washington. Then they had Uncle Ted. They had lost the first baby. This baby was lost when he was two weeks old in the hospital in Green Bay Wisconsin. Pneumonia. In those days they didn't have antibiotics. And two weeks old. And my father said that was the only time his wedding ring came off in all their years of marriage that day the baby died. He slipped on the stairs when he was rushing to the hospital. His ring came off and rolled. My father, very Irish, said that was an omen. And the baby died, two weeks old. Then they had Uncle Ted and he was called into the Army as an engineer, he was in ordinance and then I was born in August and when the war was over, Daddy kind of wanted to go back to France and Mother did too. And Ted right at that time got chickenpox and they just stayed. It fizzled out. And so Daddy talked to Ganger and he said he wanted to go to Detroit. He said it was the hub of new inventions and that's where he started Michigan Drilling and he got to know Henry Ford and all those people, Dodge and, but anyway, then I went to the University of Detroit taught by the Jesuits and a wonderful…

SLSA: Did you go to Catholic grade school?

EJEA: Oh, yeah. St. Bridgets, the Dominican nuns at St. Bridgets in Detroit and St. Cecilia in high school. And then I went to live a year with my grandmother before, because she was eighty-six, in Wisconsin and I went to school there. And then I came back and I went to St. Theresa High School, graduated from there, Dominican once again.

JEA; What high school in Green Bay did you go to?

EJEA: Not Green Bay. Oconto. It was just the Oconto High School. Everybody was Catholic, so it was like a Catholic school.

JEA: Was Uncle Ted born in Green Bay then? Just as Gampa was going in the Army?

EJEA: Yeah. He was born, the first baby John Early was born in Green Bay, died two weeks. Ted was born in Green bay and then I was born in Washington because he had been sent by the Army to Washington, DC.

JEA; What middle name was given to John Early.

EJEA: I don't know. Two weeks old at the time to be baptized, that's all you know.

JEA: Gampa on his Army registration said that he was at Ft. Sheridan, Illinois.

EJEA: Yeah, he went to Ft. Sheridan too in his service. But I think that was first before he went to Washington.

JEA; It said ROTC, Ft. Sheridan. Maybe during the summers during college he would go there.

EJEA: Yeah. And he was at Marquette University and I think that's where that ROTC came in.

JEA; Well, where did Ganger go to high school?

EJEA: See, she went to St. Joseph's High School the same as Ella Early and then she went away to Lawrence University to get her degree, they had her come back and teach, and she was teaching at St. Josephs Academy when Ella Early, and everybody said you should meet our teacher, Jessica O'Keefe. So Daddy was a real good friend, there was someone, Phil Sheridan, a friend next door to the academy, it was a beautiful street, and he brought Dad over to meet her. It was very casually done, you know. And then they were married at St. Joseph Academy. And in Sound of Music, you know how excited the nuns were, well the nuns decorated all the banisters and everything leading tom the chapel. So it was a very beautiful wedding. AMEN!!!!!!!!!!! [Laughs]

EJEA: One thing I was going to say, in nursing, one thing I really did love, my last year of nursing I was chosen to crown the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that was a really beautiful ceremony. That was just before I signed for the Army. And it was so beautiful. The whole chapel was filled with all the graduating nurses and it was very beautiful and crowning of Blessed Virgin Mary, and then we graduated after that and then the Army came in recruiting because the war was at so fever a pitch.

JEA; Do you remember first coming to the farm?

EJEA: Oh, of course.

JEA; We drove down in Gampa's car. It was a Packard, right.

EJEA: Yeah.

JEA; Daddy didn't have a car then, did he?

EJEA: No, I don't think at the time he did. But we got one afterwards because.. we kept that [the Packard].

JEA; But the Packard broke down right away, right?

EJEA: No. It wasn't a Packard, a Buick I think. It might have been either one, but it was dark.

JEA: I remember a maroon Packard. But I remember there was a time for a few months, I thought a year, when we didn't have a car.

EJEA: I know. But that was on one trip to Detroit, we rode back in his car. Well, I'll tell you, yeah, but this doesn't matter.

JEA; So what was Daddy planning to do. He was going to farm school. Was Daddy just planning to farm all the time? Make his income farming, when we first moved to the farm, because he was going to farm school at night I remember?

EJEA: Yeah. It was just because he got it free from the Army. But we were at Point er Roche, Canada and we left there for Detroit and then Bill had started to school in Canada, Ecohl de Beauf after Father Brae Bouf, you know, the Indian, he was martyred. He was such a hero to the Indians even though he was martyred. They drank his blood. They had begun to realize what a great person he was. It was in the works that he would be martyred. But anyway, "Ecohl" – "School"; "Brae Bouf". And then we came to the farm, and I just dreaded it. I just, to go back to Tennessee… and everything was so hard. To think of going there. And we stopped in Columbia, everything was awful, going back to Tennessee. And we drove in the front gate of the farm. The gate was chained, and got out and opened it and we drove in, and this peace, this joy came over me. And the children bounded out of the car and headed for the barns. And it was the happiest time of my life. We had 61 years of marriage and mostly at the farm that was just heaven. Just heaven! It was just heaven, that's all. And then I went back to nursing at a time and that's when all this "life after life" encountered on a large scale at the hospital in Lewisburg and Daddy retired then and I started nursing and always took night duty. And it was a glorious time in nursing because I had scores of encounters with people not resuscitated coming back on their own from after-death experience. They would even say to me, "I died last night." Leonard Hospital has Olivia, you asked about Olivia, her's where she died, they have it charted.

JEA: Now, she was Ross Beckham's mother, right?

EJEA: Ross Beckham's mother. Really wonderful, and related to Tennessee Tucker.

JEA; I wonder what her maiden name was?

EJEA: I imagine she was a Tucker.

JEA; No, the Tucker married a Duncan.

EJEA: But she told me she was related to Tennessee Tucker.

JEA: Tennessee Tucker was her grandmother's sister I think.

EJEA: Yeah. But Olivia was a wonderful person and she had a very, very profound after-death experience. And they elect to come back. They are given the chance to finish work. Ross was just a little baby, and she elected… You know, they don't want to come back, it is so beautiful and then they elect to come back to finish what they wanted to do and great grace coming back like that.

JEA: How did Daddy decide to leave Santa Fe and teach at Belfast?

EJEA: Well, that's amazing too. He was taking, we were driving over country roads to go to St. Catherine's school. And this priest we had, his mother, a priest came, a native Tennessean, it's a big story about that, I don't want to go into that, but his mother said, you go right up to Santa Fe and they need a teacher in the high school. So he got the job. So, he would go to school, then all of a sudden I started going with him every morning too and started teaching at St. Catherine's, and then we'd wait for Daddy. But Daddy was the happiest person in the world to retire. He was really happy. And I'm going to tell you the truth. As much as I loved nursing, it was a wonderful, wonderful thing to retire and just think that for the rest of your life you just take care of your family.

JEA: How did Daddy decide to quit Santa Fe and go to Belfast?

EJEA: Oh, that was so he wouldn't have the long drive.

JEA; Did you have problems with us going to a public school though, leaving St. Catherine's?

EJEA: I felt bad about it. But I felt I was doing it for my love of Daddy. But it was a very bad move. For the girls it was a very bad move.

JEA: Oh, even for us. That first year, Mrs. Muse didn't teach us a thing.

EJEA: They were beaten up and everything, and they'd never tell me. And even though they were the principal's daughters, it was all because, they were kind of looked upon as odd because they were Catholic and the only Catholics ever known, you know. So it was a very bad move. And then we got to Nashville for high schools and everything. And David got to Christ the King and graduated, David was at Christ the King eight years and graduated. Miriam almost did. And that's the story, it was a very, very nice life. It was a hardship at first, but the most glorious thing of all was when Aunt Sara came to live with us, four years, Daddy and I took care of her, but then the last four months that Aunt Sara lived, she lived with Susan taking care of her at the Chalet. That was the greatest thing because I never knew that Aunt Sara liked being with us. We had wonderful meals; better than she cooked because she, just one person, you don't cook for yourself. But when she got to the Chalet with Susan, Susan knew how to, she would say, oh your mother went to Europe, and she's say well Gampa gave the trip to my father but he wouldn't go. And she would explain everything and then Aunt Sara would kind of back-off. And that was with everything. So Susan could talk to Aunt Sara.

JEA: What did you think of Paul and Barbara [Harris]? Did you know them very well?

EJEA: I don't want to talk about that.

JEA; Did you ever meet David Harris?

EJEA: Yeah, I met all of them. Honey, why are you doing that?

JEA: I never met him. I wonder what he was like.

EJEA: Yeah, I met them all. They were all alike, like Aunt Sara.

JEA: How about Elgie. He seemed nice. Remember, he'd come over and sheer our sheep.

EJEA: I had him at the hospital. And I think he had an eye-opener meeting me for the first time, I think he decided I wasn't a witch hollow. Yeah, and I got to know Elgie and his wife Mary. I got to know people at the hospital.

JEA: What were they like? So, you never came out and met him when he was out sheering sheep?

EJEA: They were nice people. He didn't die at the hospital. I just met him at the hospital when he was sick and got to know them. I think they got to like me alright. Oh [with a very surprised expression] --I remember--- He said something. He said all these things I've heard about Betty Early Andrews, he said there's a, what do they say, something in the woodpile. He said I don't know how much, and he said I'm beginning to think there's, I shouldn't say word, he said a nigger in the woodpile after he met me. So it was conversion for them, but the greatest conversion of all is when Susan had Aunt Sara. And she liked my saying, I said to the children, it's not Ant Sara, it's A u n t Sara. So I always tried to have respect for Aunt Sara. But what Susan did for me; when you have a life-time enemy. And that's what it really was essentially. This thing that Aunt Sara and I had it was, no matter how hard you tried to be good, it just wasn't…but Susan had her the four months and everything changed. She began, I didn't know it…

JEA: Grandmama, what was David like as a little boy?

EJEA: He was supremely happy on the farm. He loved it.

JEA: More than Nashville?

EJEA: But David was the happiest boy on the farm there ever was. And, of course, he wasn't in school just like Miriam, but when we …

JEA: Did he not like Nashville or Christ the King?

EJEA: He said he loved it, but moving away from the farm was hard. The time that was bad for David was, he graduated from Christ the King and he knew the Rohling boys who came out to the farm and the Bushes who came out to the farm, Pat Bush. He loved Christ the King, but when he started high school at the farm and Miriam came back, that was a hard time for David.

JEA: I remember he said he had been beaten up. Remember he said the first day of high school in Lewisburg he was beaten up?

EJEA: Oh, yeah. It was a hard time. But especially Miriam. Miriam was so, it was hard for Joan and Susan and all the children.

JEA: What was Bill like as a little boy?

EJEA: A dear boy. Your children were all dear children. Wonderful children.

JEA: Who was the smartest? [Sue laughing]

EJEA: You all were very smart. And you know Susan took one of the highest intelligence test that was given. The nuns told me, brought me in the office. And Joan at St. Bernards Academy, the nuns said on the days of examinations, you know, everybody is not speaking and she said Joan spends her time in the chapel or else helping someone with their work. And Joan got a scholarship to Acquinas, but she went to St. Louis University.

JEA: What about the other children? Who's left? We talked about Bill, we talked about Susan and David. We talked about Joan. Is there anybody else? I guess not. Nobody important.

SUE: Was John as smart as he is now? Did you know he was going to be as brilliant as he is now?

EJEA: When you went to Father Ryan, Bill took four years of Latin. John took four years of Latin, but John took Greek too. And, ah, he was Editor of the Moina. And Father James Hitchcock, whose Monsignor Hitchcock, he said the Moina, Moina means Mary in Ireland, in Irish, he said the Moina always lost money, we had to support it out of school funds. He said when John was editor, for the first time it made money. He have copies, stacks sent over to St. Bernards Academy, he'd have people with a regular job to, and some of the boys would go to Acquinas College with copies of Moina, and it became a big paper and m-a-d-e m-o-n-e-y.

SUE: What was your secret?

EJEA: But I do want to say, the last four years of Aunt Sara's life was amazing, and it was happy. She said…

JEA: Who was the happiest of your children?

EJEA: I don't know. You all were very, very happy on the farm. When you're, you know we'd say the Rosary at night. The children would be in bed and I'd be in the rocking chair, always with the youngest child, and we'd say the Rosary.

JEA: Was anybody unhappy on the farm?

EJEA: No, we all…Daddy loved it. These were the happy years.

JEA: How was it when Daddy was working for Bell Telephone. Did he like that?

EJEA: No. He didn't like Bell Telephone and he didn't like teaching. Daddy was meant for the farm. Those were happy years.

JEA; Do you think there would have been any job that Daddy would have liked?

EJEA: The greatest work that he had, he started playing the organ at the little church on the Nashville Highway. It was the church, Winston Rutledge, Winston Rutledge became a convert in Korea War and he came to Lewisburg and donated an organ and Daddy would play that first organ at the church. You know we have pictures of Daddy playing the organ at that little church. It was a beautiful little church. St. John's Church in Lewisburg. And that was the joy of Daddy's life. He loved it. He would write the scoring.

JEA: Who had the hardest time in school do you thing?

EJEA: Susan fell from the horse one time. She was standing on Judy King [ we have a picture] and she cracked to the floor on a stone and couldn't find her way home and for about a year they x-rayed, they thought, but she came out of it. But it took a year of, and prayer. But before that they said she took the highest intelligence test at the school. But she came out of it when she went to St. Bernards.

JEA: Did Bill make real high intelligence scores?

EJEA: Yes. You all did. Just a degree or so. But I want to say one thing.

JEA: Do you remember studying with us during the summers. Drilling us and everything?

EJEA: I was very negligent that way. In those days you'd send your children to a Catholic school and that's all you'd do. And you kids on your own just made everything.

JEA; Grandmama, I remember your drilling us in Geometry and English and home and in the summers. Remember we had those Uncle Ben workbooks during the summer that you'd put us through.

EJEA: Well…

INTERVIEW WITH MAMA 6/10/07 COLORA:

JEA: Grandmama, I just wanted to ask you about Uncle Carol and Uncle Horace. Did you not see them very much.

EJEA: Well they lived in Chicago. We saw them on occasion but that' all.

JEA: What kind of work did Uncle Horace do?

EJEA: Of course we didn't see Uncle Carroll at all.

JEA: Did you ever meet him?

EJEA: Honey, I met Uncle Carroll a few times. Uncle Horace would come to our house. I got to know him.

JEA; How did Ganger happen to give us the Tyne House?

EJEA: Honey, Ganger was going to heaven, and Daddy said if you don't put it in our name, it will go to all the family. Ganger already gave my sister two homes, one in Detroit and one in Birmingham, so she didn't need another time. So I told it to my mother and she said we'll go down town tomorrow, and she put on her long, gray kit gloves and we went to town. We were ushered into the president's office at Third National Bank in Nashville. He had someone come in, notarized Daddy and my signatures.

JEA: Ganger's signature you mean.

EJEA: Yes.

JEA. Did you like the house. Did you like Tyne?

EJEA: Yes. It was beautiful.

JEA; What made Ganger decide to move to Nashville?

EJEA; She wanted to be near us, honey.

JEA; Well, why didn't she move to Birmingham?

EJEA: Because she wanted to be near us.

March 10, 2007 - Betty told her sons that after they met at Stuttgart, Arkansas, she noticed that Andy had a small box clipped to the inside of his army shirt but wouldn't tell her what it was or let her see it. Finally she playfully grabbed it and noticed that it was an engagement ring. Betty then told him that she didn't think there was any way that they could marry (especially after having met his family), but he said just wear it. The next day she was called into Col. Ryan's office, the head of her outfit and head surgeon. He immediately commented on the ring on her finger and she said, "yes, Andy." He immediately lifted up papers on his desk and ripped them in two. They were orders reassigning Betty to the Pacific where she had wanted to go to be closer to treatment of the wounded there.

Betty enrolled at the University of Detroit in 1937 and St. Joseph Hospital, Hamtramck, Michigan in September, 1939, receiving an R.N. Degree in 1943.Elizabeth Jane Early has a deep faith like her father and is completely selfless and kind. She is also strikingly beautiful. When she was little her siblings could not pronounce her name so she was called "Bitte Nine" rather than Betty Jane. At age 6, Betty was struck by a car as she chased a ball into a street in Detroit near Grand River and West Grand Boulevard and she was taken to Providence Hospital in Detroit with a broken leg. Her father successfully tracked down the driver and called him simply to let him know that he knew he had hit his daughter. In her early years of grade school, a little girl in school always made derrogatory comments to others, watched Betty play the piano while she was taking lessons and commented that she had the ugliest hands she had ever seen. Betty never again played the piano. The family moved to Monica Street in Detroit when Betty was 9 or 10. Twenty years later or so, her parents moved to 2850 Oakman Boulevard in Detroit the day she returned home from the hospital after her son Bill was born in 1945. Betty's brother Ted had not returned home from the war in Europe yet. Earlier, Betty's father planned to put money into the construction of a building for his company, Michigan Drilling Company and came home to find his wife, Jessica, had been crying. He told her then and there that the house on Oakman Boulevard was her's and he did not build the building for Michigan Drilling Company. Betty Early attended St. Bridget Grade School and was taught by the Dominican nuns. She then attended St. Cecilia's High School at Grand River and Livernois in Detroit and the University of Detroit from 1937 to 1939, the most wonderful years of her life under the Jesuits. She met, and developed a strong friendship with, Otto Christian Winson and his family while at the Univeristy of Detroit. (Otto and his wife in the late 1950s visited the farm in Tennessee on their return to their home in Minnesota after a stratispheric baloon liftoff in Florida. Otto produced the scientific baloons that proceeded Alan Shepard's flight and the space program). Otto's father was the Henry Ford of Germany (Christian Otto Winson). Father Kuhn said that everyone in Germany knowns Otto's father, Christian Otto Winsin, just as everyone here knows Henry Ford. Otto's mother, Lillie was the sister of Von Poppen, Chancellor and Prime Minister of Germany before Hitler. Lilie Winson loved Betty, saying that Betty looks like an Angel. Otto's brother, Hans Winsin was president of Buick Motor Company and came up with the advertizing slogan. "Better Buy a Buick." Otto's wife, Maryanne, was very religious and was being treated for cancer at the time they visited the farm in Lewisburg. They were very much in love. (Betty's son, William X. Andrews, was taught at St. Louis University by the former President and Chancellor of Austria, Kurt Von Schuznick, whom Hitler had jailed. Von Schuznick asked Bill to visit him in Austria after Von Schuznick retired from St. Louis University, which Bill did.) At the University of Detroit, Betty Early also knew Roy Chappen (whose father was President of Packard Motor Company) who became President of American Motor Company. Betty Early left the University of Detroit in her Junior Year, September 1939. She went to the University of Detroit to register, but later that same day registered for a nursing program at Mt. Carmel Mercy Hospital in Detroit instead. She left the University of Detroit because of the pressures of being very popular (elected queen of many balls and asked out very often). She received her RN degree in June 1943 and went into the Army just before Christmas of 1943 as a Second Lieutenant. She was sent to Montgomery Field, Alabama for basic training and then to Stuttgart Army Air Force Base in Arkansas in January 1944, where she met her future husband, William L. Andrews, a First Lieutenant and Medical Supply Officer. They met while she was looking for the Army Post Office on base to send a letter home, and he saw her wandering around unable to find it. She then went up to solders who were German prisoners of war who did not understand her. Another officer came up and told her that they were German prisoners. Just at that moment that officer hailed an Army Ambulance, which had her future husband in it, to take her to the Post Office. William L. Andrews introduced himself and, that night in pouring rain, went over to the base hospital and told Betty Early that he had some nice records that he wanted her to hear.