As a child Dad played with Louise Sykes, niece of General Frank Maxwell Andrews after whom Andrews Air Force Base is named (unaware he was a reative). His and our family descend from Thomas Andrews, the Emmigrant. The General's father, James David Andrews wrote a family geneology showing the family's relationship to Lancelot Andrews, whose parents were in shipbuilding and owned a ship named The Mayflower. Thomas Coleman Andrews, Commissioner of Internal Revenue during the 1950s, also so descends.

Dad spoke of his Tucker relatives and the many doctors from that family (Newton G. Tucker, etc.). He loved Claudia Sainz Andrews and admired son John's brother-in-law Michael Mangan, but was unaware of doctors John Summerfield Andrews, Ephraim A. Andrews, Robert Cobb Andrews and Brockenbrough Andrews. He was proud of his heroic daughter Joan.

Dad, a gifted musician, is related to Tennessee Williams through his g-g grandmother, Lucy Lanier Andrews and through the Lanier side of the family, musicians to the Kings of France, then England and to Thomas Henry Malone founder and the first dean of the Vanderbilt Law School. He is also related to Sidney Lanier and undesirable relative John Andrews Murrell. His daughter-in-law Sue is related to Philip Arnold, son of Penelope, and John B. Slack, of diamond hoax fame.

Daddy's closest cousin, maybe even closer than Paul Harris, was Orlando Simpson. Dad said, "Orlando, Jr. ran the farm. He was my hero." Son David: "Funny, thinking back on those trips to Fairfield, IL. Orlando and his family clearly loved Daddy, and me by extension. It's only now that I see the smiles and attention so clearly as more than the kind of bounded affection we experienced with Aunt Sara and Grandmother, and even with Auntie Joan, maybe. Of course it was just a couple visits, but I remember very clearly being nonplused and unable to recognize the way all that family came to see Daddy and me, and with such interest. I spent more time with Larry. He may not have taught me to fish, but I'm pretty sure it was with him on his farm pond that I caught my first fish. I remember being incredible with excitement and didn't want to leave. I loved Larry, and he seemed especially genuine to me and willing to please a young kid--for a young teenager or in his early 20s."

At Hume Fogg HS, Dad was Vice-President of the Astronomy Club in which Dinah Shore was a member.

Father's legacy: A Love of nature and virtue

When my 88-year-old father died early last month, the event was not unexpected. A mild stroke last summer was followed this May by one more debilitating. By the standards of the departure, it was a peaceful passing -- on the Lewisburg family farm and in the company of loved ones.

Understanding that the end was near, most of my siblings came home to Lewisburg to be with our father in his last weeks, taking shifts to help our mother with Dad's needs and to assist the medical personnel who made periodic visits. My watch was generally in the early morning hours until sunrise when the atmosphere was peaceful and quiet.

I was there to talk to him, adjust his position and monitor his respiration and IV. When sunlight broke over the horizon each morning, we could see through his window the promise of a new day. In the rising mist deer and horses foraged on wet orchard grass, a pair of gray foxes cut through the field from their eastern lair to some breakfast in the west, and a cacophony of bird sounds filtered into the house.

Dad loved nature. On more than one occasion he told me that, though truth can be divined from sacred scripture, God's greatest revelations come from nature because "that text is written in His own hand." This affection for the beauty and mystery of natural life made him appreciate the natural sciences because they attempted to quantify the cosmos, the Romantic poets because they glorified nature, and the American transcendentalists because they linked the life of the mind to the lessons learned from the symmetry, design and immutable constancy of nature's laws.

One of his favorite writers was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendental essayist whom Dad discovered while a student at Vanderbilt and who prompted in him a rather passionate and youthful flirtation with Unitarianism.

Dad was also fond of saying that honorable behavior in life was more valuable if it came from a love of virtue for its own sake than from a fear of hell. He admitted to me on numerous occasions that he had problems with the notion of hell. Ultimately he converted to Catholicism, but I am not at all sure whether he did it out of conviction or to please my mother. Knowing Dad, it was probably both. He was good at reconciling positions that others found irreconcilable.

My father was also something of a determinist. In one memorable conversation I had with him while looking for prehistoric flints in our Arrowhead Field, he said that he had the free will to buy an ice cream cone at Alford's Drug Store whenever he got the urge. But he couldn't explain why he liked chocolate over vanilla. He continued by admitting that he could not determine his IQ, his parents, his race or the epoch of his existence. Similarly, he felt that religious faith was not always an act of the will.

From my teenage years well into middle age, Dad would periodically give me a copy of John Cardinal Newman's 1852 tract "The Definition of a Gentleman," a beautiful piece of prose that perhaps is better suited to a less cynical age when thoughtful optimists genuinely believed in human perfectibility and in the efficacy of noblesse oblige.

A gentleman is tender towards the bashful, gentle toward the distant, and merciful towards the absurd. He is seldom prominent in conversation and never wearisome. He makes light of favors while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring...He submits to pain because it is inevitable, to bereavement because it is irreparable, and to death because it is his destiny."

Unknown to me before the family gathering for the funeral, Dad also gave copies of the Newman lecture to my brothers when they were ready for college and, more recently, to my three sons. This came as something of a shock to me because I always regarded myself, after my mother, as Dad's closest confidant. I thought myself the only recipient. If there was a needling suspicion that his handouts were to mitigate some disappointment in me, I am now reassured because, in all honesty, I regard my brothers and my sons as conspicuously more virtuous than I--and they got the handouts, too. It was not in Dad's nature to be judgmental.

Grief is very personal, and, as each of us dies individually, so too do we grieve. Between Dad's death and burial, I was too busy to grieve. My eyes were dry when I hoisted the gurney into the ambulance when death was pronounced. Likewise, I held it together at the cemetery during the 21-gun salute, the very moving rendition of taps by a Guard bugler and the presentation of the folded flag (Dad and Mom were both World War II officers). After the luncheon-reception at the Lewisburg church, I returned to Columbia with Claudia.

However, too much was left unsaid, the prayers were all too public and the fatigue from three weeks of little sleep was numbing. I decided to return to the cemetery for some private moments.

It was late in the afternoon when I arrived at the Andrews-Liggett Cemetery. No one was present. The sun had returned after a brief lightning storm during the internment and the heat and humidity were intense. At the grave, two things happened that were totally unanticipated.

First, as I looked down at the fresh dirt and read the headstone, the floodgates opened and I wept as I have not wept since I was a child. It was all too sad. It wasn't long before I regained my composure by saying some prayers and reciting a rosary.

Then, noticing that the four largest flower arrangements were somewhat distant, I decided to move them closer to the fresh dirt. My shirt was soaked from that labor. Then, before departing, I spoke audibly to my father. I told him that I hoped he was alright, that he was at peace, and that he was in heaven. I also remember saying that I wished there were some way I could know for sure that everything was alright.

At that precise moment, a breeze blew across the cemetery from the west and a dark red rose fell from the flower arrangement on the right of the headstone. I was about to return the flower to its stand when I noticed that a ribbon from the arrangement read "From Your Children." It was all over with that single gust of wind.

Yes, it may have been coincidence. In the process of dragging the stand to its new location, I may have disturbed the flower's footing. However, in the grand scheme of things, I prefer to believe that Dad was reassuring me that all was as it should be.

Bill Andrews is Chairman of the History Department at Columbia State.

LEWISBURG TRIBUNE- 6/2/2005

William L. Andrews, 88 years, died of heart failure peacefully at his home Thursday at 1:30 am on June 2, 2005. A World War II veteran, an attorney, an educator and a farmer, he regarded his greatest accomplishment being a father. His best times were those years spent with his wife of sixty years and his six children on the Lewisburg family farm he inherited from his parents: William L. and Stella Simpson Andrews.

In his last year of law school at Vanderbilt, he was conscripted in the first peacetime draft in U.S. history and served for five-and-one-half years.

It was as an officer in the army medical corps at Stuttgart Army Airfield that he met and married Elizabeth Early, head surgical nurse at the base hospital. They both received the American Campaign Medal for service to their country in the Second World War.

After receiving his law degree, he and his wife moved to their 236 acre farm on the outskirts of Lewisburg where they raised their children. Mr. Andrews supplemented his farm income with a career in education as a teacher and principal. After retiring, he changed the farm operation from dairy to beef cattle.

A communicant at St. John's Catholic Church, he was the organist for forty years. In a recent salute to him by the local Knights of Columbus, he was described as a man "beloved by his life-long friends at St. John's and by all who know his soft-spoken manner and kindness. Very endearing is his love of people and his touch of shyness." Ever the educator, he gave to his sons for their instruction copies of his favorite essay by John Cardinal Newman - "The Definition of a Gentleman." All of his children regard the passages of this tract emblematic of their father's personality and values. They consider its words a fitting epitaph for a true Southern gentleman:(see quote above).

Mr. Andrews is survived by his wife Elizabeth, children William X. (Claudia Sainz) Andrews of Columbia, John Early (Sue Sullivan) Andrews of Colora, MD, David Edward Early (Judith Condon) Andrews of Chattanooga, Joan Andrews (Chris) Bell of Montague, New Jersey, Susan Andrews (Dave) Brindle of Lewisburg, and Miriam Andrews (John) Lademan of Annapolis, MD, and thirty-eight grandchildren.

A requiem mass was concelebrated by Rev. Thomas Perrin, pastor of St. John's, and Rev. Zacharias Payikat of Karala, India, at St. John's Catholic Church in Lewisburg at 11:00 am on Monday, June 6th. Burial followed in the Andrews-Liggett Cemetery with full military honors.Pallbearers were grandsons: Matthew, Will and Glennon Andrews, Joseph Andrews, and Andrew, Daniel, Michael, and Joey Brindle.

HIS SISTER SARA TALKING ABOUT HER BROTHER:
My brother growing up always had the best disposition. We were all very close together. I saw somebody Sunday and he said "Sara, I haven't seen you for years, but he has. And he said, "how's Willy?" Everybody called him Willy, the boys here that knew him. He said, "every time I go by Oakland, I say to this friend who's with me, "that's where Willy lived." Yes, my brother was a good student. He went to Lewisburg, I don't think he ever went to a public school; he went to a private school, Price-Webb, and I did too. I was quite a bit older and I had two or three years in the public school. And after my father died, he was eight and I was sixteen, we moved to Pulaski which was close by, and I went to high school there and he went to the grade school there and it was right after my father died and we were all sad, but we had more friends there and I run into them all the time now.

DAUGHTER JOAN:
My early memories of my brothers are wanting to be like them and play with them. I remember Bill as more the storyteller. I would say "bad boy" to Bill if he did anything. I remember Lake House and feeling that if wanting to go outside, John would go out with me when Bill and Susan wouldn't. John doing things like that more than the other kids.

DAUGHTER JOAN'S MEMORIES
I remember Daddy walking with us a lot in the woods and telling us stories. Daddy was sweet and quiet. He spanked me twice, once after we took corncobs out of John Ezel's old house in woods. I remember John getting in trouble with Daddy a lot, because he got the tractor stuck in the mud or because of electronics. I remember once John getting spanked and running into woods. 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. I remember times when Mama would cry. I recall staying at Grandmother's and Aunt Sara's for two weeks while Mama was in Europe with Ganger and Aunt Sara holding up a newspaper article showing an oceanliner sinking while at sea saying that your mother was on that ship and she's dead. I remember trying to convince Susan that Aunt Sara was lying and running away with Susan that night.

"THE ARROWHEAD FIELD" BY SON BILL:

My favorite scene in the movie "Forrest Gump" is the soliloquy in which the protagonist, played by Tom Hanks, stands by the grave of his love, musing about fate and chance in life's dramas. He tells the recently departed Jenny that, while Lt. Dan believes in destiny, his mother believes in the random thunderbolts of chance, an existentialist's universe as unfathomable as a box of chocolates. And then he concedes that perhaps they are both right, that life is a mix of determinism and chance.

I thought it a profound statement and it reminded me of something my dad once said in the Arrowhead Field. We were canvassing the furrows of the recently disked field. I remember telling him that I felt lucky that morning because I had already found three broken or badly chipped flints and that the fourth find was nearly always a perfect stone. The word "lucky" elicited from him a bemused expression, similar to what he looked like before challenging John or me to a game of chess. He said he didn't believe in luck, that determinism best defined our lives. If I had the free will to spend hours each late spring day looking for arrowheads, he opined, then there was only the probability that I would find something over time. I had no control over the important things that influenced me–my family, my ethnicity, my intelligence quotient, my personality, my sex, or the epoch of my existence. He conceded that he could choose to buy ice cream at Alford's soda fountain on the Lewisburg Square whenever he had the urge but he had no choice in his preference for chocolate over vanilla.

Now four decades later I can't explain why I like Samoans over Thin Mints, tennis over golf, CNN over Fox, Spain over Germany, or Rock & Roll over Country. Like many ideas that have germinated in my mind over the years, I can trace the origins of this and other musings to conversations I had in the arrowhead field as a youngster. Many were with Dad. Many were with my siblings. The Arrowhead Field for me was a classroom. It was the education Jean Jacques Rousseau prescribed in Emile, learning from the observations of nature and asking the questions that spontaneously spring to mind from such contact with the physical world.

If our drives are forged in the crucible of genetic engines churning neurons into thoughts, then my fashioning has been fortuitous. For an overly protected child raised in the cacoon of rural Middle Tennessee in the bland 1950's, many of my little adventures of imagination have morphed into some of action. If as a child in Michigan I felt in sync with neighborhood peers, this was certainly not the case when we moved to Tennessee. There was culture shock. However, children can often adapt more readily than adults. It was easier for us kids than for Mom. We were now being raised as a family of Catholics in the WASP landscape of rural Middle Tennessee. Born in Detroit, I was the Yankee sibling. Our family didn't fit the mold. Dad received his law degree when I was a year old, his schooling interrupted by the war. He and my Mom were raising a brew of children in the protective sanctuary of a 236-acre farm. We lived simply. Dad gave up law for a profession less lucrative financially but, as he confides, more rewarding emotionally. He became a public school teacher and principal.

We lived a little like innocent hobbits on our farm, close to the earth, living simply, and robustly incubated. We drank milk so fresh from the cows that it arrived warm, Mom spoon-scooping off the creamy surface froth. When the cows foraged on onions, we could taste the bitter flavor in the milk. We swam in the Clay Pond, ate watermelons at the Spring, and climbed trees to such heights that we confirmed the spherical form of the earth. We raced horses bareback and hunted arrowheads barefoot. And because Mom wanted us educated as Catholics, Dad drove nearly forty miles daily so we could attend parochial school. Mom made sacrifices for our religious training and Dad made sacrifices to please Mom and to keep the family intact after years of religious strife.

The lives of all my siblings – John, Joan, Susan, David and Miriam – appear to alternate between adventure and discord. If these lives seem ordinary to some, to my biased mind they resonate with drama, adventure and not a little altruism. This appreciation I have not always had. As a child, lying down at night in the soft tilled earth of the Arrowhead Field under a canopy of a billion galaxies, I sensed our unimportance. However, when I reminisce with family members in an environment of frankness and candor, I am always stunned by the variety and depth of our collective and individual experiences, adventures that in no way appear ordinary.

My little adventures often came my way unsolicited, germinating in some culture-bed unknown to me. Collectively, I suppose, they acquired sufficient critical mass to register as worthy of note and friends keep urging me to write about them...I've hiked the Appalachian trail and regard it less an epiphany of sudden self-awareness than as a monumentally humdrum enterprise. Unlike Bryson, I celebrate my casual encounters with black bears. Perhaps my dismissive attitude toward the Bryson saunter is more the result of having been raised on a farm where we rode horses, climbed trees, shot guns, camped in musty-aromatic WWII pup tents, stepped on snakes, and encountered wildlife as a matter of course. These were rights of passage for my siblings and me. We were aware that we were transfiguring the landscape with our small feet, leaving footprints as indelibly recorded in memory as 200 million year old dinosaur tracks imbedded in fossil-encrusted magma.

Our little adventures of childhood have evolved into the adventures of adulthood. The recollections are burned into memory because they engaged all the senses. I've watched weaving streams of red ribbons emerge from hovering helicopter gunship in the night skies of Vietnam, the visual splendor enhanced by the smell of cordite, the shattering sounds of exploding ordnance, and the spasmodic whiffs of balmy breezes rushing wave-like upon us. On occasion when tribal yearning trumped discretion, I sprinted down Pamplona's Calle de San Jose, courage-fortified by the consumption of cheap Navarese wine, running in lock-step with a mass of red-bereted humanity before stampeding Andalucian bulls. I've climbed majestic peaks on four continents and looked down to see pretty much the same people at each base, all enjoying the same 99.9 percent of genetic makeup. I've camped in the moon shadows of Stonehenge and Avesberry, inspired by the former and terrified by the latter. I once followed an Afghan camel caravan of Pushtan nomads journeying to Hazarrastan and filmed Tajiik horsemen fighting for possession of a headless goat carcass. I've exchanged trade goods with the Lacondones of Chiapas and the descendants of the Inca in the Andes. I worked for the presidential candidacy of Eugene McCarthy and I attended the burial of his primary rival, Bobby Kennedy. In Morocco I was stoned by a coterie of angst-laden men for photographing a local woman without a chador and in Afghanistan for photographing the grave of some revered mullah.

On a train in Eastern Turkey I fought four local men who were assaulting an American girl and I prevailed because my cleated jungle boots better negotiated the frozen urine on the floor. I slept one night in the crest-comb vault of Tikal's Giant Jaguar Temple Number One, sharing my lodgings with howler monkeys who in manic chatter implored me to abandon my perch. Once in a violent lightning storm in the tropics of South America, I wrestled a massive boar hog for possession of a generator shed hoping to save a patient in surgery. In an adrenaline surge in my pre-pubertal youth, I swung with my siblings Frost-like in broad elliptical arches from young maples. I spent entire summers looking for atlantl points in the Arrowhead Field and years daydreaming about the affections of flirtatious women.

When friends were about to consign me to a jaded life of cynical self-absorption, an idealistic young doctor whose dream was to work among the Third World poor saved me. When attending the birth of my three sons, I acquired a renewed sense of the miraculous which skepticism and science have occasionally taken from me...I've gazed through frosty windowpanes upon the tire fires of Canadian ice fishermen and I've listened mesmerized to the plain chant of Benedictine monks in a millennium-old French cloister. With bare feet I've stomped grapes in Bordeaux for hourly wages and with blistered hands I've loaded produce as a day laborer in Barcelona. I once observed an exorcism in a tropical South American hamlet and conversed with an old Yucatani Maya priestess who chanted incantations for rain. In Ireland I kissed the Blarney Stone and in the dark reliquary of an Italian catacomb I stumbled upon the desiccated bones of Christian martyrs. As a child I was mesmerized by the pathos of Ann Frank and the altruism of Atticus Finch. In college the buzz came from the existentialism of Unamuno and the descriptive power of Dostoyevsky. I've section-hiked the Appalachian Trail, canoed stretches of the Lewis and Clark route, and ridden my horse through all the national forests along Hernando de Soto's 16th century odyssey. I've been frisked at gunpoint at so many Latin American roadblocks that the experience no longer elicits concern and I've flown on so many obsolete third-world aircraft that I constantly make little promises to God, promises that, with feet on the ground, I conveniently forget. I was interrogated by Afghan intelligence officers who thought me an American spy and I was examined for contraband by a burka-ensconced Iranian hag who held her hand to my heart. I've spent almost as much time playing tennis as looking for arrowheads and I have some small trophies to validate the bragging rights when I'm in the mood for arrogance.

People at home and abroad have extended me so many courtesies and favors that I could never repay their generosities in a single lifetime. I've been to places that challenge the notion that we were created in God's image and I've met people whose lives are monumental testaments to a divine spark within. By walking across a hundred battlefields, I have come to know that humanity loves war and that, in the divine schemata of evolution, we have as a species a long way to go before we behave as we were enjoined in the Sermon on the Mount.

If friends have succeeded in having me write about my small adventures, I'm realistic enough to know they pale in comparison to the life tales of many casual acquaintances about whom I write in this story. The experiences highlighted in this book should reaffirm for the discerning that it is not adventure and it is not wealth that give meaning to our lives. Life is a priori a gift and it is well lived if in the final account it is defined by the Stoics injunction to love family, defend friends, aspire to truth, show compassion, find joy in work, and make good one's allotted time in this world. The sublime truth of the matter is that our tenure here is brief and precarious.

THE ARROWHEAD FIELD CHAPTER ONE - ANTECEDENTS: Grandparents, German POW's and Turtle Eggs

I found my first arrowhead in the spring of 1954, less than a year after our return to Tennessee. I remember the event well not only because it began my obsession with collecting prehistoric projectile points but because it was sandwiched between other events which, if I didn't have the capacity to appreciate them at the time, were important to the history of my family.

That week Dad was glued to the television set watching Senator Joseph McCarthy haranguing the US army for its alleged links to communist cells in the Signal Corps. Although I've often witnessed emotion in my dad, I've seldom seen the kind of affective distain he reserved for McCarthy. Dad regarded the Wisconsin Republican as a self-promoting, headline-grabbing demagogue whose shoddy investigations were matched by what Dad regarded as a dangerous disregard for constitutional rights. Dad was still a liberal back in those days, not yet jettisoning his high enthusiasm for New Deal activism or the crusading idealism of his student days at Vanderbilt University.

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. Dad is a native Tennessean who was raised Methodist but who discovered Emersonian transcendentalism in college and, to this day, carries on a lively flirtation with the Unitarian take on the world. 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.

Dad was born in 1916 to William Lafayette Andrews, Sr. and Stella Simpson in the small rural town of Lewisburg, about fifty miles south of Nashville. Named after his father, Dad was southern to the core, educated in private schools and raised under a chivalric ethic that esteemed civility and courteousness, reserve and restraint. By the time of my father's birth, Grandfather Andrews, a graduate of Macon Business College, was already a prominent entrepreneur who owned two general stores. Soon he would open a bank and buy up prime real estate on the Lewisburg Square. He was a hardworking, fastidious and socially conservative teetotaler who died in 1924 in his early forties. No one knows for sure the cause of death but his extremely jaundiced appearance during his last days suggests a form of hepatitis. Dad lost his father at the tender age of eight and was raised thereafter by his mother and a sister, my Aunt Sara, who was eight years his senior. More so than my Dad, it was Aunt Sara who acquired my grandfather's conspicuous talent for moneymaking through scrupulous frugality. Two years ago, Aunt Sara died, one month shy of ninety-four. To the end she reminisced about her wealthy friends in the Junior League and the prominent social elites of Nashville with whom she associated as a young woman in the twenties.

Left with a small fortune in savings and investments, my widowed paternal grandmother abandoned the small town of Lewisburg and moved to Nashville with her two children whom she enrolled in private schools. Aunt Sara graduated from Belmont Methodist College and later headed the children's section of the Nashville Public Library, a position she retained until retirement in 1973.

As a child, my father attended Duncan Latin Grammar School and Hume-Fogg in Nashville. In high school at Hume-Fogg, Dad's favorite course was an astronomy class in which the teacher encouraged the students to make their own reflector telescope. His instrument had a 6-inch mirror with lenses sufficiently powerful to reveal the rings of Saturn. His first year in college was at Davidson in North Carolina where the highlight of his spring semester was a trip he took with a friend hitch-hiking to South Carolina. There he met an old African-American woman who proudly informed him that, when she was a young girl, she stood in a crowd of people listening to a speech given by John C. Calhoun, the great southern fire-eating apologist for slavery whose stand on states rights portended secession and Civil War. In his sophomore year, Dad returned to Nashville where he attended Vanderbilt University. There he could often be found on the campus tennis courts where he brandished a Write-Didson racquet and sported a wicked backhand. Although much of his social life centered on his Vanderbilt fraternity, Sigma Nu, he took his studies seriously and reaped the rewards in stellar grades. In 1938, toward the end of the Great Depression, he entered Vanderbilt Law School where he displayed enthusiasm for FDR's New Deal programs and sympathized with the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War. The world of the Andrews was thoroughly WASP and they moved in a social milieu that would have appeared alien to my mother.

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 J. Early and Jessica A. 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, the son of John J. Early, and graduated with a civil engineering degree from Marquette University around 1907. One of his sisters [Ella] became a nun and the other [Margaret], 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 Joseph 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... 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..." -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.

On our march back, the senior drill sergeant, always rather gruff with me, let slip out of the corner of his mouth in a barely audible report "good shooting, Andrews." I had assumed that most of the boys in our company had done as well.Mine was the tightest pattern of all shooters. One of the trainees told me that I was so good a shot that the DI's would surely recommend me for an infantry sniper MOS at graduation. I gulped hard at the thought.

During our first days in Basic, we had the proverbial buzz haircuts, we were issued our uniforms and field gear, and we were introduced to the high-pressure inoculation guns which replaced the syringe needles of my childhood fears. The blow from these pressure guns felt like a knuckled fist pounding the upper arm. After this experience, I learned to appreciate how little pain was associated with the old needle method. We were given our army ID numbers and ordered to memorize them upon penalty of death. Although I have trouble remembering the names of my college students from last year, I can still remember "US53908912," the number impressed on my dogtags along with my name, my faith and my blood type.

[Cont'd son Joel]

Our first workday was spent with our entire platoon on the barracks floor. All of us were in our olive drab boxer shorts and all of us were issued putty knives. We were ordered to scrape all the wax off a well-polished floor. The next day we waxed and buffed. The reason, I gathered, was to strip away our dignity in layers as we were stripping away the wax.

It was to instill in us a sense that we were an organic unit all working together for a common objective, building us up to be reflexively obedient, unquestioning instruments of war. And woe to the individual who asked for an explanation or who complained openly. It was a psychology that worked.

I got the impression that my drill sergeant knew I didn't buy it. Most of the boys in my unit were two to three years younger than I and few had anything more than a high school education. I suspected that some didn't even have that. The reason why the military preferred young and impressionable youths was made abundantly clear to me when we had a company assembly in an indoor arena during our third or fourth week of Basic.

Our platoon leader was a tall, skinny redheaded second lieutenant who seldom said anything to us and who just walked around returning salutes. He was probably fresh out of ROTC but he looked like he was eighteen and so bewildered by his new responsibilities (returning salutes) that our foul-mouthed, chiseled-faced, battle-hardened DI's could have waffled him down for breakfast.

In any case, at the assembly we heard the lieutenant speak publicly for the first time. It was a short address, probably meant to be motivational, but it faltered somewhat. He seemed somewhat diminished in the presence of all those beefy, leather-faced DI's. He was followed by one of the DI's who walked on the stage and began to cuss all the hippies and radicals who were badmouthing the war. Everyone was listening intently and I was trying to figure out where he was going. Then he said that during the previous year more than thirty thousand Americans had been killed in car accidents on our highways. He paused. Then he bellowed out "so what the hell are all those s___-faced pacifists complaining about when only ten-thousand American soldiers got killed in Vietnam last year? Why don't they complain about them what was killed on the highways?" With this the crowd of soldiers, almost to a man, yelled out their enthusiastic accord. "Yeah!!!" Looking around, I could not help the forlorn thought that it would be a long two years.

I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut about my antiwar sentiments in front of the DI's but in bull sessions in the field or at night in the barracks, the guys in my platoon began to talk to me about their anxieties. My nickname became "professor." My only serious confrontation with my drill sergeant occurred the day when we were fighting each other with pugil sticks and football helmets. I had befriended a couple of Puerto Rican recruits who were in our company but whose platoon was assigned to an adjacent barracks. After the fourth week, the discipline was relaxed enough where, after mess, we could fraternize with men of our company in other barracks. These Puerto Riquenos were teaching me some of their songs on the guitar and I was trying to improve my language skills after two semesters of Spanish in college. On the pugil course, our DI was unusually insulting to the Hispanics, calling them Spics, ____ and "__ for brains." What occasioned some of this animosity, beyond simple prejudice, was the fact that the Puerto Ricans were part of a reserve unit activated only for our eight-week basic training course after which time they would return to their civilian jobs back on their island paradise. At any rate, I got tired of the sergeant's tirade and called out to him "why don't you leave them alone." There was a dead silence. The DI turned and walked up to me and smiled. "Andrews," he said with an even voice, "I want you to be the first to demonstrate the pugil stick." He handed me a stick and ordered me to the center of the group. He handed the other stick to the biggest draftee in our unit, a giant of a man who had the physique of a serious bodybuilder. The sergeant handed him a football helmet and told him to beat the __ out of me. When I reached over for a helmet, he told me that my head was too big to fit any of those on the ground.

My opponent, whose name I can not remember, went on to become a friend and, when we graduated, told me he was assigned an MOS as a military policeman. As per instruction, he didn't hold back and I was on my back after just a couple well-laid-on blows. If I had some bruises and a headache that lasted several days, I also had a lot more friends among the Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans in my company. And the biggest surprise was that the sergeant seemed to ease up a bit more after the incident.

We went back to the rifle range several times and I always did well. In fact, after knocking down my human cut-out targets, I sometimes turned my M-14 to fire on the targets in the adjacent lanes. Most of the DI's from the other platoons saw some humor in this. They got together and suggested that I compete with the best shot in another company of two-hundred men. The next morning after our 5:00 am breakfast mess, the company marched out to the rifle range. When we arrived, we noticed that another company was on site milling around and waiting for us. My recollection is that many of them were on some bleachers. There was a steady drizzle this morning and, as we were now in early November, the light was low. The DI's ordered me and the other company's sharpshooter to take our positions and prepare to fire on our respective pop-up targets. I was ordered to fire first. We were the only two on the line to fire.

I had a pair of glasses issued me during the first week and I only used them when on the rifle range. The cold rain increased and my glasses began to fog up as soon as I put them on. After adjusting my rifle's rear sight for elevation, the targets popped up. The cold air and my expirations fogged up the glasses even more as I fired away. I missed many of the targets, particularly in the prone position which was usually my best position for firing. The sharpshooter from the other company bested me. Through the grapevine I learned that my DI had bet a bunch of money on me and had lost. Remembering how he had me disciplined in the pugil beating, I considered his lost money poetic justice.

In the last weeks of Basic we were given a few more privileges, the most prized of which were the visits from loved ones. On several occasions Dad and Joan drove up from Nashville to visit on Sunday afternoons when we were free from work or drilling (so long as we confined ourselves to the base). I considered myself particularly lucky with family so close. Few of my comrades enjoyed Sunday visitations. On the second trip they brought my youngest siblings, David and Miriam who had recently turned ten and eight respedctively. They would always bring my favorite treat, a carton of milk and a box of Keebler coconut chocolate chip cookies. I devoured them in ecstasy as Dad and Joan brought me up to date on family news. Although these visits were the only gifts I cherished during basic, they probably left me afterwards in an even greater state of demoralization. More than anything else I gained from my two years of military service, it was an appreciation for personal freedom.

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. He was eventually made a Chaplain's assistant.

On graduation day I learned that I had been assigned to Fort Polk, Louisiana for AIT (advanced infantry training). My assigned MOS (military occupational specialty) was 11 Bravo, the designation for an infantry rifleman. I began to think that my pride on the rifle range had trumped my common sense. On the other hand, in true paranoid fashion, I thought that perhaps my DI had gotten the final revenge. Once more familiar with the process of cutting orders, I later realized that a DI likely had little input in the decision.

In stark contrast to my graduation from Father Ryan High, my family was not present for the ceremony at Fort Campbell. In truth, I did not wish them to be present. As I walked back to my barracks for the final time with Fort Polk orders in hand, I noticed a new batch of recruits, all on the floor stripped to their shorts, with putty knives in hand, all quaking under the thunder of our ex-drill sergeant's demonic-sounding tirades.

In one of many fortuitous incidences in my life, I had a piece of good luck when I arrived at Fort Polk. Few recruits in an infantry MOS had any illusions about their future duty location after Louisiana. Nearly all would be shipped out to Vietnam at the end of their eight-week AIT session. One is not trained at Fort Polk's Jungle Warfare Training Center to be sent to Germany or Korea.

Our bus arrived at the sprawling infantry-training center about 10:00 in the evening and as we stepped from our vehicle I noticed a dramatic difference in the climate. It was late November. Just a week before during bivouac at Fort Campbell, we experience some very cold weather. The temperature in Louisiana was by contrast warm and humid despite the late hour of our arrival. After gathering our gear from the belly of the bus, we queued up for registration and assignment to our infantry training units and barracks. My line moved closer to the registration table and there was only one soldier in front of me when a staff sergeant stepped up to us and asked if anyone in our line could type. Several of us raised our hands. We were taken out of the original line and ordered to queue up in another line. We had our MOS's changed and, instead of the infantry, we were reassigned to an administrative training school at the same base. Although I didn't know it at the time, an incident had occurred to alter Uncle Sam's plans for me. The infantry barracks were filled to capacity and arrangements had to be found for additional quarters. Exacerbating the housing shortage was a recent outbreak of meningitis in which some young recruits in the infantry barracks had died and a quarantine temporarily closed down their buildings.

For the next two months I was trained in administration to be an army clerk and my MOS was changed to 70 Bravo. Mom had taught me to type on Dad's old portable Royal typewriter and more recently I had been typing term papers for myself and other students at SLU. I had also typed up reports and papers for other students. Even before the army's clerical school I was typing sixty words a minute.

Fort Polk was one of the bleakest military outposts imaginable north of Antarctica. The nearest town was Leesville and its only excitement was at the Greyhound Bus Station and a drab USO club. The fact that the surrounding counties were dry certainly added to the sense of desolation. The base was known for its jungle survival school and its training in counter-insurgency warfare. On marches into the swamps and bayous, soldiers made it a point to take the snakes they killed and hang them over fences on the side of the roads. Even though I was now in administration, some of our training overlapped with that of the infantry and we would sometimes go out on joint maneuvers. I will never forget the smell of decomposing reptiles, pungent swamp waters, and decaying vegetation that permeated the atmosphere. The only source of entertainment open to me, it seemed, was checking out books from the base library and meandering through the PX looking for creature comforts to buy. It was truly a dead base adjacent to a dead town. Lewisburg appeared like Greenwich Village by comparison.

In another fortuitous twist, my orders came down in early January 1968 for my first post-training duty assignment. It was not Vietnam as I had feared but rather the United States Military Academy Prep School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, just to the south of Alexandria and Washington, DC. To say that I was elated would be understatement. With only a stopover for a couple of days in Nashville to see the family, I flew to Washington and took military transport to Fort Belvoir, a major Corps of Engineers base on the Potomac.

The prep school functioned as a feeder institution for West Point where men already in the army with promising IQ's and high ACT or SAT scores could take military and academic courses which would get them up to speed for entry a year later to the Academy. My work was as an administrative clerk for Major Chandler, the vice commander of the school. It was a plush assignment by any army standard. When I arrived I was given a room much like what I had as a student in Clement Hall dormitory at SLU. My roommate was Frank Anselmo, another clerk from Spokane and a college graduate. I remember that he was a trekkie who could recount in detail every episode of the science fiction TV series. It came as no surprise that he loved Italian cuisine and music. On various weekend trips with him to Washington, we canvassed the city for restaurants and record shops that catered to his tastes. With a room to ourselves and with Washington just a half hour away, the Prep School with its Federal brick architecture exuded the atmosphere of a sleepy Ivy League college.

Almost as soon as I got to Fort Belvoir, I made a quick trip to Georgetown University where I spoke to the undergraduate dean about taking some classes after work. The only problem was that, since I had already finished my junior year, the only evening courses available to me in my political science major or my history minor were graduate level classes. After processing my application and granting me admission, I had the challenge of getting Major Chandler's approval. He flatly denied my request because, to take the two evening classes, I would have to miss two hours of work each week. In frustration, I overlooked the chain of command and went over his head. The commandant, a Colonel Sterling, had been friendly from the outset and had complemented me on my writing style in the memos I authored. He was also an avid tennis player and liked to bullshit with me about the fortunes of the game and its current stars. Of course, to play with him would have been no insignificant breach in military etiquette. Apparently he had seen me play on the base courts a couple of times and told me I had an impressive baseline game. When he approved my request, I knew there would be hell to pay with Chandler. There was.I took a graduate level class on the history of China and a political science graduate class on the League of Nations in International Law. I often did not have the time to change out of uniform and came to school dressed as I worked. I was the youngest student in these seminar-style classes and was probably the only one not working on my masters or doctorate. Many of my fellow students were Federal employees working in the State Department, the Pentagon or other agencies and several of the full-time students were in Georgetown's well respected foreign policy school. I loved being back in the classroom again and each of these three-hour sessions made me think I was back at SLU. Both were Jesuit universities and both emphasized the Socratic or dialectic approach to learning. I was not as outspoken in class discussion here, however, in part because these people were older and not the undergraduate bullshiters I was accustomed to debating in St. Louis. I noticed that the students were much more competitive in trying to win points by verbally grubbing their colleagues. A somewhat pompous lay professor in Chinese history periodically humiliated his students by answering their queries in a Latin soliloquy while assuming an expression of exasperation as if dismissing his students as idiots when they couldn't understand the dead language.

One afternoon in late spring, I had just gotten off a bus, which carried me from Belvoir to downtown Washington, and I was waiting for a connecting bus to Georgetown. As I was waiting, a middle-aged gentleman wearing a trimmed goatee and sporting a tweed jacket approached me and stared into my face as he walked. He stopped immediately in front of me and shook his head. Then, after a short pause he said in a serious and somewhat guttural tone "you son of a bitch." He turned and walked away. I turned around to see if he were addressing someone else. There was no one behind me. I was utterly perplexed until I looked down and realized that I was in uniform. Obviously he sported strong anti-war sentiments and regarded me as a deserved object of odium. It was ironic, I thought on reflection, that I was one of the few anti-war soldiers in Washington and it was I who had to be in his path. The encounter was upsetting to me and I found it more difficult than usual to take notes in class that evening.

During the spring of that year I made a quick trip home after I cut my own orders. On the flight back to Washington, we were informed of the assassination of Martin Luther King and told to expect delays and perhaps disturbances in Washington. As our plane approached National Airport (now Reagan International), in the darkness below we could see fires throughout the capital, particularly the area immediately behind the Library of Congress. At the airport, those of us in uniform were asked to take special buses with wire mesh windows to our bases. It was only later that night that I heard of Bobby Kennedy's efforts to quell the potential violence erupting in the wake of the assassination. What he said impressed me much.

My problem with Kennedy was his delay in announcing his candidacy for the democratic presidential nomination. I had decided to work for the most conspicuously anti-war candidate among the democrats and this was Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. I volunteered on weekends to work in McCarthy's Washington campaign headquarters and the bulk of this work consisted of mailing out donation requests and licking envelopes. I never wore my uniform to work in the campaign, as this would have been unlawful. After McCarthy's success in the New Hampshire primary race, Johnson's campaign abdication announcement, and Kennedy's tardy entry into the primary race, I was ambivalent about how to proceed. I knew that Kennedy had the best chance to win in November against the Republicans but I was still upset by his delay. It seemed opportunistic. Perception was a factor and I feared that Kennedy's decision to run, so soon after McCarthy's victory, might appear manipulative and self-serving. Nevertheless, I planned to leave McCarthy and begin volunteer work for Kennedy as soon as my end of semester class work at Georgetown was behind me. Then in June, after his impressive California primary victory, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. I was demoralized and heart-broken. All I could think of was the incredible violence of this year – the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and two assassinations - and the year was not even half over. The evening after Kennedy's funeral mass in New York was a graveyard service in Arlington and I made it a point to be there. In the distance with what appeared to be camera lights, I watched the Kennedy family as prayers were said and condolences conveyed. Even at a considerable distance, I could observe on the expressions of the mourners grief, shock, pain and despair.

On many spring and summer weekends in Washington I walked through the museums of the Smithsonian or read in the Library of Congress. Because Mount Vernon was just a few miles away, it was one of my first excursions off base. Monticello followed shortly afterward. Sometimes I'd ride my ten-speed bicycle into the capital until I got permission to leave it at one of the men's dormitories at Georgetown University. I would take the bus into the capital, transfer out to Georgetown, pick up my bike and then ride all over the city. I particularly liked to bike over to the Jefferson and Lincoln monuments, find a shady spot under a tree, and read. I also went on occasion with army companions to discos in the Georgetown area. The location I liked most was a disco converted from an old jail near the intersection of Wisconsin and K Streets. During fall semester orientation week at Georgetown U, I went to some mixers where I met a couple of girls from nearby Marymount College. One, whose first name was Jane, I took barhopping the following weekend and I introduced her to the old jailhouse disco. When I received orders for Vietnam a couple of months later, Jane gave me a St. Christopher medal, which I sewed into the canvas camouflage helmet cover.

Another girl at that mixer, whose name I cannot remember, said her favorite pastime was horseback riding. I rented a car and took her to a riding stable in the northern Virginia countryside. I can't remember much about her except that she was attractive, her father was a mortician, her conversational skills were pretty much limited to horse talk, and, at our equestrian outing, she only wished to post around a small track. I got bored with this and, without informing the owner, took my rented thoroughbred for a canter in the adjacent open field. When I nudged the mount in the ribs to move from a walk to a trot, she took off as if from a starting gate. We were at a full gallop and I discovered too late that, unlike all of the horses on our Lewisburg farm, this animal did not neck-rein. I pulled back as hard as I could and she did not slow down. By the time I tried to turn her with just the right rein to get her into a slowing circle, it was too late. She galloped at full throttle into a wooded trail and I had to ease up on the reins to keep from getting beheaded by overhanging branches. The trail opened into another field with a telephone pole in the center. Again I tried to pull on the right reign to get her into a circle to slow her down. I pulled so hard that her head was turned to our rear and she was still at a full gallop. Realizing that we were heading directly for the pole, I let go of the reins and slid off. Because she was a tall horse of over sixteen hands, it was a painful fall. I jumped about thirty years from the pole but the horses momentum was so great that she did not have time to veer out of the way. I could hear the impact like a slap to the face. The thoroughbred slammed into the pole and her body provided enough cushion to absorb my impact a second later. My helmet was knocked off, my nose was bleeding, and I was dizzily sitting next to the prostrate and bloodied beast. The owner came running down to the crash site screaming that the horse was not trained for riding except on the track. As soon as we got the animal on its feet again, the young woman asked me if I had signed my legal release form at the barn. Although she was initially castigating me for possibly breaking a few of the horses ribs, her demeanor suddenly became conspicuously solicitous. She was obviously very contented once I signed that paper.

One of the things I liked best about my duty assignment at Fort Belvoir was the variety of work I did. One of my assignments was to assist a reporter for Stars and Stripes by doing some research for him in the military archives of the Pentagon. I loved working at this library because its holdings were extensive. Additionally I could do research for papers I was writing for my classes at Georgetown. Sometimes, when I heard that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was meeting, I'd get to the Pentagon early and work later in order to take a two-hour lunch break to attend the sessions. Because of the crowds, when I arrived late I often had to stand in the back of the committee chamber. Often, as when a celebrity like Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford testified before the committee, it was difficult to see much because of photographers, television crews and lighting technicians.

Three senators on the committee were of special interest to me because I admired their skeptical appraisal of war conduct. One was Clairborne Pell of Rhode Island, another was Al Gore, Sr. from my state of Tennessee, and finally there was J. William Fullbright of Arkansas. In particular I thought Gore and Fullbright exhibited courage because of their rather conservative and pro-war constituencies back home. After all, Tennessee is known as the volunteer state, a dubious distinction when I think of its contribution to the Mexican War with all its moral ambiguities. At one of the smaller and more hum drum sessions, I went up to Gore and Fullbright to introduce myself and to encourage them to continue to ask the tough questions in their gadfly manner. I informed Gore that he and I met once before in 1963 at the Tennessean Three Star banquet when I was in high school and I told Fullbright that I had enjoyed reading his book The Arrogance of Power. I can't explain it but my sense was that they took more than a perfunctory interest in me because I was a sympathetic supporter in uniform at a time when they were under fire from the military brass and from hawks in the general population. In my last face-to-face conversation with Gore, I told him that I thought his stand on Vietnam was no less heroic than his refusal in 1955 to sign the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, a southern manifesto condemning the Brown desegregation decision. Fullbright's record on the race issue was not so impressive and I never asked him why he could be so enlightened and farsighted on Vietnam while so uninspiring on race. I think I know what he would have said if I had asked. I think he would have told me that, to do good in government service, one must first get elected and, in Arkansas of that era, to support civil rights openly would be political suicide. What I admired about Gore was, despite all his refined political instincts that would have cautioned otherwise, he followed his conscience in 1968 as he had in 1955.

My time in the military was, I can say without reservation, the loneliest in my life. My roommate at the prep school, Frank Anselmo, was as convivial and accommodating as any trekkie could be but I missed my family and the people I had grown to care about at St. Louis University. I didn't much like the singles bar scene in Washington. It seemed that when on occasion I went with a group of fellow soldiers to the bars and discos, there was this competition to impress each other with one's ability to pick up any female regardless of appearance, IQ, and ability to converse. With some of the lamest lines imaginable, it almost seemed that the guys were trying to impress each other more than the women they'd greet. At times like this, I'd think of Patty Daugherty, Anne Wynn, or Cheryl Meloff and wonder what they were doing at the precise time. I missed them. I particularly wondered why I had not heard from Cheryl. Unknown to me, she had sent several letters in the summer before my induction. In one of these communiqués, she included a photograph of herself sitting on my lap with her lips pressed to mine and with a bottle of beer in her hand. The picture was taken at Jack Peronski's cabin in Wisconsin. Mom had opened the letters and, not fond of what she read and no doubt trying to protect me from myself, failed to forward them. Two years later when I had returned to St. Louis U, Jack Peronski and Rick Brutine informed me that Cheryl had written often during my first year in the army and, not hearing from me, assumed I wanted to end the relationship. They told me Cheryl dropped out of Webster College to become a hippie.

Yes, my love life was about as moribund as a desiccated tumbleweed in the Arizona desert. A middle aged civilian secretary working for Major Chandler asked me so many times to take her daughter out that I eventually complied. Despite my apprehension about blind dates, I enjoyed the young woman's company and we went to a Washington restaurant for a nice dinner. Her father was a reporter for the Washington Post and she had some interesting stories to tell about his take on the fourth estate's inability to breach the wall of secrecy around the White House during this year of high political drama. I should have asked her out again but there was little chemistry and, probably subconsciously, I couldn't help but compare any date with the girls I knew in St. Louis.

About a block from my office at the prep school was a cleaners where I took my uniforms for pressing. Two girls working there took an interest in me and one, a pretty nineteen-year-old redhead by the name of Jessie, asked me to take her to a malt shop nearby. She was an army brat, the daughter of an NCO. She let me understand in no uncertain terms that she hated her job and she hated living on an army base. I suggested that she consider college as a door to a wider world. As an enticement I told her I would give her a tour of Georgetown University the following Saturday afternoon. I had to drop off a term paper, I told her, and had to make the trip anyway. She agreed. On the bus to GU, she read some of my paper on the 1921 Washington Naval Disarmament Conference. I couldn't help but notice how good looking she was. She was wearing a halter top and shorts, which revealed a slim, athletic and very feminine figure.

After depositing the paper in my professor's office mailbox, I gave Jessie a tour of the student center, the university observatory, and the library. On the lawn fronting the main administrative building, we talked until well after dark. On the return trip she asked me to accompany her to the home of her uncle and aunt where she planned to spend the night. It was only when we arrived that she informed me that the couple was out of town and that "we had the house to ourselves." She invited me in for a late night snack. I never got to eat.

During the summer of 1968 I particularly enjoyed riding my bicycle through the capital. On one occasion I was biking by the grassy area to the north of the reflecting pond between the Washington and Lincoln memorials when I noticed a huge throng of African-Americans putting up tents and other shelters. Out of curiosity I biked over for a closer look and discovered placards and banners proclaiming the Poor Peoples March. The sprawl of tents was referred to as Resurrection City. At one point a black minister sweating in his three-piece suit came up to me and began talking about his crusade. I asked him if he thought the civil rights movement might grow disillusioned with peaceful protest as a result of the King assassination. His response was to acknowledge the loss while affirming that he was in Washington doing exactly what the martyred civil rights leader himself had planned for this summer. He and the others assembled claimed to be working to realize the dream about which King spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial five years earlier. He looked over his should and nodded at the monument as he spoke these words.

John was at Fort Carson, Colorado, in the fall of 1968 when he came down with orders for Vietnam. This event brought on something of a family crisis. I cut my own orders and flew home for an emergency weekend family conference. Something Joan once told me was worrisome. While a freshman at St. Louis University where she was active in the antiwar movement, Joan knocked on my dorm room door one night and in a very anxious state told me of a dream she had had the night before. John had just been drafted and in her dream she came to meet him at a train station somewhere. She came up to him and started to hug him when she saw that his face was ashen gray with a sad and forlorn expression. She told me that he appeared dead.

I never assigned much weight to her dream and dismissed it as just one more of the superstitions coalescing around the women in my family. I knew they were devoutly religious and believed much more in the miraculous than experience, reason and science should permit. That said, with Joan's dream now on my mind and my sudden recollection of Mom's premonition of Gampa's death and of my car accident with Pete Cacciopo, I tried on the flight home to think of a way to get John off the Vietnam levy.

In the family dining room at the Tyne residence, I told Mom and Dad that, while John's was combat related, my MOS was non-combat and that I should request service in Vietnam myself to preempt John's orders. We were all aware of the Defense Department's policy precluding more than one brother at any one time in a combat zone. Everyone agreed with me. Furthermore, as I explained to them, John would be in Vietnam for an entire year while my ETS or separation date meant that I would be in Nam for nine months at the most. The only SNAFU was that John already had his orders and that I would have to get some help if I were to preempt him. I told Dad and Mom of my contact with Senators Gore, Fulbright and Pell and surmised that they might be able to expedite my orders.

As soon as I returned to Fort Belvoir, I submitted to Major Chandler the request for reassignment to Vietnam. He was probably none too fond of me after I went over his head to take classes at Georgetown U but he told me he would grant the request. He also told me that he could not reassign me to any special unit in Vietnam. This was done, he confided, by a replacement battalion once I was "in country." The very day that I contacted Major Chandler about Vietnam, I also horridly drafted letters to the three senators. The word spread like wildfire through the prep school and most of my colleagues, including Frank Anselmo, told me in no minced words that I was crazy to leave this cushioned duty station for the hazards of Vietnam.

Despite the proverbial inefficiency of Washington bureaucracy, I was amazed to discover that within weeks I had my orders for Vietnam and that John's orders had been flagged with a new reassignment to Fort Riley, Kansas. I wrote thank-you notes to Gore, Fulbright and Pell. Unfortunately for Gore, his reputation as a war critic was viewed by many Tennesseans as unpatriotic. After thirty-two years of service in Congress, he was defeated in his bid for re-election in 1970. Fulbright was also singed by the Vietnam afterburner. He left the Senate in 1974 after chairing the Foreign Relations Committee longer than anyone in history. Claiborne Pell, the only member of the triumvirate whose constituents kept him in office, served in the Senate until 1996 and is renown for the Pell Grant program which today benefits college students of modest means.

It was now late November 1968. It had been a wild year with the Tet Offensive, classes at Georgetown U, campaign work for Eugene McCarthy, the assassinations of King and Kennedy, peace demonstrations in Washington, a police riot at the Democratic nominating convention in Chicago ...and now orders for Vietnam.

A couple days after Christmas 1968, I reported to Fort Dix, New Jersey. The weather was bleak with overcast skies, a bitterly cold wind, and the residue of a recent blanketing of snow. Fort Dix was one of the processing centers for troops near the East Coast going to Nam. I had another battery of painful prophylactics delivered by the pressure gun method and my papers were scrutinized by orders clerks doing the same job I had done during my year-long stay at Fort Belvoir. I remember looking into the faces of fellow GI's and seeing subdued expressions of anxiety in their eyes. Most like me had no idea where they would be assigned in Vietnam. Most were infantrymen and they knew their prospects of avoiding combat were not good. Because of flying west across many different time zones, I would leave Fort Dix on New Years Day and arrive in Vietnam the same day. I was ready to bid adieu to 1968.

I flew on a commercial jet from Ft. Dix to a brief refueling stop in Anchorage. Walking on the tarmac with snow all enveloping in the distance, I was surprised to discover that the temperature in Alaska was actually slightly warmer than in New Jersey, despite a difference of --- degrees latitude. From Alaska we flew to Tokyo where again we deplaned briefly to the chill of a blistery Japanese winter. That night we arrived at Bien Hoa military airfield in the Republic of Vietnam. I'll never forget my first impression of the country when I stepped up to the plane's open door and looked out. The first thing that hit me was a blast of warm and humid tropical air. In the distance, under the lights of the terminal, I saw the burning carcass of a plane. I could feel my pulse quicken. The date was 1 January 1969. No one was in the mood for celebration. We were all going to be processed at the 90th Replacement Battalion where within a day or two we would be assigned to specific units in country.

From the plane we were marched to a large, corrugated metal processing building where, at attention rest, we were told a little about the country and how the war was progressing. A first sergeant told us about what happens to GI's who have sex with the local women. We were informed of a dreaded and incurable venereal disease. Soldiers who contracted the pathogen were sent to an isolated island for the remainder of their days. Their families were informed, according to this NCO, that the GI's in question were MIA's or presumed dead. He also related how Vietnamese women, with a sharp razor blade inserted strategically in their vaginas, tried to lure American boys to a brief sexual encounter which would deprive them of their manhood. If I was somewhat worried about the so-called "Black Island," when I heard the razor blade reference I smiled and said quietly to the young man next to me "bullshit." However, turning to see the reaction of my follow troopers in formation, I could see that they all looked frightened. It was a memorable introduction to my new country of residence.

In another one of those strange twists of fate to which I had grown accustomed, I received from the 90th Replacement Detachment my "in country" orders. Instead of some remote artillery firebase or some insecure infantry redoubt in I Corps, I was assigned to the 165th Combat Aviation Group of the First Aviation Brigade at Long Binh, a sprawling and relatively secure installation twenty-seven miles northeast of Saigon. If guardian angels labor on our behalf, mine was working overtime.

At the 165th, I was among men whom I respected and whose company I very much enjoyed. Unlike other duty stations where we would all go our separate directions as soon as our eight-hour work day was at an end, the men in the 165th were truly a family. Not only was it prohibited to leave the base, it was down-right dangerous to do so. Viet Cong operatives were constantly at work building tunnels, collecting intelligence, or constructing rocket launching pads around the nearby hamlets. As such, we worked together and, after work, we gathered in our hooches to play cards, bullshit, listen to music, eat in the canvas-roofed mess, or play volleyball on a makeshift court we built adjacent to the sandbagged bunkers. Many of the men were college graduates who were drafted as soon as their deferments expired. Among these, Roland Renee was a tall, gregarious and self-effacing friend who had a wife and child back in the states. Unlike my comrades at Belvoir, there was no small number of married men in the 165th. Duty so far from home was particularly grueling for these people. Glenn Poppinga was a mild-mannered farmer's son from South Dakota who was a star basketball player at his college and John Marino was a University of Tennessee graduate who enjoyed spiking the volleyball even though he was no taller than I. Two other friends, Bob Lacosta and Dale Hendrickson, were always up for a game of hearts or spades. We were close enough where we knew the names of wives, girlfriends and family members back home. We sometimes read their letters to each other and expected comment and analysis.

All around our hooch was a four-foot-high sandbagged parapet wall that, in the event of hostile rockets exploding on the ground nearby, would protect soldiers sleeping on the bottom bunks. I was on a bottom bunk. Within a hundred feet was a corrugated metal tunnel covered with sandbags in the event of an emergency. Up the road about a mile away were the headquarters for the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) and the United States Army Vietnam (USARV). Although the base was situated in the midst of a topical jungle area, Long Binh looked something akin to a desiccated desert due to the massive defoliation efforts of Agent Orange and the work of great numbers of earthmovers and bulldozers. The entire perimeter contained bunker complexes, concertina wire, pressure mines, remote controlled claymores, and M-60 machine gun emplacements. For added protection we had an artillery firebase at nearby Bear Cat, which could direct its 105mm howitzers to our defense. After the Tet Offensive of the previous year, such precautions seemed justified. Over nine hundred guerrillas and sappers of the 274th and 275th regiments of the Viet Cong Fifth Division were killed in their attack on Long Binh. We were still measuring success by the body count.

Our unit was the administrative and support unit of the First Aviation Brigade's fleet of assault and transport helicopters along with the personnel to fly, service and control their traffic. Our workstation was a Quonset hut located adjacent to the large Sanford Army Airfield and hanger complex at the base. Outside of our hut was a wooden sign which displayed our unit designation and a professional-looking painting of Snoopy in World War I aviation goggles straddling his doghouse roof with paws on the controls, scarf blowing in the wind. We would travel to and from work in deuce and a half trucks.

Behind our complex of canvass-roofed hooches was a small motor pool at one end and, at the opposite, an outdoor movie screen built of white-painted plywood. Adjacent to the movie screen was a small water tower, the latrines, and primitive multi-stalled showers. Behind a row of hooches was the silver, air-conditioned house trailer that functioned as the company captain's personal residence. He was a Tennessean whose preferred side arm was not the standard issue 1911 Colt 45 but a Peacemaker six-shoot .45 revolver of the kind all my cowboy heroes of the 1950's sported...

The most anticipated moment of the day was mail call and I was fortunate to have many letters from home. My letters, written on -----, were subject to censure so I was more inclined to use my battery charged tape recorder for most correspondence. In one of my letters from Joan, I learned that she was taking a political science course from one of my old professors. She was now a sophomore at St. Louis University and she had Dr. Leguey Fillier. She described a conversation she had with him after class in which he tried to justify our role in the Vietnam War in terms of the lesser of two evils. He had catalogued all the evils of Ho Chi Minh's regime in the North and this included religious persecution of Vietnamese Catholics and mass execution of dissenters. Joan's tone, if such could be expressed in a two-dimensional letter, appeared to be one of approval. At first I was surprised by my sister's apparent 180-degree turnabout on the war issue. After all, it was Joan who first demonstrated against the war before I ever began to entertain doubts. In retrospect, the softening of her earlier position seemed in keeping with her views on the Hitler opposition during World War II. Back in high school, she had read my William Shirer book on "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and had become fascinated with the anti-Nazi student opposition group known as the White Rose. An admirer of the early Christian martyrs, Joan realized that these saints and the White Rose students had much in common, particularly their pacifism. However, as she read more on the subject, she came to an almost passionate respect for Count Claus von Stauffenburg, the heavily decorated and much wounded German army colonel who, because of religious scruples, had carried the satchel bomb into Hitler's bunker in the July 20th Plot of 1944. Hitler narrowly escaped and Stauffenburg was executed once it was apparent that the plot had failed. Although I may have been wrong, my impression was that Joan felt that, despite the Biblical injunction against taking life, to assassinate a Hitler to save millions of Jews, Gypsies, and other undesirables was morally justified. From her letter, it seemed that the SLU professor was appealing to a similar rationale in Vietnam.

If I found it difficult to accept Dr. Leguey Felliur's analogy, it was easier to attack the war effort in Vietnam on more practical grounds. I told her that our tactics were as inefficient as those of the French before us, that our strategic hamlet plan to forcibly relocate unwilling civilians was alienating the population, that sweeping search-and-destroy missions, free-fire zones, and carpet-bombing were taking the lives of too many civilians, and that, ultimately, as foreign interlopers we could not win the hearts and minds of a people whose culture and history were so different from our own. In a follow-up letter, Joan admitted that some of my arguments made sense. I could sense, however, that my little sister was becoming in almost imperceptible increments more conservative. The evolution in her thinking, I was soon to discover, was prompted by more than the Vietnam War. Joan was soon to devote herself heart and soul to the Right to Life movement in the aftermath of the Roe v. Wade decision. Her new calling would trump all of her previous crusades.

Although Saigon was officially off limits to us, I managed to make a couple of quick trips to the South Vietnamese capital. On one of these excursions, we filled a Deuce-and-a-half with food, medical supplies and some toys and drove to an orphanage, which we had adopted. The facility was run by Catholic nuns who were Vietnamese and who spoke to us in French. There were children everywhere and they were of all ages. The unusually clean and spacious nursery was impressive. There were classrooms whose framed religious iconography and dark wooden desks with ink-well holes reminded me of my elementary school in Columbia. I thought it odd that a picture of Pope Pius XII hung from the wall over the chalkboard and concluded that the chaos of war had prevented a replacement with the likeness of subsequent prelates.

Most of the older orphans were Vietnamese while overwhelmingly the infants in the nursery and the toddlers were Amerasian. Young Vietnamese women were increasingly getting pregnant from the American liaisons and, for the sake of their family honor and to avoid the stigma which could torpedo chances of a future marriage, the orphanage was an obvious solution. Marriage to American soldiers was vigorously discouraged by the military, the State Department, and the INS. We were here to help the Vietnamese in every possible way other than marriage. Sex could not be prevented and this orphanage was here to deal with the consequences.

When I arrived in Nam in January, because my ETS date was 21 September, I figured I'd be there for only nine months. However, in a scenario with which I was growing familiar, fortune struck again. I learned that if one were accepted to a college and the paperwork supported the request, a GI in Vietnam could apply for an early out for school for as much as three months. I learned about this very important policy only after being in-country for several months. I immediately wrote to Father Barry McGannon, Dean of Students at St. Louis University, and asked for a summer class schedule and a reapplication form. With the course work I had at Georgetown University the previous year, all I needed to graduate from SLU were two classes. Father McGannon took a personal interest in my case, expediting all the paperwork and waiving the deadline that had already passed. Because summer school classes began a week before I could be discharged from the army, Father McGannon suggested that Susan, already a student at SLU, take notes for me during that first week. By the third week in May, the army approved my request. My new ETS date was 21 June 1969, exactly one year and nine months after my induction date. I was ecstatic. In one more month I would be free. Never before had I thirsted so much for freedom. I would never again take it for granted.

The euphoria was temporarily shattered by the death of a comrade. It was a late Sunday afternoon, a day of leisure and I was on my bunk recording a taped message home to Mom wishing her a happy Mother's Day. I was communicating the good news of my impending early out and also the fact that I was to receive the Army Commendation Medal, an award which for many American soldiers in Vietnam was a perfunctory recognition that the recipient simply did his job without rancor or an Article Four conviction. For me, the medal was tantamount to collegiate grade inflation, an inexpensive way for the brass to build some sense of morale in a war that was increasingly looking like a military cul de sac. As I was doing my recording, I could hear the 105mm batteries at Bear Cat opening up. I was sure that Mom would hear the noise in the background and reassured her that it was merely a salvo of outgoing ordnance. When I finished the taping, I walked over to headquarters and asked the orderly what all the commotion was. He divulged from his information conduit – really a mix of gossip, speculation, and shreds of actual intelligence from the bamboo pipeline – that the area Viet Cong were mobilizing for some kind of a demonstration to celebrate the birthday of Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese president who four months hence would die of natural causes. I shrugged wistfully and returned to my bunk to read the final chapter of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead," a gift from our lone hippie when he left the 165th for a reassignment to I Corps near the DMZ. "Olie" Olson had left about two months earlier and I had suspected that it was because he incurred the ire of the brass for his rather conspicuous display of peace signs, beads and long hair. There wasn't much marijuana use among the men of my hooch but, for those who were tookers, I suspected that this soldier was their supplier. I finished the book that night and, after eating in the mess and playing a game of poker, turned in. I fell into a deep sleep.

I awoke suddenly to a thunderous roar and with a blast which catapulted me out of my bunk. My first thought was that I had been hit by lightning. However, with flying sparks of shrapnel smashing through the plywood walls and ricocheting about, I knew instantly we were under attack. In the darkness everyone instinctively ran to the hooch door facing the wooden walkway closest to the large corrugated steel cylindrical bunker encased in sandbags. We wore nothing but our olive green boxer shorts and we all hit the door at the same time. The impact of nearly twenty GI's was sufficient to knock the door off its hinges and the entire façade seemed to give way, ripping nails and screws from their moorings. Those of us in the back had to retreat momentarily to permit an efficient exit. I was actually laughing and I could hear others uttering a similar response. Granted it was nervous laughter. Pounding hearts and surging adrenaline levels more accurately represented our endorphin states – but still there was laughter. I cannot speak for the rest but, for me, it was the recognition that we had all been suddenly transformed into herd animals with none of the macho bullshit which passes for courage. Rather it was collective terror. Our guard was down and we were all behaving like frightened beasts and this is what seemed humorous at the time. Looking back on the event, some thirty-four years later, the scene appears surrealistic.

We sprinted to the reinforced bunker while incoming rockets intermittently exploded. Because my bunk was at the opposite end of the hooch exit, I was the last from our hooch to enter the bunker. It was already filled to capacity with the boys from the entire company. All were sitting nervously on two parallel benches facing each other in the dark, all barefoot and in shorts. The atmosphere was heavy, hot, and stuffy with the strong sense of sweat and body odor. In only the second time since a child, I was suddenly overtaken by a sense of claustrophobic nausea and I worked my way out into the fresh air as comrades from more remote hooches tried to pile in. I knelt at the entrance, somewhat protected by the sandbagged parapet abutting the edifice. I breathed in the fresh air and regained my composure. As men were continuing to squeeze in, I saw in the partially illuminated night a fully uniformed sergeant rushing the opposite direction, yelling out for help. He yelled that there were some casualties. I arose and ran after him, thinking of giving a hand. We entered the hooch next to the outdoor theatre and water tank. In the erratic motion of flashlight illumination, I could see several injured men being helped out the opposite door where the ambulance driver, a Mormon friend from Utah, was at the wheel. Then I approached a bed at the far left. The top bunk was empty, its mattress and sheets ripped into shreds. On the bottom bunk was the contorted form of John Love, our occasional poker companion with the Scottish brogue and the eye for the photographs on my wall. A desperate effort was being made by a corpsman to stabilize him for the ambulance ride to the --- Medivac Hospital. Blood seemed to be pouring out of his body faster than the beer was running out of the midget refrigerator by his bed. Overhead was a poster of the Sacred Heart of Jesus – the face perforated and the heart pierced yet again. On the floor, blood and beer ran in rivulets about our bare feet. He was promptly evacuated with the other wounded and the rest of us returned to the bunker. I can't recall how long it was but, after an interval when the rocket attack seemed to have subsided, the Mormon ambulance driver approached us and told us that John Love had died before he ever reached the hospital. A Chinese-made 140mm rocket had scored a direct hit, smashing through the metal roof of John's hooch. Fortunately for John's bunkmate, he was at that very moment returning from R&R and, had the attack had occurred a day later, would likely have shared John's fate.

Heavy monsoon rains suddenly began to fall and the rocket attack ended as abruptly as it had begun. Except for a small group considering the possibility of a renewed attack, most of us returned to our hooches. As we slowly reentered the building, we kept the lights off to make it more difficult for VC on the perimeter to sight and align their rocket launchers to us. The din from the rains pounding against our metallic roof nearly drowned out the voice of one of our number. It sounded like Bob Lacosta but it was too dark to know for certain. The speaker reminded us that torrential rains fell immediately after the death of Christ. We were all stunned and eager for analogy, so this comment met with our approval. In the flicker of a cigarette lighter I could see some of us nodding.

No one was in the mood for bed. No one wanted to die alone in a bed like John. We began to sit on the plywood floor in the middle of the hooch or on the sides of nearby bunks. A rough circle began to form. In the light of a candle that we were careful to hold to the floor, we began a discussion which I will never forget. The conversation began with our poker group and it began quietly. Soon everyone in the hooch left their beds to join the conversation, a few talking and most listening. It was not long before the talk grew to such intensity that even the thunder outside, indistinguishable from the occasional artillery salvos from Bear Cat, did not interrupt us. We spoke of wives and lovers, of parents and hometown haunts. I had heard many of the stories before but now the telling possessed more urgency and depth. It was as if we wanted our stories told so they could outlive us. We had to speak loudly to be heard over the downpour.

We reminisced about John and tried to understand the meaning of his leaving us. We tried to imagine what an afterlife would be like. We spoke of free will and bad luck. We explored the purpose of pain and evil in the world and we acknowledged the injustice of death. This was a pretty sophisticated group in my midst. I never imaged that these carefree and reckless souls could ever be so serious. While sitting there discussing John Love's life, I could not help remembering the bullsession that I had in our Walsh Hall dorm room when we heard of Ben Guthrie's highway death in late 1965. Because Ben had been killed with his girlfriend after a weekend together in the Ozarks, one of our number had questioned whether God would punish him in the afterlife. I must have grown because the question seemed to deserve an answer four years earlier. Not now. It was as if God were required to offer some explanation for all death.

Now in our Long Binh hooch, there was no agenda, thoughts and feelings haphazardly intermeshing, sometimes in randomly flowing verbage and sometimes in profoundly moving testimonials. I remember someone spoke of his sister's out-of-body experience while on the operating table and another told the story of an aunt who late one night saw her husband standing in the doorway at the moment his ship was sunk by a Japanese torpedo. Then someone told a joke about a naked cheerleader standing in the doorway and the resulting laughter was louder than the story deserved. We were clinging to levity no matter how banal. Some, I could fathom from the intonations, seemed to be laughing and weeping at the same time.

Soon Roland Renee and Glen Poppinga left their hooch nextdoor to join us. As the bull session grew in emotional intensity, other GI's whose voices were not familiar to us joined in. The candlelight was now augmented by popping cigarette lighters and the occasional luminescence of parachute flares descending in the distance around the perimeter. The frankness with which we admitted our fears and the candor with which we spoke of disappointments in life and love's dramas had a leveling effect, sealing us even more compactly into a band of brothers. The experience, I concluded, helped us to better understand the psychological components of the conflict and John's death deepened that awareness. We could with greater insight, I thought, appreciate the value of camradship, group loyalty and personal responsibility.

I told the group that our assembly reminded me of a late medieval book I had once read, a book by Giovanni Boccacio called "The Decameron." It concerned a group of young men and women who had left the city of Florence for a hideout in the countryside to escape the ravages of the Black Death. Like Chaucer's "Canterbery Tales, each of the men and women told a story to while away the time. I told everyone present that none of us would probably ever forget this night. I told them that we could refer to it as our Vietnam Decameron.

I'll never forget the dimly lit faces around the candle that night. My great regret is that I never kept a journal during these years. Already the ravages of time are assaulting my memory. The names are beginning to fade but not the faces. Many years later, after reading a book by Czech writer Milan Kundara, I made a trip to Washington DC with my wife and our three young sons. We were going to visit the Vietnam Wall. Kundara claimed in his novella that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetfulness. As we walked toward the wall from the Lincoln Memorial, I could not help but think that I had already forgotten too much. When it comes to war, I believe we are all anesthetized to its reality by the stupor of romantic myth and the imperfect programming of our genetic codes. We become lethargic and forgetful.

At the wall I discovered to my dismay that John Love's name appeared twice – two men by the same name killed in the same month. Because I could not remember his middle name or his exact date of death, I felt that something important was lost to me when I touched the two names on the polished black basalt. My wife, who had participated in several antiwar demonstrations at her medical school while I was in Nam, wept when she thought of the boys in her high school whose names were on the wall. Our three boys, observing the emotion overtaking both parents, remained silent.

Written by William L. Andrews in the Tennessee Law Review, Volume 19, 1946, Page 372:

Res Ipsa Loquitur in X-ray Injuries

In a leading Tennessee case a physician administered X-ray treatments to a tumor patient for a period of more than six years. A total of 161 treatments were given, each dosage being of the same quantity, quality, and intensity. No apparent injury developed from any of the first 160 treatments, but the 161st treatment resulted in third degree burns of the patient's abdomen. The patient died after the commencement of an action against the physician. The immediate cause of death was attributed to appendicitis. The burned tissue of the patient's abdomen made an operation impossible. The defense interposed was the supersensitiveness of the patient to the X-ray. There was evidence to the effect that some patients are more susceptible to burns than other patients under similar conditions. The lower court directed a verdict for the defendant.

Held: Reversed, and cause remanded for another trial. The doctrine of res ipsa loquitur is applicable where the operation of the X-ray machine is under the exclusive control of a physician. Under the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur there was sufficient evidence to carry the case to the jury.

In stating the general conditions under which the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur applies, the court said, in a later decision in the same case, that the doctrine is applicable if the instrument that produced the injury was under the exclusive control of the defendant, and injury would not ordinarily result if due care was exercised.2The same position was taken in the Missouri case Evans v. Clapp3, holding the res ipsa loquitur doctrine applicable to X-ray burn cases. The court there said, "X-ray examinations, when carefully and properly made, do not produce burns; hence when a burn is produced, this fact is of itself some evidence from which the jury may find theat the degree of care and skill ordinarily exercised by persons of like professions, and using such agencies, was not exercised in that particular case."4

The courts, however, are not in accord in applying the res ipsa loquitur doctrine to X-ray burn injury cases, and many courts have refused to apply the doctrine.5 The reason generally assigned for refusing to apply the doctrine in X-ray burn cases, is that it does not take into account the idiosyncrasy of the patient to the X-ray, which is occasionally responsible for the burn. These courts support the contention that an X-ray burn may well occur, even though proper care is exercised by the defendant, and that the mere fact of the plintiff's injury should not give rise to any inference of negligence. ....

"...The application of the doctrine does not affect the general rule

that, where the evidence is so clear and convincing that reasonable minds would not differ in their conclusions therefrom, and there is no other material evidence to the contrary, the question of the defendant's negligence is then for the court and not for the jury; and hence, if the defendant's explanation establishes the absence of negligence so clearly as to leave no substantial conflict in the testimony, or issuable fact for the jury to pass on the presumption will be overcome as a matter of law."10

W.L.A.

_____________

William L. Andrews' favorite poem is "In School Days" by John Greenleaf Whittier.

When he happened to notice his son John reading a biography of Goerta, he mentioned that he liked, and both he and John knew from memory, Goerta's poem that went, "If I once the whole world could see, on free soil stand and the people free; thence to the moment I would say, linger awhile, how fair thou art."

[CONTINUED TO GRANDSON DOMINIC LADEMAN]

TIMELINE
William Lafayette Andrews, Jr

Birth
4 Oct 1916 At his parents' home on Limestone Avenue in Lewisburg, Tennessee. He was always called "William" by his mother and sister, and "Andy" by his wife (from their Army days). Dad was born in 1916 to William Lafayette Andrews and Stella Simpson in the small rural town of Lewisburg, about fifty miles south of Nashville.

1918
Age 2 — Second Birthday
October 4, 1918 Birthday Post Card from Katherine Wallace October 4, 1918, Lewisburg, Tennessee. Master William L. Andrews, Jr. City c/o WL Andrews My dear little boy, Today the 4th is your second year birthday and may it be a happy one for you, mother, daddy and little sister is my wish to you, all. Katherine Wallace.

1919
Age 3 — Illness
Lewisburg, Tennessee- Dad had a serious disease when very young and had to learn to walk all over again because of it. He had to have a couple of operations and his mother accompanied him to St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville but his father was busy at the store and unable to accompany him. (His father had stores in Silver Creek, in Verona and on the square in Lewisburg.)

1920
Age 4 — Census
Lewisburg: Census. Dad's Aunt Lou Bascum told Mom that when Dad 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. Comments about Growing up with Sister Sara: 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.

1920
Age 4 — Illness
Lewisburg - Dad had to have a hernia operation when he was about four years old and then at five or six he had a glandular problem that also required an operation. As a result he had to learn to walk over again. He recalls having a sheepskin rug that he learned to walk on. Dr. Logan in Lewisburg, Tennessee was his doctor who thought he had hodgkins disease. Another of his later doctors, Dr. Zukos, thought that it could not have been hodgkins disease because "he would no longer be with us if it were."

1920
Age 4 — Residence
Lewisburg, Marshall, Tennessee - WL Andrews, Jr. - It seems to me that some of the Simpsons originally came from Cullyoka. I may be wrong about this. You know, the old Sunny Webb school used to be at Cullyoka. Price-Webb school up here, that's where Sara & I first started to school & I went thru the 4th grade I think before the school burned.

Age 5 — Education
About 1921 Lewisburg Tennessee - He attended Price Webb School in Lewisburg through 3rd grade when the school burned down. "The school burned over here where Connelly School used to be, Price Webb School, a private boys school. Constitutionally now you couldn't do that – have a boys school and a girls school separate. Dumbest thing I've ever heard of."

Age 8 — Death of father William Lafayette (known as W.L. or Will) Andrews Sr.(1881–1924) December 21, 1924 Lewisburg, Tennessee at Doctor Wheat's hospital

Age 8 — Father's death
1924 Lewisburg, Tennessee - Daddy told Michael Mangan that, after his father's death when he was nine years old in Pulaski someone took him to the courthouse to show him a black man hanging dead from the chandelier. Son Bill: Dad lost his father at the tender age of eight and was raised thereafter by his mother and a sister, my Aunt Sara, who was eight years his senior

1925
Age 9 — Residence
1925 Pulaski, Giles, Tennessee, USA
"Moved In the fall of 1925 I guess in the summer, stayed a year then Sara went to Ward Belmont and I started out at Peabody Demonstration School for two years in Nashville."

Age 10 — Move to Nashville
1926 From Pulaski the family then moved to Nashville and for two years Daddy attended Peabody Demonstration School where the old gym on the Vanderbilt University campus is. The family then moved to Oakland Avenue in Nashville and he had to transfer to Calvert School for part of the 7th grade and then Clement School for 8th Grade, then attending Hume Fogg High for a year and 1/2 where he was vice-president of the Astronomy Club of which Dina Shore was a member. Dina went on to be a famous singer and actress.

Age 10 — Residence
1926 Nashville, Davidson, Tennessee, USA - We moved out on Oakland. when I was eleven in 1928. 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. We lived there for two years, 1926.

Age 11 — Childhood Playmate
1927 As a young boy in Nashville, WLA played with Louise Sykes, the niece of General Frank Maxwell Andrews. The general's father's letter said the family is related to Bishop Lancelot Andrews. The family is also related to Tennessee Williams on the Lanier side.
Daddy told me about a friend (from Nashville?) named (Dick?) Sinclair who was killed by a sniper on one of the Pacific islands. Daddy seemed to have been close to him as a boy or young adult. Is this the person you mean? David.

Age 13 — Piano
1930s
He taught himself to play the piano at an early age, played almost daily throughout his life and loved music. His son John Early and grandson John Patrick Andrews also loved to play the piano.

Age 14 — Census
1930 Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee
Bill: Unlike many of their generation, neither of my parents was much affected in the quality of their lives by the Great Depression.

Age 14 — Education
1930 Dad was southern to the core, educated in private schools and raised under a chivalric ethic that esteemed civility and courteousness, reserve and restraint. He started grade school at Peabody Demonstration School in Nashville and after his first year of High School at Hume Fogg, attended Duncan School on the Vanderbilt Campus. After High School he attended Davidson College in North Carolina his first year of College and then transferred to Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Age 14 — Residence
1930 2404 Oakland Avenue, Nashville, Tennessee 37212

Age 16 — High School- Hume Fogg
About 1932 As a child my father attended Duncan Latin Grammer School & Hume-Fogg in Nashville. In high school at Hume-Fogg, Dad's favorite course was an astronomy class in which the teacher encouraged the students to make their own reflector telescope. His instrument had a 6-inch mirror with lenses sufficiently powerful to reveal the rings of Saturn. Fellow student, singer Diana Shore, was in his class.

Age 18 — Graduation
June 1935 Graduated from Duncan Preparatory School on the Vanderbilt Campus
Did you just get real interested in philosophy & 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. Philosophy just seemed more reasonable to me than anything else.

Age 19 — Residence
1935 Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee
2404 Oakland Avenue

Age 19 — Education
September 1936 Davidson, NC - in his first year in college at Davidson in North Carolina, the highlight of his spring semester was a trip he took with a friend hitch-hiking to South Carolina. There he met an old African-American woman who proudly informed him that, when she was a young girl she stood in a crowd listening to a speech given by John C Calhoun the great southern fire-eating apologist for slavery whose stand on state's rights portended secession and Civil War. In his sophomore year, Dad returned to Vanderbilt.

Age 20 — Education
1936 In his first year in college at Davidson the highlight of his spring semester was a trip he took with a friend hitch-hiking to South Carolina. There he met an old African-American woman who proudly informed him that, when she was a young girl, she stood in a crowd of people listening to John C Calhoun speak, the great southern fire-eating apologist for slavery whose stand on state's rights portended secession and Civil War.

Age 21 — FRATURNITY - VANDERBILT
1937 Nashville, Tennessee
Sigma Nu Fraternity at Vanderbilt University - Mr. William Lafayette Andrews Sigma 0466

Age 21 — Education
1937 In his sophomore year, Dad returned to Nashville where he attended Vanderbilt University. There he could often be found on the campus tennis courts where he brandished a Write-Didson racquet and sported a wicked backhand. Although much of his social life centered on his Vanderbilt fraternity, Sigma Nu, he took his studies seriously and reaped the rewards in stellar grades.

Age 21 — Academic Interests
1937 I was more interested in law not because of the profession, but more on the philosophical part of it. 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. 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!

Age 22 — Residence
1938 Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee
Student - 2404 Oakland Avenue

Age 23 — Residence
1939 Nashville, Tennessee
2404 Oakland Avenue - Student Vanderbilt University

Age 23 — Graduation
June 12, 1940 B.A. Vanderbilt University - member of Sigma Nu Fraternity at Vanderbilt University - Mr. William Lafayette Andrews Sigma 0466 Waverly Dunning told his son John that a friend of hers was dating Paul Harris and she wanted a date with Daddy, so they doubled. Daddy was at Vanderbilt at the time and spent his summers on the farm.

Age 23 — Law School
September 1940 Bill: Toward the end of the Great Depression, he entered Vanderbilt Law School where he displayed enthusiasm for FDR's New Deal programs and sympathized with the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War. The world of the Andrews was thoroughly WASP and they moved in a social milieu that would have appeared alien to my mother

Age 24 — Military Service
October 1940 President Roosevelt by lot pulled draft number 158, Dad's number, and he was the first man from Nashville drafted into the Army from Nashville. He was discharged as a captain (with flight training, then time in Judge Advocate General corps.)

Age 24 — Census
1940 Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee
Ward 24

Age 24 — Religion
1940
Dad is a native Tennessean who was raised Methodist but who discovered Emersonian transcendentalism in college and, to this day, carries on a lively flirtation with the Unitarian take on the world.

Age 24 — Military Induction, Sworn in at Ft. Ogelthorpe
July 17, 1941 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 semester [11 hours (4 Media) shy of finishing law school when he entered the army. "The drawing was in October 1940 – I had started back to school before they called me and they let me finish that whole semester, which took me down to June. So, I didn't really go in until July 16th."

Age 24 — Army - Basic Training
July 1941 Camp Lee, Virginia
Dad received his basic training at Camp Lee, Virginia, and advanced training at Camp Barkley, Texas eleven miles southwest of Abilene.

Age 24 — Army - Advanced Individual Training
September 1941 Camp Barkeley, Texas
Camp Barkeley was a large United States Army training installation during World War II. The base was located eleven miles southwest of Abilene, Texas near what is now Dyess Air Force Base.

Age 25 — Military Service - Officer's Candidate School
January 1942 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...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.

Age 25 — Opening Hospital in Ohio
July 1942 about Lockburn, Ohio - I went to Lockburn, Ohio. I was up there, it was a glider school, and I was at the hospital and opened it up there and we were getting it ready for…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.

Age 26 — Military Service - Stuttgart, Arkansas (Meets Future Wife)
October 1942 about 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 summer of 1943 & began basic training at Montgomery Field Alabama in January 1944. She was sent to the main hospital at Stutgart Army Air Corps Base in Arkansas's rice & duck hunting country. The 1940 draft that snared my dad was the first peacetime draft

Age 27 — Military Service - Pilots Training
1943 San Antonio - In late 1943 Dad 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.

Age 27 — 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. As death approached him during late May 2005, it was still unclear whether he had embraced the Catholic faith, or any faith.

Age 27 — Military Service - Pilots Training Incident
January 1944 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 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

Age 27 — Military Service - Hospital Administration
February 1944 I find it interesting to speculate that if my father has 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 asked to assist in a court marshall case where he had to work as an assistant defense counsel for a homesick soldier who had gotten drunk and stolen a plane for a flight home. Officers in the judge advocate division prevailed upon Dad to help in the case.

Age 28 — 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 hostel to her. Despite that, her husband appeared to have primary allegiance to his mother and sister.

Age 28 — Army Legal Work
1944 Dad successfully represented a soldier in a court marshall proceeding after the soldier took a plane home to visit his parents. William Andrews is not aggressive & that helped with the jury (officers) according to Mom. To this day Mom claims that it was because Dad did not like the contentious nature of law practice & even Dad admits that his distaste for law stemmed much from its proclivity to win cases rather than seek truth. To this day I don't believe Dad regrets his decision to eschew a law career.

Age 28 — Residence
1944 U S Army - 2404 Oakland Ave. - Transfer to Stuttgart Ar about 1942 - 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….

Age 28 — Wife Leaving Army and Transfer to Exler Field
January 1945 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, hypocracy enhanced by less than a warm reception from Dad's Mom and sister-Mom considered herself more urbane, elitist, and some snobbish condescension over Lewisburg folk; Dad knew he was bright, enjoyed socializing more than Mom with his people.

Age 28 — Civilian Life after the Army
February 1945 about 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.

Age 29 — Children - Seven
November 14, 1945
Bill first born in 1945 - Dad always said he felt the older children, Bill, John, Joan and Susan were Mom's and the later children, David and Miriam, were his. Susan always had great need for money and spent freely.

Age 29 — Dad and the Farm
December 1945 Lewisburg, TN - Son John recalls that he never felt more at home than on the farm in Lewisburg. It was always the most wonderful place in the world and he has fond memories of walking in the fields and woods as an adult with his father discussing history, philosophy and politics. He fondly recalls watching Washington Week in Review & Wall Street Week with his father as the sun set on the farm.

Age 29 — Occupation
1945
Work Career: Left Army late 1945 as captain; finished Law School; AT&T Rate Department 1947 to abt 1951; teacher September 1955 through June 1974 retirement, with one year at Peabody College for teaching classes about 1963.

Age 29 — Move to Knoxville
January 1946 Knoxville Tennessee - to finish his last 11 hours of law school at the University of Tennessee, Vanderbilt University no having reopened yet after the war. 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.

Age 29 — Civilian Life
January 1946 about 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.

Age 29 — Military Discharge from Active Duty
January 1946 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 [semester] 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.

Age 29 — Law Review University of Tennessee
January 1946

Age 29 — Graduation
August 3, 1946 L.L.B. University of Tennessee (did all but 11 hrs toward law degree at Vanderbilt Attended Law School at Vanderbilt University and was drafted 11 hours short of graduating. Vanderbilt had not reopened immediately after the war and he had to finish his law degree at the University of Tennessee.

Age 29 — Auding Law Courses at Vanderbilt in Preparation for Bar Exam
September 1946 Nashville, Tennessee through December 1946

Age 29 — Residence
September 1946 Nashville, Tennessee
Oakland Avenue-With a law degree under his belt in Sept of 1946, Dad moved Mom & me to Nashville. As was typical across the country, housing was in short supply after the war, we were forced to live with Grandmother Andrews and Aunt Sara for several months

Age 30 — Residence
November 1946 Nashville, TN - Bill: 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 by not coming to Mom's defense. 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

Age 30 — Tennessee Bar Exam
January 16, 1947 Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee - Son Bill: 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.

Age 30 — Birth of son John Early Andrews(1947–2022)
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 30 — Occupation
January 1947 Nashville, Davidson Co., TN
After passing the bar exam, he was in a law office and left before his job interview after deciding he did not want to practice law. Took the 2nd day of the Tennessee bar exam on the day his son John was born.

Age 30 — Law Practice
February 1947 Nashville, Davidson Co., TN
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 & working, & tensions began to grow between Mom & her in-laws.

Age 30 — Occupation
February 1947 Nashville TN - Started work in the Rates Department of American Telephone and Telegraph Company. 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 seek truth. To this day, I don't believe Dad regrets his decision to eschew law as a career.

Age 30 — First Home Purchase / Xfer of Bank Building & Pharmacy to Mother
March 1947 Stokes Lane, Nashville, Tennessee: David - Do you know what year it was or have a story from that time? It was probably 1949 before we moved to Atlanta. I have memories of Stokes Lane and remember one Saturday seeing Daddy about to go out the door, to work I presumed, with his dress hat on, looking at a baseball game on TV before going out the door. We must have had a TV which was unusual. This is my only memory of Dad before moving from Detroit to the farm at 6.

Age 30 — Temporary Strike Break Duty in Pulaski with AT&T
April 1947 Pulaski, Giles, Tennessee, USA

Age 31 — Residence
1947 Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee
Attorney, SBT&TCo (Southern Bell Telephone & Telegraph Company); home 1616 Stokes lane

Age 31 — 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 32 — Residence
1948 Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee
Clk, Bell Tel Home 1616 Stokes Lane

Age 32 — Birth of daughter Susan Catherine Andrews(1949–)
30 Apr 1949 St. Thomas Hospital, Nashville, Tennessee (birth Certificate has Jean as her middle name)

Age 33 — Residence
1949 Nashville, Davidson Co., TN
John remembers very little of his father before the farm. He recalls his father sitting, wearing a men's dress hat, in front of a television set next to the front door with a baseball game on one Saturday in either Nashville or Atlanta just before going out to work.

Age 33 — Marital Separation - 3 Years
January 1950 Lewisburg Tennessee
Wife and children left for Detroit in January 1950, he continued working in Atlanta for AT&T for two more months, leaving April 1, 1950 for his father's farm in Lewisburg until the family reunited on the farm in Lewisburg during August 1953.

Farm House Floors and Separation
From: [email protected]
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2022 9:15 PM
Sue: What kind of floor was in the farmhouse when your parents lived there, and you all?

John: Wood planks with linoleum in the kitchen.

Sue: Why planks instead of a hard wood floor?

John: It may have been grooved, but I don't remember too well. I think the flooring in the upstairs that was torn up to put in electricity was grooved, so the downstairs probably was also, but I don't remember. Why?

Sue Dirt floor!!!

John: What?

Sue: Talking with poppy. He thought dirt floor!
Sue. Poppy thought you had a dirt floor. But he thinks maybe your dad told him that it was a dirt floor when he moved in, and then he had a real floor put in. Could that be right?

John: No, I don't think that's right. All he put in was a bathroom and the outhouse was moved.to Sally and Milton's. When I asked him about the separation, he said that Mama and us went to Detroit while he put in the bathroom. I couldn't believe that took three years, but I think he was embarrassed about the separation and was trying to make me think it was only a few months.

Sue: Ah, that's sad.

Age 33 — Residence
January 1950 about Scotts Circle, Decatur, Georgia -He hated the rat race and the idea of materialistic ambition. He also appeared a little afraid of the world. American Telephone and Telegraph Company transferred Daddy to Atlanta and after a year he resigned to return to the farm in Lewisburg while his family returned to Detroit while he fixed up the farm.

Age 33 — Avocation
1950s Lewisburg, Tennessee
Dad repaired old televisions and could fix anything he put his hands on. He had an amazing ability with electronics despite having no training in electronics. He could repair radios and televisions easily and enjoyed building anything electronic.

Age 34 — Name
1950 Lewisburg, Tennessee
Aunt Sara and grandmother called Daddy "William" exclusively while Mama called him either "Andy" as a result of their Army days together, or "Daddy". Sally and Milton always called him, "Mr. William".

Age 34 — Residence
1950 Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee
Lawyer - home 1616 Stokes Lane. 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 ...

Age 34 — Marital Separation
February 1951 Atlanta, Georgia
Son Bill - 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.

Age 34 — Quitting Work and Unemployment
April 1, 1951 Atlanta, GA - Left AT&T and didn't work for the next three or four years. Joan: I remember when Daddy came and he was a stranger. You boys said it's our Daddy. I said no, Gampa's our Daddy. I remember in Detroit that Daddy came and was there a few days and I would say something and he's twist it and I'd say it was wrong. I knew he was doing this to play with him, and Daddy was surprised when I told him.

Age 34 — Residence
April 1, 1951 Phone number on the farm in Lewisburg, Tennessee during the 1950s was 187R
Daddy left his job with American Telephone & Telegraph in Atlanta & moved to the farm in Lewisburg while his family left for Detroit, raising Jersey milk cows for the next 10 years. They were back together on the farm three years later in August of 1953.

Age 34 — Return to Nashville
April 1951 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.

Age 35 — Tenant Farmers
1951 WLA's black tenant farmers were Milton & Sally Evans & their 12 children. When WLA's wife and their 4 children moved to the farm in 1954, they started drinking quite a bit of the milk leaving less to be sold on the market & subject to the sharing of profits meaning, although still doing all work, Sally and Milton were getting less from profit sharing. Milton also worked at the foundry in town.

Age 36 — Military Discharge from Reserves
December 8, 1952 We lived in this bucolic setting of Knoxville until Dad got his 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. With a law degree under his belt, in 1946 Dad moved Mom & me to Nashville where he planned to study for the bar exam and look for look for a house. As was typical across the country, housing was in short supply after the war & we were forced to live with Grandmother Andrews and Aunt Sara.

Age 36 — Reunion with Family after over 2 1/2 years & Move to the farm
August 1953 Lewisburg, Tennessee, Franklin Road, two miles from the square.
We were here on Lewisburg farm because Mom and Dad reconciled after a nearly three year separation - why? Religion, in-laws criticism of our family size, Aunt Sara's hostility to Catholicism; incompatibility.

Age 36 — Religion
August 1953 Lewisburg, TN. Bill: 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.

Age 36 — Farm School
September 1953 The first year the family was together on the farm, W.L. Andrews attended farm school at night under the G.I. Bill and brought Bill and John to and from first grade at St. Catherine's School in Columbia during the day. Wheat was harvested from the "Corn Field" and oats from the field nearest town the following summer. This was the last time these crops were grown on the farm, corn and hay being grown thereafter. In the fall of 1955, W.L. Andrews began teaching 7th and 12th grades at Santa Fe School

Age 37 — Engagement Ring
1953 Lewisburg, Marshall Co., TN USA - Mom did not know over all these years that Dad had given her engagement ring to Aunt Sara. Mom thinking they were so poor, gave Dad her engagement ring and asked him to sell it so she could buy school books for their children. 50 years later upon his sister Sara's death in 2002, the engagement ring was found among Aunt Sara's possessions.

Age 37 — Religious Conflict and reconciliation
1953 Atlanta & Nashville - Bill: 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.

Age 38 — Sons' Travel to St. Catherine's School
1954 Columbia, Tennessee
Dad didn't work the first year his family was at the farm and he started driving Bill and John to Columbia for school each day. Bit Hardison would pickup and deliver eggs to Columbia every morning so Dad asked him if we boys could ride to school with him.

Age 38 — Philosophy of life
1954 John asked Mom if Daddy was afraid of dying & she said no and thought it was because of their relationship. She said that before and just after we moved to the farm, Daddy always kept the doors locked and an ax next to the back door, but shortly thereafter he removed the ax and always kept the doors unlocked. Mama said that Daddy always had an affinity for money.

Age 38 — Politics
Spring 1954 Dad was still a liberal back in 1954, not yet jettisoning his high enthusiasm for New Deal activism or the crusading idealism of his student days at Vanderbilt University. Watching McCarthy hearings on TV, although I've often witnessed emotion in my dad, I've seldom seen the kind of affective disdain he reserved for McCarthy. Mom 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.

Age 38 — Occupation
1954 Santa Fe, Maury, Tennessee, USA
When his boys started second grade and the girls first grade, their father began teaching at Santa Fe School, 13 miles north of Columbia, a lady friend suggesting to him that rather than waiting in Columbia for school to end he apply for the Santa Fe job.

Age 40 — 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 42 — Occupation
1958 Belfast, Marshall, Tennessee, USA - Principal and 7th and 8th Grade Teacher at Belfast Elementary School While principal at Belfast Elementary School he set up a television on the auditorium stage and assembled all 8 grades there to watch Alan Shepard's and America's first manned space flight in the late afternoon of the fall of 1959

Age 43 — Birth of daughter Miriam Ann Andrews(1959–)
October 7, 1959 St. Thomas Hospital, Nashville, Tennessee at 12:01 a.m.

Age 43 — Sale of Michigan Drilling Company
1959 Detroit-Dad acted as Ganger's attorney in the sale of Michigan Drilling Company to his sister-in-law, Catherine Hargrave-Thomas Early for a token $70,000 and used the gratuity Ganger gave him to buy Voice-of-Music and other electronic equipment. While principal at Belfast Elementary School he set up a television on the auditorium stage and assembled all 8 grades there to watch Alan Shepard's and America's first manned space flight in the late afternoon of the fall of 1959.

Age 43 — Representing Ganger with Michigan Drilling Company
1959 Detroit -Dad loved music with a passion & played it almost constantly in the family farm house, falling to sleep with it at night, until later in life he began listening to talk radio through the night. Music probably sparked his interest in electronics. He used his fee for representing Ganger in the Michigan Drilling sale to buy music equipment.

Age 44 — Birth and death of son Joel Andrews(1960–1960)
1 Dec 1960 Farm House Kitchen in Lewisburg, Tennessee

Age 44 — Sale of Peoples & Union Bank Building
1960 about Lewisburg, Marshall County, Tennessee
When he sold the Peoples & Union Bank building on the square in Lewisburg, he didn't tell his wife. She was completely unaware of his business affairs.

Age 44 — Sons Start High School at Father Ryan
September 1961 Nashville - Daddy loved the farm as did Mom 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. During the years they lived in Nashville, the children loved spending every weekend and every summer on the farm. Dad & Joan stayed on farm next year when family moved to Nashville.

Age 47 — Residence
1963 1003 Tyne Boulevard, Nashville, Tn - Teacher Lipscomb School, Williamson County - Daddy reluctantly moved from the farm in Lewisburg after he and Joan stayed on the farm alone during the family's first year in Nashville. Niece Cathy Watts: Andy was a high school teacher. He was also a very accomplished pianist. He played by ear, in other words, he couldn't read music, but if he heard a melody he could play it ever so perfectly on the piano or the organ.

Age 49 — Son John's Draft Reclassification
September 1966 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 morning, his father knocked on the door to the dorm room shared with Bill to tell John he received a draft notice. He had travelled 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.

Age 52 — Son Bill's Return From Viet Nam
June 1969 Dad was as excited about the American moon landing as by my homecoming from Vietnam. We spent a lot of time with our father peering into the heavens. I remember him once pointing to Polaris and telling us that the light leaving that star takes over 600 years to reach our eyes. He said that, for all we knew, the North Star could have burned out some time ago.

Age 53 — Death of Mother / Transfer of Tyne House
June 7, 1970 Nashville - Mom felt that Dad had an obsession about his mother and sister and was crazy about them. After Dad died she began to realize that this obsession was probably the result of a need for security and 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 Mom as his wife.

Age 53 — Death of mother Stella Viola Simpson(1883–1970)
June 7, 1970 Nashville, TN - Grandson David: I don't remember Grandmother very well. Perhaps mostly from the silent home movies, she always seemed to be listening more than talking. Maybe Aunt Sara spoke for her. I do remember her bedridden. I remember being scared

Age 55 — Property
October 23, 1971 Nashville, Davidson, Tennessee, USA
4110 Lealand Lane - DEED FROM WILLIAM L. ANDREWS, JR., TO SARA ANDREWS B00K 4589 PAGE 174; MAP 132-1 PAR. 166 For and in consideration of the love and affection which I have for my sister,

Age 55 — Transfer of Home Inheritance to sister Sara
April 3, 1972 4110 Lealand Lane, Nashville, Tennessee
Dad transferred the interest in the Lealand home he inherited from his mother to his sister Sara. This home was purchased by grandson Glennon N. Andrews after Aunt Sara and Dad's death.

Age 55 — Retirement
June 1972 Williamson Cnty, TN - worked the election polls in Lewisburg for years after his retirement at about 56. Betty went to work as a nurse and retired in 1980, the weekend Bill Lademan visited the farm and proposed to daughter Joan. Retired from Lipscomb School after his wife decided to sell the family's Tyne Blvd. home and return to their farm in Lewisburg after she urged their son John to buy the Old Hillsboro farm with a loan to him from the proceeds of the home sale.

Age 58 — Son Bill's Wedding
December 31, 1974 St. Louis, Missouri - Washington University Medical School Chapel - I just want to tell you how beautiful your wedding was and how very grateful we are to God for guiding your paths together & letting them merge into one. It is truly wonderful dear Claudia to have you for our daughter. Bill, I am enclosing a copy of your poem written for us. It is a beautiful and tender thought. Any words I can think of seem so inadequate to describe our feelings when we read it. I think I felt the greatest lump in my throat

Age 58 — Son David's Time Capsule Found June 4, 2015
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 58 — Confirmation
February 23, 1975 Shelbyville, Tennessee
St. Williams Church - Confirmed by Bishop Durick with his youngest child Miriam

Age 60 — Death of First Grandchild
October 1976 Lewisburg, TN- After returning to the farm in Tennessee from Delaware the summer after his daughters stayed with their brother John and worked with horses at Delaware Park. In about 1977, Dad was called for jury duty in a aluminum smelter explosion that killed one person at Consolidated Aluminum Corporation in Columbia. The defense dismissed Dad when he told them he was a lawyer and his son was employed by the company.

Age 61 — Property
1977 Santa Fe, TN - $75,000 Purchase of 114 acre farm with Bill and Claudia buying the house on that farm and paying that portion of the mortgage. Money I got from the bank bldg sale is what I used to buy the Santa Fe farm. Bill and Claudia bought 1/3 and we bought 2/3s and so I paid $46,000. We made it even and they paid the $24,000, so that made the $70,000. I put $30,000 into it and I owed $16,000

Age 66 — Friendship
1982 Lewisburg, TN - Bill and Elizabeth sponsored me when I became Catholic in 1982 while living in Lewisburg. Your Dad both mystified and delighted me. He was a mans man but he was compassionate and intelligent. In the short time I was with him he taught me a lot about life and he is one of the reasons I'm blessed and successful in my professional life today. I will always remember him and pray for his family. Phillip Hamilton Senior Director Memorial Park Funeral Home, Memphis.

Age 67 — Surgery
1983 Maury County Hospital, Columbia, Tennessee
Dad suffered with a hernia for most of his life and he finally had it repaired at a time when his son John was able to return briefly from his job in Saudi Arabia.

Age 68 — 40th Wedding Anniversary
November 25, 1984 Lewisburg, TN - Son John recalls that he never felt more at home than on the farm in Lewisburg. It was always the most wonderful place in the world and he has fond memories of walking in the fields and woods as an adult with his father, discussing history, philosophy and politics. He fondly recalls watching Washington Week in Review and Wall Street Week with his father as the sun set on the farm, and then movies or documentaries selected by his father. It was the most wonderful and peaceful place on earth.

Age 68 — ANDREWS REUNION HEALD - LEWISBURG PAPER
1984 Summer Dave and Susan pictured above with their children of Newark, DE were home in Tennessee this past week for a Family Reunion. Susan is the daughter. Also enjoying a wonderful farm holiday were daughters Joan Andrews, Newark, DE & Miriam Lademan Annapolis, Drs. Bill and Claudia Andrews and children of Columbia.. The reunion was especially joyous since son John Andrews was home after 4 1/2 years in Saudi Arabia and son David Andrews was home after 2 years at the University of Bonn in West Germany.

Age 70 — 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 76 — Gift of Santa Fe Farm to Daughter
1992 David: [We] repeated so many times that we agreed not to look at gifts made before Daddy's stroke that it made me think for the first time about what a large and unequal gift the Santa Fe farm was. All of us had attachments to Santa Fe, mainly through Bill and Claudia. But there was great beauty there and many memories that I felt sharp loss over, especially the way it was given away and sold on the quick.

Age 76 — Chalet Construction on Farm
1992 Lewisburg, Marshall County, Tennessee - Daughter's construction of Chalet. Bill's comments:
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.

Age 78 — Wedding Anniversary
November 25, 1994 Lewisburg, Tennessee - 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..

Age 81 — Granddaughter's First Communion by Saint Pope John Paul II
1997 Rome, Italy
Maria Brindle

Age 82 — Family Reunion
1998 Farm, Lewisburg, Tennessee
Dad loved banana sandwiches and green pepper sandwiches, always salted his watermelon and cantaloupe, made welsh rarbit-a cheese fondu on toast-for the family and loved to bake bread and rolls. He told his children that he'd love to open a family restaurant.

Age 83 — Fifty-Fifth Wedding Anniversary
November 25, 1999 Lewisburg, Tennessee

Age 85 — Death of sister Sara Josephine "Sara Jo" Andrews(1908–2002)
June 12, 2002 Lewisburg, Marshall County, Tennessee

Age 86 — Daddy's Car Accident
2002 about Lewisburg, Marshall County, Tennessee - Bill: Daddy had a car accident a year or two before his stroke but Brenda [Haslip] told me yesterday that her son hit Daddy in the rain as Daddy was driving his car across 431 to go to the mailbox to get the mail. No one was hurt and because her son did not have his headlights on, it was judged to be his fault. No hard feelings though. Daddy never told me about this. Did you know? I guess this is why we moved the mailboxes to the other side of the road. Bill

Age 87 — Stroke (3:50 pm Wednesday)
June 30, 2004 Lewisburg, TN Mama called to say that Daddy just had a stroke, is paralyzed on his right side and an ambulance is taking him to the hospital. Bill said that if Daddy were to live in the condition he was in at that point he thought it would be better to let him die. John Lademan said that after his stroke he had had some of the most intellectually stimulating conversations with him, contrary to the recollection of others.

Age 87 — Move to Chalet
June 2004 Despite Dad's desire never to live in the Chalet, his daughter was paid a $30,000 a year salary in addition to food & lodging for her family & chore expense reimbursement (for mowing etc.) for his care. Mom characterized this as the most difficult year of her life. Following Dad's death a year later after his daughter spent 2 weeks in California during Dad's most difficult time & after Mom's move back to the farm house, it was hard to stop the salary.

Age 87 — Will
July 2004 Dad's stroke left him with severe comprehension difficulties, yet Susan had a will drawn up naming herself with Bill as executors and trustees, dividing the estate between Dad & Mom (with his prior death exceedingly likely, obviating estate tax need but imposing capital gains expense), & giving very valuable portions of the estate to herself & Miriam at the expense of the others, things that would have been anathema to Dad had he had comprehension & in light of his dedication to fairness and equity.

Age 87 — Will
August 4, 2004 Lewisburg, Tennessee - Division of Lewisburg Farm. son Bill had misspelled "coop" in an email to John and John's wife Sue Commented: I always thought that a chicken house was spelled "coop" and that a "coup" is overthrowing a government. It would be very upsetting if the chickens had a coup and took over the farm. If you think Susan is hard to deal with, try negotiating with poultry

Age 88 — Second Stroke
May 2005 Lewisburg, Marshall Co., TN USA TELEPHONE CALL FROM BILL TO JOHN 5/19/05 6:42 PM
Yeah, hi John, it's quarter to six our time, I guess it's quarter to seven your time. I just got your message, your email. I got back from Lewisburg and Daddy is a lot weaker pulse is spiking; Mom says you might want to think about coming down.

Age 88 — Residence
June 2, 2005 Lewisburg, TN IrishAyes - Father Ryan High School death announcement. Summer 2005 Volume XXV Number 3.IN MEMORIAM please pray for the following: WILLIAM ANDREWS father of Bill Andrews '64, John Andrews '65 and Miriam Andrews Lademan '77.
U.S. Public Records Index, Volume 1 about William L Andrews Name: William L Andrews Birth Date: 4 Oct 1916 Address: 1448 New Columbia Hwy, Lewisburg, TN, 37091-4530 (1993) Phone: 931-359-5018.

Age 88 — Death
June 2, 2005 Lewisburg TN farm Chalet at 1:15 am Thursday with children Joan, Susan, Miriam & David present, Bill having just left. About 2 weeks after second stroke (1st stroke 1 year earlier), the girls were turning Daddy onto his side when they noticed he had stopped breathing, so turned him on his back and didn't breathe for about 10 minutes then took a final breath and died.

Funeral
June 6. 2005 St John's Catholic Church, Lewisburg, Tennessee
Burial- 21 gun salute-Ma'am, this flag is presented as a token of the appreciation of the faithful, honorable service that your loved one has rendered this country. It is my privilege to present you this flag on behalf of the President of the United States
1 Media

Burial
June 6, 2005 Berlin, Marshall Co., TN - Andrews-Liggett Cemetery- April 27, 2006, Mom stated that a few weeks before his death Dad appeared to be feeling guilty about not telling his wife about their financial affairs and tried to tell her where their money was deposited but couldn't get it out because of his stroke, so they drove him around so that he might recognize what the bank looked like, but he couldn't.

Probate
2005 Lewisburg, Marshall County, Tennessee - On quick visit to courthouse, unable to determine owner of the Andrews property at the time of transfers of realty from property owners to the Louisville and Northern Railroad between the years 1911 through 1915 - 100 feet wide was being conveyed and the strip of land was "50' in width on each side of the centerline of the Louisville and Northern RR

Probate Closing
April 21, 2007 Lewisburg- Michael Boyd and Marshall Lile have both said that John has made their work so easy that they were on "auto-pilot." In fact, when I returned last week to check with the assessor of property, they told me that Michal Boyd had told them that John was one of the savviest and knowledgeable lawyers he had ever had the pleasure of knowing – and the two have never met. They only communicate by email and on conference calls with me.

Daughter Joan re Nobel Peace Prize
October 2009

Farm Division
February 2014 Lewisburg TN- David: I feel it's too late to make any positive emotional difference for Eli and Lydia. In some ways, seems to me the farm cost me my sisters. I just feel I'll have to live with the experience of their worst; the closer to the farm I get, the more ugly it seems - can't see things from any point of view than their own desire to get the most for her children

Interviews
Various Dates Dad loved nature. On more than one occasion he told me that, though truth can be divined from sacred scripture, God's greatest revelations come from nature because "that text is written in His own hand." This affection for the beauty and mystery of natural life made him appreciate the natural sciences because they attempted to quantify the cosmos, the Romantic poets because they glorified nature, and the American transcendentalists because they linked the life of the mind to the lessons learned from the symmetry of nature

Letters and Writings
Various Dates
Although he never wrote anything down (few letters), Dad had an eloquence of speech, expression and thought that was unusual, making it sad that he never wrote.

Description
Dad who grayed very early told his daughter-in Law Sue Andrews that it was an advantage because people who hadn't seen you for years would say you haven't changed a bit. Dad was just such a generous spirit. I've never heard him ever say a mean thing about anybody to their face or behind their face. I've never heard of that. I've never heard him use a single curse word in my whole life. I've never heard him use a profanity. Doesn't he remind us of Adicus Funch, the country lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird?

Description
Daddy disliked very much going along with the crowd. When his sons wanted to wear white socks during high school he thought they should do otherwise to show that they were doing something different. He wore bow ties for this reason-but wanted to be liked. Son David Andrews - My earliest interests in photography lie in my father¹s making of super-8 home movies and my mother's nearly religious snapping of Instamatics in the 60s.

Son John
John-I'm very grateful to my father for always having beautiful music playing in the kitchen (where we spent our time together) growing up & cultivating a love of music in me; for introducing us to great movies such as A.J. Cronin's Keys of the Kingdom with Gregory Peck & introducing me to the wonders of electronics. Bill-I remember thinking what a good brother John was. He was the most sensitive of my siblings the one who broke down & cried when in 1966 Milton our black sharecropper, and '71 Ganger died

Favorite Movie, Music and Hobbies
Dad's favorite movie of all times was Keys of the Kingdom by AJ Cronin. Dad had a personality and character similar to that of Fr. Chisom, the main character. It's hard to imagine conversing with anyone more enjoyable than WL Andrews. We loved him dearly.

Parents were opposites. Dad felt antipathy toward the work ethic & money, yet money meant a great deal to him &, although he spent on himself, since he never made much money, he hated having to spend money & made sure lights, stove, hot water heater & water pump were used as infrequently as possible. Mom was very generous with money & would have given away as much as she could, especially to the church. Poverty was a virtue, yet, due to her mother's aristocratic family & her father's wealth, some of her children might have felt that money signified success.

Social Security Number
415-44-7673

Personality
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. He loved philosophy and poetry and while teaching had his children and students study "In Memoriam" by Tenneyson, "The Raven", etc.

Religion
5/23/04: Mom said that after they married Daddy told her that he thought he could break her faith within a year, but he now knows that nothing could break her faith. As death approached him during late May 2005, it was still unclear whether he had embraced the Catholic faith, or any faith. He was raised Methodist but discovered Emersonian transcendentalism in college and, to this day, carries on a lively flirtation with the Unitarian take on the world.

Cousins
Dad-Orlando was my hero. David-Funny thinking back on those trips to Fairfield. Orlando and his family clearly loved Daddy, and me by extension. It's only now that I see the smiles and attention so clearly as more than the kind of bounded affection we had with Aunt Sara and Grandmother. I remember very clearly being nonplused and unable to recognize the way all that family came to see Daddy and me, and with such interest.

Closeness to Mother and Sister
Susan remembers how Daddy would get mad and squeeze our arms if we would try to defend Mama from the bad things Aunt Sara and Grandmother had said. As Aunt Sara & Grandmother were viciously deriding Mama with Dad and us there, while he said nothing in her defense as was his custom, daughter Susan, younger than 6, got up, walked out to their porch and Anna Lou Andrews came out, put her arms around Susan and said, pay no attention to your aunt & grandmother. Your mother is a good woman.

Dad and his Children
Lewisburg, TN-Daddy always said that he felt that the older children (Bill, John, Joan and Susan) were Mama's children and that the later children, David and Miriam were his. After a disagreement with his son John, in an attempt to make-up Dad went upstairs in the farm house and told John that he remembered John when he was little and it is almost as if that little boy is dead and he misses that little boy. He built a tree house for his children in a large elm tree at the spring.

Biography
Keys of the Kingdom: Son Bill- I love that movie; John - I do too! I can see why it was Daddy's favorite – Gregory Peck is so much like Daddy, and has so much of Daddy's character in the movie, that I can't watch it without being moved to constant tears.

Work History
Work Career: Left the Army in late 1945 as a captain
Finished last 11 hrs of Law School; AT&T Rate Department 1947 to abt 1951; teacher September 1955 through June 1974 retirement, with one year at Peabody College for teaching education about 1963.

Grandfather Nicholas
Son Bill named a son Glennon Nicholas Andrews after his great-grandfather and
Dad was so happy that his son John & his wife Sue had named their son Gerald Nicholas, with Nicholas for his grandfather Nicholas Green Andrews. Dad said his grandfather was never angry or yelled, was very kind & close to him.

Love of Astronomy
Astronomy was one of his many loves, and he tried to instill that affection in his children. One Christmas he gave us a plastic pin-hole planetarium from which we learned the names and configurations of the major constellations

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY HISTORY PAPER BY William Lafayette Andrews, Jr., MARCH 8, 1939

"PROPAGANDA AND PRESS OPINION ON SLAVERY"

Propaganda has played an important role in inciting the animosity of factions of opposing forces in all wars. It played just as important a part in arousing tempers in the South and North prior to and during the Civil afar. This temper in the North was due directly to the propaganda ex-pounded by writers and publishers concerning slavery and social conditions effected therefrom in the South. The temper in the South was due largely to resentment of this propaganda.

The attack on slavery became a war on a section and its way of life. "Slavery was imagined, not investigated. Southern people and Southern life were distorted into forms best suited to purposes of propaganda. Church, political party, and State were drawn in as agents of a crusade declared to be launched in the name of morality and democracy."*

The machinery of attack ranged from local and national organizations, publications of every kind from newspapers to 'best sellers', to traveling preachers and missionary bands and organized legislative lobbies. It appealed mostly to the emotions. It made abolition and morality the same thing and it impressed two ideas on the northern mind, namely, that the Southerner was "an aristocrat, an enemy of democracy in society and government, and that slave-holders were men of violent and uncontrolled passions--intemperate, licentious, and brutal." * These northern organizations taught that the South was divided into two classes, slave-holders and poor whites. The slave-holders were said to completely control the section and had as their purpose the rule or ruin of the nation.

In one pamphlet circulated in the North, the writer spoke of the "savage ferocity" of Southern men. He says that their savage nature is the result of their habit of plundering and oppressing the slave. He tells of "perpetual idleness broken only by brutal cock-fights, gander-pullings, and horse races so barbarous in character that 'the blood of the tortured animal drips from the lash and flies at every leap from the stroke of the rowel.' "

Another article declared that thousands of slave women are given up as prey to the lusts of their masters. One writer stated that the South was full of mulattoes; that its best blood flowed in the veins of its slaves.

The final conclusion was stated by Theodore Parker in 1851 when he wrote: "The South, in the main, had a. very different origin from the North. I think few if any persons settled there for religious reasons, or for the sake of the freedom of the State. It was not a moral idea which sent men to Virginia, Georgia, or Carolina. 'Men do not gather grapes of thorns.' The difference in the seed will appear in difference of the crop. In the character of the people of the North and South, it appears at this day….. Here, now, is the great cause of the difference in the material results, represented in towns and villages, by farms and factories, ships and shops; here lies the cause of the differences in the schools and colleges, churches, and in the literature; the cause of difference in men themselves. The South with its despotic idea, dishonors labor, but wishes to compromise between its idleness and its appetite, and so kidnaps men to do the work."

On a July day in 1861 the New York Herald carried the story of Southern atrocities committed on the battle field at Bull Run. It told of a private in the First Connecticut regiment who found a wounded rebel lying in the sun crying for water. He lifted the rebel and carried him to the shade where he gently laid him and gave him water from his canteen. Revived by the water the rebel drew his pistol and shot his benefactor through the heart.

Another instance was related of a troop of rebel cavalry deliberately firing upon a number of wounded men who had been placed together in the shade. "All of which," the article added, "was attributed to the barbarism of slavery, in which, and to which the Southern soldiers have been educated."

For years the Southern men and women lived under such attacks. The answer of the South to such propaganda grew from a "half apologetic defense of slavery to an aggressive assertion of a superiority of all things Southern." Slavery benefited the Negro, it was asserted, and had made twice as many Christians out of heathens as all missionary efforts put together. A Southern minister declared that he was certain that God had confined slavery to the South because its people were better fitted to lift ignorant Africans to civilization. The South declared that the slave was better off than the white factory workers of England or New England; that he was useless to himself and to so­ciety without supervision and direction, and that nature or the curse of God on Ham had destined him to servitude. It was said by the South that true republican government was possible only where all white citizens were free from drudgery; that without slavery, farmers were destined to peasantry; that slave societies alone escape the ills of labor and race wars, unemployment and old age insecurity. The South had achieved a superior civiliza­tion.

The men who organized the attack on slavery and those who developed its defense were in most cases too extreme and radical to represent true sentiment of the masses. Conservatives in both the North and the South usually dismissed them as fanatics and assured themselves that they did not represent the true feelings of the people in either section. Nevertheless as the senti­ment and tension grew and politicians became more and more vehe­ment, these conservatives became fewer.

The true relationship of master and slave was predominately different from the pictures presented by propaganda machines. There were good masters and bad masters; extremely kind ones and occasionally cruel ones, though the really cruel or hard master was a marked exception. The conduct of the slaves in the war confirm this. It was not true as sometimes claimed, that every slave was loyal to his master, but the fact that the white mas­ter could go into the army, leaving his often lonely and remote farm or plantation, his wife and children, and frequently even money and jewels, in the care of the slave for whose liberty his opponent was fighting, indicates at least that there could have been no widespread hatred of the masters or resentment against them. Usually the relationship between slave and master was a per­sonal one and there was none of that impersonalism which made for the discontent and brutality suffered by the New England factory worker. But if the plantation was of unusual size or if the mas­ter owned several of them in different places, this personal re­lationship might be lost, and the slaves' lives could be made a hell on earth. However, even when a slave was placed in good sur­roundings there was always the danger of his being sold. The best families prided themselves on not selling their slaves and on not breaking up slave families, but even the best of such owners might fall into circumstances necessitating the sale of the slaves. It is interesting to survey some of the leading articles that appeared in the various newspapers of the country prior to and during the rebellion. It is difficult to determine just how many of these articles are propaganda and how many represent the true feelings of the editors and writers. No doubt the fault was not much in the newspapers themselves but rather in the sources of their information. An interesting article concerning the famous assault by Preston S. Brooke, a member of the House of Representatives from South Caro­lina, upon Senator Sumner of Massachusetts, appeared in the New York Evening Post, May 23, 1856. The article entitled, "The Outrage On Mr. Sumner" is directed against the Southern Representative and Senator Butler. An excerpt follows: "The friends of slavery at Washington are attempting to silence the members of Congress from the free states by the same modes of discipline which make the slaves units on their plantations. Two ruffians from South Carolina, yesterday made the Senate Chamber the scene of their cow­ardly brutality. They had armed themselves with heavy canes, and-approaching Mr. Sumner, who was seated in his chair writing, Brooks struck him with his cane a violent blow on the head, which brought him stunned to the floor, and Keith with his weapon kept off the by-standers, while the other Ruffian, Brooks, repeated the blows upon the head of the apparently lifeless victim until his cane was shattered to fragments. Mr. Sumner was conveyed from the Senate Chamber bleeding and senseless, so severely wounded that the phy­sician attending did not think it prudent to allow friends to have access to him. The excuse for this base assault is that Mr. Sumner had in the course of debate spoken disrespectfully of Mr. Butler, a relative of Preston S. Brooks, one of the authors of the outrage. No possible indecorum of language on the part of Mr. Sumner could excuse, much less justify an attack like this; but we have carefully examined his speech to see if it contains any matter which could even extenuate such an act of violence, and we find none. He had ridiculed Mr. Butler's devotion to slavery, it is true, but the weapons of ridicule and contempt in debate is by common consent as fair and allowable weapons as argument. We agree fully with Mr. Sumner that Mr. Butler is a monomaniac in the respect of which we speak; we certainly should place no con­fidence in any representation he might make which concerned the subject of slavery…… The truth is, that the proslavery party, which rules the Senate, looks upon violence as the proper instru­ment of its designs. Violence reigns in the streets of Washington; violence has now found its way to the Senate Chamber; In short violence is the order of the day; the North is to be pushed to the wall by it, and this plot will succeed if the people of the free States are as apathetic as the slaveholders are insolent."** It can readily be seen that the author of this article is vehemently opposed to the pro-slavery party, and the article illustrates perfectly the use of the newspaper for political means. An article appeared in the Springfield Republican October 19, 1859, praising the character of John Brown. "The universal feel­ing is that John Brown is a hero--a misguided and insane man, but nevertheless inspired with a genuine heroism. He has a large infusion of the stern old Puritan element in him." The text of the article appearing in the Springfield Republican December 3, 1859, the day after the execution of John Brown, follows! "John Brown still lives. The great State of Virginia has hung his venerable body upon the ignominous gallows, and released John Brown himself to join the noble army of martyrs.............................. A Christian man hung by Christians for acting upon his convictions of duty--a brave man hung for his chivalrous and self-sacrificing deed of humanity--a philanthropist hung for seeking the liberty of oppressed men. No outcry about violated law can cover up the essential enormity of a deed like this." Editorials such as those above did much to influence the populations of both the North and the South. By appealing to the emo­tions, sense of morality, and by publishing doubtful stories of atrocities the newspapers, along with the teachings of preachers and political speakers, were able to whip the fighting spirit of people on either side to a feverish pitch. This method of in­fluencing the public opinion of all factions has been employed in. all of the wars since the Civil War and is playing its same role in totalitarian and democratic countries alike.

_____
*Slavery and the Civil War, Southern Review, Autumn, 1938

**This article is thought to be the work of William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the paper at that time.

Friday, December 22, 2006 12:49 AM
From: WL Andrews' Son William Xavier Andrews
I did not have a copy of this paper. Its theme reflects the common view of historians both North and South after the Civil War, a romanticized view of the agricultural South as portrayed in the literature of such Vanderbilt Agrarian writers as Penn Warren and Tate.

If Daddy had been at Vanderbilt thirty years later, the literature would have been much harsher on the South. For those people who claim that slavery was not the major cause of the Civil War, I came across an interesting document when I was at Corinth, Mississippi last year. It was at the Civil War museum there and it was an original copy of Mississippi's declaration of secession in 1861.

LETTER DATED 5 NOVEMBER 1981 FROM DAUGHTER JOAN ANDREWS TO HER BROTHER JOHN:

"It's strange. This lonliness only draws me to a desire to be more removed. To go further away from everybody. I know these feelings won't last forever. And I don't even really mind, though it makes me restless and sad. I do wish I could be free of the sit-ins here in St. Louis so I could take off. Somewhere beautiful and fresh and close to nature and winter. Somewhere alone, with a cabin and a fireplace I keep thinking. I want to enjoy the solitude. Maybe you feel the same way. Maybe deep down I know why you stay in Saudi Arabia and won't be coming home at Christmas, not til June-or maybe not even then."

LETTER DATED 19 NOVEMBER 1981 FROM JOAN ANDREWS TO HER BROTHER JOHN:

"Today a dear friend, Fr. Jim Danis was buried.... I knew Fr. Danis was dying for a long time, but just seeing him in the coffin, slender and black-haired...I suddenly recalled the warmth and dedication of the man I had seen so often at the clinics. I was so moved I guess because I have been in a strange mood for several months now, feeling lost and lonely....And Fr. Danis was healthy when they discovered my cancer, which they thought at the time was terminal. (Dr. Hoy, you know, thought the remission of my cancer contrary to prognosis, and bluntly told me, as if he thought it slightly shocking, that it was 'uncanny,' and 'unfathomable')....Life is really strange. I recall that the main sorrow and regret I felt when I knew I had cancer and the doctors warned me that it was very likely terminal, was that I had never been in love yet. Never known what it was to be held by a man I loved, and who loved me. And then two months later....And what developed from that I thought was real...but it was not. But at least I have known love, and I have been held. And maybe that's enough....But I want to have my own children so very badly, and I am getting older and older. Please pray God sends me someone whom I will fall in love with, and he with me!!...God bless you, John. I love you so very much. Take care of yourself. You are always in my prayers. Please keep me in yours.

LETTER DATED JUNE 19, 1998 TO JOAN FROM MOTHER TERESA OF CALCUTTA (Nobel Peace Prize winner):

Dear Joan Andrews, This brings you my prayer and blessing that you may be only all for Jesus through Mary. You have offered all to God and accepted all suffering for the love of him - because you know that whatever you do to the least or for the least you do it to Jesus - because Jesus has clearly said If you receive a little child in my name you receive me. We are all praying for you - do not be afraid. All this suffering is but the kiss of Jesus - a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross-so that He can kiss you. Be not afraid - Jesus loves you-you are precious to Him - He loves you. My prayer is always near you & for you.

God bless you
les Teresoi me

SUNSHINE, THE MAGAZINE OF SOUTH FLORIDA, APRIL 19, 1987, by Scott Eyman:

When she was a child, she dreamt of Adolph Hitler. Some old movie had started the dreams: lurid scenes of helpless women being trussed up and whipped by jackbooted storm troopers. Joanie was fascinated by it and began reading about Nazi Germany. How could this have happened in a Christian country? The dreams started. She would confront Hitler, hitting him with her balled-up fists. She would awake frightened, her stomach aching with emotion. By the time she was 18, she had arrived at the conclusion that the Nazis were monsters in human form. It was a sign-post pointing toward the mission that has consumed her life. The dreams of Hitler have long since ended, replaced by more immediate atrocities. Now Joan Elizabeth Andrews sits in solitary confinement at Broward Correctional Institution, under a five-year sentence for burglary, criminal mischief and resisting arrest without violence at a Pensacola abortion clinic. It was a harsh sentence, twice as long as the maximum indicated under Florida Sentencing Guidelines. Joan Andrews has refused to cooperate, either at her trial or during her incarceration. While being sentenced, she sat cross-legged on the floor. When she was imprisoned at the medium-security women's facility in Lowell, Fla., she refused to be processed. So she was transferred to the maximum security of Broward Correctional, where, 29 or 30 days out of every month, she is in solitary confinement. She is permitted no visit, no phone calls, no writing letters. The highlight of her day is an hour-long walk in the courtyard. After her term in solitary, she is released and once more refuses to go to orientation, and the process begins all over again. Normally, Joan Andrews would be paroled after two years, but at this rate, she will have to serve the full five-year sentence. We cannot know what Henry David Thoreau would have thought of Joan Elizabeth Andrews' cause, but he would certainly respect her steadfast refusal to capitulate to the norm. It's not that she is obstreperous or abusive in any way; by her actions, she simply announces, with a chilling clarity and confidence, that she "would prefer not to." "Would that I could crawl back into that violated sanctuary of the womb and be them..." -From a letter by Joan Andrews. She was a sensitive child. "If anybody else got a spanking, it was Joanie who cried," remembers her younger sister Susan. "And she was always the first one to give her money away to anybody who seemed to need it more than she did. We did most of our shopping at Goodwill or at house-sales, and you can get very nice things there for five or ten dollars. But whenever we'd give Joan a coat, she'd give it away to some lady on the street. I always thought she was going to be a nun, because she was so spiritual." The Andrews family was serious and God-fearing. William Andrews was a lawyer, then a schoolmaster in rural Tennessee. His wife was a nurse. There were six children, three boys, three girls. They had little money, but there was 230 acres, the family worked together. Joan began to draw, and her earnest, naive representations of small children became the pride of the family. Once, when Joan's mother Elizabeth Andrews was three months pregnant, she miscarried. The baby was born alive, perfectly shaped, in the family kitchen, and 12-year-old Joan and 11 year old Susan saw the baby and held him. They baptized the baby, named him Joel, and at the funeral, each family member put a lock of hair in the coffin. Three months later, Joan was playing with a 10-year-old cousin in Duck River which runs near the family farm. The cousin was cough by a current and began screaming, lashing at the water in panic. Joan was paralyzed. She thought: "She's a better swimmer than I am; if I go in, we'll both drown." She went in anyway, more afraid of doing nothing than of dying. The current carried her and her cousin to safety on the river's shore. From that, she learned that attempts have to be made, ever if the task seems impossible. Joanie got a scholarship. At St. Louis University, she became involved in the anti-war movement. As always, it was a total commitment. Susan remembers Joan begging for money to go to Viet Nam. But there was a gradual disillusionment with the self-rightousness and incipient hostility of the movement; the break came after a rally in which some of her cohorts spat at a speaker they didn't agree with. After two semesters, she left school. Then, in 1973, the Supreme Court's landmark Roe vs. Wade decision legalized abortion. And Joan Andrews had a new mission, one that completely replaced her long-standing ambition to write and illustrate children's books. She dropped out of college and adopted an itinerant life-style, traveling around the country to attend pro-life rallies, working as a domestic or exercising horses. She made no more than $1,000 in any given year. She mostly lived with her sister Susan Bindle and her husband, babysitting for their growing brood. And, like the other women in the family, she began doing what she referred to as "rescues." Joan Andrews' raids on abortion clinics were fairly ritualistic. She walked in the front or back door and told the waiting women that they were making a terrible mistake. And sometimes she attempted to unplug surgical equipment, with the idea of rendering the clinic incapable of operating for the rest of the day. Sometimes the rescues worked and Andrews would convince a woman to forego the abortion. At one time, Susan Brindle had three such girls living with her. It was on one of those rescues that Joan Andrews came to the Ladies Center in Pensacola in March 1986. This is the same Pensacola that remains rather jumpy on the subject of abortion. It was only 2 1/2 years ago, on Christmas Day, 1984, that four young blue-collar Pensacolans blew up three abortion clinics-including the Ladies Center-as a "gift to the baby Jesus on his birthday." The back door of the Ladies Center was open when Andrews, followed by several other protesters, walked into a vacant procedure room and began pulling out the plug of the suction machine. A policeman who had followed the group said, "Lady, stop it or I'll have to arrest you." In response, Andrews begged him to help her. "As long as I'm here, no children will be killed," she said, kicking at the medical equipment. The cop pulled her away while she was still yanking at the cord, and arrested her for conspiracy to burglarize. Court records indicate that $1,978 worth of damage was done to the premises. It was something like the hundredth time Joan Andrews had been arrested. Three days later she was released on bond. On April 25, 1986, she was arrested for picketing outside the same clinic. This time, requests for bond were refused. A non-jury trial presided over by Judge William H. Anderson found Andrews guilty of burglary, criminal mischief and resisting arrest without violence. In August, when Anderson asked for verbal assurance that she would cease her harassment of abortion clinics in return for bond, Andrews replied, "I couldn't promise I wouldn't try to save a child's life." Bond was again denied. In late September, with the judge calling her "unrepentant," Joan Andrews was sentenced to five years in prison. The sentence provoked widespread anger in the anti-abortion community. "The same judge sentenced two men to four years for being accessories to murder on the same day he sentenced my sister," Susan Brindle points out. "Where's the justice in that?" But while the hand-wringing and legal maneuvering continue, Joan Andrews sits in solitary confinement, secure in her beliefs. "The souls of the just are in the hands of the Lord." (Wisdon 3:1) She could be a pretty woman, but she is beginning to look worn and old beyond her 38 years. She bears her afflictions with a joyful grace. Jail does not seem to be such a bad place, although she misses her family terribly. She admits with something of a girlish giggle, that from the time she was 11, all she wanted to do was get married and have children - and yet she never kissed a man until she was 33. She lost her right eye to cancer six years ago and has a glass replacement, giving half her face the unblinking, baleful stare of a stuffed animal. She dismisses the difficulty it causes her: "I have to be careful going down stairs." To look at her is to see someone rare, someone who has willfully chosen to mortify, not merely her flesh, but her entire life. The unspoken logic is crushingly simple: If the babies with whom she identifies so strongly are unable to have a life, then neither will Joan Andrews. "If abortion had been legalized earlier than it was, I would have devoted myself to that, rather than to anti-war activitiesm" she says. "But there's a difference between injustice and murder. I have drawn only one line for myself: I will not ever do violence to any human being." The basis of Andrews' non-cooperation is her feeling that, by sentencing her, the judicial system announced that the lives of unborn children were not worth defending - and that, were she to cooperate with her jailers, she would be implicitly agreeing with that evaluation. To cooperate with her sentence would, in effect, be to admit her guilt. She is a glowing, articulate presence; her words rush out, her fingers skittering nervously through the air. Her religious feeling is intense, but she lacks the holier-than-thou arrogance of so many pro-lifers. "There is a spiritual side to non-cooperation" she says. "I believe that all humans are as valuable as I am. I believe that if we murder one age group, it can be escalated to others. And even if I had been sentenced to 30 days instead of five years, I wouldn't have cooperated." Joan has not always been the Happy Warrier of the pro-life movement. In 1978 and '79, the constant living out of a sleeping bag, traveling on buses ("You can get shoes at Goodwill for 10 cents; nice ones..."), rooming for a few weeks at a time with other pro-lifers in the network, seeing her family for only five or six days a month, began dragging her down. "I hit a crisis. The burden, the pain was too much. I would do my job at the racetrack during the day and I'd just come home and cry all night long. I couldn't handle the anguish." Her zeal had been renewed by the time her eye, initially damaged when a horse kicked it, developed a malignant melanoma. The eye was removed on a Wednesday and she was back disrupting an abortion clinic on Saturday, telling her sister, "What's my eye compared to the lives of children?" Andrews has elaborated on her theories of passive resistance in a series of letters to family and supporters. "This conduct, if multiplied by numbers, can make it impossible to send life savers to jail," she wrote. "I'm told if I persist, Lowell prison won't be able to keep me and they'll send me to B.C.I. in South Florida, the maximum security prison. That's fine...I cannot be seen as a regular inmate. They must deal with me as someone who is saying by her actions that she loves the preborn babies." But is her civil disobedience having any effect on the world beyond her immediate circle of anti-abortion activists? "Is anybody listening? No. Not really. Not in the world at large," Andrews says. "I think people think I'm a radical or nuts. But if 2-year-olds were dying instead of babies everybody would be up in arms." The Rev. Daniel Kubala is director of the Respect Life Ministry for the Archdiocese of Miami. He struggles to come to grips with her apparently limitless gift for self-sacrifice. "I neither condemn nor bless what she is doing," Kubala says. "Part of our theology is that God reveals himself to different people in different ways. Outside of the early martyrs, there's 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," Kubala sighs. There is no end to it, of course. Barring a reduction in her sentence from a friendly Florida Attorney General's office, or a pardon, she will serve her full sentence. Upon her release, she vows, she will "go right out and do a rescue." "In all honesty, I don't know what's going to happen; the holocaust could go on for 10 years or a hundred. When I was having such a hard time, back in 1979, one of the things that brought me out of it was something Mother Teresa said: 'We are not called to be successful, we are called to be faithful.' "I realize the truth of that; I just want to be able to say that, when all is said and done, I've done what I could." And then this intelligent, passionate - perhaps too passionate - woman who has yielded to the temptation of martyrdom, goes back to her cell. The private Calvary of Joan Andrews begins all over again.

Joan, like her mother, is a completely selfless, kind and saintly person. She would give a person in need the shirt off her own back (and literally has). Her brother John recalls her taking off her coat in the bitter cold and giving it to a homeless person. This trait has been obvious in Joan almost from the day she was born. Joan, like her brother John, was extremely shy as a child. Her parents permitted her to wait a year and start first grade with her sister Susan at St. Catherine's in Columbia. Her father skipped Joan to 8th Grade from 6th Grade as he had done for Bill. In 1980, when having her eye removed at St. Louis U. hospital, Joan refused meals because she did not have insurance, couldn't pay and did not want to be any more of a burden on anyone than she had to be. Her father had just bought a new car and was embarrassed to be seen at the hospital in it for the same reason.

In the late 1980s, Joan's father was watching the nationally televised program "The McLaughlin Report" and, to his surprise, Pat Buchanan (the future Presidential candidate who also mentioned Joan in one of his books) predicted at the end of the program that Governor Martinez would release Joan Andrews from prison in Florida within a short period of time. Joan's brother, John, bumped into and spoke with John McLaughlin several times in the elevator to the building where they both worked in Washington, D.C. When John was visiting his parents he answered the phone only to find that it was former Governor of California, Jerry Brown, who Mother Teresa had asked to call Joan's sister Susan to ask how he might help in efforts to get her out of jail. He spoke with Susan for about an hour. Jerry Brown had spent time in Calcutta, India with Mother Teresa after he left office. Joan told of the ABC network television program 20/20 coming down to Broward prison to do a segment on her. During the interview, the interviewer constantly rolled his eyes as Joan was answering his questions. The program never ran. Amnesty International got in touch with Joan's brother John just before she was released from prison to determine how they could help in her release effort. Joan's mother and brother John drove down to Lowell prison in Florida to visit Joan, but the prison would not let her mother see her even though she had driving all the way from Lewisburg. Only John saw her for about an hour because he received prior clearance as one of her lawyers. Joan's brother John recalls the demeanor Joan displayed ever toward her accusers. During a court session in Philadelphia, Joan was informed that the lunch break was to be longer than announced in court. As Joan saw the people from the abortion clinic walking back into the courtroom, she kindly with a smile on her face told them of the delay, to which she got a harsh look and cold shoulder. Joan, at about age nine or so, saved her cousin Cindy Watt's life by rescuing her from drowning in the Duck River in Marshall County,

Tennessee. Joan said she just knew she would drown herself, but she could not just stand by and do nothing. She swam down and grabbed Cindy, put her on her shoulders and, with her own head under water, walked her to the shore while standing on the bottom of the river. Joan's brothers, John and Bill, were standing on a sand bar about 100 feet from Cindy. John recalls being frozen and unable to do anything other than shove a log down toward Joan. In June 1969, Joan was visiting John at Ft. Carson Colorado at the time Bobby Kennedy was shot. John left for maneuvers in the field when there was still hope that Kennedy might live. When John returned from the field Sunday afternoon, he drove straight to the guest quarters next to the hospital to see Joan and became aware for the first time that Robert Kennedy had died. Joan was visiting John at Ft. Riley Kansas when former president Dwight D. Eisenhower died in January 1969. Joan was staying at the guest quarters along the railroad tracks and John, on his way to see Joan, saw the black-draped funeral train slowly travel through Ft. Riley and past the guest house early in the morning of the burial. Joan attend the burial in Abelene, Kansas with the priests with whom her brother worked. John was serving mass in the chapel of the oldest church in Kansas at noon when President Richard Nixon's helicopter landed and he could hear the 21-gun salute.

The following letter from Joan was written and published in the early 1980s:

FROM A JAIL CELL

The third month of my seven-and-a-half month jail sentence is drawing to a close for me. I was sentenced along with three other pro-lifers for repeated rescue attempts at the death's doors of an abortion chamber in St. Louis.

My experiences in jail have been many and varied, but I'd rather just say a word or two about them and go on to plead for continued efforts of those who are carrying on the struggle on the outside. In any jail, it is the people more than the system that leave the lasting impressions.

Praying together with fellow inmates, discussing abortion with them, passing out hand-made rosaries sent by a dear Blue Army friend, agonizing during frequent disruptions in the form of verbal hatred and violent fights among the inmates, witnessing cruelty and a constant flow of foul language: this is all part of the burden and joy of sharing and suffering with those around me.

But despite the evidence of so much pain in such a place as this, the burden of knowing that legalized, technological, manicured killing is being carried out upon innocent, defenseless babies outside these bars and guard towers, out there in so-called civilized society, brings down the heaviest burden on my soul.

I have known deep frustration from being physically restrained from trying to rescue the babies who are even at this moment dying at area abortion death chambers. Prayer has held me together amid the strain of this unjust interference and restraint that physically prohibits my response to God's calling to reach out to His children in need. Doing penance will sustain me till this incarceration is all over, though I doubt this will be my last jail sentence as long as the baby-killing continues.

This is my fervent prayer and my constant plea to my fellow pro-lifers: Please God, help us all to respond urgently to the realty of the killing. Help us to forsake the legalistic game-playing at which the courts and secular society are so adept.

May our dear Lord Jesus bless you each one, and guide you through the burning love found in His Most Sacred Heart. May Mary, our Queen and our Mother, be your constant companion, your consolation, and your source of joy. Keep up the good fight.

OUR SUNDAY VISITOR EDITORIAL FEBRUARY 1, 1998

The high cost of bearing the cross - For many Catholics, news that pro-lifer Joan Andrews is going away to jail for as long as three years provokes as much consternation as admiration. The mother of young children, Joan Andrews, many might think, has responsibilities that go beyond principles. While they may admire her for her valiant pro-life work - silent witness and prayer outside abortion clinics, "rescues" on behalf of the unborn - they may also secretly think that the kind of witness that leads to prison is best left to the young or the graybeards, to priest and nuns - those with less to lose or fewer people depending on them. Joan Andrews does not agree. In fact, when faced Jan. 15 with an indeterminate jail sentence intended to force her to accept probation and thus - in her mind - acquiesce to a system that imprisons the rescuers and protects the killers, Joan Andrews refused to accept the solace of family or the excuse that her family's needs come first: "I will die in jail," she told the court, "before I place even my family before God." Joan Andrews - like others before her in the pro-life, anti-war and civil-rights movements - embodies the kind of stubborn heroism that seems at once saintly and slightly insane. Such holy activists dedicate their actions to God, and act out of an acute sense of God's love and their own responsibility to protect His creation and witness to His moral law. Many of us who are Catholic mothers and fathers may feel strongly about the state's approval of abortion, or about the use of tax dollars for weapons of mass destruction. Yet we are uncomfortable with action that would make it difficult to provide for our family's welfare. For many of us who make our way through the compromises, and challenges of daily life, radical action, and the equally radical - some might say foolhardy - trust that God will protect us and our families, seems hard to justify, and harder to do. So we flinch when we hear Joan Andrews say: "If anyone puts God first, can he ever doubt God's protection over his family? No, never! Regardless of what happens, my husband and children are in God's hands. I worry not." Yet Jesus himself asks of all of us an equally radical commitment: "whoever loves father or mother more than me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. (Mt 10:37) Not everyone may be called to make the sacrifice of a Joan Andrews, but we are all called to be saints. We are all challenged to respond with our whole heart and mind to God's call. The example of people like Joan Andrews reminds us that Christians are not called to the comfortable life, but to the cross. Symbol of worldly shame and heavenly glory, the cross can embarrass and discomfort us. Too often we flee from its weight rather than embrace it. But it is Jesus himself who challenged us to prayer, do penance and, on occasion, go beyond the comfortable and the routine in order to bear witness to His love for us and our trust in Him.

YOU REJECT THEM, YOU REJECT ME - RICHARD COWDEN-GUIDO, Trinity Communications, Manassas, Virginia:

There has been something missing from the pro-life movement from the beginning. The enormity of what abortion is has always demanded something more than magazine articles and politicians, though no one denies the vital necessity of those things as well. But for all the unsung, amazing willingness to sacrifice on the part of so many pro-lifers across the country, and world, there has been missing from that sacrifice an element Joan Andrews has now introduced.

This book is a collection mostly of clips from Joan's prison letters, but some others as well, along with a few articles and anecdotes relating to her story. They tell it vividly, and I believe those who read them will come away with the same eerie impression that struck me as I read them.

It is this: The abortion culture cannot long endure the witness of a Joan Andrews. Either it will kill her, or she, by the grace of God, will destroy it. If you think I exaggerate, read on. The end of the abortion culture may be at hand.

Richard Cowden Guido

NATIONALLY SYNDICATED COLUMN BY JOSEPH SOBRAN: MARCH 10, 1988

Our whole society has done a series of flip-flops on what we now call "issues" but which used to be matters of consensus, abortion being the most crucial of them. Many politicians decided abortion was a right rather than a crime about the time the Supreme Court said so....

As I watch [Richard] Gephardt's star rise, I am reminded of a woman named Joan Andrews. Andrews is serving a five-year prison sentence-more than some hardened criminals get-for slightly damaging a machine used to abort unborn children.

You can say what you like about her, but Andrews did what public opinion says Kurt Waldheim should have done. She refused to go along with what she saw as an aberration from civilized life. She couldn't join the general flip-flop.

If Andrews is a "fanatic," Waldheim must be a "moderate" - a reasonable man who goes along with change when it iccurs, even if he wasn't on the cutting edge. A chameleon. Naturally he is against Nazism now. He knows when to flip and when to flop.

Gephardt is an embarassing reminder that most of us are closer to Waldheim than to Andrews. Andrews goes to prison. Gephardt may yet go to the White House. That's how our system works.

LETTER DATED MAY 2, 1986 FROM JOAN TO HER PARENTS:

I sure love and miss you... I'm doing fine and friends in other areas are trying to help out with this Pensacola case. Whatever happens, I am at peace and am happy to leave it in God's hands....

As far as my own life is concerned, I have come to the conclusion that I am meant to stay single.... I must be called to the single life... there is one man I knew I even loved right from the beginning, but... God has called him to... the Holy Priesthood (Sean Mahoney), the highest vocation of all. How deeply God loves him! What a great priest he will make!...

AFFIDAVIT OF JOAN ANDREWS BELL, DECEMBER 22, 1998

This is my statement of conscience. This is why I cannot accept probation. Human life begins at the moment of conception. This is an undisputed fact of medical science. It is confirmed in every human biology and physiology book. It is confirmed in the fields of embryology and fetology. Dr. Jerome Lejeune, Dr. Liley, and all the experts of medical science I have read confirm this fact. The research does not need further defense. It stands on its own uncontested merit. Even the "Supreme" Court in Roe and Doe could not refute this fact. The Court, acting in a cowardly manner, pretended the fact did not exist by refusing to address it. The court lied by claiming that it is unknown when human life begins. The court ignored documentation in legal briefs which contained undisputed scientific and medical proof that life begins at conception. The court preferred, instead, to enshrine social reasons as the "impeccable" basis for launching a brutal holocaust against the most defenseless in our society, the preborn. All proponents of abortion maintain the same intellectually dishonest position that recites hollow rhetoric that preborn children are "blobs of tissue," and that this "developing tissue" must be destroyed for social reasons. Scientific fact and inalienable rights of those deprived of their lives are ignored. Not surprising. Every holocaust in history has stood on the same corrupt and faulty premise which claims that certain categories of people must die under the guise of social necessity, proclaimed emotionally in an effort to mislead. In my 24 years in this sorrowful struggle, I have never met an abortionist yet, nor any proponents of the "choice to kill" position, who, when willing to discuss the facts instead of spouting falsehoods, did not admit that abortion is the act of killing a human child. However, the façade gone, they maintain that killing is necessary for social reasons. It's a shame. Truth and reason have been rejected and Trust has been stomped underfoot. Distorted logic is maintained through an act of will. We in America know we are killing children! God help us, we are a people who condone or ignore the brutal destruction of human life for a myriad of shallow and baseless reasons. We have made destruction of children our one true god. It comes down to a matter of false values and conscience. Do we value human life or do we uphold falsehood and personal selfishness? Indeed, the "choice people" have manufactured their own private laws depending on neither a morally based legal tradition nor moral norms of human conduct and moral behavior. Tragically and shamefully, government power and legal sanction has been given to this slaughter of the innocent, this corrupting and undermining of our whole system of law and order. The courts of our land have unleashed anarchy against its most vulnerable members. America now stands under judgment of history, and the just hand of God. It is not surprising that after World War II, not only were the doctors of Nazi Germany held accountable for the murder of the innocent, but also the judges who had followed laws of corrput legislatures which legislated Jews to be non-persons and "enemies of the State." We mock justice today and show ourselves to be the greatest of hypocrites. God is Truth. Because God is Trust, all correct knowledge, judgment, understanding, wisdom, and science come from God and have their sole validity in the relationship they have to eternal laws of Truth, proceeding from the Universal law-giver, the Creator of the Universe. Human life is sacred because mankind is made in the image and likeness of God. Abortion is not only a crime against humanity, in that individual human beings are denied due process of law, but it is a crime against God! Without measure or limitation, all human life is sacred because we belong to god, and we shall one day return to Him. By our merits and our choice, we will either gain eternal happiness with god or lose God forever. To declare that certain human life is not sacred, is to declare that no human life is sacred, that no one is to be universally cherished and protected. In essence, it is to say there is no God, and all reality is anarchy that truth is meaningless, justice is non-existent, and love is outlawed. From earliest childhood, I was taught my Roman Catholic faith by word and example. First by my parents, then by the good priests and nuns whom God placed in my life. Catholic doctrine is clear and must be universally accepted. It is infallible trust. Dissenters from Divine truth have excommunicated themselves from the Catholic faith.

The Catholic Church teaches with the force of infallible doctrine that abortion is a heinous sin, the act of killing an innocent child.. No Catholic can approve such crime. Neither can he give consent, support or cooperation nor any participation with the murder of the innocent, defenseless child in the womb. Pope John Paul II clearly spells this out in his recent encyclical, Evangelium Vitae. My Catholic faith also teaches that the Catholic faithful must inform their conscience according to the teachings of the Church. Once one has an informed, correct conscience, one must follow his conscience, regardless of the consequences. It is my humble privilege to follow my conscience and my Catholic faith in defense of the innocent and the just. I will not cooperate with immoral, unjust laws corruptly and cowardly imposed on the American people for the sake of pretending to solve social and economic problems by murdering innocent children. I will not accept probation. To accept probation would be to accept the lie that I harmed society by trying to peacefully, prayerfully and non-violently save children from a brutal death by abortion, and that I therefore need to be rehabilitated. To accept probation demands that I sign my name to a paper which says I will obey unjust laws. Indeed, I will not obey unjust laws nor consent to cooperate with the murder of the sacred lives of God's precious children. I could no more adhere to the unjust laws of this land, or in any way give credence to evil enshrined in law, than deny God Himself. With God's help, I will with trembling and shame for my own sins and weaknesses, accept and defend the Laws of God.

Finally, the United States, like all of Western Civilization, has a legal and moral tradition that accepts the fact that abortion is a crime against human life. This great evil was illegal up until the Un-Supreme Court decided to reject the facts of science and the legal and moral traditions of this country. Against all moral norms the Judiciary falsely "legalized" child killing. Abraham Lincoln said, in response to the argument that Blacks were not fully human because slavery was legal, "It is never right to do wrong, even when sanctioned by law." Law becomes anarchy when it discriminates against or dehumanizes a segment of humanity, and furthermore murders the innocent under pretext of law. Human laws which are unjust are null and void, wrote the master theologian Thomas Aquinas, when they violate ultimate Truth, God's law. Thomas Jefferson wrote that the first and most basic duty of government and of law is the protection of human life, not its destruction. He maintained that if government violates this most basic right, which is its primary purpose for existing, then it forfeits its authority to rule. In essence, such a government and its law unleashes anarchy upon the governed and, indeed, the world order. "Sometimes we must interfere," said the Nazi Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel, as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. "When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy--whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political views, that place must--at that moment--become the center of the universe." When anarchy reigns under the tyranny of law, the people must re-establish law and order by giving no credence to false authority. Rather they should re-establish legitimate authority. Unjust laws and decrees will cease to have power when just men refuse to cooperate with the evil. Recognizing that in the United States of America today so-called "unwanted" preborn children do not have protection under the law, it is only fitting that those of us who love them, and align ourselves with them, be denied freedom, and be condemned to jails and prisons. Preborn children, denied legal protection, often find the womb a tomb. We, the born, who struggle on behalf of these abandoned children, can find our tomb of reparation in a jail cell or prison dungeon. An yet, the deepest and darkest tomb and dungeon of all is the human heart in a nation gone murderous. When a child can be coldly dismembered alive in-utero, with national approval and brutal sanction of law, there is no hope for such a nation without Divine Intervention. My only prayer is for God's will to be done in all things, and may repentense come so that no immortal soul is lost. In summary, there are three platforms to my continued decision to serve God and refuse to cooperate with the Abortion Holocaust in America:

1) Science. The undisputed medical, scientific fact that human life begins at conception. I accept that fact.

2) My faith. The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is a hedonistic crime against an innocent human life, and that this evil must be opposed by all the faithful at every opportunity and by every moral means. The Church also teaches that conscience is primary, that one must have an informed, correct conscience. I understand and accept this fact about my religious teaching as a Roman Catholic and I affirm it.

3) America's true legal and moral tradition brands abortion as a crime against humanity. I accept this fact as an American citizen.

Therefore, regardless of the consequences, I cannot deny trust, nor violate my conscience by cooperating with unjust laws, nor commit treason by betraying the founding principles and moral truths upon which our nation was built. I know I must act in a way which will help re-establish true law and order in America. I pray that our nation's self-destructive course can be reversed. It is a deep privilege to suffer imprisonment for the love of God and for the sake of innocent children. I surely have enough sins of my own to warrant long and hard reparation behind bars, but I pray God will use any time of separation from my family to also atone for the sin of abortion, even in the smallest way. It is a fitting thing to suffer imprisonment when one's nation has shown contempt for life and for the laws of God. As this holocaust of the Culture of Death has shown time and again, this whole struggle goes far beyond unjust laws and a government gone bad; it is a war between good and evil. That is why the Court is not putting me in jail to serve a fixed sentence. instead, there may be an effort to coerce me to violate my conscience under the cruel pressure of jail and the suffering caused to my family by an indeterminate incarceration. With God's grace, I will die in jail before I place even my family before God. If anyone puts God first, can he ever doubt God's protection over his family? No, never! Regardless of what happens, my husband and children are in God's hands. I worry not. Any pain is joy when offered to the Just and Merciful God of us all. thank you, dear, sweet Jesus, for this opportunity to draw closer to You!

Joan Andrews Bell
AMDG

Mary E. Dimmel
6115 Dumfries Road
Warrenton, Va 20187

Dear Mr. Andrews,

I hope that you will forgive this intrusion, but I am moved to share this with you:

At the birth of Jesus Christ the Sacred Scriptures tell us that the Angels sang "Glory to
God in the highest and peace to men of good will." This has always startled me since our age places such a heavy emphasis on the intellect and its role in discovering truth. I have spent the summer considering the acting person, and I wish to pass on some of what I have discovered. The human soul is made of four powers: the will, the intellect, the imagination, and the memory. The Thomistic philosopher will tell you that the will is blind and waits eagerly to accept the truth which the intellect searches out and then presents to the will to embrace-thus it is the intellect which forms the will. The Augustinian philosopher, more in line with the Angelic proclamation, will tell you that the will is not created blind, but is made blind by sin. It is therefor the good will
which sorts through what the intellect presents to it, deciding what is true and what is false. The will is good because it has abandoned self to find God and His truth. The bad will seeks itself and accepts falsehood as truth because it furthers the satisfaction in self There are two sterling examples of the truth of this in Adam and Eve, and Satan. In both examples the intellect was perfected, there was no lack of knowledge. However, it was the determination of the bad will which substituted evil for good, and falsehoods for truth. It is important also to know that Satan can access with his distortions and temptations only our imagination. It is we ourselves who bring his evil into our wills, and thus our intellects.

The really "Good News" about all this is that our search for God and His truth does not
rely on our intellect. It relies on the act of the will which says, "I abandon sin and self to seek God alone." Once the will is thus fashioned, all intellectual difficulties are as nothing, because God's grace of Faith, which He freely and abundantly gives to all, can now operate unhindered in the acting person. Thus, Faith will successfully seek understanding, because the will, through God's grace, will embrace only what is true. Faith then is not what we believe, but Who we believe. The question is: Do we believe God as He speaks through Revelation, or have we chosen another authority?

Revelation, in the Christian sense of the word, means the Word spoken by God to men.
Correlatively, the faith which is a response to Christian revelation consists in holding for true whatever God has revealed and proposes, through His Church, for the belief of mankind. The God-given economy is an economy of revelation, and it is in the economy of revelation that man must work out his salvation. God has spoken: this is a fact attested by history. He has spoken first of all through the prophets, then through Jesus Christ, Word Incarnate, come to bring men to a knowledge of the true God. In Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, divine revelation reaches its peak, as activity, as message, and as economy. As a result, there exists only one religion: revealed
religion. There exists also only one Church, founded by Christ and assisted by the Holy Ghost, through which the divine word comes down to us, immutable and absolute. The role of the Church is to preserve revealed doctrine forever intact, as a deposit, without adding or changing anything, bringing it to the knowledge of men as a good news, defending it against error and, if necessary, defining certain points by making explicit what was implicit and clarifying what was obscure. It is from this always living Church that we receive the object of our faith; the sources of revelation are in her hands together with the explanations she has received, and we go back to the original sources not to judge the Church's explanation, but rather to enlighten these sources in the light of the Church teaching, which tells us infallibly what they contain. To proceed in any
other way would be to explain what is clear by what is obscure, to prefer what is indistinct to the explicit truth. The duty of man is to accept this revelation, that is, the word spoken by God, and to submit to it. Faith consists in holding for whatever God has said and revealed and whatever He proposes through His Church. In adhering thus to the truth proposed, with all his soul and in the spirit of the truth, the Christian inaugurates, in his heart, this knowledge of God which Jesus Christ foretold would have its completion in everlasting life.

Since fear is the beginning of the Wisdom of God, I offer you a truth which I pray you will
accept. Hell is a reality, and our path to salvation begins with God's grace (given to all
unreservedly) which must be responded to through an act of the will. God will not save us, without this act of the will to seek Him and believe Him when he speaks. We live in times which are confusing, but this will not excuse us, as all men have lived in such times. I ask you to wear this green scapular and pray fervently for the grace to respond willfully to God's grace of salvation. I will be offering all of my Holy Communions for the sake of your salvation in the month of September, and offer to you my willingness to discuss anything that troubles you.

Yours in Jesus Christ through Mary.

Mary

W. L. Andrews, Jr. was inducted into the Army at Ft. Oglethorpe, Georgia during his third year of law school at Vanderbilt University, one year before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He served 5 1/2 years in the Army until the surrender of Japan in 1945. He went through Officer's Candidate School at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania before being sent to Stuttgart, Arkansas. He was at Stuttgart Army Base in Arkansas for a year and 1/2 before he applied for flight training to get away from Stuttgart. (This was before he met Elizabeth Jane Early.) He was sent to San Antonio, Texas to complete preliminary matters and then to Ft. Stockton, Texas for three months of mono-plane training. He completed his 42 solo hours before taking his flight test. There were only one-way communications between him and his instructor, and he misunderstood his instructor to tell him to fly at a steep angle. This didn't sound right to him, but because he couldn't question the instructor, he did it anyway. He never received his wings because of this and was sent back to Stuttgart, Arkansas. If this hadn't happened, he never would have met Elizabeth Jane Early.

William L. Andrews' commanding officer recommended him, and the post commander at Stuttgart appointed him to serve as defense counsel in military trials. He was assigned an assistant counsel and tried several AWOL cases where the maximum sentence was 6 months. He was assistant trial counsel in a general court marshal case involving an aircraft that was flown without authorization.

Aunt Sara talks about Daddy as a Child
My brother growing up always had the best disposition. We were all very close together. I saw somebody Sunday and he said "Sara, I haven't seen you for years," but he has. And he said, "how's Willy?" Everybody called him Willy, the boys here that knew him. He said, "every time I go by Oakland, I say to this friend who's with me, 'that's where Willy lived.' " Yes, my brother was a good student. He went to Lewisburg, I don't think he ever went to a public school; he went to a private school, Price-Webb, and I did too. I was quite a bit older and I had two or three years in the public school. And after my father died, he was eight and I was sixteen, we moved to Pulaski which was close by, and I went to high school there and he went to the grade school there and it was right after my father died and we were all sad, but we had more friends there and I run into them all the time now.

Son John's Intverview with his father about Army Days:
"The first time I found out that I was going to be drafted, the Tennessean found me in the moot court room at Vanderbilt, got me up there and took an awful picture of me in moot court with a cigarette hanging from my mouth. Then we went to lunch and the Nashville Banner came down where we ate lunch (a pharmacy at the corner of where Vanderbilt goes up to the law school with one of those lunch places in back) and took a picture also. The reporter who came down was from Lewisburg. I knew him and so it was a nice article. I was surprised. I think this was the first I had heard about being drafted and both papers printed an article that night.

There were 20 boards in Nashville and each one of them had a number 158, but I was the only one of those 20 who was called into service because the rest of them were married or had some other reason for deferment. The thing was, even though I had number 158, I had already started the new semester. The drawing was in October 1940, I think, but they didn't – I had started back to school before they called me and they let me finish that whole semester, which took me down to June. And so, I didn't really go in until July 16th. That ended my second year. I would have gone in in January.

I got to Ft. Oglethorpe and that's where we were sworn in on July 17th. I was in five months before Pearl Harbor. When they got a call from wherever they needed somebody they went down the list. They got two calls - one of us went to coast artillery and the next one they sent to medical replacement training. So a whole bunch of Vanderbilt people were on that because they all had been deferred until June. I got to Stuttgart in the fall of 1942 after I finished OCS in June 1942 at Carlisle Barracks and after a couple of detours.

I first went to Columbus, Ohio for almost three months doing the same thing in the medical department. I went down to Maxwell Field, Alabama for about 2 or 3 weeks after OCS, but another OCS candidate, who was at OCS at the same time I was, had worked under the general of the Eastern Flying Training Command at Maxwell Field and had been his sergeant, so when we got out, they sent me down there, but the general realized that his own sergeant had been commissioned and was there, so they sent me back up to Columbus, Ohio.

Then that field went over to the 1st Air Force. Columbus, Ohio was a glider school. See, I was in the Air Force all the time. All of us were Air Force from then on. Maxwell Field was Air Force, so my first assignment was Air Force. Pilot training was a couple of years later. That was just before I met Mama. From Stuttgart, I went to San Antonio where we got our radio, Morris Code, to prepare for flight training, and then they sent me to Ft. Stockton, Texas for my actual flight training. I washed out because we had an Army test pilot who was giving us our test and I misunderstood him. You couldn't ask him to repeat because only he could talk; you were in the front cockpit, he's behind you. He told me to fly at a certain angle. I thought I was going at a pretty steep angle, but I thought you weren't supposed to question, so I didn't. But I guess I lucked out, because I met Mama then when they sent me back to Stuttgart. I thought too that I was getting out of Stuttgart for good. I thought that after I did wash out, well they'll send me someplace else. They sent me right back to Stuttgart because I was just on temporary assignment down there while I was in training. You had three different stages down there. Advanced flying. That was primary school. I got 41 solo hours. That's almost two days solo. Uncle Ted was an actual pilot at that time. I didn't know Uncle Ted at that time. He flew Cardinal Spellman to Rome. I found out all about that later."

ARTICLE IN THE TENNESSEAN A YEAR AFTER WLA WENT INTO SERVICE:
Lt. Andrews heads Medical Detachment:

Lt. William L. Andrews, son of W. L. Andrews, 2404 Oakland Avenue, is now commanding officer of the medical detachment at the Stuttgart Army Air Field, Stuttgart, Arkansas. Lt. Andrews was the first Vanderbilt University student to be called into service in 1941. He had completed his four year academic course and was a second year law student at the time. Andrews attended Officer's Candidate School at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania and was commissioned 1st Lieutenant there. He received his earlier training at Camp Lee, Virginia and Camp Barkley, Texas. Born in Lewisburg, Tennessee, Andrews came to Nashville with his parents [Note -his father was actually dead at this time] as a boy and had lived here since. He is expected home on a visit soon.

SUE AND JOHN'S INTERVIEW WITH DADDY UNKNOWN DATE:

WLA: (train whistle in background) .. we all went to the Medical Replacement Training Center. After 12 weeks there, we went from there to Camp Barkley, Texas. It was Camp Barkley back then. Now it's Ft. Barkley. And after Camp Barkley I went into OCS and went up to Carlyle, Pennsylvania.

SUE: (to John) Do you know where that is?

JEA (Cameraman): It's not far from us.

WLA: Then after that, they sent me down to, we were in the Eastern Flying Training Command, sent me down to Montgomery, Alabama, but at the same time I graduated, the clerk down there that the General had used before also graduated. I would have been his clerk except he wanted his clerk back, the one he had before. So I got there and stayed about a week and they sent me to Stuttgart, Arkansas, and that's where I spent most of the time. Betty came, I think she got there I think in February of 1944 and we were married in November of 1944. And we expected Bill not too long after that, so she got out and was back in Detroit when I got out after the thing was over. After almost 5 years.

JEA: Was it hard going back to law school after that?

WLA; It was, because I had been gone so long. Of course one good thing about it, there weren't very many in the senior class. I had to work on the law review you know.

JEA: Did you ever think about not going back to law school?

WLA: I thought I'd go back to law school, but I didn't know about practicing.

JEA: Did you interview with law firms after graduating?

WLA: No, I don't believe so. I went with the telephone company.

JEA: How did you find out about the telephone company?

WLA: Oh, I don't know. I just happened to. It was a good company to work for. I started in Nashville, up there on Capital Boulevard, you know. That's where the accounting office was.

JEA: How did you happen to talk to that teacher in Columbia?

WLA: I was trying to find a ride for you and Bill so I didn't have to go to Columbia every morning and she taught in Columbia just before you get to St. Catherine's. There used to be a school on the left. I think it was home ec or something. I forget the name of it. But I talked to her and she said, "Why don't you teach because then you, instead of spending half a day coming and going?" So I talked to superintendent of schools in Columbia, Mr.Baker and he told me to go up to Santa Fe and talk to them up there. I did and they hired me.

JEA: And what did you teach?

WLA: I taught 7th grade and 12th grade economics and then I switched over and taught a half year of business law in high school. It was 1 through 12. I taught everything in 7th grade except economics and business law. Then after 4 years up there I came back and taught 5 years at Belfast.

JEA: If you hadn't talked to that lady, would you just have farmed?

WLA: I was trying to do that a little bit, but I was just trying to find a ride for you. That's before the girls started too, you see. And then when they started, Mr. Irwin. And he died just before I started teaching at Belfast. He was a friend of Winston's and that's the way I met him.

WLA: I worked for AT&T three years in Nashville and one year in Atlanta.

JEA: How did they happen to send you to Atlanta?

WLA: Well, that was the headquarters and when I started working there, Mr. Stubbs was head of the accounting office in Nashville. He was transferred to Atlanta as Vice President and sent for me or something I guess and I did audit of stock records of Southern Bell in Nashville. MR. Stubbs had already been transferred . And we just stayed there a year and then came back to the farm and (waited?) for you all.

JEA: When I was up in San Francisco, I had to do an audit of bond records and found a Safeway bond previously held by George Recktenwald, Susan's uncle who lived in Walnut Creek and was an engineer had worked on the Manhattan project at Lawrence Livermore Labs and that's how he got to California.

JEA: And when we came back to the farm, how did you tell them that you were leaving? Did they want to transfer you back here?

WLA: I explained I had a farm and a family and I wanted to go back. It was a good company and I enjoyed working for them. I don't know what it was. It wasn't quite my, it isn't what I would have picked, [and I didn't like accounting?]

JEA: Did you like Santa Fe School or Belfast School the best?

WLA: I liked both of them pretty well. Of course I didn't like driving all the way to Santa Fe.

JEA: How far was that.

WLA: It was about 13 miles the other side of Columbia, [in the hills].

JEA; So how many total miles was it?

WLA: About 35 I guess.

JEA: How long did it take to drive.

WLA: it didn't take very long. A lot of times we'd go by Bit's store, and go that way you know.

JEA; How long do you think it took?

WLA: We'd leave home usually about 6:30 and I'd drop you off a little after 7:00. I had to be at school about a quarter to 7:00 for the early bus. We used to go by Morresville to pick up Mr. Irvin. And then we'd drive in. Once a week we'd use his car and leave my car.

JEA; So it would only take a half an hour to get to Columbia, even on the gravel roads?

WLA: A little over maybe.

JEA: Really.

WLA: At that time they didn't have the..

JEA; I remember they were all gravel.

WLA: Silver Creek Pike you know you couldn't get on. Now you just go down and hit it right there at the interstate. Back then you had to go back all the way through town and wind all the way back around.

JEA: Did I tell you that I did find that the Simpsons did come from Tennessee. The census records show that the Simpsons were from Tennessee, but they don't say where.

WLA: Near Cullioka some place. I think I heard that from the family. And my grandfather had seven girls and one boy. Orlando was the only boy and he was the last one. But of course his first wife died. He had four girls. And he married again a couple of years and needed a mother for the girls and then he had three more and a boy. Hazel, Winnifred and Leona.

WLA [looking at photos]: This one's Clyde Brinkley [he had a bandage over his chin.] the one who was stationed near me at Stuttgart for awhile. And that's Bill Houston [looks as if he has just thrown something.] Marshall Houston. And that's he again four years later.

JEA; He was your roommate at Davidson?

WLA: Yeah, I was there just one year myself. I went there my freshman year. I met him and Clyde there. One was killed almost at the beginning of the war and the other one … Clyde was from Brinkley, Arkansas and he used to stop by after I started back to Vanderbilt. Nashville was on his way home anyway, Brinkley, Arkansas. And he'd stop and stay a few days with me in Nashville, two or three sometimes. Sometimes not that long. And then when I finally got in the Army at Stuttgart, he came down and brought his girlfriend and another couple with him, had dinner with me down at Stuttgart. And then he married that Christmas before he left. And his plane was lost just about as soon as he got overseas over the English Channel. I don't know whether he was shot down or what.

JEA: Were they just forming Stuttgart when you got there?

WLA: Yes, when I got there they were just forming it. It was a glider school. They moved it down from Columbus, Ohio and it was part of the Eastern Flying Training Command, and they transferred it to, oh what do they call it, anyway one, whatever they called it, and then I moved, they moved everybody out to Stuttgart so I could stay in the Southeastern Flying Training Command. Then it became a twin-engine school.

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.

Move to Nashville from Pulaski
The family moved to Pulaski where Dad attended Massey School for 4th grade. It was there that he recalls seeing a black man hanging by the neck from the chandelier of the court house. The family then moved to Nashville and for two years he attended Peabody Demonstration School where the old gym on the Vanderbilt Campus is. The family then moved to Oakland Avenue in Nashville and he had to transfer to Calvert School for part of the 7th grade and then Clement School for 8th Grade. He then attended Hume Fogg High School for a year and 1/2 where he was vice-president of the Astronomy Club of which the famous Dina Shore was a member. Dina went on to be a famous singer and television personality. He then attended Duncan School on the Vanderbilt campus for his junior and senior years of high school.


DAD'S CHILDHOOD BY SON BILL
As a child, my father attended Duncan Latin Grammar School and Hume-Fogg in Nashville. In high school at Hume-Fogg, Dad's favorite course was an astronomy class in which the teacher encouraged the students to make their own reflector telescope. His instrument has a 6-inch mirror with lenses sufficiently powerful to reveal the rings of Saturn.

I just transferred a June 2001 recording of an interview with Daddy where he showed us pictures of two of his WW II friends. One was Clyde Brinkley and the other was Bill (Marshall) Houston. Bill was Daddy's roommate at Davidson and was killed after WWII in a plane crash I believe. Clyde was killed at the beginning of the war.

1936 Davidson College, NC Yearbook - Quips & Cranks
William LaFayette Andrews - Nashville, TN
Allen M. Steele - Franklin, TN [Future President of Life & Casualty Insurance Company, Nashville, who lived behind Tyne Blvd.]

Piano and Waverly Dunning
5/28/2005
Waverly Dunning came over to visit WLA at the Chalet as he was dying and told son John that WLA used to come over to her house, sit down and play the piano beautifully. She was 16 & he was 5 years older & she was enamored of him he was so handsome sitting there playing. He then went off to the Army and she married a Purdue lawyer.

Dad's Work with AT&T and Resigning:
WLA: I worked for AT&T three years in Nashville and one year in Atlanta.

JEA; How did they happen to send you to Atlanta?
WLA: Well, that was the headquarters and when I started working there, Mr. Stubbs was head of the accounting office in Nashville. He was transferred to Atlanta as Vice President and asked for me or something I guess and I did audit of stock records of Southern Bell.

JEA; And how did you tell them that you were leaving? Did they want to transfer you back here?
WLA: I explained I had a farm and a family and I wanted to go back. It was a good company and I enjoyed working for them.

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 [actually he didn't start playing until 1976 or so]. 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.

JUNE 16, 1996 INTERVIEW OF WILLIAM L. ANDREWS BY SON DAVID WITH DAVID'S 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.

It's great to see this transcribed. Thanks John.

After listening to Daddy's story this week (and I'd forgotten all about it till now), I had so many questions. I didn't realize that Daddy was so close to Paul.

From: Andrews, William X.
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2007 10:31 AM
To: Andrews, John (DC)
Subject: RE: Stories 5:6 (Daddy of Nicholas G. Andrews)

I may be mistaken but somehow I thought Daddy and Paul also went to basic training together in the army. There is a picture I once saw of the two of them in front of a pup tent. I think it was in Daddy's old World War II photo album. I wish we could find that book if it weren't thrown away. There is a picture of Daddy laying on his bed with soldiers drilling outside his window. You could see them through the window. I think Daddy was listening to the radio and enjoying the music. He was in uniform and I think I remember a lieutenant's bar on his collar. It would have had to have been after 1943 and officer training school in Carlyle Pa. Bill

From: Andrews, John (DC)
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2007 10:40 AM
To: 'Andrews, William X.'
Cc: 'David'
Subject: RE: Stories 5:6 (Daddy of Nicholas G. Andrews)

I think I remember that picture, but I don't recall hearing that they were in basic training together. Paul was two years younger than Daddy (Mama's age, born 1818) and I thought that Daddy was one of the first drafted. He didn't go into the Army until several months latter since he was in Vanderbilt law school, so maybe it is likely they were in basic together. Was that Camp Barkley - where is that?

I also wish we could find that album.

Thanks for this information, Bill.

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 amazing 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 and took 21 credit hours that semester.

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 thought 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: Yeah. 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: Yeah, 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 Stuttgart.

INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM L. ANDREWS, JR, JULY 2002:
See, my Aunt Myrtle's husband died in 1920 and my father died in 1924, so after my father died, see, he had bought this [farm on Highway 431] in January and he intended probably because he had cancer, which I don't think he knew what it was, he intended to retire and live here I think and he died the following December. I remember when I was a boy, we came out here and burned off all these fields, like sage grass then. He brought all of the boys from the store up there you know that worked for him at the store. I think they used to get off on Thursday afternoons or Wednesday – one afternoon – and they came out here and, of course, I was 7 years old. I remember. My father was with them. See, it occurred in January I think after he bought the place. I guess [he found the farm because] it was just for sale. I've forgotten the names of the people he bought it from, but they moved to Nashville and I used to know their names. I think originally it was Ewing property. I think it was sold off before [my father bought it]. Then that track in back was a different one, different track, so he bought it that way too. But after Aunt Myrtle's husband died, then when he realized I guess that he wasn't going to be able to live here himself, he, I don't know how it came about but anyway Aunt Myrtle lived here with her 4 boys you see. [They moved here] after my father died. My father [probably arranged for them to do that.] He probably talked… And Elgie lived here at one time and then of course Paul was just young, my age, and Elgie and Mary lived here and they bought a place down there and then Aunt Myrtle and David and Evelyn lived here. She had the twin girls and another daughter Nancy, and they lived here. You know they were going out to Belfast when we were out there. Nancy had just finished [Belfast Elementary School] the year before I started teaching and she was the one who had to have her leg amputated. [Nicholas' farm when he moved here - or after he died] - was sold then and just the money divided up. And, of course, I bought my electric guitar I think with the money I got. That was his [Nicholas']original farm. It was where – see, we were living there when Sara was born. My father and mother were living at Silver Creek when she was born, but I think she was born down there (at Nicholas' farm) at that time. I don't think they were born in hospitals then I guess.

JEA – But how did Nicholas happen to buy his farm? That wasn't a part of his father's farm was it?
WLA – I don't know.
JEA – But he lived there from an early age, right?
WLA – I don't know whether anybody else in the family lived there before or not. I just don't remember. I kind of think he bought it. I may be wrong.

JEA – How did your father and mother meet?
WLA – Well, the Harris' had a cousin, Riggs Harris, and he moved up to southern Illinois. And so my father was visiting him and their farm was about maybe 2 or 3 miles from Orlando Simpson's farm – maybe not that far. And he met them that way. Riggs Harris, the grandmother lived right down there you know when you go toward the interstate (on highway 50) and go past the, you know that road (on the left just after the Ezell Curve) that goes off to that cemetery (the Bryant Cemetery) on the other side there (left side), when you go over the hill there, that first house way over there, I mean it's just after you get out of the hill and the woods, you can see the two houses there. The one way down and that first one was cousin Mildred's. I call her cousin Mildred, Mildred Harris. That would be Paul's grandmother or great grandmother. So Riggs Harris was related to them.
JEA – Then did they go together to the 1800 World's Fair in St. Louis? (I think Aunt Sara told me this.)
WLA – I don't remember. It seems to me that some of the Simpsons originally came from Culleoka. I may be wrong about this. You know, the old Sunny Webb school used to be at Culleoka. Sonnie Webb started the Webb School at Bell Buckle and his daughter married Mr. Price and they started the Price-Webb school up here, that's where Sara and I went to school, first started to school and I went through the 4th grade I think before the school burned. Sara was named for her (Sara Bryant). They called her Aunt Sallie. She died in 1928 and Nicholas died in 1934.
[Looking at Photograph]
That's Sara and my father, and that's that house on Limestone Avenue here where we lived before we moved over to Verona Avenue. That was the first house from the corner and now I bet there are 10 houses between there and the corner. Uncle Bob (not related) worked for my father and he lived over here. Bob Adams was his name, wasn't related. We called him uncle. He worked for my father at the grocery store and he was older, was retired and everything else. Sara was born in 1908, so that would be about 1914.
I never saw my father with his hair parted down the middle. I never saw him look like that in my life.
WLA Jr -
after Aunt Myrtle's husband died, when he realized I guess that he wasn't going to be able to live here himself, he, I don't knowhow it came about but anyway Aunt Myrtle lived here with her 4 boys you see.[They moved here] after my father died. ...He probably talked… And Elgie lived here at one time and then of course Paul was just young, my age, and Elgie and Mary lived here and they bought a place down there and then Aunt Myrtle and David and Evelyn lived here. She had the twin girls and another daughter Nancy, and they lived here. You know they were going out to Belfast when we were out there. Nancy had just finished [Belfast Elementary School] the year before I started teaching and she was the one who had to have her leg amputated. [Nicholas' farm when he moved here - or after he died] - was sold then and just the money divided up.

And, of course, I bought my electric guitar I think with the money I got [from the sale of Nicholas Green Andrews' farm] because Carta McClina arranged for five of us to go to Europe and play on the way over. We never did go because he got a job then with Francis Craig's orchestra and he was broadcasting every Sunday night. When he got that job, we didn't go. Mama gave [the guitar] to, well remember when Susan was dating Rich Kimble, she gave it to his brother. Susan played on it some down at Belfast once I think, but it was an electric Richenbacher guitar.

[Another Picture]

Here I am at the same address. My first day of school I think. Price Webb.

Hume Fogg. We built this telescope and I was vice-president of the club there and Diana Shore was in this teacher's room with me. Fairly large telescope. Started Duncan in the middle of the third year (of high school).

I took the bar on the 16th and 17th and you were born on the 17th and I had to wait all day to go see you at the hospital because it was my second day of taking the bar exam and didn't have enough time to go out there at lunch. The night before, Mama and I had been over to Daps and Mina's visiting over there. We got home and then about midnight we had to go to the hospital, no I guess it was the next night.

[New Picture]

That's my father's store, not a very good picture. There's my father right there. Jeb Purdom, I don't remember him, and Bob Adams is right here and he's the one who lived next door to us and worked for my father. That's the old store. It's right next to – this is where the old Peoples & Union Bank was and after he died, sold it to Doctor that Mama had in Columbia who operated on Mama, Dr. Veldon Harwell, Jr., his father. And he bought the store from my father. Where Parson's Pharmacy is now. Well that was it. Before Dr. Leonard bought it for his daughter, the bank was on the left side and McBride & Rutledge Drug Store was next to it on the right, all in the same building. Then upstairs there was a law office that one time we rented to the governor, Prentice Cooper. The back of it was owned by a lodge. My father didn't own that. My mother rented it to Prentice Cooper after my father died. See, we kept that until 1964. The money I got from that is what I bought the Santa Fe farm with – made the down payment. I got $25,000 after my mother died. Aunt Sara and I each got $25,000. I put it in the bank and it had grown to about $30,000, so when we bought the Santa Fe farm, Bill and Claudia, Bill and Claudia bought 1/3 and we bought 2/3s and so I paid $46,000. We made it even and they paid the $24,000, so that made the $70,000. The Old Hillsboro Farm was $75,000 as you remember and we paid $50,000 [loaning this amount to John to buy the farm]. [Susan and her husband David Brindle always felt bad because they thought Daddy and Mama had given John the Old Hillsboro farm free and Bill and Claudia the Santa Fe farm free, while they had received nothing.] I owed $16,000, so I paid mine once a year. I put $30,000 into it and Bill and Claudia paid once a month since they had just started working. Bill was still working for the paper.

I never saw my father with his hair parted down the middle. I never saw him look like that in my life.

So he [WLA's grandfather, Orlando Simpson] had eight children, one boy. Orlando, Jr. ran the farm and was 5 years older than I was. He was my hero, because he was just, we were interested in a lot of the same things. Well, music. He liked guitar and all, and, of course, I was probably playing the piano back then too, in my teens. I could always pretty much pick out a melody, like one finger you know. And then you know those little ukulele cords they used to have on sheet music. I'd get my ukulele and get the cord and then match the sound on that and it made those cords. And the first song I ever learned was in E flat which most people don't play in E flats and A flats and all those, but that's the way I learned it, so I played most of my songs in E flat and A flat and B flat. I could handle it better than I could just the straight ones. That's the reason the girls I played with at church, they usually had to use a capo so I'd be in key a little bit higher and they'd use a capo and get up with me.

This was in the Tennessean I think. It would be about a year after I went in. It says: "Lt. Andrews heads Medical Detachment, etc."

WLA – You know, at a base they always sent things like that home. I didn't know they were doing it.

I got to Stuttgart in the fall of 1942 see, because I finished in June OCS at Carlisle Barracks, in June of 1942. And then I went to Columbus, Ohio for almost three months doing the same thing in the medical department. You know, [I got into medical because]when you're drafted, they sent us to Ft. Oglethorpe and they went down the list when they get a call from wherever they needed somebody. They got two calls, and they started. One of us went to coast artillery and the next one they sent to the medical replacement training. And they just went down the list like that. So a whole bunch of Vanderbilt people were on that because they all had been deferred until June. They deferred you if you were in the middle of a semester. See, I would have gone in in probably January or February of 1941 certainly instead of July 16th. I went in on July 16th, sworn in on the 17th. That was 5 months before Pearl Harbor.

JEA – So why did they send you to Columbus, Ohio for just 3 months?
WLA – I'll tell you what happened. I was supposed to go to Maxwell Field. I went down there for about 2 or 3 weeks in Alabama. One of the OCS candidates had worked under the general there, of the Eastern Flying Training Command, or Southeastern, and had been his sergeant there and he went to OCS the same time I did, so when we got out, they sent me down there, but the general realized that his own sergeant had been commissioned and was there, so they sent me back up to Columbus, Ohio. I hadn't even started working down there. I remember him at OCS, but I didn't know what was going on. Then that field went over to the 1st Air Force. It was a glider school – Columbus, Ohio. See, I was in the Air Force all the time. All of us were Air Force from then on. Maxwell Field was Air Force, so my first assignment was Air Force.

JEA – Where did you do that pilot training?
WLA – That was a couple of years later. That was just before I met Mama. I was still at Stuttgart and I went to San Antonio and down that way for, San Antonio is where we got our radio, Morris Code and all that, getting ready, and then they sent me to Ft. Stockton, Texas for my actual flight training. I washed out because we had an Army test pilot who was giving us our test and I misunderstood him. You couldn't ask him again because they had one of those sounds where he could talk to you; you were in the front cockpit, he's behind you. He told me to fly at a certain angle and I misunderstood him, so I thought I was going at a pretty steep angle, but I thought you weren't supposed to question, so I didn't. But I guess I lucked out, because I met Mama then when I went back to Stuttgart. They sent me back. See, I thought too that I was getting out of Stuttgart for good. I thought that after I did wash out, well they'll send me someplace else. They sent me right back to Stuttgart because I was just on temporary assignment down there while I was in training. You had three different stages down there. Advanced flying. That was primary school. I got 41 solo hours. That's almost two days solo. Uncle Ted was an actual pilot at that time. I didn't know Uncle Ted at that time. He flew Cardinal Spellman to Rome. I found out all about that later.

JEA – What kind of personality did Uncle Ted have?
WLA – I liked him. I didn't see him much. He and Catherine came down to the farm after we moved back here [Mama and the kids for the first time]. When I was there (in Detroit), he was still in the service. I know Mama left me in Alexandria because he was coming home and wanted tell them about Catherine. Ganger wanted Mama to come home to be there when he got there, so she left Alexandria and went on. See, I was transferred there after Stuttgart went over to – We were married in 1944. Mama went down to Alexandria, but not in the service. She got out as soon as she was expecting Bill. We were married in November 1944 and she was expecting that spring, so she got out the spring of 1945 and the Stuttgart went over to the 3rd Air Force, and so they shipped us all out - Shipped me out to Ester Field, Louisiana right out of Alexandria. I had to stay in a hotel down there for 3 or 4 weeks before I got assigned. I did the same thing down there – Just medical stuff. Just the paperwork and all that stuff. We didn't have a detachment down there or anything. Mama was down in Alexandria about a month; 3 weeks or a month because we lived in town. We just got a room. I don't know that Catherine was coming home with Uncle Ted then. Mama stayed in Detroit because I got out in – the 1st atomic bomb was dropped in August 1945 and, boy, after that everything closed real quickly. Since we had all gone in before the war started, we got out early. Of course, I still had to be in uniform until almost the end of December. We had so much accumulated leave that, I was in Detroit, but still on leave. I left Alexandria, I guess, in November. Bill was born November 14th, so I was home then. It might have been the later part of October. Uncle Ray drove Mama to the airport and then took the car and left the car and took the bus so we'd be together , and, of course, I had never driven in Detroit and Mama is not very good on directions. We made it home though. He and Aunt Joan were married at that time. They got married before we did. they were expecting Cathy. She was born 3 or 4 weeks before Bill. So he was out of the Army too.
###

W. L. Andrews, Jr. was inducted into the Army at Ft. Oglethorpe, Georgia during his third year of law school at Vanderbilt University, one year before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He served 5 1/2 years in the Army until the surrender of Japan in 1945. He went through Officer's Candidate School at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania before being sent to Stuttgart, Arkansas. He was at Stuttgart Army Base in Arkansas for a year and 1/2 before he applied for flight training to get away from Stuttgart. (This was before he met Elizabeth Jane Early.) He was sent to San Antonio, Texas to complete preliminary matters and then to Ft. Stockton, Texas for three months of mono-plane training. He completed his 42 solo hours before taking his flight test. There were only one-way communications between him and his instructor, and he misunderstood his instructor to tell him to fly at a steep angle. This didn't sound right to him, but because he couldn't question the instructor, he did it anyway. He never received his wings because of this and was sent back to Stuttgart, Arkansas. If this hadn't happened, he never would have met Elizabeth Jane Early.

William L. Andrews' commanding officer recommended him, and the post commander at Stuttgart appointed him to serve as defense counsel in military trials. He was assigned an assistant counsel and tried several AWOL cases where the maximum sentence was 6 months. He was assistant trial counsel in a general court marshal case involving an aircraft that was flown without authorization.

William L. Andrews, Jr. went to work for American Telephone and Telegraph Company in the Rate Department in Nashville after law school. He was transferred to Atlanta by AT&T in 1950 and stayed about a year, resigning in 1951. He hated the rat race and the idea of materialistic ambition. He also appeared a little afraid of the world.

His son John recalls his father as an extremely moral and intelligent person with a vast storehouse of knowledge. He appeared to love discussing philosophy and analyzing things logically. John was told the story that his father passed-out while young upon being hurt rather than saying a curse word. John never heard either of his parents curse, use profanity or God's name in vain, vulgarity or distasteful language. The most enjoyable part of life for John after college was sitting and talking to his father about life and politics.

Although he never heard his father speak derisively of Catholicism or religion in general, John's impression was that his father felt that he had to trust his own intellect and could accept nothing on faith. William L. Andrews became a Catholic after his sons, Bill and John, had finished undergraduate school. The family found this out at a weekday Mass at Christ the King Church in Nashville when their father, without saying anything, went to communion with them. John recalls thinking at that moment, "Why could this not have happened years earlier?" Later in the 1990s, William L. Andrews stopped receiving holy communion because he knew he could not do this if he really did not believe.

John remembers very little of his father before the farm. He recalls his father sitting, wearing a men's dress hat, in front of a television set next to the front door with a baseball game on one Saturday in either Nashville or Atlanta just before going out the door for work. While in the water with his cousins at "Lake House" on Lake St. Clair in Point aux Roches, Canada, John recalls seeing a man walk up to his mother and kiss her on the cheek. He asked his cousin, Cathy Watts, who was standing next to him in the water, "Who is that man?" Cathy replied, "That's Uncle Andy!" At Lake House, John recalls Bill beginning first grade at Ecole Brebeuf School. He also remembers, just before leaving Lake House to move to the farm, his father throwing a cigarette butt on the ground and, after his father was out of sight, picking it up and trying to smoke it. John recalls that his big ambitions then were to grow up like his father, have change in his pockets, and smoke cigarettes. John never saw his father smoke again after moving to the farm a short time later. John also recalls one cold winter night leaving Lake House for Detroit with Bill and John in Gampa's car and Joan and Susan following with their mother in the car they called the "Old Grey Mare". 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 but it did not seem to be moving. Gampa turned around and found that the Old Grey Mare had slid off of the road at the 90 degree turn and landed upside down on the ice covering the river. Everyone was safe after Gampa pulled them from the car.

John recalls his father going to Mass every Sunday with the family with the exception of one Sunday. When everyone came home that Sunday, he recalls seeing his father sitting at the kitchen table looking very down-hearted.

As he was growing up on the farm, John recalls that his father appeared very unhappy. That unhappiness rubbed off on John after he was about 8 years old, possibly because John partially interpreted his father's unhappiness as an unhappiness with him. Although John recalls his father having a close relationship with Bill, talking often of the law and politics, John did not feel the same closeness to his father until years later. Because John loved farming and had the energy and enthusiasm of his mother for accomplishing things, he was constantly getting in trouble with his father for the things he did or wanted to do.

John recalls sitting for hours with his father in the "secret room" upstairs watching him build electronic devices or fix televisions, with neither saying very much if anything to each other. John also recalls the first crystal radio his father built for him in a plastic sandwich box which received only WSM or WJJM and the subsequent "one tube" radio his father built for him, which he would stare at in the dark of the night watching the vacuum tube glow and listening to the only music it would receive, country music, which he did not like that much. Later his Aunt Sara and Grandmother gave him one of their old radios (an early battery operated model) off of which he loved to take the back so that he could watch the many tubes glow all together in the dark at night. While John was in eighth grade, his father "jerry-rigged" a AM carrier wave transmitter on the Halliburton short wave receiver he had given him (John loved to sit for hours listening to Radio Moscow, Vatican Radio, etc. on this receiver). This transmitter carried the transmitted signal along the telephone lines. John and his fellow Belfast School companions used this transmitter to start radio station WBES broadcasting music programs each morning before school started from a vacant classroom with students lining up at the door with their transistor radios to their ears and people at the country store in town picking it up also. All of this caused John to develop a great interest in electronics, just as Michigan Drilling Company had caused him to develop an interest in engineering.

The first time John felt close to his father was during his sophomore year of college at Saint Louis University in 1966 when, at 5:00 in the morning, his father knocked on the door to the dorm room which he shared with Bill to tell John that he had received a draft notice from the Army. He had travelled all night via train from Nashville to St. Louis. His train had derailed about 50 miles or so outside of St. Louis and he had to be brought by bus the rest of the way in to St. Louis. John could see his father through the rear window as he got into a cab in front of St. Francis Xavier Church on campus to return to the farm after his visit, and John's eyes welled up as he experienced more emotion than he had ever felt for his father.

The first year the family was together on the farm, W.L. Andrews attended farm school at night under the G.I. Bill and brought Bill and John to and from first grade at St. Catherine's School in Columbia. Wheat was harvested from the "Corn Field" and oats was harvested from the field nearest town the following summer. This was the last time these crops were grown on the farm. Thereafter, corn and hay were grown. In the fall of 1955, W.L. Andrews began teaching 7th and 12th grades at Santa Fe School in Santa Fe, Tennessee. In September of 1959, he began teaching 7th and 8th grades and was Principal at Belfast School in Belfast, Tennessee. Then in 1962, he took education classes at Peabody College in Nashville and started teaching at Lipscomb School on Concord Road in Brentwood, Tennessee before retiring in 1972.

All of the children grew extremely close to their father in later years after high school. He had an easy-going nature and everyone he met appeared to love and admire him. As an example, Walter Bussart who was in St. John's Parish in Lewisburg, had unsuccessfully run for Governor and represented the plaintiffs in their obviously unjustified medical malpractice lawsuit against William L. Andrews' daughter-in-law, Claudia Andrews, walked up to William L. Andrews in the courtroom, shook his hand and said that he was sorry to have to meet under the circumstances. This was at a time when Bill and Claudia's son Willy was seriously ill and very likely in need of a liver transplant.
1954 Selling Cedar on Farm

When W.L Andrews brought his family from Detroit to the farm in 1954, he sold the cedar timber off the farm for pencil making and the timbermen left all of the branches in the woods making it difficult for the children to play in the woods. He also took out a loan with the Federal Land Bank of Louisville at 4% in order to build a bathroom in the farm house. The outhouse that was previously used was moved to Sally and Milton Evans' house for their use.

W.L. Andrews was principal at Belfast School in Marshall County, Tennessee and bent over backward to treat all students equally. Because his own children were in the school, he was extra hard on them in order to show that they received no special treatment. His daughters were taught by a Mrs. Muse who would frequently bring them to their father to be disciplined because of problems with the boys in their class because of their Catholicity. On one such occasion he brought them into his office and took a ruler to his own hand knowing that Mrs. Muse was listening outside the door and knowing that his daughters did not deserve discipline.

He built a tree house for his children in a large elm tree at the spring from which his son Bill later tried to get Joan and Susan to jump with parachutes made of sheets on their back.

WLA: When Gary Ladd was in 7th grade at Santa Fe School, every time I'd give him a test, he'd bless himself. I'm sure he wasn't Catholic, but he'd seen that on television I guess. [Letter to WXA:] "I count myself extremely fortunate to have been in your father's 1955 to 1956 7th grade class at Santa Fe School, and have always considered him to be one of the three best teachers, including both the high school and university level, I studied under. From him I learned practically all there was to know about English grammar and an immense amount about other things as well. He taught me the rudiments of chess and even sold me my first chess set." WLA – He thought I sold him; he didn't say I gave it to him. I don't remember. I wish I had given it to him. But I taught a whole bunch of them how to play chess.

Gary Ladd – student of Daddy's at Santa Fe.
[Letter to William X. Andrews:]
"I count myself extremely fortunate to have been in your father's 1955 to 1956 7th grade class at Santa Fe School, and have always considered him to be one of the three best teachers, including both the high school and university level, I studied under. From him I learned practically all there was to know about English grammar and an immense amount about other things as well. He taught me the rudiments of chess and even sold me my first chess set."

WLA – He thought I sold him; he didn't say I gave it to him. I don't remember. I wish I had given it to him. But I taught a whole bunch of them how to play chess.

WLA – Cousin Sam Tucker, Cousin Annie [his wife, I think] lived right next to the Hugh Gracie place. Farm was pretty big – 180 acres, both sides of the road. We were real close, like first cousins. He had a son who lived in Atlanta, married a wealthy girl from Atlanta and they had two daughters and one of the daughters was killed when she was in college in Atlanta. She and a friend had gone out and a car hit them as they went over a hill. She was in College at Georgia Tech, maybe Emery. Pretty prominent family in Atlanta. This daughter was killed after the parents died.

Cousin Sam's son went to Davidson and then on to Vanderbilt. Frank Tucker.

I had to stay down in Atlanta several months before I could find a place to live and you all still lived on Stokes Lane, and I'd come home every weekend. every now and then, Betty would come down and we'd look for a place. I think you stayed over with Grandmother and Aunt Sara. But I was having dinner one night with a fellow and he later became mayor of Atlanta. We didn't notice while we were talking, but everyone had left the restaurant. Some man had died and they came in with a stretcher to take him out and everyone stopped eating but us. No one told us. He was Mayor or Governor of Georgia. I was there only a year – 1950. We were there when the war broke out – Truman's War I guess you'd call it. We left in April. You'll went to Detroit and I came on down to the farm here. 1st of April, 1951. I had to wait a couple of months to finish my job there.

WLA – Sam Tucker's father might have been Ferdinand. I'm not sure. He came out here to work on the farm and knew Elizabeth Andrews who was Eddie Derryberry's mother. She had gone to school in Murfreesboro and was pretty popular in those days. John R. Andrews, Jr. was with the fire department or sheriff's department for awhile. His father was in the plumbing business. Eddie Derryberry's father was too.

WLA - The first place I went after basic training was Abilene, Texas (Camp Barkley), and then latter flight training at Ft. Stockton, Texas. Then from Camp Barkley, I went to OCS at Carlisle Barracks, and then I came back and went to Arkansas after I went down to Maxwell Field for a week or so waiting to see where I was supposed to go. I would have stayed in Columbus if it had stayed, but it went from Southeastern Flying Training Command to the 1st Air Force, so they moved most of us out to different places. I went to Arkansas. That's where I stayed most. I was there almost 2 ½ years.

I'm sure I've seen a picture of William Vaughn Andrews someplace.

JEA – William J. Andrews; somebody by the name of Cunningham is married to William J. Andrews. Horace Andrews built the kitchen cabinet according to Martha Andrews, the one Bill and Claudia have, but she isn't sure about the other one that we're getting.
Aunt Sara retired in 1974. Aunt Sara had more friends than I did. I ran around with school buddies all my life, with Dap, Leo Bolster, all those boys. [In the past he had mentioned a Billy Lynch who was at Father Ryan.] I knew about as many Catholic boys…

I started teaching at Lipscomb [grade school on Concord Pike in Williamson County] in 1964.

John R. Andrews, Sr. and this is John R., Jr. The one my age is John R., Jr. They were probably one of Nicholas' brothers. John R., Jr. and I went to school together at Price-Webb for awhile and he worked for the fire department. Price-Webb was the only time I went to school over here. I remember walking to school, we started throwing rocks at something. One of the rocks skipped off something and hit one of us. I'm not sure whether it was I or John R. At the time I was staying up at the Staceys. I guess they were related some way. Margaret Stacey. Those houses are all gone now. My mother was up there visiting I guess. We were walking home together. It hit me and I started bleeding and John R. ran home afraid he'd be in trouble.

Margaret Stacey's brother became pretty wealthy. He lived up in Kentucky. He'd give us a lot of money for the cemetery. All of his family is buried up there [Liggett-Andrews] and we never could get another road up there. His parents are…
I don't think the Johnson's bought Nicholas' farm when they had the sale.
Will Harris was a farmer and his farm was up there where they live now [near Belfast]. They lived there as long as I know back in the late 20s when I was 4 years old when he died.

The first time I found out that I was going to be drafted, the Tennessean sent someone out. We were in the student court room, moot court room at Vanderbilt. We had mock trials and all, and they got me up there and took a picture of me in moot court and then put it in the paper. It was an awful picture. Then we went to lunch. It was the same day I'm sure. They came on down where we ate lunch – it was one of those; it was a pharmacy where they had one of those lunch places in back too. We were eating back there and they came in there and took a picture. [The other paper; probably the Banner.] It was much better. The restaurant is right there at the corner of where Vanderbilt goes up to the law school. The reporter that came down was from Lewisburg. I knew him and so it was a nice article. I can't think of his name right now. I was surprised. I think this was the first I had heard about being drafted. There were 20 boards in Nashville and each one of them had a number 158, but I was the only one of those 20 that was called into service because the rest of them were married or things like that. But both of them had it in the paper that night. As I say, that one in the Tennessean was awful. It looked as if I hadn't shaved. I had a cigarette out of my mouth. Oh boy!

JEA – Were you in the same draft board Bill and I were in? [We were in no. 20 at the Federal Building at 8th and Broadway. I remember going down and signing up for the draft in January 1965 when I turned 18.]
WLA – Probably. I think it was number 20. I was living on Oakland then.

The thing was, even though I had number 158, I had already started the new semester. The drawing was in October 1940 I think, but they didn't – I had started back to school before they called me and they let me finish that whole semester, which took me down to June. And so, I didn't really go in until July 16th. That ended my second year. See, I would have gone in in January. I got to Ft. Oglethorpe and that's where we were sworn in on the 17th. That was before Pearl Harbor. I was in 5 months before Pearl Harbor.
George Tucker lived in Memphis and he had one son. They used to come over quite often. You know, related to Cousin Sam and and Cousin Annie. The son was closer to my age. I don't think he was a brother of Cousin Sam. I don't think it was that close. Could have been, but I don't think so. But you know, there were three or four in the Tucker family, two of them who were doctors and this man wasn't a doctor., but had a plumbing business in Memphis.

JEA – It says Mr. and Mrs. George Opscola Hauge Tucker.

WLA – I don't know who they are.

WLA – I think Aunt Lou and Uncle Bascum got married kind of late. Aunt Lou laughed a lot and joked a good bit, but Aunt Myrtle was older than Aunt Lou. I think she was older than my father too. I think she was the oldest girl. I think my Aunt Myrtle Sanford was the oldest on the Simpson side. Aunt Myrtle, Aunt Clara, my mother, Aunt Judith. We used to go up once a year during the summer and visit for a week or two.
JEA – Aunt Myrtle died in 1952. She must have died fairly young.
WLA – She seemed pretty old to me.
WLA – That's Myrtle V's mother, Hazel, more Aunt Sara's age, who lived in that house with a wrap –around porch by the railroad tracks. Hazel Tennison. Hazel Tennison was Aunt Myrtle Harris' daughter. Myrtle V. Tennison – Lynn Perry was Myrtle V.'s husband. Hazel had another daughter and she lived in Knoxville, near Morristown. Hazel had two daughters Myrtle V. Perry and Mildred Ann. Myrtle and Will Harris had Elgie, David, Paul and Hazel. Hazel was older than Paul, but that's the right order. Paul was younger than I was. Betty and I went over and saw Hazel at the Merryhill nursing home before she died. Hazel had two girls - Myrtle V. and Mildred Ann. Myrtle V's husband is Lynn Perry and I talk to her quite often. She's pretty sick now. They don't get out any place anymore. Mildred Ann is a little younger than Myrtle V., maybe a couple of years. When they [Hazel] sold their farm, they moved into town.
Mildred Harris was Will Harris' mother. There is a cemetery behind the old Will Harris house in Silver Creek. That Will Harris is not the one who died in 1920, but an ancestor.
WLA – Margaret Cannon's son was in law school with me. He was interested in aviation law. He graduated after I did. And that's Elizabeth Derryberry's [Eddy Derryberry's mother] and John R. Andrews; that's the one I played with, and that's her children. She had 4 children.
JEA – So Anna Andrews was the daughter of Tennessee Tucker.


CONVERSATION WITH WILLIAM L. ANDREWS 2/15/04:
Aunt Sara was born at her grandfather Nicholas' house while she and her parents were living in Silver Creek at the Harris house they rented.
Orlando Sr. had 7 girls and 1 boy. Orlando Jr. was 5 years older that Daddy and the two of them were very close. Hazel Simpson and her husband, Walter Terrill moved to Detroit. He had a job with Chrysler. Their son was an invalid. After Walter died, Hazel moved back to Fairfield.
Cousin Sam Tucker was one of Daddy's favorites.
William A. Harris had a big log house and a big tree in the front yard. William L. Andrews, Jr. used to spend the weekends there. He was 4 years old when Will Harris died of appendicitis. Will's grandson, Allan Harris lives in his house now in Belfast. Aunt Myrtle lived right around the corner from he Harris house in Silver Creek.
Margaret Andrews (Cannon)
William L. Andrews, Jr. called her "Cousin Jose May." She had several children, one of whom was J. R. William L. Andrews and John R. were close in age and one time while they were waliing home from school together in Lewisburg, they were throwing rocks at each other and one went astray and hit John R. and he started crying a little bit. They were close in age, but John R.'s sister Elizabeth was a little older. Ross Beckham built the septic tank at William L. Andrews' farm in 1950 or so, someone from Murfreesboro come out to help with the septic tank and he had dated Elizabeth. When William L. Andrews was in law school, another boy in law school at Tennessee was a member of their family. He was going into aviation law in Knoxville.
Margaret Stacy is somehow related to William L. Andrews.

SUE'S INTERVIEW WITH DADDY UNKNOWN DATE:
WLA: (train whistle in background) .. we all went to the Medical Replacement Training Center. After 12 weeks there, we went from there to Camp Barkley, Texas. It was Camp Barkley back then. Now it's Ft. Barkley. And after Camp Barkley I went into OCS and went up to Carlyle, Pennsylvania.

SUE: (to John) Do you know where that is?

JEA (Cameraman): It's not far from us.

WLA: Then after that, they sent me down to, we were in the Eastern Flying Training Command, sent me down to Montgomery, Alabama, but at the same time I graduated, the clerk down there that the General had before also graduated. I would have been his clerk except he wanted his clerk back, the one he had before. So I got there and stayed about a week and they sent me to Stuttgart, Arkansas, and that's where I spent most of the time. Betty came, I think she got there I think in February of 1944 and we were married in November of 1944. And we expected Bill not too long after that, so she got out and was back in Detroit when I got out after the thing was over. After almost 5 years.

JEA: Was it hard going back to law school after that?

WLA; It was, because I had been gone so long. Of course one good thing about it, there weren't very many in the senior class. I had to work on the law review you know.

JEA: Did you ever think about not going back to law school?
WLA: I thought I'd go back to law school, but I didn't know about practicing.
JEA: Did you interview with law firms after graduating?
WLA: No, I don't believe so. I went with the telephone company.
JEA: How did you find out about the telephone company?
WLA: Oh, I don't know. I just happened to. It was a good company to work for. I started in Nashville, up there on Capital Boulevard, you know. That's where the accounting office was.

JEA: How did you happen to talk to that teacher in Columbia?
WLA: I was trying to find a ride for you and Bill so I didn't have to go to Columbia every morning and she taught in Columbia just before you get to St. Catherine's. There used to be a school on the left. I think it was home economics or something. I forget the name of it. But I talked to her and she said, "Why don't you teach because then you, instead of spending half a day coming and going?" So I talked to superintendent of schools in Columbia, Mr. Baker and he told me to go up to Santa Fe and talk to them up there. I did and they hired me.

JEA: And what did you teach?
WLA: I taught 7th grade and 12th grade economics and then I switched over and taught a half year of business law in high school. It was 1 through 12. I taught everything in 7th grade except economics and business law. Then after 4 years up there I came back and taught 5 years at Belfast.

JEA: If you hadn't talked to that lady, would you just have farmed?
WLA: I was trying to do that a little bit, but I was just trying to find a ride for you. That's before the girls started too, you see. And then when they started, Mr. Irwin. And he died just before I started teaching at Belfast. He was a friend of Winston's and that's the way I met him.

WLA: I worked for AT&T three years in Nashville and one year in Atlanta.
JEA: How did they happen to send you to Atlanta?
WLA: Well, that was the headquarters and when I started working there, Mr. Stubbs was head of the accounting office in Nashville. He was transferred to Atlanta as Vice President and sent for me or something I guess and I did audit of stock records of Southern Bell in Nashville. MR. Stubbs had already been transferred . And we just stayed there a year and then came back to the farm and (waited?) for you all.

JEA: When I was up in San Francisco, I had to do an audit of bond records and found a Safeway bond previously held by George Recktenwald, Susan's uncle who lived in Walnut Creek and was an engineer had worked on the Manhattan project at Lawrence Livermore Labs and that's how he got to California.

JEA: And when we came back to the farm, how did you tell them that you were leaving? Did they want to transfer you back here?

WLA: I explained I had a farm and a family and I wanted to go back. It was a good company and I enjoyed working for them. I don't know what it was. It wasn't quite my, it isn't what I would have picked, [and I didn't like accounting?]

JEA: Did you like Santa Fe School or Belfast School the best?

WLA: I liked both of them pretty well. Of course I didn't like driving all the way to Santa Fe.
JEA: How far was that.
WLA: It was about 13 miles the other side of Columbia, [in the hills].
JEA: So how many total miles was it?
WLA: About 35 I guess.
JEA: How long did it take to drive.
WLA: it didn't take very long. A lot of times we'd go by Bit's store, and go that way you know.
JEA: How long do you think it took?
WLA: We'd leave home usually about 6:30 and I'd drop you off a little after 7:00. I had to be at school about a quarter to 7:00 for the early bus. We used to go by Morresville to pick up Mr. Irvin. And then we'd drive in. Once a week we'd use his car and leave my car.
JEA: So it would only take a half an hour to get to Columbia, even on the gravel roads?
WLA: A little over maybe.
JEA: Really.
WLA: At that time they didn't have the..
JEA: I remember they were all gravel.
WLA: Silver Creek Pike you know you couldn't get on. Now you just go down and hit it right there at the interstate. Back then you had to go back all the way through town and wind all the way back around.

JEA: Did I tell you that I did find that the Simpsons did come from Tennessee. The census records show that the Simpsons were from Tennessee, but they don't say where.

WLA: Near Culleoka some place. I think I heard that from the family. And my grandfather had seven girls and one boy. Orlando was the only boy and he was the last one. But of course his first wife died. He had four girls. And he married again a couple of years and needed a mother for the girls and then he had three more and a boy. Hazel, Winnifred and Leona.

WLA [looking at photos]: This one's Clyde Brinkley [he had a bandage over his chin.] the one who was stationed near me at Stuttgart for awhile. And that's Bill Houston [looks as if he has just thrown something.] Marshall Houston. And that's he again four years later.

JEA: He was your roommate at Davidson?

WLA: Yeah, I was there just one year myself. I went there my freshman year. I met him and Clyde there. One was killed almost at the beginning of the war and the other one … Clyde was from Brinkley, Arkansas and he used to stop by after I started back to Vanderbilt. Nashville was on his way home anyway, Brinkley, Arkansas. And he'd stop and stay a few days with me in Nashville, two or three sometimes. Sometimes not that long. And then when I finally got in the Army at Stuttgart, he came down and brought his girlfriend and another couple with him, had dinner with me down at Stuttgart. And then he married that Christmas before he left. And his plane was lost just about as soon as he got overseas over the English Channel. I don't know whether he was shot down or what.

JEA: Were they just forming Stuttgart when you got there?

WLA: Yes, when I got there they were just forming it. It was a glider school. They moved it down from Columbus, Ohio and it was part of the Eastern Flying Training Command, and they transferred it to, oh what do they call it, anyway one, whatever they called it, and then I moved, they moved everybody out to Stuttgart so I could stay in the Southeastern Flying Training Command. Then it became a twin-engine school.

Aunt Sara's father died when she was seventeen and she never married. She was engaged to farmer once. She saved almost every penny she made and was proud to say that she had saved well over $1,000,000. She was well known and well liked in Nashville, being featured as "woman of the month or day" on local radio several times. Her only brother had a very strong attachment to her and appeared to place her and his mother above any person or thing in his life. He appeared to have somewhat of a fear of the world and asked his wife either before or just after they were married that they never put their children in a closet. Sarah's nieces, Joan and Susan, recall their Aunt Sara telling them that their mother had died at sea during her trip to Europe with her mother, Jessica Early, in 1954 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. Sarah lived with her brother and his wife on the farm in Lewisburg beginning in 1999. Sarah's sister-in-law, Betty, while in her eighties, prepared meals for Sarah and took care of her when she moved in to the farm after she was unable to care for her self. Betty saw this as a penance. Sarah fell and had to have hip surgery on February 18, 2002 and resided in Oakwood Hall nursing home in Lewisburg for 20 days and then moved into the Chalet on the Lewisburg, Tennessee farm with her niece, Susan Brindle, caring for her thereafter. It is thought that a cousin of Sarah's married Buford Ellington, Governor of Tennessee who was a friend of President Lyndon Johnson. Sara was named for her grandmother, Sara Bryant. They called Sara Bryant Aunt Sallie. She died in 1928 and Sallie's husband Nicholas died in 1934. WLA-Aunt Sara retired in 1974. Aunt Sara had more friends than I did. I ran around with school buddies all my life, with Dap, Leo Bolster, all those boys. [In the past he had mentioned a Billy Lynch who was at Father Ryan.] I knew about as many Catholic boys… Her nephew, John Andrews, recalls he and his brother Bill living with their Aunt Sara and their grandmother for a portion of a semester during the spring of their freshman year at Father Ryan High School (and remembering the apple sause pie that they loved) and getting to know Mary Kathryn Frazier next door on Lealand Lane who was John's age and at St. Bernard's Academy. [Lather both John and Mary Kathryn were editors-in-chief of their high school newspapers. She was John's first date and they double-dated with her brother George to a fall mixer at Father Ryan their sophomore year. She was more interested in John's brother Bill who begin dating her the spring of that year. Bill gently broke the news to John that Mary Kathryn liked him when he and John went for a walk to the hills together behind the Tyne Blvd. House. While he was on leave from the Army, John visited Mary Kathryn and her boy friend at Vanderbilt University for lunch where Mary Kathryn was in the nursing program after transferring from St. Mary of the Woods in Indiana after her freshman year. The following Christmas Mary Kathryn's mother invited John to visit Mary Kathryn in the hospital, but John got the impression that there was nothing serious and he didn't take time from his short visit to see her. The following March, John's mother informed him at Ft. Riley, Kansas that Mary Kathryn had died of cancer at 20 years old. John later stayed with his Aunt Sara while he was building the house on Cotton Lane. John had unexpectedly bumped into and then dated a couple of times Karen Riordan, who was Aunt Sara and Grandmother's neighbor, and who had given John a white horse when he stayed home with his grandmother rather than going to the circus at six years old in the 1950s. Karen's brother asked John to prepare a will for him that he wanted Dr. and Mrs. Frazier to witness at their house.]

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 bewteen 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 intertubes 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, but also some of the worse. 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 drove down to Nashville with John on the weekends to help him put up fencing for the cattle on the Old Hillsboro Farm. Bob Quatman, who was dating Susan at St. Louis University and had left his job as an electrical engineer at Emerson Electric for the MBA program, was replacing the gaskets on the engine to Susan's brothers Bill and John's Volkswagen bug in their Lewis Hall dorm room. It was final exam time and Bob had been given a take-home exam by a professor in one of his classes who had been a Nazi fighter pilot during WWII. John had this same professor for an undergraduate economics class and since he was majoring in economics and felt sorry for Bob who was spending so much time on the engine, he volunteered to coach Bob through the exam. John ended up having the same exam as an in-class exam and got an "A" on it. Others in the class had done very poorly on the exam so the professor allowed everyone but John to retake the exam. John, who had never done anything like this before in his life, felt very bad about this afterwards. 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 [Cont'd Mary Andrews] at a gym where they were working out. When Bill returned home from Barcelona Spain (he had been working on his Ph.D. at 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. After they were married and Claudia finished her residency in Dallas, Bill and Claudia signed up for a year in Columbia, South American with the American Medical Missions Board. Earlier after finishing his MBA at St. Louis University, John had started in a management training program with 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. 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. When they heard that Susan had been abused by a person at the Delaware race track, Bill and Claudia immediately returned home after only six months in Columbia, South America and began living on the Old Hillsboro Farm. Bill started working for the Herald Tribune and Claudia at the Pediatric Clinic in Columbia. 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. While Susan's sister Joan was in prision in Florida as a result of her pro-life work, Susan worked tirelessly and constantly toward getting her out of prison.

Susan recalls being in the back yard at Gampa's and Ganger's house in Detroit when 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 rembers 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 put 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 form 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 beautiful, 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 whole 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, called to her mother, "look." Her mother said eat it every time she 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 us getting into trouble, and she remembers crying and hearing the fire engens and hearing us cry or get scolded by Uncle Ted. She remembers us hiding. She also remembers Uncle Ted taking her out on his motor boat on a place in Detroit like Old Hickory 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 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 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 there mother had gone to take up Bill and John to school (St. Bridget's). In Canada they got lost and mounted police brought them back. When Susan and Joan were 4 and 5 and their mother has taken a ship to Europe with their grandmother, Aunt Sara told them that their mother was dead; that she had drowned. Up until 4 or 5 years ago 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 she built the chalet, Susan told daddy it 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 every night and all day long when 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 bond fire. 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 brotught 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 floor and grandmother 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 that's a lie, that never happened. Susan was so shocked that he 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 umbrella. 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," and Joan told Susan things about that weekend that she didn't even remember. Susan asked how did you know that Aunt Sara was lying. She said I didn't, but I knew how much she 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 the Bill's barn, Bill saying Teddy 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 had really been reincarnated. That he was a civil war soldier and that his grave was that big monument in Columbia. The other children wanted to believe him because he was such a great storyteller. Latter they found out that it was a monument 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 inaugrated 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 not 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 next day it was all over school. So Ralph's reply to that was Gail Hobby's too skinney, Kathy Beach is too fat and Joan Andrews is just right and he started liking Joan and gave her perfume for Christmas. Joan was so embarrassed, 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 dancing 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 our arms if we 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.

1/23/03 - Susan mentioned that her mother collected bottles to earn money to buy a piano for her husband when the children were very young 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 latter she told him that she saw him get off the bus and asked him why he 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 every afternoon.

Mr. Do Do stories

5/30/05

Son Bill reminded his brothers & sisters sitting with their dying father who still recognized them & whispered their names of how their father would tell Mr. Do Do stories as they traveled the 40 mile round trip to school in Columbia on gravel roads each day in the mid-1950s. Mr. Do Do lived under the hood.

WLA:
When Gary Ladd was in 7th grade at Santa Fe School, every time I'd give him a test, he'd bless himself. I'm sure he wasn't Catholic, but he'd seen that on television I guess. [Letter to WXA:] "I count myself extremely fortunate to have been in your father's 1955 to 1956 7th grade class at Santa Fe School, and have always considered him to be one of the three best teachers, including both the high school and university level, I studied under. From him I learned practically all there was to know about English grammar and an immense amount about other things as well. He taught me the rudiments of chess and even sold me my first chess set." WLA – He thought I sold him; he didn't say I gave it to him. I don't remember. I wish I had given it to him. But I taught a whole bunch of them how to play chess.
How Dad Started Teaching:
JEA: How did you happen to talk to that teacher in Columbia?

WLA: I was trying to find a ride for you and Bill so I didn't have to go to Columbia every morning and she taught in Columbia [at the school] just before you get to St. Catherine's. There used to be a school on the left. I think it was home ec or something. I forget the name of it. But I talked to her and she said, "Why don't you teach because then you, instead of spending half a day coming and going?" So I talked to superintendent of schools Baker and he told me to go up to Santa Fe and talk to them up there. I did and they hired me.

JEA: And what did you teach?

WLA: I taught 7th grade and 12th grade economics and then I switched over and taught a half year of business law in high school. It was 1 through 12. I taught everything in 7th grade except economics and business law. Then after 4 years up there I came back and taught 5 years at Belfast.

JEA: If you hadn't talked to that lady, would you just have farmed?

WLA: I was trying to do that a little bit, but I was just trying to find a ride for you. That's before the girls started too, you see. And then when they started, Mr. Irwin. And he died just before I started Belfast. He was a friend of Winston's and that's the way I met him.

WLA: I worked for AT&T three years in Nashville and one year in Atlanta.

JEA; How did they happen to send you to Atlanta?

WLA: Well, that was the headquarters and when I started working there, Mr. Stubbs was head of the accounting office in Nashville. He was transferred to Atlanta as Vice President and asked for me or something I guess and I did audit of stock records of Southern Bell.

Susan Catherine Andrews' recollections 1954:
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, saying, "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 that 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 umbrella.
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 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.

Aunt Sara saying "Mother's Boat Sank":
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 1998? Joan & Susan had never discussed this. One time Susan 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 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. 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, saying,"look your mother's ship sank [Cont'd spouse - No spouse - never married]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 umbrella. 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 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.

Dear Mama,
Thanks so much for the letter. I hope you didn't feel you needed to explain our childhood or justify the way you raised us. I know you and Daddy did the best you could, and I am very happy with the childhood you gave me. Still, I liked what you wrote. I liked the way you described life back then, and I wish you'd write more about the things you loved, including the farm and us. When I go home now and spend so few hours with you, I feel sad about how much energy you put into explaining your love of Jesus and Daddy's conversion and how great it all is. I believe you, but I wish you wouldn't insist so. It's the insistence that makes me wonder about Daddy and your happiness. As much as you talk about what a blessing this time is for you, I know there is great challenge. You've always been so independent, and it must be disconcerting being on your own farm and being part of Susan's household too. As you say, we can never thank Susan and Dave enough; we're lucky beyond measure and expression to have the arrangement that Susan has allowed all of us… and yet it has to be one of the hardest things in the world for you to give up control of your household. For both you and Susan. When I go home, what makes me happiest is just looking at you. Growing up, it was easy for me to see Daddy as handsome, and, of course, I can still see that in him. With you things were a little more complicated. I knew you were beautiful; I could see it in pictures, but had a hard time experiencing it in the moment. It seems I was always much more aware of your religion and your need for me to believe what you did. But now something has changed, and when I look at you, I feel like the luckiest son in the world. Both you and Daddy have a beauty to me that comes from great caring and love. It's in your faces and kept both of you looking alive and even young. My hope is that Eli can see beauty in Judy and me someday. The earlier in his life the better, and my goal is to keep my needs and beliefs from obscuring my love for him and Judy and life. You've given me this ability, I think. You and Daddy. When I can be still with you, I can see it in you as easily as your smile. I love you Mama. I hope you can see that in me too. I hope you can be quiet enough in your heart to know that I'm happy and that everyday I thank you and Daddy and the childhood you gave me: brothers and sisters and farm…

David

Hi John,
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

JOHN'S MEMORIES OF HIS FATHER;
John recalls his father going to Mass every Sunday with the family with the exception of one Sunday. When everyone came home that Sunday, he recalls seeing his father sitting at the kitchen table looking very down-hearted.

As he was growing up on the farm, John recalls that his father appeared very unhappy. That unhappiness rubbed off on John after he was about 8 years old, possibly because John partially interpreted his father's unhappiness as an unhappiness with him. Although John recalls his father having a close relationship with Bill, talking often of the law and politics, John did not feel the same closeness to his father until years later. Because John loved farming and had the energy and enthusiasm of his mother for accomplishing things, he was constantly getting in trouble with his father for the things he did or wanted to do.

John recalls sitting for hours with his father in the "secret room" upstairs watching him build electronic devices or fix televisions, with neither saying very much if anything to each other. John also recalls the first crystal radio his father built for him in a plastic sandwich box which received only WSM or WJJM and the subsequent "one tube" radio his father built for him, which he would stare at in the dark of the night watching the vacuum tube glow and listening to the only music it would receive, country music, which he did not like that much. Later his Aunt Sara and Grandmother gave him one of their old radios (an early battery operated model) off of which he loved to take the back so that he could watch the many tubes glow all together in the dark at night. While John was in eighth grade, his father "jerry-rigged" a AM carrier wave transmitter on the Halliburton short wave receiver he had given him (John loved to sit for hours listening to Radio Moscow, Vatican Radio, etc. on this receiver). This transmitter carried the transmitted signal along the telephone lines. John and his fellow Belfast School companions used this transmitter to start radio station WBES broadcasting music programs each morning before school started from a vacant classroom with students lining up at the door with their transistor radios to their ears and people at the country store in town picking it up also. All of this caused John to develop a great interest in electronics, just as Michigan Drilling Company had caused him to develop an interest in engineering.

The first time John felt close to his father was during his sophomore year of college at Saint Louis University in 1966 when, at 5:00 in the morning, his father knocked on the door to the dorm room which he shared with Bill to tell John that he had received a draft notice from the Army. He had travelled all night via train from Nashville to St. Louis. His train had derailed about 50 miles or so outside of St. Louis and he had to be brought by bus the rest of the way in to St. Louis. John could see his father through the rear window as he got into a cab in front of St. Francis Xavier Church on campus to return to the farm after his visit, and John's eyes welled up as he experienced more emotion than he had ever felt for his father.

Dad's Memories of Atlanta
"I had to stay down in Atlanta several months before I could find a place to live and you all still lived on Stokes Lane, and I'd come home every weekend. Every now and then Betty would come down and we'd look for a place. I think you stayed over with Grandmother and Aunt Sara.

But I was having dinner one night with a fellow and he later became mayor of Atlanta or governor of Georgia. We didn't notice while we were talking, but everyone had left the restaurant. Some man had died and they came in with a stretcher to take him out and everyone stopped eating but us. No one told us. I was there only a year – 1950. We were there when the war broke out – Truman's War I guess you'd call it. We left in April. You all went to Detroit and I came on down to the farm here. 1st of April, 1951. I had to wait a couple of months to finish my job there."

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.

QUITTING JOB;
On September 9, 2008, upon his asking, Betty told her son John that her husband quit his job with American Telephone and telegraph Company in Atlanta before she left with the children for Detroit and Betty said she didn't really care about his quitting and didn't think about the family's financial future. He didn't like working for the company or for any company for that matter and didn't even like teaching, his ultimate profession. He just didn't want to have a job at all. He was brought up not to have confidence in himself. [The family had been in Atlanta about a year at this point.]
After he had given notice, his boss and his wife came out to the house to visit Betty and her husband. The Taylors next door were a very nice family, the husband a naval officer and the wife Connie a very good Catholic who wrote Betty for years after that. Betty's husband put the family on a train for Detroit in November of 1950 (Holy Year) and everything was happy in the departure. The plan was for him to go back to the farm in Lewisburg, Tennessee as he always wanted and fix it up in preparation for the family's return [Ross Beckham had put the bathroom in the house and the out-house was moved to the tenant house (Sally & Milton's) in 1954 or so]. Her husband called an Friday evenings but it wasn't regular and he didn't call a lot. He never sent a penny to Betty during the three years she was in Detroit and he was gradually pulling completely out of responsibility for the family. Betty's father noticed that fixing up the farm was taking an inordinate amount of time so he bought a lake house on Lake Saint Claire in Canada for Betty and her husband began to notice that Betty was adjusting well to Detroit so he took a train up to Detroit to see her. Betty's father was reluctant to tell him where Betty was because of his concern for her. Betty's husband started "farm school" [a 6 month course] on the GI Bill for six months just before the family returned to Tennessee and for a short time after, taking these classes at night at the local high school. He didn't want to go back to work and had no plans.

WORK AFTER ATLANTA:
William L. Andrews did not work the first year the family was on the farm, and had been unable to work after leaving Atlanta some time earlier. The family did not have regular meals and were nourished primarily by milk fresh (warm, with thick cream on the top that their mother stirred into it with a raw eggs each morning before school and then taking a jug of milk to school everyday as their only lunch food with Chairs March, a year older that John, cleaning the jug every day for them on his own) from the cows on the farm, honey toast and popcorn. The children never lacked nourishment and they, especially John, loved the farm life they were lucky enough to live.
Andrews Family in Detroit - Bill Andrews
OAKMAN BLVD - My siblings were all born in Nashville and we lived most of our childhood years in Nashville or on our Lewisburg farm. However, for a couple of years, we lived at the home of our maternal grandparents in Detroit. My mother loved to take photographs and these early ones of me (I'm the oldest) and my siblings were taken at my grandparents' home. In the shot of us on the bikes, my grandfather can be seen looking out the bay window. The color shot I took in 1980 when Claudia and I visited Detroit.

Move to the Farm
The Andrews family did not have a car for a period of time after the break-down of the Packard 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, their Uncle Ted gave then his car for a trip back to Tennessee after summer vacation in Detroit. Betty sold her wedding and engagement rings to purchase school books for her children, Bill and John, who were starting first grade at St. Catherine's School in Columbia, Tennessee. William L. Andrews did not work the first year the family was on the farm, and had been unable to work after leaving Atlanta some time earlier. The family did not have regular meals and were nourished primarily by milk fresh (warm, with thick cream on the top that their mother stirred a raw eggs into it each morning before school, and then taking a jug of milk to school everyday as their only lunch food with Chairs March, a year older that John, cleaning the jug every day for them on his own) from the cows on the farm, honey toast and popcorn). The children never lacked nourishment 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 and, although 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 kerosene lamp go on before they had electricity and help Milton and Harvey milk. John also loved to plant a garden each year, 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. For a period Bill and John rode into Columbia with Bit Hardison in his van while he picked up eggs at farms along the way. John can remember throwing-up frequently in the mornings at one particular spot in the road just before getting into Columbia. 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, 13 or so miles north of Columbia.
When John was seven, he woke up after about an hour of sleep in the early fall of the year unable to to control his crying after he had strong feelings about being all alone someday without his parents and family. His mother took him out into the front lawn, joined by his father, and they sat with him attempting to give him solace.
In the early 1950s when the 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 Boulevard 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 Lipscomb 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."

QUESTIONS ABOUT DAD:
Betty's husband was a wonderful person and was deeply loved by her and by each of her children; however, her son John has asked questions of his mother to find out more about the family as follows:
August 30, 2008: Betty mentioned how her husband was never really excited when his children were born but that when she called him at Belfast School in December 1960 to tell him that she thought they were losing their baby, he raced home to the farm as quickly as he could and as he held the baby, still alive, in his hands said, "Oh, Betty," and you could tell for the first time how much the baby meant to him. She said that she doesn't know why she picked the name Joel. She also mentioned how when she started dating her husband he had always had his own car at Stuttgart Air Field, but shortly after they started dating the car disappeared and she thought that Aunt Sara tried to control his behavior in that way. Her daughter Miriam was surprised this weekend when told that her father had not worked their first year on the farm and the prior three years since leaving American Telephone and telegraph Company (AT&T) in Atlanta in 1950.
On September 3, 2008 [Miriam's husband John Lademan had just received a big promotion that day at Northrup-Grumman Corporation to a level just below vice-president and he was taking Miriam out to dinner to celebrate that night], as Betty's son John was waiting to pick up his family at BWI Airport upon their return from Phoenix, Betty told him that she had always done everything that her mother had asked of her and that her mother had picked the names of all of her children except her first-born Bill, who was named after his father, Miriam and David who her husband named after his cousin David Andrews Harris because he wanted to gain the approval of the Harris family after he took the farm from them in 1953 when his family returned from Detroit and wanted to be close to the Harrises and make up for it. She went along with the name David because she was just so happy that her husband didn't seem to object to a child for the first time. She said that none of the Harris' seemed to like her because of her Catholicism. She also said that just before her daughter Miriam was born she saw the front page of the "Nashville Banner" with a story about a wealthy, Jewish South African diamond mine owner named Jesse who had named his daughter Miriam.

DAUGHTER JOAN'S BIRTH:
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 later loved living in poverty on the farm in Lewisburg.

INTERVIEW OF MOM:
The Andrews family did not have a car for a period of time after the break-down of the Packard car that Edward J. Early had given them for their trip from Detroit to move to the farm in August 1954. A few years later after owning their own cars, their Uncle Ted gave then his car for a trip back to Tennessee after summer vacation in Detroit.
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, here's where she died, they have it charted.

Joan - I remember once John getting spanked and running into woods. He spanked me twice, once after we took corncobs out of John Ezel's old house in woods. I remember John getting in trouble with Daddy a lot, because he got the tractor stuck in the mud or because of electronics.

I remember the trip to farm and our dog Bobo - arguing in the car and Daddy threatening to put out. He did put him out along the road and all of us felt horrible. We named our first collie at the farm Bobo after this dog. I remember the trip to farm, stopping at hotel, and thinking were going to live forever in that room. When we got to the farm, I thought were going going back to Detroit the next day. That night we arrived it was very dark and I remember everyone running around the buildings near the house. I wanted to claim the barn with horses, but claimed the chicken coop, & Susan claimed the garage made from the previous farm house that burned down. By the next morning, the boys had claimed the big barns. I collected the chickens and put them into the car to bring back to Detroit. I remember Daddy walking with us a lot in the woods and telling us stories. Daddy was sweet and quiet. I would say bad boy to Bill if he did anything.

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. I remember times when Mama would cry.

I recall staying at Grandmother's and Aunt Sara's for two weeks while Mama was in Europe with Ganger and Aunt Sara holding up a newspaper article showing an oceanliner sinking while at sea saying that your mother was on that ship and she's dead. I recall trying to convince Susan Aunt Sara was lying and running away with her that night.

John's recollection - After a disagreement, in an attempt to make-up, Daddy went upstairs in the farm house and told John that he remembered John as a lttle boy and it is almost as if that little boy is dead and he misses that little boy.

Mom told her daughter-in-law Susan Sullivan Andrews that in Atlanta about 1950, Bill held up a crucifix and told his father, this is God. His father replied, "maybe it is and maybe it's not."

John at about 8 or 9 years old had saved up three dollars to buy tractor tools and Dad asked John if he would like him to hold on to the money for him. The family was so poor at the time that he was never able to return the money to John.

Daddy called Susan Squeezems.

FOOD:
He loved banana sandwiches and green pepper sandwiches, always salted his watermelon and cantaloupe, made welsh rarbit-a cheese fondu on toast-for the family and loved to bake bread and rolls. He told his children that he'd love to open a family restaurant. He didn't have much of an appetite for meat and ate very moderately, usually leaving food on his plate when he finished.

The first time John felt close to his father was during his sophomore year of college at Saint Louis University in 1966 when, at 5:00 in the morning, his father knocked on the door to the dorm room which he shared with Bill to tell John that he had received a draft notice from the Army. He had travelled all night via train from Nashville to St. Louis. His train had derailed about 50 miles or so outside of St. Louis and he had to be brought by bus the rest of the way in to St. Louis. John could see his father through the rear window as he got into a cab in front of St. Francis Xavier Church on campus to return to the farm after his visit, and John's eyes welled up as he experienced more emotion than he had ever felt for his father.

The first year the family was together on the farm, W.L. Andrews attended farm school at night under the G.I. Bill and brought Bill and John to and from first grade at St. Catherine's School in Columbia. Wheat was harvested from the "Corn Field" and oats was harvested from the field nearest town the following summer. This was the last time these crops were grown on the farm. Thereafter, corn and hay were grown. In the fall of 1955, W.L. Andrews began teaching 7th and 12th grades at Santa Fe School in Santa Fe, Tennessee. In September of 1959, he bagan teaching 7th and 8th grades and was Principal at Belfast School in Belfast, Tennessee. Then in 1962, he took education classes at Peabody College in Nashville and started teaching at Lipscomb School on Concord Road in Brentwood, Tennessee before retiring in 1972.

All of the children grew extremely close to their father in later years after high school. He had an easy-going nature and everyone he met appeared to love and admire him. As an example, Walter Bussart who was in St. John's Parish in Lewisburg, had unsuccessfully run for Governer and represented the plaintiffs in their obviously unjustified medical malpractice lawsuit against William L. Andrews' daughter-in-law, Claudia Andrews, walked up to William L. Andrews in the courtroom, shook his hand and said that he was sorry to have to meet under the circumstances. This was at a time when Bill and Claudia's son Willy was seriously ill and very likely in need of a liver transplant.

CALL FROM JOAN TO JOHN AT WORK IN DC

May 31, 2005; 4:57 pm

Daddy's Death:
John, hi. It's Joan. About midnight last night Daddy got very yellow, got very jaundiced and his heart was down to 50 and this morning the nurse hardly wanted to move him. She thought he could die if moved because- so he seemed to have deteriorated. She asked to stop the I.V. completely but we didn't want to do that, but his body isn't accepting that because his feet are swollen now; his legs are getting swollen. So we're cutting it way back to 25 so it doesn't do any harm but it still might have a little bit of a drip to not become dehydrated. So it looks like it's getting close. He has a fever. He had a fever last night of 102. It's down now to 101 point something. So his color is beginning to look good. His jaundice has left. His liver is shutting down, but now his color is coming back, so still touch and go but it looks like the same trend of his whole system is slowly shutting down. It doesn't look immediate, but probably in the next couple of days the nurse is thinking. God bless you. We love you. Just keeping you updated on everything. Bye Bye. God bless you.

June 2, 2005 1:15 am Thursday - About 2 weeks after second stroke (1st stroke 1 year earlier), the girls were turning Daddy onto his side when they noticed he had stopped breathing, so turned him on his back and didn't breath for about 10 minutes; then took a final breath and died. Joan Susan, Miriam, David and Mama were with him at the Chalet, Bill having just left for Columbia.

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.

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.
______
My name is Prentiss Andrews and I am a descendant of Varney Andrews ... I was very pleased to find the photographs of the Varney Andrews farm and home on the Meherrin River, as well as the photographs related to Henrico County. I had previously located the site of the Varney Andrews, Jr. farm near Celina, Tennessee and was able to view it by means of the Google street view. My brother, Michael Andrews, and I located the grave of Varney Andrews Jr, near Bells, Texas, and it looks very similar to your photos of the Varney Andrews cemetery in Virginia. [Varney Jr's wife, Mary Maxey's father, William Maxey, was the brother of General Rice Maxey, whose son was General Samuel Bell Maxey.]

Varney Andrews, Jr., was my great-great grandfather. My great grandfather was Edwin Jones Andrews. My grandfather was Charles Carlton Andrews. My dad was Prentiss Wilson Andrews. Varney Andrews, Jr and 28-year old Edwin Jones Andrews moved with their entire families, from near Celina, Tennessee to Grayson County, Texas, in 1858. I'm mentioned on page 87 of James Ray Andrews' The Andrews Family; Descendants of Varney Andrews, Virginia Soldier of the American Revolution. At that writing, I was a student at North Texas State University. After graduation, I got a commission in the U.S.A.F., and served from 1965-1969, in South Carolina and Okinawa (with a brief TDY to Korea during the Pueblo Crisis). While in college, I married my high school sweetheart, Martha Frances "Francey" Neill, and we're approaching our 48th anniversary in a week. To make a long story short, I retired from the FAA in 2007, with 36 years service. Francey and I live in Denton, Texas, have one daughter (Lisa Michelle), two sons (Daniel and David), four grandchildren, and one great grandchild. My sons had only daughters, so except for one male grandchild of my brother Michael, it appears our particular branch will cease to carry the Andrews family name...

No, Bernetta Fowler was not my great grandmother. She was the first wife of Edwin Jones Andrews and passed away in 1862, while he was serving in the First Texas Sharpshooters. Edwin Jones Andrews and Burnetta Fowler had six children: Eugene Rollin, Harvey Wilson, Laura, Samuel Varney, Patrick Henry, and Martha Oglesby Burnetta. In 1868, he married his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Abernathy, my great grandmother. Edwin Jones Andrews and Mary Elizabeth Abernathey had four children: Frank A. Andrews, Charles Carleton Andrews (my grandfather), Mark Edwin Andrews, and James Richard Andrews. I understand that a number of the brothers of Edwin Jones Andrews served in the 9th Texas Infantry Division and fought in the west in almost every engagement from Shiloh until the end of the war. From what I can learn, Edwin Jones Andrews (32 years old and with six children) was enrolled in the First Texas Sharpshooters (Burnet's Battalion), in August, 1862. He was apparently elected as a 1st Lieutenant of Company D and served for the remainder of the War. From what I can glean, the First Texas Sharpshooters were originally organized to join the 9th Texas Infantry, which had already moved into Tennessee and Mississippi. However, the First Texas Sharpshooters were redirected and participated in engagements at Jackson, Mississippi, and Mobile, Alabama. Sometime in 1863, they made their way back across the Mississippi, and were assigned to General Samuel Bell Maxey's command in the Indian Territory (Oklahoma), until the war ended.

There is a late 19th century publication for Grayson County, Texas, which listed many of the county residents, with a short biography. It listed Edwin Jones Andrews as owner of a farm near Howe, Texas and also as an agent for a lumber company in nearby Sherman, Texas. It states that he was a good Christian, respected by all who knew him. He died in 1900. My dad, who was his grandson, was born in 1910 and recalled seeing one picture of Edwin Jones Andrews. He said that he was wearing a necklace with an Indian symbol similar to what became known as the swastika. Since he enrolled in the First Texas Sharpshooters in August, 1862, which I believe believe was the same month the Confederate draft was introduced in Texas, I surmise that he may not have been as much of a firebrand as his younger brother, Dr. Richard Andrews was active in the secession movement in Grayson County.

I have plenty of pictures of my grandparents, their family, and of course my own parents and family. I don't have any pictures of family members my preceding grandparents. I'm attaching a sketch I started from memory, shortly after my brother and I had crossed barbed wire fences to find the grave of Varney Andrews, Jr., at Greenwood Cemetary, near Bells, Texas. It depicts my brother, Mike Andrews, standing next to the Varney Andrews monument. Also attached, is a document I scanned from an old Grayson county history book I found in the library. I just scanned the relevant portion, which relates to Dr. Richard Andrews' roll in the Texas secession.

Prentiss
________
Prentiss Andrews
Dallas, Texas

Dear John,

Wow, thanks so much for the information! I love the pictures and I have always wondered what life would be like on a farm. Your dad was truly a man of great honor and character with an endless capacity for love. His quests for knowledge and wanting to share that knowledge are truly inspiring!! It does not get any better than that! A very handsome man as well. I will share these pictures with my family and my mother. I am glad to be able to share this wonderful Andrews family with you.

P.S. I LOVED the cemetery story with the red rose. There are no coincidences in life. It was your daddy.

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
Dallas, Texas