Newspaper article about Christopher's mother:
Susan Shea Develops Her Talents And Those Of Others

Mrs. Susan (Andrews) Shea, having returned to Lewisburg after the death of her husband, Christopher, intends to open an art studio here, where art classes will be offered and where some of her paintings and sculptures will be exhibited. Mrs. Shea plans to make teaching art her future and her career. Susan studied art at St. Louis University under Thomas Toner, professor, Artist-in-Residence and celebrated authority in ultra-realism.

She attended grade school at Belfast where her father was principal. It was during her high school years at St. Bernard Academy in Nashville, however, that her talents gained recognition. She designed and executed all the major backdrops and murals for her school's many stage productions and was asked to assist in art instruction, an offer credited to her natural talents since she had never before been in an art class.

Immediately after high school, Susan discovered that a career in art was rapidly opening to her with a number of her works already being sold and with requests for portrait work increasing. Much of her free time at Aquinas College went into work with sketches, paintings and backdrops.

Before her regular course work at St. Louis University, Susan discovered in Europe the dynamics and techniques of the old European Masters and the characteristics of the various schools. The Louvre, the Prado and other great museums of Europe made a great impression on her. In Greece she had an opportunity to study first hand the classical style; in Italy, the color techniques of Renaissance Art; but in Israel and Jordan, it was primitive Christian art that moved her most.

In the villages of Spain, Portugal, and France, and its people, Susan found an immense reservoir from which flowed innumerable subjects to be captured on canvas for years to come. "This", (sic) she says "was a great source of inspiration and learning – for not only did I study the techniques and styles of the immortals, but I found the people and villages familiar subjects. Europe seemed like the olden days; simple, good lives, simple living. I had gone back in time. The faces of the people seemed to be the faces I grew up with – country people living close to the soil." So strong was this attachment that on later trips to Europe, she gathered material for paintings, sketches, and sculptures.

Susan has fixed an art studio in the family farm home of her parents, Mr. And Mrs. William L. Andrews. Their farm is located on Franklin Road at the city limits of Lewisburg.

There will be an art exhibit of Susan's work at their home. She is offering an inexpensive course; in order to enable anyone interested and talented in art to have an opportunity to develop it. "I would rather have more students paying the minimum and really learning and enjoying it than a few paying the regular price.

THE WRATH OF ANGELS by James Risen, Judy Thomas 1988 – Page 188

Joan Andrews grew up in rural Tennessee, steeped in a Catholicism that was totally out of place not only in the Southern Bible Belt, but also within her own family. She was the product of a wartime marriage between a devout Irish Catholic woman from Detroit and a laconic, irreligious Methodist from Nashville, a marriage greeted with thinly disguised rage by her father's anti-Catholic mother and sister.

William and Elizabeth met and fell in love while both were stationed at an Army hospital in Arkansas during World War II. After they married and left the Army, they moved back to Nashville, where Elizabeth found herself surrounded by strange and hostile relatives, pressuring her to renounce her church; in defense, she pressured William to convert to Catholicism. Caught in the middle, William resented his wife's attempts to convert him and was confounded by the fact that religion had become such weight on his marriage; their relationship began to founder. Nonetheless, they began to have children in quick succession, which created new tensions when it came time to baptize them as Catholics.

As the children grew, their Aunt Sara bitterly took to lecturing the children that their mother had forced their father to have such a large family – they eventually had six children- because of her Catholic beliefs. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Elizabeth Andrews decided she had to break free to save herself. In 1951, she piled her four young children into a car and headed north, leaving William and his family far behind. She settled in a small lakeside village in Canada, and there she raised her children by herself for nearly three years, until her estranged husband pleaded with her to come back.

William had fixed up an old Tennessee farm to serve as his family's new home, far from the turmoil with his relatives. When he told Elizabeth that religion would never again come between them, she agreed to return, and the two fell in love for a second time. On the farm, Elizabeth Andrews was finally free to bring devout Catholicism into their family life, and her husband no longer challenged her on it. Elizabeth would sit and read Bible stories and say a fervent rosary with her children each night.

Joan began to fight similar battles over religion at school, where the Andrews children were the only Catholics. William Andrews was now their principal, but that did not provide enough protection from the rural Protestant children who taunted Joan and her siblings because of their Catholicism. That only led Joan into an early defense of the church, similar to her mother's reaction to attack, and into repeated schoolyard fights. Her mother's miscarriage of a seventh child – and the way her mother involved her children to help her deal with the personal loss – had a profound impact on Andrews's attitude toward abortion.

Joan was twelve in 1960 when her mother, at home on the farm, miscarried what would have been another son. When Joan and the other children came home from school on the day of her miscarriage, Elizabeth Andrews allowed each of her small children to see and even hold the three- or four month-old fetus as it lay in the holy water in which it had just been blessed and baptized by a local priest. Together, the family named him John Mary Joel Andrews.

The next day, the family placed the fetus in a can, along with a lock of hair from each Andrews child, and then, following a funeral, buried the unborn child on a farmland plot blessed by the priest.

Joan's religious fervor soon began to match her mother's... but Joan knew a secret about herself: that her love for the church was not matched by a willingness to accept a vow of obedience to it. Behind a quite façade, Joan had a rebellious heart. "I just knew, even then at fourteen or fifteen, I couldn't take that vow."

....Andrews headed to St. Louis University after high school, in 1966. She participated in a few anti-war demonstrations but quickly dropped out and returned home to be with her parents when her brother was drafted, an event that sparked in Andrews a personal turmoil about the war and a world that would allow it to happen.... Except for Viet Nam and the threat to her brother, the outside world had never really intruded, but Roe felt like a personal violation...In 1974, Joan and her Sister Susan, who had left the convent, followed one of their brothers and moved to Delaware. In Delaware, Susan was raped and became pregnant; she planned to give birth until she suffered a miscarriage. Finally, in 1979, [Joan's] younger sister Miriam, then a student at St. Louis University, called Joan in Delaware to tell her about Sam Lee's first sit-ins… Andrews decided to move to St. Louis to live with Miriam...

By 1988... Joan had transcended St. Louis. She was now the movement's first martyr – "Saint Joan" – the star subject of countless radio and television appeals nationwide by Evangelicals like Pat Robinson, D. James Kennedy, and James Dobson. Andrews had become the movement's "prisoner of conscience," subjected to some of the harshest prison conditions ever faced by an anti-abortion activist...sentenced to five years in a Florida state prison, she protested her sentence by refusing to cooperate with the system; she sat down in the courtroom at her sentencing, and from that moment on, guards had to carry her everywhere.

Her vow of total non-cooperation earned her twenty months in solitary confinement on the punishment block of the Broward Correctional Institution for Women. In solitary, she spent her days pacing – three steps across, two steps to the side, three steps back – around the perimeter of her cell. Her window was painted out, her cell closed off by a solid metal door with one slot for food and one for eyes. .. Except for brief exercise periods, she stayed in her cell twenty-four hours a day.

While in solitary confinement, she was denied church services, denied almost all visitors, and forced to endure, on at least one occasion, a full-body search by a male and female guard working together…

Worn by a life of protest, Andrews was still attractive in a rough-hewn, mid-American sort of way. She was a slight wisp of a woman, with a quiet, plaintive voice and a remarkable sense of modesty about her plight. She repeatedly insisted that she did not think of herself as a martyr, and she urged her supporters to "focus on the babies." But her willingness to endure such treatment, her show of self-abnegation, and her wholesome appearance combined to increase her standing as a martyr figure… Ultimately, her case did more than all of [John Cavanaugh] O'Keefe's pamphlets and Ryan's rescues to shine a national spotlight on the new wave of anti-abortion activism that was building in the mid-1980s.

… She received at least thirty-thousand letters of support, many from those who wept when they heard her story. Another fifteen-thousand fell on the desk of Florida Governor Bob Martinez, demanding her release. It is one of the great ironies of the anti-abortion cause that fundamentalist Protestants, who until then had steered clear of anti-abortion activism in part because of their antipathy toward all things Catholic, were finally mobilized by the plight of a woman who was feverishly Catholic: a woman who gripped her rosary beads at each moment of crisis, who felt the greatest punishment she could endure in prison was to be denied attendance at Catholic Mass and participation in the sacrament of Holy Communion.
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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 caught 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-righousness 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 Pensacolians 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 activism" 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.
##

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

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

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

When Susan and Joan were 4 and 5 and their mother had taken a ship to Europe with their grandmother, their Aunt Sara told them that their mother was dead; that she had drowned. Up until 4 or 5 years ago (1998?) Joan and Susan had never talked about this. One time Susan had talked to her father about putting the farm in her mother's name also, because if he died, Aunt Sara would get the whole thing. So after Susan built the Chalet on the farm, she told Daddy that not also putting the farm in Mama's name wasn't a fair thing to do to her mother. This was after her father had collapsed at Mass while playing the organ. So her father said that the farm had nothing to do with her mother. That his father had given it to him and his sister and it had nothing to do with Mama. Susan told Daddy that when they moved to the farm, it looked like a trash farm because it had all those barns around the house and the upstairs had corsets and snake skins and it was real messy. There were chicken coops, the smoke house, the kitchen of the original house that had burned down that was used as a garage and old barns. She told Daddy that every night and all day long while Daddy was at school, Mama would pull up all those bushes that had stalks like trees and red berries. She would pull them up by their roots. And every night when everyone got home from school, they would have a bonfire. And now it looks like a park and that Mama made it look like that. "How can you say it has nothing to do with Mama?" Aunt Sara has never lived there one day in her life. To prove her point, Susan said she had never told anyone this before, but Aunt Sara really hated Mama. (Susan felt that her grandmother had talked Aunt Sara into hating Mama). Susan's father said that wasn't true. To prove it, she told him that when she was 4 years old and Joan 5, when Daddy brought them to Aunt Sara's house, and Daddy left Bill and John there for a week and then Susan and Joan there for another week, one night when Joan and Susan were playing on the floor and grandmother was sitting on one recliner and Aunt Sara on another, Aunt Sara called them over to her chair and showed them a picture of an ocean liner in the newspaper. She said, "look your mother's ship sank and your mother's dead." Joan grabbed Susan's hand and pulled her into the bedroom as Susan was crying and told Susan that Aunt Sara was lying, that she hates Mama and Mama wasn't dead. So, years later, Daddy told Susan what Susan had said about Aunt Sara was a lie, that it never happened. Susan was so shocked that Daddy called her a liar 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's memory of her brother Bill is playing in Bill's barn and Bill saying Teddy (his teddy bear) could do anything. She remembers that John pulled out Teddy's eye to prove that he wasn't real. Bill said that Teddy was so incredible that he didn't need an eye to see. Bill told the story that he himself had really been reincarnated. That he was a civil war soldier and that his grave was that big obolisque monument on top of the hill in Columbia just before St. Catherine's School on West 7th Street. The other children wanted to believe him because he was such a great storyteller. Later they found out that the monument was to a dead horse. At school a needle broke off in Chairs March's arm as he was getting a shot and Bill, who was trying to act so tough, keeled over and fainted. Susan remembers John as the peacemaker and always trying to look out for everyone, but that Bill and John would always try to leave her. She remember her father spanking John often, and the time their dog, Bo Bo, wouldn't let Daddy spank John and chased Daddy into the house. Daddy had given John a spanking for breaking something and John said, "thank you." Daddy thought John was being sarcastic, and was angrily going to spank him again, but really their mother had always taught the kids to be respectful and to always say thank you. As he started to spank again, Bo Bo started growling at Daddy and chased him into the house before he could spank John. Susan remembers John digging a pig-pin and the post hold digger cutting off the tip of her finger and John carrying her home. This happened the night Kennedy was nominated by the Democratic party and Susan got to sit up and watch TV and soak her finger in coal oil. She remembers that Joan would get into a fight and Mama would separate Susan and Joan, and Susan would pretend she was going to touch her things and this make Joan so mad. When Mama would separate the children, she would put the girls in the front yard and the boys in the back with a rope on the ground separating them. So the girls had very little land to play on while the boys had all the rest of the farm. She remembers the rules Mama had written in cardboard in pencil. She drew a hand and foot etc. to say "no touching," "no hitting," etc. Joan beat up Ralph Fuller at Belfast School in 3rd grade, Mrs. Orr's class, in the long hallway. Joan would always protect Susan. Ralph was kept back a couple of years so was a big, tall guy. One day after school in the long hallway, Ralph starting pulling Susan's hair and making her cry. Gail Hobby went and got Joan who came running down the hallway at full speed with her hand stretched out in a fist hitting Ralph's noise and knocking him down with a bloody nose. Gail Hobby started running through the school yelling, "Joan Andrews beat up Ralph Fuller." By the next day it was all over school. So Ralph's reply to that was, "Gail Hobby's too skinny, Kathy Beach is too fat, but Joan Andrews is just right," and he started liking Joan and gave her perfume for Christmas. Joan was so 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 would dance with him. Susan always thought of Miriam as their age. They were like triplets. 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.

Susan's mother collected bottles to earn money to buy a piano for her husband when the children were very young on Stokes Lane in Nashville. Late afternoon while her mother was out with the children pushing a stroller, her mother saw her father get off a bus and get into a car with his mother and sister. When he got home a couple of hours later she told him that she saw him get off the bus and asked him why he had said he was going to work late. According to Susan, her father got very mad and accused her mother of spying on him, and told her it was none of her business.

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

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

At Lake-House, John and Bill built a boat from a ladder by tying inner tubes 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 for 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. Tom Berens was a Glenmary seminarian who was sent from Cincinnati to Lewisburg after receiving an electrical engineering degree from the University of Cincinnati. Tom was called from Cincinnati to tell her that he was leaving the seminary. He talked to Susan's father who said Susan wasn't home but didn't say she was at Bill and Claudia's, who were concerned Tom was merely stringing Susan along. Susan wrote a negative letter to Tom 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. 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.

In 1971, 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 tirelessly clearing the lot while John was in graduate school in St. Louis. Susan joined the Carmelite monastery in St. Louis as a novice while her brother John was working on his M.B.A. at St. Louis University. A very good person by the name of Bob Rider, who lived on the monastery grounds and whose sister was a Carmelite nun there, would drive down to Nashville and help John from day-break until dusk install fencing for the cattle on the Old Hillsboro farm.

CHRISTOPHER'S GRANDFATHER
Dad, Draft, Vanderbilt and UT Law Review:

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 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. 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 first cousin..

While at Davidson, 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. I had another roommate Clyde Brinkley. 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.

WLA: Yeah, I just read all the time [when little]. 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. 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. There were 22 in my law school class at Vanderbilt if I remember correctly. There were only about fifty in the entire law school..

The first time I found out that I was going to be drafted, the Tennessean sent someone out. We were in the student moot court room at Vanderbilt. (The founder and first Dean of the Vanderbilt Law School is related thru Nicholas Lanier .) 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 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. 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!

I think [my draft board] was number 20 [same as sons Bill and John]. 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 – 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 January. I got to Ft. Ogelthorpe and that's where we were sworn in on the 17th. That was before 5 months before Pearl Harbor.

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 Eustis. 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 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 to Camp Barkley. And then he put me up in the office with him as a clerk. 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.

I was at Stuttgart 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 ninety eights. They were model planes and one wing and [we] 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 every day. 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 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. 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 this 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. You just practice that - 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, 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...
.
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 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 were killed during that time because they had to get up so fast..

You had just one engine and most of your what you might call your daredevil stuff, you do, your spins and your loops, 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. 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 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, 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 you're 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 scrubbed for surgery, but we were to 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 so we saw this plane and I said, Andy! And this plane came down and crashed. We rang the alarm bell and [the] Red Cross truck 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, the boys, the pilots. They were awfully nice. They should have been killed. But they were just waiting and grinning. It was the happiest moment of my life to see those two pilots sitting there. And they took a pose deliberately. They heard the sirens, the ambulance and they were just grinning and sitting there...

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 engineering school.

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, the freshmen 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 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.. Oh I did [like working on the law review]. It was nice. I remember David found that article you know.

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.

WLA [about leaving Davidson]: 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. .. but you know how Bill is. You can't count on him. Something always comes up. He's a little bit that way..

I guess [Bill was extremely bright]. He started writing those letters to the paper you know. They published everyone and gave him three stars.. He was 15 or 16 I guess. Didn't he go twice? [JEA: Every time he sent an article in it got three stars]

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..

[The] dean of the medical school. I always liked [his] 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. [for Joan and Miriam].

[In the army] 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. 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....

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.

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.

[Pilot training 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.

I liked [Ted]. I didn't see him much. He and Catherine came down to the farm after we moved back here 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.

I guess I've always been a little interested [in electronics], 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..

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.

[Teaching in Columbia] - I was trying to find a ride for John and Bill so I didn't have to go to Columbia every morning and [a lady] taught in Columbia just before you get to St. Catherine's. 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. 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.

I worked for AT&T three years in Nashville and one year in Atlanta. [Atlanta] 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. [When I left] 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.

Post-Law Degree Return to Nashville (by son Bill):.

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 her animated denunciations of my mother... 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.

CHRISTOPHER'S UNCLES:
April 13, 2009

Dear Mama,

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

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

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

I love you,
David

December 24, 2009
Dear Mama!
It was nice talking with you a moment ago. Our new telephone line made your voice much clearer to me. I hope you too could hear a difference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David.

From: David
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2010 9:20 AM

Bill and John,

After much concern, I'm feeling pretty hopeful about the farm division. It seems possible we'll have some peace for ourselves and for Mama soon, and we'll be able to enjoy the farm again.

I know it's been challenging and sometimes shocking to see how little trust there is between brothers and sisters, but between my brothers I've been surprised and inspired by the trust and generosity you've extended me: John with flexibility and Bill with giving up the Arrowhead field. I felt a good kind of weightlessness last night, thinking it over. A sense that regardless of whether I get exactly what I want of land, I've got so much for my family from our relationship and in gratitude. I can show Eli and Lydia that division can be done a good way.

Knowing I can live with whatever results--even if _____ and ____ ________ won't remove their drive over my land--there's a great sense of excitement in me for seeing you guys and catching up on our lives.

Brother David

From: John
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2010 9:25 AM
To: David

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

Thanks David.

March 28, 2010
Dear Mama,
Judy has just taken Eli &Lydia to a movie, giving me a chance to thank you for your note (March 7, regarding my letters to ______ and ______). Your response was very unexpected and welcome. I appreciate so much the faith and genuine kindness in your asking me to smile and wish well every person I come across. I cant think of anything less complicated or more fundamental in its goodness.

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

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

I miss and love you.

David.

From: David

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

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

_____ wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brother _____

COUSIN FATHER GERALD NICHOLAS ANDREWS' FIRST HOMILY AT SUNDAY MASS AT HIS HOME PARISH OF GOOD SHEPHERD, PERRYVILLE MARYLAND JUNE 26, 2022, A WEEK AFTER HIS ORDINATION IN WASHINGTON, DC

Explain

Jesus set his face to journey to Jerusalem. He had been preaching and teaching in Galilee for some time. Some believed in him, and many began to oppose him. The time had come for him to accomplish his mission by undergoing his passion and death. And so, with resolution and courage, he set out on the road for Jerusalem, to suffer and die. And he doesn't set out alone, but, he sent out his disciples as messangers before him, to prepare the towns for his coming, like heralds before a king. Truly, because he is the Son of God, he is, and always was, rightfully the king of the universe. But he didn't live with kingly authority at first, but was born in a manger and lived in poverty. But now, with his passion, he was setting out to take possession of what belonged to him, to begin to exercise his authority as king of the whole universe, the authority which he now has in heaven. It's amazing to think of our Lord as such a great and powerful king. And almost more amazing to think of his passion and death, when he took possession of his kingdom by combat with his enemies. He conquered by undergoing tremendous physical and spiritual sufferings, maintaining throughout it all his steadfast fortitude and his burning love for the Father and for the souls who he would save. This great love reconciled all human beings to God, ripping them out of the slavery of Satan.

And so, when he began to journey toward this engagement with his enemies, he began to gather a large group of followers around him. And as he calls them to follow him, it's surprising how inflexible he seems. He would not allow one to even go bury his father; another he will not allow even to say farewell to his family. [No, he demanded an all in response: he explained, "whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me, scatters." Jesus accepts no hesitation or sitting on the fence, but expects those whom he calls to jump in and dedicate their whole life to him.]

Interpret

He didn't call everyone to follow him in this way, leaving everything behind, but those whom he did call to this, he expected to respond wholeheartedly. This call of Jesus is still present in the Church: the Lord calls many to follow him by consecrating their lives to him as religious sisters, brothers, and priests. And just as in the Gospel, he desires them to respond wholeheartedly. Why must one respond in this way? Why does Jesus expect some to leave everything behind to follow him? Because, he's inviting them to love him, and that's how love works: The more one loves, the less one wants to be concerned with anything except the beloved. So Jesus inspires some to gladly give up all that might hold them back from loving and serving Him.

Further, they must respond immediately because of the unsurpassed importance of serving Jesus. The Lord Jesus is the king of the whole universe; and he shows some people the great kindness of calling them to be his friends and close co-workers. To serve in his kingdom is a greater honor than to occupy the highest positions on earth; and to be his friend is worth more than all the money of the earth. Those whom he calls should way his call against the things of the earth, and realize that there is nothing on earth that would be worth delaying even one day in following Jesus.]

But does this Gospel have anything to say for the rest of Christ's faithful, those whom he does not call to the priesthood or religious life? Well, every Christian is called to love the Lord with their whole heart, soul, mind, and strength. But how can they do this without leaving everything? The good news for the rest of the faithful is that the true obstacle to loving Jesus wholeheartedly is not worldly things in themselves, but the attachment to them. Owning a nice car does not prevent one from loving Jesus, but obsession with one's car certainly does. Getting married need not lessen one's love for God, as long as one doesn't look to find perfect happiness and fulfillment from one's spouse. Having friends need not hold one back but trying to control their affairs does.

So while not all are called to actually leave everything behind to serve the Lord, every Christian is called to do this interiorly: To continue to deal with the things of the world, not with desire for them, but desiring only to use them to glorify God. This is what St. Paul meant by his mysterious call that, "those who deal with the world should be as if they did not deal with it", because they don't desire these things, but only want to serve Jesus and please him.

But how is this possible? Seeing the great love of Christ for the soul, especially on the cross, moves one to die to oneself, leaving behind hopes and desires for the things of this world, and running forth to return love to Jesus, and to enjoy his friendship. St. Paul describes it well: "the love of Christ compels us who have reached the conviction that since one died for all, therefore, all have died" – died to their earthly desires. They serve him by all their affairs in the world: living holy marriages and family life, and in their work in the world, making affairs in every field – medicine, law, engineering – align more closely to the Gospel.

This call of our Lord to each Christian is beautiful and heroic. He calls each one to great heights of holiness, lived out among the ordinary things of daily life.

When one begins to live the love of Jesus, forgetting lesser desires, He comes quickly to visit them with the joy of his friendship. Even a moment of His company makes it all worth it.

Apply

So how can one attain this great love of God, and allow it to quiet desires for earthly things? One very helpful way is by remembering one's death. At death, the difference between those consecrated to God and the rest of the faithful becomes much less. Because, at death, Jesus invites each faithful soul to leave behind everything in the world and go forward to be with him in paradise. It's as if the saints were calling to the soul "forget your own power over your earthly home; so does the King desire you." Remembering this great destination of union with God in heaven helps other desires to fade into the background.

But unfortunately, many fall into the folly of ignoring death. One may know theoretically that they will die, but they think of it as very distant, effectively infinitely far off. This causes one to put off the most important things; one may think: "I'll have plenty of time to go back to Church when I'm older." Even among Catholics, forgetting death can lead one to the sad folly of delaying the project of growing closer to Jesus.

One great time to recall one's death could be before one lays down one's head for the evening. I once heard someone admit that they disliked going to bed early, and they reflected that this was probably because sleep reminded them of their coming death, and they wanted to avoid facing it. So whenever one does set their head down to sleep, perhaps they could benefit from imaging that that very night they will appear before the Lord. They can then entrust themselves to him with desire for heaven and sorrow for their sins, letting go of passing cares and anxieties.

Considering one's death can fill the soul with wisdom, putting all things in perspective, letting the things that seem so important in this life take their proper place, focusing instead on the things that truly matter: following the Lord Jesus, the king of the universe, who invites each one to serve him as his close friends and servants, and one day to reign with him forever in paradise.

Joan Andrews Bell writes from prison: I want to live like a cloistered nun in her cell
'I want my prison stay to be a time of undistracted prayer, as well a time of penance – for myself and our nation,' writes Joan Andrews Bell.

Wed Sep 20, 2023 - 9:59 am EDT

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (LifeSiteNews) — The following letter was sent to LifeSiteNews last night by Joan Andrews Bell's husband Chris Bell. He told LifeSite that Joan has been able to call him from Alexandria City Jail every night "so far" since her incarceration and that she has a message to share. Joan was taken into custody on Friday immediately after being declared guilty of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and conspiracy against rights. She and seven of her companions are in prison awaiting sentencing for their part in an October 2020 attempt to rescue unborn babies scheduled for death at a late-term abortion business in Washington, D.C.

I am so very grateful for everyone who would want to send me commissary money, or write me a letter (letters are most special gifts), or visit me in prison. But I hope you will be able to understand why I am pleading with you not to do any of these. Please!

The short explanation is that I want my prison stay to be a time of undistracted prayer, as well a time of penance – for myself and our nation. I want to make my cell as it were a cloistered monastery cell. In a Carmelite monastery the nuns are only allowed 2 visits a year from family, and depending upon the specific monastery, they are only allowed 2-4 letters a year from family. Therefore, that is what I want to emulate. My family will visit when they are able and will write. So I will have that.

I love each of you so very much! We in the prolife movement are as much family as could possibly be. At this point I cannot be on the front lines with you, but in my prayers and in my heart I am with you and our precious unborn brothers and sisters who are suffering martyrdom.

I am afraid that the only way I can bear not being with them and you at the killing places is by making of my life behind these walls a time of constant prayer, and whatever little additional sacrifice I can embrace.

I join my prayers with yours. We are united in Him Our Savior and Our Blessed Virgin Mary.

Thank you, and may God bless you beyond measure!

Yours in the United Hearts of Jesus and Mary,

Joan Bell