RUTH JEANETTE ANDRE

While Nana was still an infant she contracted spinal meningitis, and her resulting fever at one point hovered around 105 degrees. She wasn't expected to survive. She did, though, and ever afterwards her parents were overly protective of her.

Nana told me the story from time to time that when she was a girl, her dad received a note threatening that Nana would be kidnapped if he didn't pay up a certain amount of money. The money was to be left somewhere outside their house on Maple Street. When the pickup time came, though, there were police hidden all around the house and the master switch to the house was turned off--so that when the would-be kidnapper showed up, Bopop could throw it on and turn on every light in the house. The would-be kidnapper took off running, but stopped when one of the policeman called out to him and fired his gun into the air. It turned out that the fellow who wrote the note was named Earl MacElroy, one of Nana's schoolmates. She added that later he was sent to prison for grand theft auto.

According to the 1932 Burlington Pathfinder--Nana's sophomore year high school annual--she was a member of the Girls' Glee Club and the Baton Club. The Baton Club was devoted to the study of music, including such activities as presenting papers on musical subjects, and which required its members to practice an instrument or singing from 30-60 minutes every day. She graduated early, then spent a year working at the Kreske's dime store until the family moved to Peoria, Illinois in 1934. She loved working at Kresge's--so much, in fact, that she still talked about it with me sixty years later. Once in Peoria she attended business college, where she loved typing and shorthand--taking after her dad, who was very skilled at both.

The Peoria Daily Record of Thursday, July 23, 1936, records Nana and Paw getting their marriage license (and misspelling Paw's name in the process): Dan V. KNAPP, 21, apprentice, 709 Indiana and Ruth ANDRE, 19, 402 Third

The day Nana and Paw got married was the hottest of the year. The temperature soared well past 100 degrees as they were married in front of Gagi's living room fireplace; Nana almost fainted during the ceremony at least once. But she made it through, and she and Paw embarked on a honeymoon at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Nana told me later some of her best memories of the honeymoon were scenic boat tours around the lake, and that she was particularly awed by the Wrigley Mansion on the lakeshore.

Nana's favorite poet in her youth was one very popular in the early 20th century but little known and regarded today, Edgar A. Guest. After she died, I found a scrapbook she had compiled through the late 1940's filled with snippets and clippings of all sorts of things, but primarily the poetry of Edgar Guest. Other poets she included were Violet Alleyn Storey, Richard Armour, Donald J. MacCargo, the "Cheerful Cherub", Mary Waller, Helen Frith Stickney, Dot Aaron, and Ethel Jacobson.

When Japan surrendered in 1945 after being at war with America for nearly four years, most people celebrated in the streets. Nana told me, though, she couldn't stand all the huzzahs. She kept thinking of people she knew who had died, including one friend from high school who died on the Bataan Death March. So while everyone else was celebrating, she sat down on her porch and cried instead. She would end up hating Japan for the rest of her life, convinced that Japanese were sneaky and their country had changed its tactic to conquering America economimically instead of militarily. She infected me with that prejudice too while I was growing up, and I didn't start shaking it until I was fully twenty years old.

Nana had a distrust of doctors that lasted most of her adult life. This stemmed mainly from the fact that she spent at least ten years--possibly as many as twenty--with a brain tumor. For all those years she suffered severe headaches, but the doctors told that the pain was all in her head (no pun intended). When they finally did discover the tumor it had grown so large that the surgeons had to remove a piece of her skull that the tumor had grown into.

Paw's nickname for Nana was Missy--at least until October of 1985, when he bought a little shetland sheepdog that he named Missy, too. Occasionally from then on he would call Missy "Little Missy" and Nana "Big Missy."

Nana gave me the title of my first historical novel: The Trek West, which I wrote in 1984.

In the last hours before she died, Paw and I were on either side of Nana's bed, Paw holding her left hand and I holding her right. In the moments before she passed away--at 1:23 pm, according to my own watch--Paw was smiling sadly and whispering to her, too quietly for the rest of us to hear (as it should be, I suppose). Not long before, I had done the same. But it seemed to us that she passed away while Paw was whispering to her.

Gagi with Nana, 1920

Nana with her grandparents at the Van Gerpen home, early 1920's:
Oma and Opa are on the left, Grandma and Grandpa Andre on the right

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