2 - Phyllis James 1926-2011

Born: Camp Hill, Pennsylvania   July 14, 1926

Died: Gainesville, Florida  September 13, 2011

Daughter Karen’s comments:  My mom grew up in an economically comfortable family in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. Her mother was a public school teacher and her father worked as some sort of agricultural agent for the State, so they were protected from the worst of the depression. 

She had three brothers, one older and two younger.  She loved her older brother, Dick, and seemed to enjoy the company of her younger brothers. Her relationship with her parents, however, did not give her pleasure. 

Her father was rather sexist and never showed any interest in his daughter, according to her accounts. As a granddaughter, I also sensed his lack of interest in female descendants, but of course it did not bother me as much.

Her parents’ marriage was not good until their later years, because (as my mom found out when she was in college) they’d had to get married. 

Mom believed her father always felt trapped in the marriage. His family was an East-coast old-money family and his wife was a farm girl nearing spinsterhood (26 years old) when they married. 

Whatever the reasons, my mother said her place in the family was that of maid. She did chores while her brothers played. Although she was an all-state basketball player in high school, neither of her parents ever came to see her play, though they faithfully attended her brothers’ games.  

By nature she was sweet and cooperative, so she never rebelled in any way that I know of. She kept trying to please her parents throughout her life. She took my grandmother in to live with her when she could no longer live on her own. 

After my grandmother died, however, my mother declined to take any of my grandmother’s belongings (which included some valuable antiques) except, for some reason, a small Limoges serving dish that Mom said she didn’t even like. Weird, I think, to take a piece of china that you dislike as your only memento of your mother. Oh, well, as far as acting out one’s resentment, that’s a pretty harmless way to go about it.

But that marriage didn’t harm Phyl’s own. She and my dad were very, very happy with one another their whole lives, and Mom credited Dad with giving all the confidence she needed that she never had while growing up. 

She majored in elementary education in college at Penn State, and was quite popular on campus. In the college yearbook from 1947-48, her senior year, she had a full-page photo as one of the “Big Women on Campus.” She taught elementary school in Smithburg, Maryland for a year or two after graduation. She quit teaching when her first child was born in 1951—or maybe even before—and never worked for a salary again.  She was, however, well-read and I sense she had a better intellect than Dad did. 

She was a fun mother. She loved to celebrate holidays—no matter what the holiday was, she would always say “(Holiday) only comes once a year!” We had strong family traditions around birthdays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. We didn’t have birthday parties with friends, but Mom would always allow the birthday person to pick the menu for a birthday dinner and the cake, and we’d have a special sit-down dinner with the good china and silver, after which we sipped Drambuie. (This led to Sue’s famous 4-year old display of tipsiness, after Mom was letting her drink as much apple cider as she wanted while the rest of us sipped Drambuie, not realizing that the cider had gone hard. After a while, little Sue stood up from the table, wobbling, and said with giddy silliness: “Everything is so funny! I can’t remember where the bathroom is!”)

She loved to sew, and made a lot of our clothes and all the draperies. She did an excellent job with home decorating, and had a lot of opportunity to do that with all the moves. She and Bill would often sell a house for much more than they paid for it, thanks in large part to her ability to make a house look attractive. She enjoyed both gardening and coffee; I remember one spring when she dug up a coffee cup that she'd inadvertently buried in the petunia bed the previous spring. 

She fought her weight her whole life, but never got heavier than 180 that I know of. She fed us fairly healthy meals,  particularly for that era (e.g. fruit at every breakfast, a green salad with every dinner.)  She always had a small waist, so even at her heaviest she had a dramatic hourglass figure. 

She was physically healthy her whole life, and to my knowledge no solid diagnosis was ever given to the disorder that slowly eroded her mind over the last two decades of her life. I remember being told they wouldn’t diagnose Alzheimer’s because of the lack of physical deterioration. It may have been Lewy Body Disease, but I don’t think that was ever confidently diagnosed, either. 

The strong physical fitness was a problem when her dementia had progressed far enough. In her violent stage, she was capable of throwing chairs and scaling fences. One time, she escaped from a residential facility by climbing into the back of a Pepsi delivery truck. When the truck driver got to his next destination and opened the back, I don’t think he had any trouble figuring out where he’d picked up his stowaway. She had started to show signs of dementia by the time she was 67 or so, but did not die until she was 85.  It was a horribly tragic end to a life that deserved a much, much more dignified and rewarding old age. 

Father: Donald James
Mother: Esta Bream

Husband: William Hollis McKim

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