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Preaching our mother’s funeral sermon in San Bernardino in 1968, Howard W Hunter commented, memorably,

“We’re all going to miss Leola. But I take comfort in the knowledge that she didn’t break stride at the Veil.”

That’s about as good a summary of her life as we can summon up.

We’re gathering friends and descendants at her birthplace in June and her Timbaloo descendants in Keokuk this summer. She turns 100 on June 19, 2010, and it seems time to pull together some of our memories of her.
General caveats, conventions, and disclaimers:
  1. We have done our best to hew to a standard of objective truth. That said, the reader will do well to keep in mind that we are a pair of senior citizens, with all that implies for factual reliability. Where we’re aware of spinning a yarn or interpolating a guess, we try so to label it. But we’re uncomfortably aware that some of what we think we remember may no longer perfectly match the objective facts. Please correct us if you know better.
  2. Throughout, we refer to our honored parents, Leola Seely Anderson and H Duane Anderson, as “Leola” and “Duane,” arrogating to ourselves the genealogist’s customary familiarity with respect to the dead. Never in our lives or theirs, of course, have we ever so addressed them nor referred to them. Early drafts of this material called them “Mammy” and “Pappy,” as indeed we usually did, but the tone didn’t work. When the narrative requires a distinction between us, similarly, we are “Richard” and “Brent.”
  3. This document began as an annotated photo-album. Where we possess more pictures, we have tended to produce more pages: the section in which we document Leola as a tourist, for example, is fatter than some more important ones, such as those which deal with her early life and her careers as writer and educator.
  4. It has already grown to incorporate a variety of remembrances and documents that we and others have treasured. We intend that this process continue: addenda and corrigenda from any surviving knowledgeable source will find an appreciative welcome.
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