Thedora "Teddie" Kellermeier Turcotte

She was her mother’s best birthday present and her father’s pride and joy.  Born on the family’s West Texas farm on November 11, 1932, during the Great Depression, the second of seven, she learned to work at her papa’s side, driving a horse-pulled wagon, chopping and picking cotton, shoes off, stickers, and scorching earth be damned.  She showed her little sisters and baby brother what it meant to work hard and spent much of her later life leading others by that same example.

She loved her five sisters and baby brother and stayed close to them through the years, frequently meeting back at the farm, children and husbands in tow, for vacation/reunions, canning confabs, pickling parties, lamb feedings, and farm business. Those visits are the stuff of family legend, with scattered cousins coming from across the country to renew bonds, wander the fields and pastures, and survive epic adventures in truancy. For some, there were even short stints of schooling in the same places as our moms, the Eola School, and extended stays with Grandma and Uncle Leo for advanced training in work ethic and farm skills.

The lessons learned at her father’s side served her well.  She never let not having a college degree hold her back. One career was not enough and so she decided to have several. The Bell System was the first and she started around 1950, in Abilene, fresh out of high school, as a switchboard operator.  Back in those days, switchboard operators played a vital role connecting customers to the services they needed.  Once, in 1952, Mom got an early morning call from a doctor attending to a paper boy who had crashed his motor scooter in front of the doc’s house and suffered a head injury.  She calmly and quickly arranged for emergency services to go to the house and the boy recovered.  Mom was honored for her actions at a banquet sponsored by the local newspaper.  It was the first of many awards she would receive over the course of her careers.

Abilene was also the place she met and married a charming and handsome airman and former Korean War marine machine gunner, George Leland Clise, in 1956.   Shortly thereafter, 1958 and 1959, Mom gave birth to two baby boys, Jay and Mark.  While Dad’s assignments took him to Europe, Mom soldiered on stateside, taking care of her two rascals and working for Ma Bell.

Like her mother before her, who pioneered farming on the West Texas Plains, Teddie was part of a pioneering generation of outside-the-home working moms, expertly juggling the duties of wife, mother, and employee. The 1960s saw the family move to another frontier, this one being a nuclear production facility at the base of the Sandia Mountains in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a remote outpost in the desert southwest.  While he and his fellow soldiers provided physical security for the nation’s nuclear program, Mom made a home, cooking, cleaning, and caring for her young ones and continuing her career at the phone company.  In August 1963, a blonde baby girl, Paula Ann, came along, completing the family.

The 1960s were a turbulent time and Mom experienced more than her fair share.  Her marriage started showing signs of stress while her country shuddered in violent spasms, experiencing the Cold War, assassinations, racial strife and general social unrest.  The assassination of Robert Kennedy was especially hard.  He passed away on a Thursday morning.  Mom was sitting in her rocking chair, in her robe, watching the sun stream through the window sheers when she told us Bobby had died.  It was the end of the American Camelot, and even our stoic and unflappable Mother struggled with the unanswerable question of Why?

1973 brought a tad of social justice home to the family, with the EEOC AT&T consent decree and the birth of Affirmative Action. Mom was a first-level manager back then, and she sat her oldest down on the side of her bed, a place for a serious conversation, explaining that the company had given her a raise and a retroactive adjustment so that her salary was the same as the men who did the same kind of work. She even showed me the pay stub.  Equal pay for equal work.  It made sense back then and it still does.  It was a struggle back then and it still is.

The late 70s brought two High School graduations, the marriage of her oldest son, and the birth of her first grandchild, a darling little girl. Like most grandmas, she loved the little one and spent as much time as she could with her.  It was the beginning of a new chapter in her life, as AT&T moved the family to Phoenix, along with another promotion for Mom.

Depression-era farm girls from West Texas know a thing or two about heat and toughness.  The transition to Phoenix and the change in weather were not particularly hard on her. Air conditioning, after all, is not a necessity, only a nice to have.   The change in jobs also went well, but that was not the case for husband George, who struggled to find good-paying work and to cope with the heat.  He was an aging Warehouseman in an owner’s labor market.  The marriage came to an end in 1981.  What had become an unhappy marriage gave way to happier times and pictures from those years show smiles and fun in the Arizona sun.

Mom was married a second time, in 1982, this time to a retired electrical engineer named Elmer Turcotte.  They traveled together, visiting family and friends, but this marriage also ended in divorce, in 1987.  Mom once asked me how many frogs she had to kiss before finding a prince and all I could think to say was that she raised two princes, which might have been a bit of a stretch, but she didn’t quibble.

She retired from AT&T in the mid-1980s as a group manager and after a short tour of Southeast Asia, moved on to Southwest Airlines, as a reservation sales agent.  She enjoyed the heck out of those free flight privileges, jetting around to visit her siblings, children, and six grandchildren. She enjoyed them even more after her second retirement. She loved her time at Southwest, making lots of friends and continuing to win all sorts of performance-related awards.  The job was fun and satisfying and she especially enjoyed being one of the gals and not having to worry about office politics. But, of all the awards she won, not a single one related to efficient handling of email.  She ignored that low-end form of communication, preferring meetings and collegial facetime instead. Sometimes, it’s very, very good to be a worker bee instead of a manager.   She might have been a bane to the Email admins, but her managers, coworkers, and customers still loved her.

The time with Southwest Airlines was also a time when Granny T spent time and influenced her Phoenix grands, three great young ladies who’ve grown into great women.  Granny T and her posse had some good times, and she was there to provide an extra set of hands for daughter Paua when she needed it.  It was a time when granddaughter Wendi could compliment her on the “Hot Grandma” photo, her first AT&T supervisor picture, and when Granny T could share some (apparently excellent) dirty jokes without any fear of recrimination.  It was also a time when three young granddaughters saw a woman in full, strong, confident, and determined, setting an example for each of them to follow.

After Southwest, she moved back to the farm, lending a hand to son Mark after the tragic and premature passing of her brother Leo.  Farm tasks, church work, and family visits, even to her growing numbers of great grands, weren’t enough to fill her plate, so mom took some classes, earned a Microsoft Office Skills certificate, and went to work for a local manufacturer.   She continued earning a paycheck until her 80th year.  In her spare time, she helped take care of sister Louise, who was mentally challenged, ensuring she had enough money to pay for meds and basic necessities. The remains of her energy and gumption were spent growing vegetables, mowing lawns and spraying weeds, moving irrigation pipes chopping the heads of trespassing snakes, and finally, taking two-mile walks to the mailbox with her best buddy Blackey, a stray who had had a hard life before finding Granny T.  Those two became best buds and spent lots of time on the front porch of the farmhouse, enjoying the afternoon sun and watching the winds ripple through the crops in the fields.

She was smart with her money, the product of a depression-era farm upbringing and a father who knew how to save, and she knew how and when to listen to financial advisors.  In her twilight years, as her health failed, her savvy and thriftiness ensured that there were ample resources for care.  She took great pride in her financial independence.

There were side projects over the years, including chinchilla farming and selling well-framed famous artistic reproductions.  The chinchillas were soft and cute and unprofitable.   The paintings required social butterfly kind of skills and an artistically aspirant array of friends and associates.  It was not a good match, but Mom liked the paintings and some of her inventory hung in her room to her last days.

She was more successful in her real estate ventures, with two and sometimes three properties in her portfolio.  They were lower middle-income houses.  She didn’t get exotic with any of these houses and took on manageable risks.  There were no esoteric financial instruments, and she acted as the landlord.  She moved out of the rental properties as she transitioned back to the farm.

Mom’s love was not about sunshine, moonbeams, and rose gardens, although there were vegetable gardens and plenty of hugs, but was instead about work ethic, deep commitment to family, and the creation of a moral foundation and way of living. Her love was sustaining and ever-true and it encouraged us to stand and deliver for those we love and cherish.  It has fed us for a lifetime.

We love you Mom and will treasure your memory for all of our days.  Rest easy, you’ve earned it.

Thedora Bertha Kellermeier Turcotte was preceded in death by her parents, Albert W. Kellermeier and Ida Margaret Braden Kellermeier, sisters Virginia Andrews and Louise Kellermeier, brother Leo Kellermeier, and both former husbands, George Clise and Elmer Turcotte.  She is survived by her sisters Veronica Hatterman, Gladys Kubitz, and Cecilia Klaus, children, Jay, Mark, and Paula, grandchildren Samantha, Wendi, Thomas, Vanessa, Deborah, and Melissa, six great-grandchildren, and scores of nieces and nephews.