This final chapter brings together the many threads the book has followed. In the Sonoran Desert city of Tucson, two people — each the inheritor of a distinct family line, each carrying with them the names, migrations, and marriages of generations before — met, married, and made a single household. In the union of Robert Gail McWard and Patricia Ann McWenie, the McWard and McWenie lines at last converged, and with them the Hobson, White, O'Connell, Hill, Pate, and Holt families whose stories have run through these pages.
Two Lines Meeting in the Desert
Robert Gail McWard was born on 8 March 1945 in Lakehurst, Ocean County, New Jersey, the son of Robert Darrel McWard, an attorney, and Marjorie Anne White. His boyhood belonged to Taylorville, Illinois, where the family lived among the cookie-cutter homes of the Veterans Addition and, later, in the great two-storied house on Market Street that had belonged to his grandparents Elmer and Helen McWard. His great-grandfather, Helen's father Hobson, had been a blacksmith and later mayor of the town. During those Taylorville years his father helped run the jail, where his grandparents lived below the inmates housed above and where his grandmother cooked the prisoners' meals. The 1950 car accident that marked that era of his childhood has been told in full elsewhere.
Bob remained rooted in Taylorville through his freshman year of high school before the family moved west to Phoenix — a hard departure that meant leaving behind friends and relatives. In Arizona he came into his own as an athlete. At Scottsdale Arcadia High School he played lineman and linebacker on the 1962 state championship team, and when the Arcadia squad ran over the Tucson Badgers forty to seven for the Arizona Class AA title, the Arizona Republic singled out "the great reactions of linebacker Bob McWard." The Taylorville paper, too, ran an account of the championship, describing him as the grandson of Mrs. Helen McWard of the Hotel Frisina. Bob attended the University of Arizona in Tucson where he met his future wife Patricia McWenie.
Patricia Ann McWenie had come to that same desert city by a different road. She was born on 8 January 1945 in Douglas, a copper-smelting town against the Mexican border in Cochise County, Arizona, the daughter of Edward John McWenie Jr. and Montine Adeline Pate. She arrived thirteen years after her brother, growing up in many ways as the youngest of her family. By 1950 the McWenies were in Tucson, where five-year-old Patricia was counted in her parents' household, and a series of residences through the early 1960s kept her in the growing city as she came of age. A long-held family rumor that the Pate line carried Choctaw ancestry was later dissolved by DNA testing, which showed no Native American heritage — one of those cherished stories common to many American families of her generation.
Patricia carried with her a scar around her left eye, the mark of a car wreck she had survived alongside her then-boyfriend, Bob. Her daughter Nancy would later joke that her father had to marry her after the accident because she was "damaged goods." Whatever truth lay behind the family humor, the two were married on 10 June 1967 in Tucson, Pima County, Arizona.
A Marriage and Its Children
In that marriage the lines the book has traced came to rest in one household. Robert and Patricia had two children, Nancy Ellen McWard and Robert Edward McWard. Their daughter inherited her father's gift for words and his quick wit — the same humor that produced his memorable turns of phrase, among them the wry line, "Tough titty said the kitty but the milk still flows."
Robert built his life around a long military career, serving and retiring as a Colonel in the United States Army. His postings carried the family across the country and the world — Germany, Vietnam, Oklahoma, Virginia, Greece, Arkansas, Kansas, and Missouri. Patricia's life as a soldier's wife took its shape from those moves; she followed the flag as far as Greece, where the local women would scold her for not speaking Greek, mistaking her for a Greek woman who had married an American serviceman.
Family life moved with the assignments. Each winter — from the children's elementary years into early high school — Bob took the family skiing with their good friends the Slocums, from Wintergreen in Virginia to Killington in Vermont, and, during the European years, to Austria and Germany. He remembered those as great times and great memories.
Through the moves and postings, Patricia built a career in education, teaching middle school both in Virginia and back home in Arizona — work that called for patience and warmth, qualities those who knew her recognized in abundance. She was, by every account, very kind to everyone, and someone whom everybody loved.
Later Years in Tucson
After retirement, both returned to Tucson, the city of their young adulthood. Patricia turned toward her church, serving in women's ministry and leading Bible studies, extending the same instinct for teaching and encouragement into her faith community. Bob took up the University of Arizona Wildcats with genuine devotion, attending most of the basketball and football games — a striking turn for a man who, by his own account, had never followed sports much despite his own athletic distinction. He loved to hunt deer and elk in Northern Arizona with his friends, and he loved to dance, in the manner of his mother Margie, to the 1950s and country music that filled his ear.
Bob was known as a very good writer, and it is to his pen that the family owes some of its richest recollections. In 2018 he set down his memories of the vanished Taylorville of his childhood. He also recalled tracking down, with his father, the small Tucson hotel where his grandfather had once stayed when the family lived in the city — a building since converted to an attorney's offices — closing the circle on a memory from his earliest years.
Patricia Ann McWenie died on 7 March 2013 in Tucson, the city where her life had first begun to take shape more than sixty years earlier. Her death came suddenly, from a brain aneurysm she suffered while attending a University of Arizona basketball game — out in the world and enjoying it to the last. The later chapters of Robert Gail McWard's life are still being written where he lives in Tucson.