Today marks the golden anniversary of a very significant event in my life: the birth of Amy Elizabeth Williams, my daughter.
It’s a good thing she was a girl, as we still did not have a boy’s name picked out even on the way to the hospital. My wife really didn’t care for Llewellyn!
We were living just north of Hiawatha and I was working as a Test Technician at Collins Radio Company in Cedar Rapids. We lived in a 41′ trailer house which I had bought when we got married. At that time, I was in the Air Force stationed in Duluth, MN.
Amy was born in St. Luke’s Hospital here in Cedar Rapids. We had no medical insurance (who did then?) so I paid the doctor his $200 bucks for his services during the entire pregnancy and delivery and paid the hospital bill of a few hundred out of my pocket. I suppose I thought it was a lot, but it was no big deal. It was a bill, we paid it, and charged on.
As all good grandmothers do, “Grandma B” (B for Branscom) came from Ft. Madison to help get us through the first week or so.
My coworkers gave her a neat little dress, I recall.
Because digital cameras had not yet been invented fifty years ago, I have relatively few pictures of her. And even those have not been recovered since our move a year-and-a-half ago. Worse yet, they are not organized well so I’d have a tough time finding them even if I did know where they were. Therefore, at the moment, there’ll be no pictures posted of her unless I can find the copy of her HS graduation picture which has been published here before.
After she learned to crawl, we had great times “playing chase” in the trailer!
When she was a few months old, we hooked onto the trailer and moved to Ames, where she spent the next couple of years. There, I remember her playing in the sandbox I built her with her little friend Cassie.
I also remember our occasional treat: Neopolitan ice milk, when it was on sale for 39-cents/half-gallon!
The next ten years were spent in Waseca, MN. Then from there to Miami, back to Waseca, to Mason City, and finally to Cedar Rapids. She was in five different schools in about as many years. She was a smart kid so did well in spite of all the disruptions in her schooling.
The bad news is that at about age nine or ten, she was diagnosed with scleroderma, an auto-immune disease which attacks the connective tissues of the body. It makes them hard, instead of soft and pliable and stretchy.
The doctors at Mayo Clinic said they saw about one case/year of a child getting the disease. They predicted that she might live ten more years. She passed away in 1981, shortly after her 19th birthday.
I’ve often wondered what she would have done with her life. She was smart, artistic, and great with detail. She wanted to be an accountant.
The best I can do is follow the lives of her two best friends, from her days in Waseca. (Facebook makes following them easy!) Both have continued to be great citizens. Karen is a wife, mother, and teacher and still lives in Waseca. Cindy is a dental hygienist and lives in Apple Valley, MN. She’s very creative, especially with scrapbooking and photography.
I like to think that the three of them would still be great friends and that Amy’s life would be just as fruitful as their lives are.