Foreword

By Senator Rand Paul

Vincent Remini

Kelley has always been a writer. Whether writing marketing literature for the telecommunications industry or for her own creative expression, it has been a constant in her life. During my medical training at Duke, she was our main breadwinner, writing for companies in Research Triangle Park. Even when the subject matter was less than scintillating, she had a gift for making it so.

Since I entered politics, Kelley is always the first reviewer I seek for my speeches and articles, and she always makes them better. As our sons and friends will attest, she is also a good storyteller, so when she told me that she wanted to write about her relationships with her grandmother, mother and close-knit group of college friends, I knew it would be great.

As you know real men don’t cry, or at least they don’t usually admit to it but, as I read Kelley’s essays, I laughed, I cried, and I was moved. The running joke in our family is that she is such a great storyteller that we weren’t sure if she was writing fiction or non-fiction, but the truth is that she always makes real life much more interesting – sometimes more interesting in the telling than perhaps it was in the living!

Kelley is convinced that her storytelling gene comes from the Irish grandmother she writes about in this book, but I think she got a healthy dose from her father Hilton too—he can tell a story you’ve heard a hundred times and still reel you in for the climax.

My family may count fewer dramatic storytellers in our ranks, but it’s not that we don’t have a story to tell. In this book, Kelley writes of the powerful sources of inspiration our mothers and grandmothers are, and in the Paul family that is certainly true.

The women in my family have been long-lived, strong-willed and opinionated. From my grandmothers to my mother runs a strength and direction that has guided our family for generations. Even during times in history when women didn’t often take leadership roles in society, the women in my family were the quiet, yet powerful directors of our destiny. In the winter of 1903, my maternal great-grandmother Millicent Duncan Creed wrote over one hundred letters to her fiancé Herman. She described great snowfalls and twenty-two degrees below zero weather. She described exhilarating sleigh rides and buggy rides and how much more delightful they would have been with him by her side.

Herman worked in a sawmill about sixty miles away. In those days, before automobiles, it was a major undertaking to travel that far and so he returned only on holidays. The train took her letters to him. Her letters warned him not to have too much fun or pay too much attention to the German girls there. She wrote of Sabbath Day School, sermons, and lectures. Often, she wrote of missing church because of quarantine for smallpox or measles or muddy, impassable roads.

I was surprised that Millicent wrote about a new card game that was “all the rage” and helped alleviate their cabin fever during the harsh winter. When she had visited us down in Texas in her late eighties, we were told that she strongly disapproved of cards and had never played. We took particular delight in corrupting her with a game of Old Maid. Little did we know then that she had once upon a time, in her rebellious youth, enjoyed a good game of cards. But we didn’t stop there. We also took my great-grandmother to her first movie, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which she loved. Oh, the rebellious influence of children in the seventies!

In addition to Millicent’s letters in 1903–1904, Herman’s mother wrote occasionally. She was ill with chronic symptoms of age, but her strong faith gave her comfort. She wrote this to Herman in March of 1904:

“Our Sabbath was lovely which I spent at home as usual. But the dear Lord willing I hope I can soon go to His house again. Anyway His grace is sufficient for me. There is a song in my soul today, a blessed sunshine that no outward circumstances can take away. The Lord is a sun and a shield to all that trust in him. May he always be your guide.”

Their families were not rich but they were literate and spiritual. My great-grandmother Millicent did not attend college but her sister graduated from North Eastern Ohio Normal School in 1908. Millicent, like her mother before her, was active in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union of Mahoning County, Ohio. In 1874, the temperance crusade began in Ohio and the first national convention of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was held in Cleveland.

According to family lore, they sang in the prisons against the devil’s liquor rum. We have no record of their involvement in women’s suffrage but the Temperance Union officially endorsed women’s suffrage as a way of gaining more participation and influence for women. I don’t think Millicent and her mother were of the Carry Nation variety of temperance activists—to my knowledge they confined their protest tactics to singing, not hatchets.

Millicent was an activist to the end. I remember listening to her interrogate my father at her one-hundredth birthday party back in 1984 about sending AWACS (advanced surveillance planes) to Egypt. My father had been a “no” vote in congress and, fortunately for him, my great-grandmother approved.

She was tireless in her efforts to register people to vote—even working to register more than one hundred fellow residents at her assisted living facility. As the descendant of abolitionists and temperance workers, I think she tried to register only Republicans.

The women in my family were a force to be reckoned with because of their faith, energy, and intelligence, but also sheer longevity. Millicent’s grandmother, Sarah Millicent Rose Howard, was born in 1836 and was still going strong at age eighty-seven, until she stepped out of a jitney and was struck by a car in 1923. My mother treasures a quilt knitted by Sarah, whom they called Ma Howard.

My mother’s mother, Carol Creed Wells, graduated from Ohio University in the early 1930s at a time when few women went to college, much less graduated. Kelley and I have a framed picture of her in the foyer of our home that never fails to draw the notice of guests. In the photo she is sitting, knees bent, aiming a rifle at a distant target, a row of carbines in the background.

Carol, or Gram as we knew her, was not quite the teetotaler her mother was. She loved parties, joined a sorority, and was a bit of a rule breaker. As kids we loved the stories she told us of my grandfather climbing in the second story window of her dormitory, long after visiting hours for boys had ended.

Gram was an avid coin collector and spent hours with me as a child, sorting coins and peering at mint marks. As time went on, her vision began to fail and I became her eyes, spying the faintness of marks on weather worn coins. I went with her to the eye surgeon as her cataracts were removed, then her corneas replaced, and, finally, when we received the sad news that macular degeneration had irreparably damaged her retinas. Those trips to the ophthalmologist with her were among the reasons I ultimately decided to become an eye surgeon.

My father’s mother, Margaret Dumont Paul, finished high school while her husband finished only eight grades. My dad says that without her management and accounting skills, the family dairy business would never have thrived to become the main milk delivery enterprise in Carnegie and Greentree, Pennsylvania.

Even after long days working at the dairy and caring for five sons, Margaret found time to help those less fortunate than she. She delivered Meals on Wheels to invalids and shut-ins well into her eighties. Even after she was crippled with her own arthritis and maladies, she would carry meals up long winding stairs to houses perched in the hilly sections of south Pittsburgh.

My grandmother lived in an era when every penny was counted and cataloged, lights were never burned without a purpose, the tap water was not allowed to run continuously when washing dishes, and buying new clothes only occurred when the old ones were worn out.

I interviewed my grandmother when she was ninety about her work in the family dairy business and as a volunteer for the American Bible Society. She spoke of taking the trolley to downtown Pittsburgh to deliver Bibles to an African American church. Although we sometimes assume race relations were far superior in the northern cities before the Civil Rights Movement, the truth is that separation de facto existed in the north as well. Her trip to downtown Pittsburgh, especially alone, was considered daring at the time. She never told her husband of seventy years about delivering those Bibles.

Grandmother Margaret lived in a time when, by all appearances, the men in the family made the decisions, but there was always a hint that the men could never have made the right decisions without her help. She was not boastful but it was always clear that she was confident of her abilities.

My mother, Carol Wells Paul, followed in her mother’s footsteps to Ohio University. My father went to Gettysburg College and my mother, just like her grandmother Millicent, wrote hundreds of letters to her beau during those years apart (those letters were pointedly not made available to the author).

My mother would have succeeded at any career she chose. She would be the first to say that her decision to devote her life to raising, organizing, feeding, and clothing her five children was the career she chose enthusiastically and should not be viewed as somehow a deprivation of another path.

But, as times changed, so did our family. Today, my sisters work both outside the home and inside the home. My older sister Lori is a bookkeeper and mother of five, and my younger sister Joy is an OB-GYN and mother of six. Two of my nieces are physicians and one is in veterinary school.

Barbara Tuchman writes of how the American Revolution opened up progress to people from all walks of life, not just the nobility. Think of what has been lost over the centuries by restricting leadership in government and society to only men of nobility. And take that one step further: Imagine what progress has been lost by excluding women and minorities from positions of leadership.

I believe we all have reason to be hopeful about the future as both men and women, of all backgrounds, races, and creeds are encouraged to excel to their maximum potential. Nothing illustrates that viewpoint better than the stories of inspiring women in this book, whose courage, perseverance and optimism define the American spirit.

—Rand Paul