Katherine Mattie Bevil Blanchette Hall, 1922 - 2011

Katherine Mattie Bevil Blanchette Hall

In 1917, Louie MacMicken (Mack) Bevil left off pitching pine-knots into the firebox of a Santa Fe locomotive and joined the 36th Infantry Division of the Texas National Guard to fight in France. As reported by Mrs. Lera Crow of happy memory, Mack and his sweetheart, Mae Christina Herndon, scandalized polite Kirbyville society by kissing goodbye in public on the depot platform. Mrs. Crow added: “But when he came home he married her, so it was all right – I suppose.”

In 1922 their only child was born: Katherine Mattie Bevil.

Katherine grew up in Kirbyville and graduated from Kirbyville High School. After her family moved to Kingsville for her father’s new job with the Missouri Pacific Railway she attended Texas A & I College for a year before marrying Claude Blanchette, second officer on the tanker S.S. Muskogee.

In 1942 the Muskogee, en route from the Caribbean to Halifax, Nova Scotia with a cargo of oil for the Canadian and British fleets, was reported missing. Although there was no doubt that the ship fell victim to a Nazi u-boat in those terrible times, Katherine never knew exactly what happened until one day, some fifty years later, when she saw on the front page of the Beaumont Enterprise a photograph, taken from the deck of a German submarine, of Claude Blanchette and other survivors on life rafts just before the sinking tanker exploded and killed them. In the chaos of war the United States government had overlooked telling Katherine and the other families.

If you have ever been to see the Statue of Liberty you have probably also seen a statue of Claude Blanchette. At the ferry landing at Battery Park there is a memorial to the America’s Merchant Marine, the civilian sailors who never took the military oath but who died as the heroes they are. One of the figures, of three desperate men clinging to a life raft, is Claude Blanchette, based on the photograph snapped by a young German sailor, almost surely a teenager who loved his family too, on a terrible day in 1942.

Claude Blanchette never knew his son, Claude Bevil Blanchette, born several months later.

In 2009 Katherine journeyed to Halifax and so finished, 67 years later, that voyage for Claude Blanchette and the rest of the crew of the Muskogee.

After World War II one of the many young Kirbyville men returning home was Hebo Ogden (Bo) Hall. He had landed on Normandy on the second day of the invasion, and said he hadn’t missed anything by not being landed on the first day. He fought with the 602nd Tank Destroyer Battalion across France and into Belgium, where he spent the Christmas of 1944 on the defensive perimeter outside Bastogne. Bo and the 602nd were the first allied soldiers to enter Ohrdruf, part of the Buchenwald complex, and then among the first to enter the main camp. The 602nd then drove through Munich, where Bo took time to pose for a photograph outside the beer hall where Hitler made his first try at politics, and then on to Zwickau and the end of the war in Europe. After the war he spent several months with an allied commission helping rebuild the police department of the city of Marseilles, France.

When they were in school before the war Bo Hall dismissed Katherine Bevil as an obnoxious little red-headed brat, and she didn’t like him either, so naturally they married in December of 1945. Bo raised Claude as his own son. Priests are said to be priests after the order of Melchizedec; men who adopt are fathers after the order of St. Joseph, and there is no nobler calling because St. Joseph wants every child to have a father.

Katherine and her husbands Claude Blanchette and Bo Hall, true heroes, were a part of what has truly been called America’s greatest generation, children of the Depression who became the men and women of World War II. They took a starving, desperate nation and, almost with their bare hands, built a free and prosperous nation to give to us.

The younger Claude’s life was complicated in 1948 by the birth of twin boys, Hebo and Mack, who insisted on more than their share of the spotlight. You can always spot the oldest sibling in a family; he or she is the one with the pained expression of existential despair.

Katherine was very proud of her sons, none of whom has yet been arrested, but, hey, they’re young; there’s still time.

And she was proud of her nieces, Donna and Mary, daughters to her, who took her for dinner and shopping every month, and occasionally to Missouri to visit grandchildren and great-nieces.

We are told that America enjoyed great prosperity after World War II, but East Texas never got that news. For farm families the 1950s were but the Great Depression continued, only with a chance of a television set someday.

Those who were raised by the children of the Depression and World War II remember vividly the commandment that there are few crimes greater than wasting food. Our parents never asked us if our supper was good; they asked us, in depths of fear and meaning we can barely comprehend, if we had gotten enough to eat. For the rest of us, their work and their sacrifices mean that we have never gone without food, but they themselves never forgot the hunger of the Depression and the desperation of global war; the fear of hunger and war haunted them always. If we fail to understand that, we fail to understand them, and that would be to fail to honor them.

While Bo farmed and raised dairy cows, Katherine worked outside the home: for the Woods Brothers, for Dr. John Thomas Moore, for Drs. Richardson, Jones, and Bailey, all of blessed memory, and then for Burdett Pulliam, CPA, and his son Ross in Jasper.
Katherine began crunching numbers for Burdett in the 1970s, and theirs was a wonderful relationship: they took turns firing each other. Their arguments were reported by the traumatized witnesses to have bridged the philosophical gap between a train wreck and an air raid. They enjoyed scrapping so much that they kept at it for over twenty years, with Mrs. Pulliam always taking Katherine’s side, and after Katherine’s retirement Burdette and his family always remembered her with gifts or dinners out every birthday and every Christmas.

Katherine loved her flowers and her birds and her books and her dachshunds and her grandchildren, probably not in that order.

When her three sons were young a Christmas custom was for Bo and them to scout out the woods for the perfect Christmas tree. One Christmas they also brought home a little magnolia, and planted it in the front yard. All of Katherine’s grandchildren loved to play in that magnolia tree when it was grown, and often that happy tree hosted all of the grandchildren, laughing and giggling, at one time.

And Katherine finally got to travel: she visited Pearl Harbor, and read the names of her generation engraved in the memorial above the USS Arizona. She and Maudie Barton flew to Ireland, that land of saints and scholars and good beer. One winter she made a pilgrimage to England with her granddaughter Sarah, and saw London and the Home Counties where Bo had spent a year in training for the invasion of Europe. She was privileged to worship God at the site of St. Thomas Becket’s martyrdom in Canterbury Cathedral, and saw the White Cliffs of Dover, only twenty miles from France.

Her last adventure in this life was to visit Canada, God’s second-favorite nation, where she took pictures of every flower in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, and reflected in the quiet of the site where the Acadians of Grand Pre’ were exiled from the world they had made. In the harbor at Halifax she remembered Claude Blanchette and all the other young men of 1939-1945 who will never grow old.

In her mid-eighties her health weakened, but not her spirit.

She began to take to the moral perils of gambling with Harold and Jenny, yes indeed! Her granddaughter Sarah says that Katherine and Jennie planned gambling trips while still in the pews just as soon as the final “Amen” was said, but this is not true – sometimes they planned gambling adventures before Mass, too!

Only a few weeks ago she fell while trying on a new pair of size-eight jeans, but the next day she was at Mass wearing a gynormous (as Sarah would say) pair of sunglasses to cover the shiner, and, yes, the new size-eight jeans. You just can’t keep a Depression-baby down.

And she sneaked cigarettes, like a naughty teenager. Well, why not? If you’re 88 years old and have survived depression, war, farming, and children, you’ve earned a cigarette, so go ahead and light up.

Last Friday night she visited her great pals, Pete and Peggy Stark, as she did most evenings, for coffee and comradeship, and stayed for supper. As she drove herself home she began feeling bad, and knew that the long-ago diagnosis was falling upon her at last.

So many of the wonderful friends who blessed her through the years made her happy by blessing her again with visits on Saturday for good-byes, which are only temporary, of course. As the older English funeral service says, we live “in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.”

Not even a big book could name the people who were such a joy to her – how could any Life of Katherine be complete without, for instance, mentioning Linda the Dog Lady? -- and this memorial is only a few sheets of paper, so thank you, everyone; thank you, thank you, thank you.

And so the tough little redhead is gone; her passing was one of dignity, courage, and grace. We are the less for her passing; we are the more for her blessing.

“Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual Light shine upon her.” – Psalm 111