A Short Biography written
by Aunt Dorothy

CLAUDE AND HAZEL COLEMAN

Contributed by: Aunt Dorothy

It's almost a minor miracle that Hazel Votaw and Claude Coleman met and got
married. At the time of their coming of age, it was not the usual thing to
go to college, however, both of these children of middle class families made
it to the University of Illinois. Claude was born on June 17, 1900, outside
Kemp, Illinois and was named Ernest Claude, one of six children. Hazel
Delores was born March 2, 1902, in Neoga, the eldest of three. Both Claude
and Hazel were brought up in small towns in central Illinois and managed to
enroll at the University where they eventually met.

In June of 1923 while both were working, Claude in Detroit and Hazel at the
U. of I. Library, Hazel managed a trip to Detroit and they became engaged.
Two years later, on June 6, 1925, they were married in Decatur, Illinois with
Hazel's sister, Eleanor, and her boyfriend, Bob McNair, as attendants. After
a summer in Madison, Wisconsin, they settled in Taylorville, Illinois, where
both were teachers until Hazel was pregnant with Bob who was born November
29, 1926. They stayed at Taylorville through the school year, then Claude
went back to Wisconsin to finish his Master's while Hazel took Bob to live
with her parents that summer. With the master's degree in hand, Claude
became a graduate assistant of the U. of I. and the Colemans moved into a
small apartment in Urbana.

The next few years were spent in Urbana/Champaign with Claude working on his
doctorate and Hazel having babies after a serious thyroid problem was solved
with surgery. Dorothy came along in 1929, Philip in 1931, Richard in 1933
and John in 1934. Finances were strained, to put in mildly, but they
survived with the assistantship salary and Hazel's small earnings doing free
lance typing. Finally, in May 1936, the thesis was completed and Claude
became a Ph.D. so the Coleman family made a huge move.

By June 1936 Claude had accepted a summer teaching job at East Texas State
College in Commerce, Texas, and away they went to join friends Jesse and
Myrtle Harris. (Author's aside: Try to imagine driving from Urbana,
Illinois, to Commerce, Texas in June with five children, no air conditioning,
no interstates, gas stations that were car related only and no quick food
restaurants. It's really a daunting thought.)   The only belongings they
took to Texas were what could be put in the car as what furniture Hazel and
Claude owned was put in storage. The family stayed in a rented, furnished
house in town for part of the summer and then in a log cabin outside town for
the last month.

In September 1936 the Colemans moved further west as Claude got a job as head
of the English Department at Sul Ross State Teachers College in Alpine,
Texas. It was a real experience for the whole family as this was an unknown
part of the country to live in, one that was hardly even recognized in books.
Alpine is a small West Texas town in the Davis Mountains, almost
foothills of the Rockies. It enjoyed a very temperate climate known in other
parts of the state as a good place for those with asthma or other pulmonary
problems. Sul Ross and the reputation as a shopping center for ranch families
were the only reasons for the town's existence.

The family arrived in Alpine and moved into a small rental, furnished house
with the landlady living in a larger house next door. Within the year, the
landlady decided a young family of four boys and a girl were safe to rent to
and she moved to San Antonio with the Colemans moving into her ‘big' house
with three bedrooms downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs. There were
actually bathrooms on each floor but that's about as far as luxuries went.
The only heat was a ‘furnace' in the living room.

For those who don't remember these years, it should be pointed out that there
was electricity, there was indoor plumbing, telephones were just coming into
general use, but there was certainly no TV.   Radio was available on a
limited basis so Alpine families listened to a station in San Antonio with a
reasonably decent signal or a station in Del Rio that mostly had religious
and advertising programming. Laundry was a washing machine that had an
agitator that you turned on for a while, turned off, put the laundry (an item
at a time) through a manual wringer, into a rinse tub, back through the
wringer to a second rinse, and finally through the wringer into a basket of
some sort for carrying outside to hang. Everything was dried on clothes
lines, outside or inside in inclement weather when you avoided laundry,
except that with five children it had to be done.

The school system in Alpine maintained two schools, one for white children,
one for Mexicans who all lived ‘across the railroad tracks.' Actually, it
was three schools as there was a separate high school for the white children
and those Mexicans who could make it into high school. When the Colemans
moved to Alpine, the public schools included only 11 grades with no
kindergarten, Both Bob and Dorothy were enrolled in the public schools and
Claude and Hazel paid a minor ‘tuition' for Phil's kindergarten.

Sul Ross College faculty, staff and students provided most of the activities
for the Colemans. Claude, of course, taught and maintained the English
Department staff in a growing institution of higher education. Hazel raised
the children and took care of the house. Both of them made friends at the
college and in town and Hazel did all the things a good faculty wife did
including belonging to AAUW, working at college functions, playing bridge
with other faculty and faculty wives, and working with PTA in the local
school system. Early in the Alpine years, Jesse Harris joined the staff at
Sul Ross and he and Myrtle lived next door, in the ‘small house' for a
couple of years.   The family also became members of the Presbyterian church
and attended on a regular basis.

During the Alpine years, after the first year the Colemans usually had a
college girl live with them to help take care of the children and with
general housework in exchange for room and board. This was the only ‘hired'
help Claude and Hazel ever had.

Communication with Illinois relatives was limited to letters and Hazel
corresponded with her parents regularly and with Claude's parents
occasionally as Claude also wrote to them. After a couple of years, the
family took a two week trip between summer school and the fall session to see
all the relatives in Illinois and repeated the trip in 1940 or ‘41. Both
sets of parents made trips to Alpine for visits though only one or two of
Claude's siblings ever visited.

As the ten years moved along, the biggest thing that happened was World War
II. A friend called Claude one Sunday afternoon and told him to listen to
the radio so he told did and told Hazel and Dorothy about Pearl Harbor when
they returned from a movie (the only time the two of them ever went to a
movie together). The boys were also told and that was really the
introduction of the outside world to all the Colemans.

WWII brought changes to Claude and Hazel's lives, as it did to the rest of
the world. Claude tried to enlist in the army but was rejected for color
blindness and continued to teach at Sul Ross though enrollment declined with
most young men going into the service at college age. Sometime soon after
Pearl Harbor, the air force established a training base between Alpine and
Marfa and this brought many young people to the area. While the men
basically had to live on base, many young wives came to either Alpine or
Marfa regardless of the lack of places to live. Hazel and Claude rented
their downstairs bedrooms to these wives. They had rented one room to a
local elderly bachelor for a period before that but during part of the war,
there were three young women living with the Coleman clan. They were given
limited kitchen privileges but basically spent their Alpine time in a small
bedroom. This was probably after Bob had graduated from high school in 1943
and went off to Texas Tech for year and then to the University of Kansas in a
Navy flight engineering program.

With the war on, Hazel went to work on a part-time basis as there was a
desperate need for teachers in Alpine. She was a substitute teacher and then
a temporary teacher covering a number of subjects in the ‘Mexican' schools
for several years.

During this time there were no summer trips to Illinois as there was no
gasoline available for civilian travel and there were no tires, either. Many
other things were rationed but they did not necessarily affect travel. They
did affect eating and Hazel joined the rest of the wives of the era learning
to feed a family on limited sugar, meat, butter, and so forth.

The ten Alpine years were good ones for all the family though Hazel and
Claude were eager to get back to ‘civilization' in Illinois when the war
finally ended. Claude got a job at Southern Illinois State Teachers College
in Carbondale, Illinois, in 1946 and once again the family took a long motor
trip. At least this time there were only six in the car as Bob was still in
the Navy and in college at the University of Kansas in Lawrence where the
family stopped for a brief visit on the way from Texas to Illinois.

Once in Carbondale, the Colemans lived with the Jesse Harrises until Claude
and Hazel found a small house about six blocks from the college and with help
from the Votaws managed to buy it and furnish it, too, and the Colemans moved
in.   As Dorothy enrolled at Southern, Phil, Rich and John all enrolled in
Carbondale public schools and the Carbondale years got off to a good start.

Claude settled into the English Department and Hazel was soon involved in
many faculty wives organizations along with watching over the four children
still at home.

On January 2, 1949, Dorothy got married and left home though she and Jerrell,
her husband, moved back to Claude and Hazel's from late 1949 until March 1950
and Hazel helped Jerrell with the math required for a radio engineer's
license. During this period, Claude and Hazel bought a larger house and just
before Dorothy and Jerrell left home again, they moved a few blocks away to
Oakland Street.

Marriages for the boys came relatively soon thereafter. Bob married Kathryn
in January 1951, and in 1954, Philip, then John, and finally Richard were all
married and for the first time since 1926 Claude and Hazel had an empty nest,
but the nest didn't stay very empty as there were frequent visits from one or
the other or all of the children.

It was also in 1954, just before the weddings, that Claude had to have rather
sudden gall bladder surgery. While he was in the hospital, Hazel, with help
from Richard, managed to move them to a small house in the country between
Carbondale and Murphysboro that they'd just purchased. This ‘farm' is the
home many of the grandchildren remember as it is where they visited their
Coleman grandparents, learned to fish in the Carter's pond, ‘helped' Claude
and/or Hazel in the garden, first met their aunts and uncles and cousins. It
was also at the farm that Hazel had her first angina problems; once
diagnosed, she quickly learned how to deal with them. Claude and Hazel lived
in the country until 1963.

In the meantime, shortly after all the children were married, Hazel started
teaching in the Math Department at Southern where she remained until 1963.
In 1960 Claude, at the behest of Southern, began "Plan A" which he organized
and then ran for five years. Following Plan A, Claude chaired a university
commission and continued teaching until retirement in September 1967. But
those were busy personal years for both as they were involved in taking care
of one child or grandchild or another much of the time, and there were
several cross country trips to remember.

Another big event in Claude and Hazel's lives was Phil's qualifying for the
Olympics in 1956. They managed to scrape up the money so Claude could make
the trip to see his son participate and Hazel had Wyona and baby Philip with
her on the ‘farm.'

They sold the farm in 1963 and moved back into Carbondale to the house on
Glenview; the largest house and certainly the most modern they ever had and
they lived there until 1969. These were relatively quiet years with visits
to and from children and work occupying most attention.

In 1970 Claude and Hazel moved full-time to Treasure Island, Florida. They had spent
two winters in downtown St. Petersburg but tired of the back and forth trips.
They'd also finally gotten a diagnosis on Claude's myasthenia gravis and
traveling was becoming more and more difficult. They rented a two-bedroom
apartment on Gulf Boulevard and moved into real retirement.

Several friends from Southern spent varying lengths of time in the Florida
area and the group enjoyed visits together, bridge and lunches. Claude and
Hazel also joined the Unitarian Church in St. Pete and participated in its
activities. Otherwise they did what retirees in Florida do--walked the
beaches, collected shells, sat around the swimming pool with other residents,
worked crossword puzzles, read, wrote, and entertained all the children and
grandchildren who came to visit. Dorothy and her husband also moved to the
area in 1972 and they spent time with Claude and Hazel, enjoying the bridge
games and eating out together. A real sign of Claude's physical condition
was his realization that he could not actually do the gardening and lawn work
at Dorothy and Jerrell's that he wanted to do.

During the Christmas holidays of 1974, a 50th anniversary party was arranged
with all of Claude and Hazel's children coming to Florida along with most of
their children. It was early for the anniversary but was a good time to
celebrate as so many had planned Florida vacations then. For the actual
anniversary, June 1974, Claude and Hazel went to Illinois and visited with
Eleanor and Bob, who stood up with them, and then attended Claire's
wedding, the first of a grandchild.

In 1978 Claude spent several weeks in the hospital with a severe myasthenia
attack, one of two such stays but this was by far more serious. During these
Florida years, he was also hospitalized for a hernia and for cataract
surgery. In 1981 Hazel had her taste of the hospital also as she fell and
broke a hip which meant a week or so of hospitalization. Aside from these
episodes, the time went relatively quietly.

Claude and Hazel had to move in 1980. For some reason their landlord decided
they were ‘using too much water and having too much company' and would not
renew their lease. They moved into a condominium, Key Capri, right at John's
Pass that had been home for Dorothy and Jerrell for a couple of years but was
in ‘80 owned by John for a vacation home. So Claude and Hazel moved to what
would prove to be their final home.

It was 1986 before the whole family was together again. Phil and Wyona
arranged a reunion at Virginia Beach and Claude and Hazel flew there to join
all their children and grandchildren for a week's family gathering.

In January 1989, Hazel had another fall and broke her ‘other' hip. When she
was able to return home, Claude was feeling very bad and in a few days had to
go to the hospital also. This was to be his last hospitalization as he died
at Palms of Pasadena on March 28, 1989.

Hazel continued living at Key Capri until 1995. She kept up her
correspondence with her children and grandchildren and enjoyed their visits.
She had given up driving but managed to get around with taxis as she
maintained her independence. Some time before 1989, Hazel's brother, Stewart
and his wife had moved to St. Petersburg and they made frequent visits to
Hazel.

The only ‘big' activities after Claude's death were family reunions at the
Bilmar in Treasure Island in June 1990 and again in July 1993. Hazel stayed
at the Bilmar for the events and actually paid for almost everyone's rooms
there; she thoroughly enjoyed seeing all her family, being with them as much
as possible and meeting and caring for grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Unfortunately, she was not able to attend the 1996 reunion though several
family members visited her.

In late December 1995 Dorothy took Hazel to the doctor and he insisted she go
right into the hospital to get electrolytes balanced. After a couple of
weeks in the hospital, Hazel was taken to a nursing home which was to be her
home for the next ten months as she died there on October 17, 1996.

So ends the biography of Claude and Hazel Coleman. While they were never
demonstrative people, with each other or with their children, they showed
their love in many ways.

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