Memorial
WINIFRED ELISABETH (ALF) ANDREW
1901 Winifred was born December 12, 1901, in Canton, China. She was the second of six children of Rev. Alfred Alf and Elizabeth (Rosene) Alf, American missionaries.
1901-1908 As an infant, and during preschool, she was cared for by Chinese nurses called amas because her mother was busy bearing all six children in the years between 1900 and 1908. Persons who knew Winifred later in life often commented that this very early exposure to oriental culture might have been what gave her the ability to accept adversity with no complaint and to continue selflessly.
1906-1911 Grade school was by home schooling methods. Her mother and other British and German missionary mothers formed a home school for children in the foreign compound of Canton. Rote memory was emphasized, especially the Bible and Classics. If one repeated the first three or four words of any verse in the Bible, Winifred could probably complete it and give the chapter and verse.
1912-1915 At age eleven Winifred boarded a Chinese junk from Canton to Hong Kong and then a coastal steamer to Shanghai in order to attend junior high at Shanghai American Boarding School. This two thousand mile round trip journey meant she saw her parents once per year.
The Alf children at Shanghai American looked out for each other during these long separations. Winifred's friends included the Luce children. Henry Luce later founded Time-Life. Education and the associated boarding school life were in the prep school tradition with college entrance and proper manners being emphasized.
At age twelve, when returning to school, Winifred became sick on the coastal steamer, but it was dismissed as sea sickness. Her appendix ruptured, and she collapsed on the steps of the school in Shanghai. She was taken to a British hospital very near death.
During her operation she said she saw a bright light and what she believed were angels. As she began to leave with them, they suddenly said she must wait.
Simultaneously, a thousand miles away, without telephone, telegraph or radio contact, all of which were almost nonexistent in 1913 China, Rev. Alf had a vision of Winifred's impending death. After twenty-four hours of prayer, a second vision formed. In this vision Rev. Alf was taken before the Almighty to plead her case. Three judges, which he interpreted to be the Trinity, listened to his plea for her life, and she was allowed to live. He shared these visions with Winifred's mother and other missionaries.
When the letter came several days later saying Winifred had almost died, the day and hour coincided exactly with the time of her father's second vision. Thus, the actual letter surprised no one, and Winifred's mother was ready to leave on the next boat to help Winifred through two months of convalescence in Shanghai .
1916-1920 The Christian missionary community in China was torn apart by World War I. Germans and British returned home. Friends became enemies.
Rev. Alf moved his family of teenagers back to the U. S. to a primitive wheat farm in North Dakota. Wartime prices were high, and farming seemed to offer the best chance to send his six children to high school and to college. Winifred became a North Dakota farm girl, cooking for the harvest hands, doing farm chores and sewing. No electricity, no running water, a hot kitchen, and lots of work were her comments about the farm.
In 1920 she graduated from Mayville, N. D., High School, valedictorian. That same year wheat prices plunged, and her father went bankrupt. He returned to the ministry, destitute, and was assigned to a series of tiny Congregational churches in western Nebraska and later to a tiny church in Lyons, Colorado .
1920-1922 Winifred entered Hastings College, Nebraska, to major in Greek and Latin. There was no help from home, so she worked as a maid in a professor's home to pay expenses.
1923-1925 Two years of college qualified her to teach high school. She quit college and taught English, Latin, botany and music at Petersburg, Nebraska high school for two years. She sent money to her brothers to allow them to enter Doane College, a Congregational college in Crete, Nebraska.
1926 Brother Ray dropped out of Doane to work for a year on a railroad track gang allowing Winifred to attend Doane and complete her junior year.
1927 Winifred dropped out of Doane and taught school for a year allowing Ray to return to college.
1928 Winifred went back to Doane, attending college with brothers Ray and Bill and sister Lillian.
This was a great year for the Alf children at Doane. Brother Bill was football captain of a winning team. Brother Ray won the NAIA national college championship in the 100 and 220 yd. dashes.
Winifred was Doane College Queen. Lillian was runner up. Winifred graduated valedictorian, Magna Cum Laude, majoring in Latin with minors in French, Greek and botany.
1928-1930 After graduation Winifred taught high school at Rock River, Wyoming, a small whistle stop on the Union Pacific where Winifred said the largest and most important building was the railroad snow shed. She always reminded one not to confuse tiny Rock River with the more well known Rock Springs.
The Colorado Rockies were near enough so Winifred's hobby could now become mountain climbing. She made many climbs. Her favorite was 14,000 ft. Longs Peak which she climbed two or three times per year for five years.
1930 Winifred had exhibited artistic talent from preschool days in China, but practical things always came first. Now, however, with college behind, and all Alf children graduated, Winifred entered the Denver Art Academy to become a fashion illustrator.
While going to school and working part time in a downtown Denver restaurant, Winifred met Jack Andrew, a depression drop-out of Denver University. He was working as a part time cook and she as a waitress.
Jack was also an amateur artist, and this mutual interest in art led to their marriage in 1930. She was 29, he was 20.
1931 John Eric was born. Winifred and Eric lived with Rev. & Mrs. Alf who at age 70 was pastor of the Lyons, Colorado, Congregational Church.
1932 Jack borrowed money to take flight training at Cheyenne, Wyoming, but after soloing his money ran out. He was forced to quit, totally broke, with a $500.00 debt that would haunt Winifred and Jack for the next ten years of Depression.
1932 Winifred and Jack moved to Denver. Work was scarce to nonexistent.
Jack returned to Montana in December riding in freezing boxcars on northbound freight trains. No steady work was available, but Winifred and Eric followed two weeks later by passenger coach because food was available from Grandmother Andrew's farm supplemented by hunting and fishing. Winifred and Jack rented a small home in Belfry, Montana, a town of 200, where Jack had graduated from high school.
1934 Billie Jo was born at the small home in Belfry.
Winifred, not allowed to teach because of a state-wide ban on married female teachers, found a job as railroad depot agent at Bearcreek, Montana, a mining town of about 200. Her salary was twelve dollars per month plus free living quarters in a lean to scabbed on the north side of the depot. Jack found part time work as a railroad track laborer, and the family moved to Bearcreek to live in Winifred's railroad depot.
Winifred sold tickets, handled freight orders, and dispatched messages at this "end of line" station on the Montana Wyoming and Southern Railroad, which was itself an "end of line" railroad serving seven coal mines, four of which had been recently abandoned as the Depression worsened.
1936 Two years later Jack found a better job as a "roustabout", or laborer, in the Montana oil fields. Winifred and children followed to Oilmont, Montana, a dusty, windy and desolate Depression era boom town. Forty below was common in the winter, and over a hundred degrees could be recorded in July and August.
Oilmont, also with a population of about 200, consisted mostly of black tar paper shacks, had no paved roads or sidewalks, no running water and no water wells. All water was trucked from springs twelve miles away, sold by the gallon, and stored in tanks or small underground cisterns to protect from freezing. No tree or lawn could survive the freezing cold of winter combined with the hot droughts of summer.
Winifred accepted the difficult conditions with no complaint. She said it was not much worse than the North Dakota farm of her high school days.
1937 Winifred and Jack bought their first car, a well used '31 Chevrolet coupe, giving them their first freedom of movement in seven years of marriage.
1938 Jack was hired as a "pumper" to tend a small independent oil lease six miles from Oilmont. This was his first steady full-time job since their marriage eight years before. The lease had a large home, and now Winifred and Jack found the time and space to begin their art work again. A hardware store fire in Sunburst, Montana, allowed them to buy damaged tubes of paint for pennies. Wooden apple-box ends were their canvases.
Winifred and Jack were appointed be joint chairmen of the fine arts exhibit at the Toole County Fair in Shelby, Montana. They also displayed their own art. Winifred's collection of ten excellent female nudes, done when she was an art student in Denver, was well received by many fair goers causing the art exhibits to out draw the farm exhibits.
After two days of blue ribbons and limelight, Winifred graciously removed her winning exhibit so the remainder of the week-long fair could continue in a normal manner.
1939 Winifred and Jack bought their first brand new car, a '39 Plymouth, paid for partly by a contract to use it as a school bus taking John Eric, Billie Jo and two others to a regular school bus stop three miles away. This better car allowed occasional drives to Glacier National Park, about seventy miles west. Winifred, in particular, longed to climb the mountains,
but settled for short driving trips because long weekends and vacations
were rare.
1941 A better pumper's job became available in oil fields near Cut Bank, Montana, and the family moved into that town. At a population of two thousand, Cut Bank seemed like a metropolis. Winifred now had a home with running water and indoor plumbing for the first time since moving from Denver eight years before. Sidewalks and lawns graced the streets, but Cut Bank was known in local circles as the "windy city" because winds roared off the east slope of the continental divide blowing steadily for days at thirty to fifty miles per hour with gusts to a hundred recorded.
Winifred and Jack began teaching art. Classes were held in their home.
1942 Wartime labor shortages lifted the state-wide ban on married female teachers. Winifred was offered a job at Columbia Falls, Montana, a logging town of 600 on the Flathead River. The school district included Glacier National Park. Jack immediately found work as a brakeman on the Great Northern railroad at Whitefish, Montana, only eight miles away.
Winifred and Jack loved the mountains of Glacier Park, and, after moving to Columbia Falls, planned never to move again. Jack could hunt and fish, and Winifred considered hiking and climbing, but most of all they could both paint pictures surrounded by mountains, trees, rivers and lakes.
1944 Winifred, who was originally hired to teach Latin and English, was asked to establish a Home Economics Department. She designed a two year course for juniors and seniors to assist young women in the transition from primitive farm, mill, and ranch homes to modern electrified homes. The Winifred designed course stressed personal hygiene and health as well as the etiquette and behavior expected in the larger world. She encouraged women to attend college.
Her prep school education in China, farm girl experience, college sorority, plus ten years of Depression tested homemaking gave Winifred unique insights into the problems that might be faced by young Montana women entering the modern world. Women of that era still remark how Winifred touched their lives.
1946 Believing they would never leave their beautiful mountains, Winifred and Jack designed and built a modern three bedroom rambler. It had an integral art studio facing the mountains. It also had a modern layout for kitchen and family room with picture windows and efficient appliances and cupboards. The home represented an achievable showpiece for students in her classes because Winifred and Jack had built the entire home with their own hands. No carpenter, plumber, electrician, painter, roofer or other craftsman, except they themselves, worked on that showpiece home.
1950 Jack was appointed union representative to the Whitefish Division's Safety Committee.
During a safety contest between all Great Northern railroad divisions, Jack, with help from Winifred, designed a series posters in cartoon format depicting safe and unsafe work practices. The Whitefish Division improved so much that the posters were distributed railroad-wide and were also published in a union and management safety journal.
As a result, Jack was asked to enter railroad management as Safety Supervisor for the western half of the railroad. With no complaint, Winifred left a rewarding career, her dream home, and her mountains to move to Spokane, Washington, beginning a new career as the wife of a railroad manager.
1954 John Eric graduated from Gonzaga University with a degree in engineering and was accepted for graduate study at Harvard.
1955 Jack received a promotion to become Director of Safety for the entire Great Northern Railway reporting to a vice president in St. Paul, Minnesota. Winifred and Jack moved from Spokane to St. Paul.
1956 Billie Jo graduated from Eastern Washington University with a degree
in Art.
1959 John Eric received a Masters degree in Business from Harvard.
1956-1967 During Jack's tenure as Director of Safety the Great Northern won several national awards for the best record in safety. Winifred and Jack were received by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy in the White House.
Jack was assigned his own private railroad car complete with living quarters and a cook. Winifred sometimes accompanied Jack to the West Coast in the private car. As they traveled through northern Montana, they reflected on the hard times they had seen, particularly their first trip from Denver when Winifred and Eric had traveled coach and Jack had ridden in freezing boxcars on whatever freight trains he could catch going north.
1960-1968 Winifred began art classes in an after hours course sponsored by the University of Minnesota Fine Arts Department. She developed a style of realistic modernism. Jack also accelerated his painting activity. Both became active in St. Paul art circles, and their joint production of oil paintings averaged about 100 per year.
1968 Jack had a heart attack which forced his retirement.
1969-1977 Winifred and Jack moved to Fairwood near Renton, Washington. Both became active in local art groups. Together they painted nearly 1,000 paintings finding a ready market for all except those they kept for their personal collection.
Winifred and Jack found time to know their grandchildren all of whom lived in the Renton area.
1977 Jack died of a heart attack.
1979 Winifred moved to the Wesley Terrace retirement home in Des Moines, Washington. She participated in many activities, and painted many miniature oil paintings. To stay in shape during her seventies and early eighties she ran the stairs to her sixth floor apartment a minimum of ten times per day and rode a stationary bicycle five miles.
1983 Winifred and her sister Mildred traveled back to China including Canton where they were born eighty years before. Winifred was not impressed with modern China, because in her opinion things seemed almost as bad as when she left before World War I.
1986 Winifred was accidentally knocked down by a store employee while shopping at The Bon. Her left hip and left elbow were both badly broken. Although she recovered partially, she could no longer run the stairs nor ride the stationary bicycle. She began to lose interest in oil painting, but her art activity increased in another way.
1985-1991 Winifred "recycled" an average of 5,000 greeting cards per year to benefit the nursing wing of Wesley. Each year she devoted over 2,000 hours of labor to this activity. Cards were sold once per week to other residents of Wesley Terrace at an average price of 23 cents.
Winifred applied an artist's touch to the reworking of each card. Her standard for a recycled card was that it must look brand new, and, if possible, it should look even better. She developed techniques for cutting out or covering signatures and combining two or more cards into one "new" one.
By now her arthritis was advancing, and she considered the hours of labor spent over a cutting table to be the most daunting challenge of her life.
1992 Winifred's arthritis forced her to move to the Assisted Living wing of Wesley Terrace. She could no longer do art work or cards, but spent much of her time reviewing poems, classics, bible verses and hymns, most of which she had memorized in her youth.
1994 Winifred could no longer walk forcing a move to Wesley Homes Health Center. Though totally bedridden, Winifred never lost her ability to spell, and in her last year of life played at least one game of scrabble per day.
1996 In her final month her interest narrowed to three things which she clutched in her arthritic hands night and day. One was a small package containing a tiny silver cup for her youngest great grandchild's first birthday. Second was a small pocket album containing pictures of all her great grandchildren. Third was a packet which opened to display, in all the colors of the rainbow, twelve art pencils.
Winifred died on 25 May , 1996.
Winifred is survived by her son, John Eric; her daughter, Billie Jo; four grandsons, Jack, Jim, Greg and Eric; two granddaughters, Kathi and Janis; three great grandsons, John, Jake and Cameron; two great grandaughters, Rachel and Mika-Lyn; one brother, Ray; and one sister, Mildred.
Winifred was preceded in death by her husband, Jack; her granddaughter, Lynn; two brothers, Al and Bill; and one sister, Lillian.
A service of worship in memory of
Winifred Elisabeth (Alf) Andrew
is being held at 3:00 p.m. on Monday, May 27, 1996 at:
Fairwood Community United Methodist Church
15255 SE Fairwood Blvd
Renton, WA 98058
(206) 228-4577
Rev. Flora J. Bowers officiating
Remembrances may be made to your favorite charity or church.
WINIFRED ELISABETH (ALF) ANDREW
1901 Winifred was born December 12, 1901, in Canton, China. She was the second of six children of Rev. Alfred Alf and Elizabeth (Rosene) Alf, American missionaries.
1901-1908 As an infant, and during preschool, she was cared for by Chinese nurses called amas because her mother was busy bearing all six children in the years between 1900 and 1908. Persons who knew Winifred later in life often commented that this very early exposure to oriental culture might have been what gave her the ability to accept adversity with no complaint and to continue selflessly.
1906-1911 Grade school was by home schooling methods. Her mother and other British and German missionary mothers formed a home school for children in the foreign compound of Canton. Rote memory was emphasized, especially the Bible and Classics. If one repeated the first three or four words of any verse in the Bible, Winifred could probably complete it and give the chapter and verse.
1912-1915 At age eleven Winifred boarded a Chinese junk from Canton to Hong Kong and then a coastal steamer to Shanghai in order to attend junior high at Shanghai American Boarding School. This two thousand mile round trip journey meant she saw her parents once per year.
The Alf children at Shanghai American looked out for each other during these long separations. Winifred's friends included the Luce children. Henry Luce later founded Time-Life. Education and the associated boarding school life were in the prep school tradition with college entrance and proper manners being emphasized.
At age twelve, when returning to school, Winifred became sick on the coastal steamer, but it was dismissed as sea sickness. Her appendix ruptured, and she collapsed on the steps of the school in Shanghai. She was taken to a British hospital very near death.
During her operation she said she saw a bright light and what she believed were angels. As she began to leave with them, they suddenly said she must wait.
Simultaneously, a thousand miles away, without telephone, telegraph or radio contact, all of which were almost nonexistent in 1913 China, Rev. Alf had a vision of Winifred's impending death. After twenty-four hours of prayer, a second vision formed. In this vision Rev. Alf was taken before the Almighty to plead her case. Three judges, which he interpreted to be the Trinity, listened to his plea for her life, and she was allowed to live. He shared these visions with Winifred's mother and other missionaries.
When the letter came several days later saying Winifred had almost died, the day and hour coincided exactly with the time of her father's second vision. Thus, the actual letter surprised no one, and Winifred's mother was ready to leave on the next boat to help Winifred through two months of convalescence in Shanghai .
1916-1920 The Christian missionary community in China was torn apart by World War I. Germans and British returned home. Friends became enemies.
Rev. Alf moved his family of teenagers back to the U. S. to a primitive wheat farm in North Dakota. Wartime prices were high, and farming seemed to offer the best chance to send his six children to high school and to college. Winifred became a North Dakota farm girl, cooking for the harvest hands, doing farm chores and sewing. No electricity, no running water, a hot kitchen, and lots of work were her comments about the farm.
In 1920 she graduated from Mayville, N. D., High School, valedictorian. That same year wheat prices plunged, and her father went bankrupt. He returned to the ministry, destitute, and was assigned to a series of tiny Congregational churches in western Nebraska and later to a tiny church in Lyons, Colorado .
1920-1922 Winifred entered Hastings College, Nebraska, to major in Greek and Latin. There was no help from home, so she worked as a maid in a professor's home to pay expenses.
1923-1925 Two years of college qualified her to teach high school. She quit college and taught English, Latin, botany and music at Petersburg, Nebraska high school for two years. She sent money to her brothers to allow them to enter Doane College, a Congregational college in Crete, Nebraska.
1926 Brother Ray dropped out of Doane to work for a year on a railroad track gang allowing Winifred to attend Doane and complete her junior year.
1927 Winifred dropped out of Doane and taught school for a year allowing Ray to return to college.
1928 Winifred went back to Doane, attending college with brothers Ray and Bill and sister Lillian.
This was a great year for the Alf children at Doane. Brother Bill was football captain of a winning team. Brother Ray won the NAIA national college championship in the 100 and 220 yd. dashes.
Winifred was Doane College Queen. Lillian was runner up. Winifred graduated valedictorian, Magna Cum Laude, majoring in Latin with minors in French, Greek and botany.
1928-1930 After graduation Winifred taught high school at Rock River, Wyoming, a small whistle stop on the Union Pacific where Winifred said the largest and most important building was the railroad snow shed. She always reminded one not to confuse tiny Rock River with the more well known Rock Springs.
The Colorado Rockies were near enough so Winifred's hobby could now become mountain climbing. She made many climbs. Her favorite was 14,000 ft. Longs Peak which she climbed two or three times per year for five years.
1930 Winifred had exhibited artistic talent from preschool days in China, but practical things always came first. Now, however, with college behind, and all Alf children graduated, Winifred entered the Denver Art Academy to become a fashion illustrator.
While going to school and working part time in a downtown Denver restaurant, Winifred met Jack Andrew, a depression drop-out of Denver University. He was working as a part time cook and she as a waitress.
Jack was also an amateur artist, and this mutual interest in art led to their marriage in 1930. She was 29, he was 20.
1931 John Eric was born. Winifred and Eric lived with Rev. & Mrs. Alf who at age 70 was pastor of the Lyons, Colorado, Congregational Church.
1932 Jack borrowed money to take flight training at Cheyenne, Wyoming, but after soloing his money ran out. He was forced to quit, totally broke, with a $500.00 debt that would haunt Winifred and Jack for the next ten years of Depression.
1932 Winifred and Jack moved to Denver. Work was scarce to nonexistent.
Jack returned to Montana in December riding in freezing boxcars on northbound freight trains. No steady work was available, but Winifred and Eric followed two weeks later by passenger coach because food was available from Grandmother Andrew's farm supplemented by hunting and fishing. Winifred and Jack rented a small home in Belfry, Montana, a town of 200, where Jack had graduated from high school.
1934 Billie Jo was born at the small home in Belfry.
Winifred, not allowed to teach because of a state-wide ban on married female teachers, found a job as railroad depot agent at Bearcreek, Montana, a mining town of about 200. Her salary was twelve dollars per month plus free living quarters in a lean to scabbed on the north side of the depot. Jack found part time work as a railroad track laborer, and the family moved to Bearcreek to live in Winifred's railroad depot.
Winifred sold tickets, handled freight orders, and dispatched messages at this "end of line" station on the Montana Wyoming and Southern Railroad, which was itself an "end of line" railroad serving seven coal mines, four of which had been recently abandoned as the Depression worsened.
1936 Two years later Jack found a better job as a "roustabout", or laborer, in the Montana oil fields. Winifred and children followed to Oilmont, Montana, a dusty, windy and desolate Depression era boom town. Forty below was common in the winter, and over a hundred degrees could be recorded in July and August.
Oilmont, also with a population of about 200, consisted mostly of black tar paper shacks, had no paved roads or sidewalks, no running water and no water wells. All water was trucked from springs twelve miles away, sold by the gallon, and stored in tanks or small underground cisterns to protect from freezing. No tree or lawn could survive the freezing cold of winter combined with the hot droughts of summer.
Winifred accepted the difficult conditions with no complaint. She said it was not much worse than the North Dakota farm of her high school days.
1937 Winifred and Jack bought their first car, a well used '31 Chevrolet coupe, giving them their first freedom of movement in seven years of marriage.
1938 Jack was hired as a "pumper" to tend a small independent oil lease six miles from Oilmont. This was his first steady full-time job since their marriage eight years before. The lease had a large home, and now Winifred and Jack found the time and space to begin their art work again. A hardware store fire in Sunburst, Montana, allowed them to buy damaged tubes of paint for pennies. Wooden apple-box ends were their canvases.
Winifred and Jack were appointed be joint chairmen of the fine arts exhibit at the Toole County Fair in Shelby, Montana. They also displayed their own art. Winifred's collection of ten excellent female nudes, done when she was an art student in Denver, was well received by many fair goers causing the art exhibits to out draw the farm exhibits.
After two days of blue ribbons and limelight, Winifred graciously removed her winning exhibit so the remainder of the week-long fair could continue in a normal manner.
1939 Winifred and Jack bought their first brand new car, a '39 Plymouth, paid for partly by a contract to use it as a school bus taking John Eric, Billie Jo and two others to a regular school bus stop three miles away. This better car allowed occasional drives to Glacier National Park, about seventy miles west. Winifred, in particular, longed to climb the mountains,
but settled for short driving trips because long weekends and vacations
were rare.
1941 A better pumper's job became available in oil fields near Cut Bank, Montana, and the family moved into that town. At a population of two thousand, Cut Bank seemed like a metropolis. Winifred now had a home with running water and indoor plumbing for the first time since moving from Denver eight years before. Sidewalks and lawns graced the streets, but Cut Bank was known in local circles as the "windy city" because winds roared off the east slope of the continental divide blowing steadily for days at thirty to fifty miles per hour with gusts to a hundred recorded.
Winifred and Jack began teaching art. Classes were held in their home.
1942 Wartime labor shortages lifted the state-wide ban on married female teachers. Winifred was offered a job at Columbia Falls, Montana, a logging town of 600 on the Flathead River. The school district included Glacier National Park. Jack immediately found work as a brakeman on the Great Northern railroad at Whitefish, Montana, only eight miles away.
Winifred and Jack loved the mountains of Glacier Park, and, after moving to Columbia Falls, planned never to move again. Jack could hunt and fish, and Winifred considered hiking and climbing, but most of all they could both paint pictures surrounded by mountains, trees, rivers and lakes.
1944 Winifred, who was originally hired to teach Latin and English, was asked to establish a Home Economics Department. She designed a two year course for juniors and seniors to assist young women in the transition from primitive farm, mill, and ranch homes to modern electrified homes. The Winifred designed course stressed personal hygiene and health as well as the etiquette and behavior expected in the larger world. She encouraged women to attend college.
Her prep school education in China, farm girl experience, college sorority, plus ten years of Depression tested homemaking gave Winifred unique insights into the problems that might be faced by young Montana women entering the modern world. Women of that era still remark how Winifred touched their lives.
1946 Believing they would never leave their beautiful mountains, Winifred and Jack designed and built a modern three bedroom rambler. It had an integral art studio facing the mountains. It also had a modern layout for kitchen and family room with picture windows and efficient appliances and cupboards. The home represented an achievable showpiece for students in her classes because Winifred and Jack had built the entire home with their own hands. No carpenter, plumber, electrician, painter, roofer or other craftsman, except they themselves, worked on that showpiece home.
1950 Jack was appointed union representative to the Whitefish Division's Safety Committee.
During a safety contest between all Great Northern railroad divisions, Jack, with help from Winifred, designed a series posters in cartoon format depicting safe and unsafe work practices. The Whitefish Division improved so much that the posters were distributed railroad-wide and were also published in a union and management safety journal.
As a result, Jack was asked to enter railroad management as Safety Supervisor for the western half of the railroad. With no complaint, Winifred left a rewarding career, her dream home, and her mountains to move to Spokane, Washington, beginning a new career as the wife of a railroad manager.
1954 John Eric graduated from Gonzaga University with a degree in engineering and was accepted for graduate study at Harvard.
1955 Jack received a promotion to become Director of Safety for the entire Great Northern Railway reporting to a vice president in St. Paul, Minnesota. Winifred and Jack moved from Spokane to St. Paul.
1956 Billie Jo graduated from Eastern Washington University with a degree
in Art.
1959 John Eric received a Masters degree in Business from Harvard.
1956-1967 During Jack's tenure as Director of Safety the Great Northern won several national awards for the best record in safety. Winifred and Jack were received by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy in the White House.
Jack was assigned his own private railroad car complete with living quarters and a cook. Winifred sometimes accompanied Jack to the West Coast in the private car. As they traveled through northern Montana, they reflected on the hard times they had seen, particularly their first trip from Denver when Winifred and Eric had traveled coach and Jack had ridden in freezing boxcars on whatever freight trains he could catch going north.
1960-1968 Winifred began art classes in an after hours course sponsored by the University of Minnesota Fine Arts Department. She developed a style of realistic modernism. Jack also accelerated his painting activity. Both became active in St. Paul art circles, and their joint production of oil paintings averaged about 100 per year.
1968 Jack had a heart attack which forced his retirement.
1969-1977 Winifred and Jack moved to Fairwood near Renton, Washington. Both became active in local art groups. Together they painted nearly 1,000 paintings finding a ready market for all except those they kept for their personal collection.
Winifred and Jack found time to know their grandchildren all of whom lived in the Renton area.
1977 Jack died of a heart attack.
1979 Winifred moved to the Wesley Terrace retirement home in Des Moines, Washington. She participated in many activities, and painted many miniature oil paintings. To stay in shape during her seventies and early eighties she ran the stairs to her sixth floor apartment a minimum of ten times per day and rode a stationary bicycle five miles.
1983 Winifred and her sister Mildred traveled back to China including Canton where they were born eighty years before. Winifred was not impressed with modern China, because in her opinion things seemed almost as bad as when she left before World War I.
1986 Winifred was accidentally knocked down by a store employee while shopping at The Bon. Her left hip and left elbow were both badly broken. Although she recovered partially, she could no longer run the stairs nor ride the stationary bicycle. She began to lose interest in oil painting, but her art activity increased in another way.
1985-1991 Winifred "recycled" an average of 5,000 greeting cards per year to benefit the nursing wing of Wesley. Each year she devoted over 2,000 hours of labor to this activity. Cards were sold once per week to other residents of Wesley Terrace at an average price of 23 cents.
Winifred applied an artist's touch to the reworking of each card. Her standard for a recycled card was that it must look brand new, and, if possible, it should look even better. She developed techniques for cutting out or covering signatures and combining two or more cards into one "new" one.
By now her arthritis was advancing, and she considered the hours of labor spent over a cutting table to be the most daunting challenge of her life.
1992 Winifred's arthritis forced her to move to the Assisted Living wing of Wesley Terrace. She could no longer do art work or cards, but spent much of her time reviewing poems, classics, bible verses and hymns, most of which she had memorized in her youth.
1994 Winifred could no longer walk forcing a move to Wesley Homes Health Center. Though totally bedridden, Winifred never lost her ability to spell, and in her last year of life played at least one game of scrabble per day.
1996 In her final month her interest narrowed to three things which she clutched in her arthritic hands night and day. One was a small package containing a tiny silver cup for her youngest great grandchild's first birthday. Second was a small pocket album containing pictures of all her great grandchildren. Third was a packet which opened to display, in all the colors of the rainbow, twelve art pencils.
Winifred died on 25 May , 1996.
Winifred is survived by her son, John Eric; her daughter, Billie Jo; four grandsons, Jack, Jim, Greg and Eric; two granddaughters, Kathi and Janis; three great grandsons, John, Jake and Cameron; two great grandaughters, Rachel and Mika-Lyn; one brother, Ray; and one sister, Mildred.
Winifred was preceded in death by her husband, Jack; her granddaughter, Lynn; two brothers, Al and Bill; and one sister, Lillian.
A service of worship in memory of
Winifred Elisabeth (Alf) Andrew
is being held at 3:00 p.m. on Monday, May 27, 1996 at:
Fairwood Community United Methodist Church
15255 SE Fairwood Blvd
Renton, WA 98058
(206) 228-4577
Rev. Flora J. Bowers officiating
Remembrances may be made to your favorite charity or church.
Memorial
WINIFRED ELISABETH (ALF) ANDREW
1901 Winifred was born December 12, 1901, in Canton, China. She was the second of six children of Rev. Alfred Alf and Elizabeth (Rosene) Alf, American missionaries.
1901-1908 As an infant, and during preschool, she was cared for by Chinese nurses called amas because her mother was busy bearing all six children in the years between 1900 and 1908. Persons who knew Winifred later in life often commented that this very early exposure to oriental culture might have been what gave her the ability to accept adversity with no complaint and to continue selflessly.
1906-1911 Grade school was by home schooling methods. Her mother and other British and German missionary mothers formed a home school for children in the foreign compound of Canton. Rote memory was emphasized, especially the Bible and Classics. If one repeated the first three or four words of any verse in the Bible, Winifred could probably complete it and give the chapter and verse.
1912-1915 At age eleven Winifred boarded a Chinese junk from Canton to Hong Kong and then a coastal steamer to Shanghai in order to attend junior high at Shanghai American Boarding School. This two thousand mile round trip journey meant she saw her parents once per year.
The Alf children at Shanghai American looked out for each other during these long separations. Winifred's friends included the Luce children. Henry Luce later founded Time-Life. Education and the associated boarding school life were in the prep school tradition with college entrance and proper manners being emphasized.
At age twelve, when returning to school, Winifred became sick on the coastal steamer, but it was dismissed as sea sickness. Her appendix ruptured, and she collapsed on the steps of the school in Shanghai. She was taken to a British hospital very near death.
During her operation she said she saw a bright light and what she believed were angels. As she began to leave with them, they suddenly said she must wait.
Simultaneously, a thousand miles away, without telephone, telegraph or radio contact, all of which were almost nonexistent in 1913 China, Rev. Alf had a vision of Winifred's impending death. After twenty-four hours of prayer, a second vision formed. In this vision Rev. Alf was taken before the Almighty to plead her case. Three judges, which he interpreted to be the Trinity, listened to his plea for her life, and she was allowed to live. He shared these visions with Winifred's mother and other missionaries.
When the letter came several days later saying Winifred had almost died, the day and hour coincided exactly with the time of her father's second vision. Thus, the actual letter surprised no one, and Winifred's mother was ready to leave on the next boat to help Winifred through two months of convalescence in Shanghai .
1916-1920 The Christian missionary community in China was torn apart by World War I. Germans and British returned home. Friends became enemies.
Rev. Alf moved his family of teenagers back to the U. S. to a primitive wheat farm in North Dakota. Wartime prices were high, and farming seemed to offer the best chance to send his six children to high school and to college. Winifred became a North Dakota farm girl, cooking for the harvest hands, doing farm chores and sewing. No electricity, no running water, a hot kitchen, and lots of work were her comments about the farm.
In 1920 she graduated from Mayville, N. D., High School, valedictorian. That same year wheat prices plunged, and her father went bankrupt. He returned to the ministry, destitute, and was assigned to a series of tiny Congregational churches in western Nebraska and later to a tiny church in Lyons, Colorado .
1920-1922 Winifred entered Hastings College, Nebraska, to major in Greek and Latin. There was no help from home, so she worked as a maid in a professor's home to pay expenses.
1923-1925 Two years of college qualified her to teach high school. She quit college and taught English, Latin, botany and music at Petersburg, Nebraska high school for two years. She sent money to her brothers to allow them to enter Doane College, a Congregational college in Crete, Nebraska.
1926 Brother Ray dropped out of Doane to work for a year on a railroad track gang allowing Winifred to attend Doane and complete her junior year.
1927 Winifred dropped out of Doane and taught school for a year allowing Ray to return to college.
1928 Winifred went back to Doane, attending college with brothers Ray and Bill and sister Lillian.
This was a great year for the Alf children at Doane. Brother Bill was football captain of a winning team. Brother Ray won the NAIA national college championship in the 100 and 220 yd. dashes.
Winifred was Doane College Queen. Lillian was runner up. Winifred graduated valedictorian, Magna Cum Laude, majoring in Latin with minors in French, Greek and botany.
1928-1930 After graduation Winifred taught high school at Rock River, Wyoming, a small whistle stop on the Union Pacific where Winifred said the largest and most important building was the railroad snow shed. She always reminded one not to confuse tiny Rock River with the more well known Rock Springs.
The Colorado Rockies were near enough so Winifred's hobby could now become mountain climbing. She made many climbs. Her favorite was 14,000 ft. Longs Peak which she climbed two or three times per year for five years.
1930 Winifred had exhibited artistic talent from preschool days in China, but practical things always came first. Now, however, with college behind, and all Alf children graduated, Winifred entered the Denver Art Academy to become a fashion illustrator.
While going to school and working part time in a downtown Denver restaurant, Winifred met Jack Andrew, a depression drop-out of Denver University. He was working as a part time cook and she as a waitress.
Jack was also an amateur artist, and this mutual interest in art led to their marriage in 1930. She was 29, he was 20.
1931 John Eric was born. Winifred and Eric lived with Rev. & Mrs. Alf who at age 70 was pastor of the Lyons, Colorado, Congregational Church.
1932 Jack borrowed money to take flight training at Cheyenne, Wyoming, but after soloing his money ran out. He was forced to quit, totally broke, with a $500.00 debt that would haunt Winifred and Jack for the next ten years of Depression.
1932 Winifred and Jack moved to Denver. Work was scarce to nonexistent.
Jack returned to Montana in December riding in freezing boxcars on northbound freight trains. No steady work was available, but Winifred and Eric followed two weeks later by passenger coach because food was available from Grandmother Andrew's farm supplemented by hunting and fishing. Winifred and Jack rented a small home in Belfry, Montana, a town of 200, where Jack had graduated from high school.
1934 Billie Jo was born at the small home in Belfry.
Winifred, not allowed to teach because of a state-wide ban on married female teachers, found a job as railroad depot agent at Bearcreek, Montana, a mining town of about 200. Her salary was twelve dollars per month plus free living quarters in a lean to scabbed on the north side of the depot. Jack found part time work as a railroad track laborer, and the family moved to Bearcreek to live in Winifred's railroad depot.
Winifred sold tickets, handled freight orders, and dispatched messages at this "end of line" station on the Montana Wyoming and Southern Railroad, which was itself an "end of line" railroad serving seven coal mines, four of which had been recently abandoned as the Depression worsened.
1936 Two years later Jack found a better job as a "roustabout", or laborer, in the Montana oil fields. Winifred and children followed to Oilmont, Montana, a dusty, windy and desolate Depression era boom town. Forty below was common in the winter, and over a hundred degrees could be recorded in July and August.
Oilmont, also with a population of about 200, consisted mostly of black tar paper shacks, had no paved roads or sidewalks, no running water and no water wells. All water was trucked from springs twelve miles away, sold by the gallon, and stored in tanks or small underground cisterns to protect from freezing. No tree or lawn could survive the freezing cold of winter combined with the hot droughts of summer.
Winifred accepted the difficult conditions with no complaint. She said it was not much worse than the North Dakota farm of her high school days.
1937 Winifred and Jack bought their first car, a well used '31 Chevrolet coupe, giving them their first freedom of movement in seven years of marriage.
1938 Jack was hired as a "pumper" to tend a small independent oil lease six miles from Oilmont. This was his first steady full-time job since their marriage eight years before. The lease had a large home, and now Winifred and Jack found the time and space to begin their art work again. A hardware store fire in Sunburst, Montana, allowed them to buy damaged tubes of paint for pennies. Wooden apple-box ends were their canvases.
Winifred and Jack were appointed be joint chairmen of the fine arts exhibit at the Toole County Fair in Shelby, Montana. They also displayed their own art. Winifred's collection of ten excellent female nudes, done when she was an art student in Denver, was well received by many fair goers causing the art exhibits to out draw the farm exhibits.
After two days of blue ribbons and limelight, Winifred graciously removed her winning exhibit so the remainder of the week-long fair could continue in a normal manner.
1939 Winifred and Jack bought their first brand new car, a '39 Plymouth, paid for partly by a contract to use it as a school bus taking John Eric, Billie Jo and two others to a regular school bus stop three miles away. This better car allowed occasional drives to Glacier National Park, about seventy miles west. Winifred, in particular, longed to climb the mountains,
but settled for short driving trips because long weekends and vacations
were rare.
1941 A better pumper's job became available in oil fields near Cut Bank, Montana, and the family moved into that town. At a population of two thousand, Cut Bank seemed like a metropolis. Winifred now had a home with running water and indoor plumbing for the first time since moving from Denver eight years before. Sidewalks and lawns graced the streets, but Cut Bank was known in local circles as the "windy city" because winds roared off the east slope of the continental divide blowing steadily for days at thirty to fifty miles per hour with gusts to a hundred recorded.
Winifred and Jack began teaching art. Classes were held in their home.
1942 Wartime labor shortages lifted the state-wide ban on married female teachers. Winifred was offered a job at Columbia Falls, Montana, a logging town of 600 on the Flathead River. The school district included Glacier National Park. Jack immediately found work as a brakeman on the Great Northern railroad at Whitefish, Montana, only eight miles away.
Winifred and Jack loved the mountains of Glacier Park, and, after moving to Columbia Falls, planned never to move again. Jack could hunt and fish, and Winifred considered hiking and climbing, but most of all they could both paint pictures surrounded by mountains, trees, rivers and lakes.
1944 Winifred, who was originally hired to teach Latin and English, was asked to establish a Home Economics Department. She designed a two year course for juniors and seniors to assist young women in the transition from primitive farm, mill, and ranch homes to modern electrified homes. The Winifred designed course stressed personal hygiene and health as well as the etiquette and behavior expected in the larger world. She encouraged women to attend college.
Her prep school education in China, farm girl experience, college sorority, plus ten years of Depression tested homemaking gave Winifred unique insights into the problems that might be faced by young Montana women entering the modern world. Women of that era still remark how Winifred touched their lives.
1946 Believing they would never leave their beautiful mountains, Winifred and Jack designed and built a modern three bedroom rambler. It had an integral art studio facing the mountains. It also had a modern layout for kitchen and family room with picture windows and efficient appliances and cupboards. The home represented an achievable showpiece for students in her classes because Winifred and Jack had built the entire home with their own hands. No carpenter, plumber, electrician, painter, roofer or other craftsman, except they themselves, worked on that showpiece home.
1950 Jack was appointed union representative to the Whitefish Division's Safety Committee.
During a safety contest between all Great Northern railroad divisions, Jack, with help from Winifred, designed a series posters in cartoon format depicting safe and unsafe work practices. The Whitefish Division improved so much that the posters were distributed railroad-wide and were also published in a union and management safety journal.
As a result, Jack was asked to enter railroad management as Safety Supervisor for the western half of the railroad. With no complaint, Winifred left a rewarding career, her dream home, and her mountains to move to Spokane, Washington, beginning a new career as the wife of a railroad manager.
1954 John Eric graduated from Gonzaga University with a degree in engineering and was accepted for graduate study at Harvard.
1955 Jack received a promotion to become Director of Safety for the entire Great Northern Railway reporting to a vice president in St. Paul, Minnesota. Winifred and Jack moved from Spokane to St. Paul.
1956 Billie Jo graduated from Eastern Washington University with a degree
in Art.
1959 John Eric received a Masters degree in Business from Harvard.
1956-1967 During Jack's tenure as Director of Safety the Great Northern won several national awards for the best record in safety. Winifred and Jack were received by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy in the White House.
Jack was assigned his own private railroad car complete with living quarters and a cook. Winifred sometimes accompanied Jack to the West Coast in the private car. As they traveled through northern Montana, they reflected on the hard times they had seen, particularly their first trip from Denver when Winifred and Eric had traveled coach and Jack had ridden in freezing boxcars on whatever freight trains he could catch going north.
1960-1968 Winifred began art classes in an after hours course sponsored by the University of Minnesota Fine Arts Department. She developed a style of realistic modernism. Jack also accelerated his painting activity. Both became active in St. Paul art circles, and their joint production of oil paintings averaged about 100 per year.
1968 Jack had a heart attack which forced his retirement.
1969-1977 Winifred and Jack moved to Fairwood near Renton, Washington. Both became active in local art groups. Together they painted nearly 1,000 paintings finding a ready market for all except those they kept for their personal collection.
Winifred and Jack found time to know their grandchildren all of whom lived in the Renton area.
1977 Jack died of a heart attack.
1979 Winifred moved to the Wesley Terrace retirement home in Des Moines, Washington. She participated in many activities, and painted many miniature oil paintings. To stay in shape during her seventies and early eighties she ran the stairs to her sixth floor apartment a minimum of ten times per day and rode a stationary bicycle five miles.
1983 Winifred and her sister Mildred traveled back to China including Canton where they were born eighty years before. Winifred was not impressed with modern China, because in her opinion things seemed almost as bad as when she left before World War I.
1986 Winifred was accidentally knocked down by a store employee while shopping at The Bon. Her left hip and left elbow were both badly broken. Although she recovered partially, she could no longer run the stairs nor ride the stationary bicycle. She began to lose interest in oil painting, but her art activity increased in another way.
1985-1991 Winifred "recycled" an average of 5,000 greeting cards per year to benefit the nursing wing of Wesley. Each year she devoted over 2,000 hours of labor to this activity. Cards were sold once per week to other residents of Wesley Terrace at an average price of 23 cents.
Winifred applied an artist's touch to the reworking of each card. Her standard for a recycled card was that it must look brand new, and, if possible, it should look even better. She developed techniques for cutting out or covering signatures and combining two or more cards into one "new" one.
By now her arthritis was advancing, and she considered the hours of labor spent over a cutting table to be the most daunting challenge of her life.
1992 Winifred's arthritis forced her to move to the Assisted Living wing of Wesley Terrace. She could no longer do art work or cards, but spent much of her time reviewing poems, classics, bible verses and hymns, most of which she had memorized in her youth.
1994 Winifred could no longer walk forcing a move to Wesley Homes Health Center. Though totally bedridden, Winifred never lost her ability to spell, and in her last year of life played at least one game of scrabble per day.
1996 In her final month her interest narrowed to three things which she clutched in her arthritic hands night and day. One was a small package containing a tiny silver cup for her youngest great grandchild's first birthday. Second was a small pocket album containing pictures of all her great grandchildren. Third was a packet which opened to display, in all the colors of the rainbow, twelve art pencils.
Winifred died on 25 May , 1996.
Winifred is survived by her son, John Eric; her daughter, Billie Jo; four grandsons, Jack, Jim, Greg and Eric; two granddaughters, Kathi and Janis; three great grandsons, John, Jake and Cameron; two great grandaughters, Rachel and Mika-Lyn; one brother, Ray; and one sister, Mildred.
Winifred was preceded in death by her husband, Jack; her granddaughter, Lynn; two brothers, Al and Bill; and one sister, Lillian.
A service of worship in memory of
Winifred Elisabeth (Alf) Andrew
is being held at 3:00 p.m. on Monday, May 27, 1996 at:
Fairwood Community United Methodist Church
15255 SE Fairwood Blvd
Renton, WA 98058
(206) 228-4577
Rev. Flora J. Bowers officiating
Remembrances may be made to your favorite charity or church.
WINIFRED ELISABETH (ALF) ANDREW
1901 Winifred was born December 12, 1901, in Canton, China. She was the second of six children of Rev. Alfred Alf and Elizabeth (Rosene) Alf, American missionaries.
1901-1908 As an infant, and during preschool, she was cared for by Chinese nurses called amas because her mother was busy bearing all six children in the years between 1900 and 1908. Persons who knew Winifred later in life often commented that this very early exposure to oriental culture might have been what gave her the ability to accept adversity with no complaint and to continue selflessly.
1906-1911 Grade school was by home schooling methods. Her mother and other British and German missionary mothers formed a home school for children in the foreign compound of Canton. Rote memory was emphasized, especially the Bible and Classics. If one repeated the first three or four words of any verse in the Bible, Winifred could probably complete it and give the chapter and verse.
1912-1915 At age eleven Winifred boarded a Chinese junk from Canton to Hong Kong and then a coastal steamer to Shanghai in order to attend junior high at Shanghai American Boarding School. This two thousand mile round trip journey meant she saw her parents once per year.
The Alf children at Shanghai American looked out for each other during these long separations. Winifred's friends included the Luce children. Henry Luce later founded Time-Life. Education and the associated boarding school life were in the prep school tradition with college entrance and proper manners being emphasized.
At age twelve, when returning to school, Winifred became sick on the coastal steamer, but it was dismissed as sea sickness. Her appendix ruptured, and she collapsed on the steps of the school in Shanghai. She was taken to a British hospital very near death.
During her operation she said she saw a bright light and what she believed were angels. As she began to leave with them, they suddenly said she must wait.
Simultaneously, a thousand miles away, without telephone, telegraph or radio contact, all of which were almost nonexistent in 1913 China, Rev. Alf had a vision of Winifred's impending death. After twenty-four hours of prayer, a second vision formed. In this vision Rev. Alf was taken before the Almighty to plead her case. Three judges, which he interpreted to be the Trinity, listened to his plea for her life, and she was allowed to live. He shared these visions with Winifred's mother and other missionaries.
When the letter came several days later saying Winifred had almost died, the day and hour coincided exactly with the time of her father's second vision. Thus, the actual letter surprised no one, and Winifred's mother was ready to leave on the next boat to help Winifred through two months of convalescence in Shanghai .
1916-1920 The Christian missionary community in China was torn apart by World War I. Germans and British returned home. Friends became enemies.
Rev. Alf moved his family of teenagers back to the U. S. to a primitive wheat farm in North Dakota. Wartime prices were high, and farming seemed to offer the best chance to send his six children to high school and to college. Winifred became a North Dakota farm girl, cooking for the harvest hands, doing farm chores and sewing. No electricity, no running water, a hot kitchen, and lots of work were her comments about the farm.
In 1920 she graduated from Mayville, N. D., High School, valedictorian. That same year wheat prices plunged, and her father went bankrupt. He returned to the ministry, destitute, and was assigned to a series of tiny Congregational churches in western Nebraska and later to a tiny church in Lyons, Colorado .
1920-1922 Winifred entered Hastings College, Nebraska, to major in Greek and Latin. There was no help from home, so she worked as a maid in a professor's home to pay expenses.
1923-1925 Two years of college qualified her to teach high school. She quit college and taught English, Latin, botany and music at Petersburg, Nebraska high school for two years. She sent money to her brothers to allow them to enter Doane College, a Congregational college in Crete, Nebraska.
1926 Brother Ray dropped out of Doane to work for a year on a railroad track gang allowing Winifred to attend Doane and complete her junior year.
1927 Winifred dropped out of Doane and taught school for a year allowing Ray to return to college.
1928 Winifred went back to Doane, attending college with brothers Ray and Bill and sister Lillian.
This was a great year for the Alf children at Doane. Brother Bill was football captain of a winning team. Brother Ray won the NAIA national college championship in the 100 and 220 yd. dashes.
Winifred was Doane College Queen. Lillian was runner up. Winifred graduated valedictorian, Magna Cum Laude, majoring in Latin with minors in French, Greek and botany.
1928-1930 After graduation Winifred taught high school at Rock River, Wyoming, a small whistle stop on the Union Pacific where Winifred said the largest and most important building was the railroad snow shed. She always reminded one not to confuse tiny Rock River with the more well known Rock Springs.
The Colorado Rockies were near enough so Winifred's hobby could now become mountain climbing. She made many climbs. Her favorite was 14,000 ft. Longs Peak which she climbed two or three times per year for five years.
1930 Winifred had exhibited artistic talent from preschool days in China, but practical things always came first. Now, however, with college behind, and all Alf children graduated, Winifred entered the Denver Art Academy to become a fashion illustrator.
While going to school and working part time in a downtown Denver restaurant, Winifred met Jack Andrew, a depression drop-out of Denver University. He was working as a part time cook and she as a waitress.
Jack was also an amateur artist, and this mutual interest in art led to their marriage in 1930. She was 29, he was 20.
1931 John Eric was born. Winifred and Eric lived with Rev. & Mrs. Alf who at age 70 was pastor of the Lyons, Colorado, Congregational Church.
1932 Jack borrowed money to take flight training at Cheyenne, Wyoming, but after soloing his money ran out. He was forced to quit, totally broke, with a $500.00 debt that would haunt Winifred and Jack for the next ten years of Depression.
1932 Winifred and Jack moved to Denver. Work was scarce to nonexistent.
Jack returned to Montana in December riding in freezing boxcars on northbound freight trains. No steady work was available, but Winifred and Eric followed two weeks later by passenger coach because food was available from Grandmother Andrew's farm supplemented by hunting and fishing. Winifred and Jack rented a small home in Belfry, Montana, a town of 200, where Jack had graduated from high school.
1934 Billie Jo was born at the small home in Belfry.
Winifred, not allowed to teach because of a state-wide ban on married female teachers, found a job as railroad depot agent at Bearcreek, Montana, a mining town of about 200. Her salary was twelve dollars per month plus free living quarters in a lean to scabbed on the north side of the depot. Jack found part time work as a railroad track laborer, and the family moved to Bearcreek to live in Winifred's railroad depot.
Winifred sold tickets, handled freight orders, and dispatched messages at this "end of line" station on the Montana Wyoming and Southern Railroad, which was itself an "end of line" railroad serving seven coal mines, four of which had been recently abandoned as the Depression worsened.
1936 Two years later Jack found a better job as a "roustabout", or laborer, in the Montana oil fields. Winifred and children followed to Oilmont, Montana, a dusty, windy and desolate Depression era boom town. Forty below was common in the winter, and over a hundred degrees could be recorded in July and August.
Oilmont, also with a population of about 200, consisted mostly of black tar paper shacks, had no paved roads or sidewalks, no running water and no water wells. All water was trucked from springs twelve miles away, sold by the gallon, and stored in tanks or small underground cisterns to protect from freezing. No tree or lawn could survive the freezing cold of winter combined with the hot droughts of summer.
Winifred accepted the difficult conditions with no complaint. She said it was not much worse than the North Dakota farm of her high school days.
1937 Winifred and Jack bought their first car, a well used '31 Chevrolet coupe, giving them their first freedom of movement in seven years of marriage.
1938 Jack was hired as a "pumper" to tend a small independent oil lease six miles from Oilmont. This was his first steady full-time job since their marriage eight years before. The lease had a large home, and now Winifred and Jack found the time and space to begin their art work again. A hardware store fire in Sunburst, Montana, allowed them to buy damaged tubes of paint for pennies. Wooden apple-box ends were their canvases.
Winifred and Jack were appointed be joint chairmen of the fine arts exhibit at the Toole County Fair in Shelby, Montana. They also displayed their own art. Winifred's collection of ten excellent female nudes, done when she was an art student in Denver, was well received by many fair goers causing the art exhibits to out draw the farm exhibits.
After two days of blue ribbons and limelight, Winifred graciously removed her winning exhibit so the remainder of the week-long fair could continue in a normal manner.
1939 Winifred and Jack bought their first brand new car, a '39 Plymouth, paid for partly by a contract to use it as a school bus taking John Eric, Billie Jo and two others to a regular school bus stop three miles away. This better car allowed occasional drives to Glacier National Park, about seventy miles west. Winifred, in particular, longed to climb the mountains,
but settled for short driving trips because long weekends and vacations
were rare.
1941 A better pumper's job became available in oil fields near Cut Bank, Montana, and the family moved into that town. At a population of two thousand, Cut Bank seemed like a metropolis. Winifred now had a home with running water and indoor plumbing for the first time since moving from Denver eight years before. Sidewalks and lawns graced the streets, but Cut Bank was known in local circles as the "windy city" because winds roared off the east slope of the continental divide blowing steadily for days at thirty to fifty miles per hour with gusts to a hundred recorded.
Winifred and Jack began teaching art. Classes were held in their home.
1942 Wartime labor shortages lifted the state-wide ban on married female teachers. Winifred was offered a job at Columbia Falls, Montana, a logging town of 600 on the Flathead River. The school district included Glacier National Park. Jack immediately found work as a brakeman on the Great Northern railroad at Whitefish, Montana, only eight miles away.
Winifred and Jack loved the mountains of Glacier Park, and, after moving to Columbia Falls, planned never to move again. Jack could hunt and fish, and Winifred considered hiking and climbing, but most of all they could both paint pictures surrounded by mountains, trees, rivers and lakes.
1944 Winifred, who was originally hired to teach Latin and English, was asked to establish a Home Economics Department. She designed a two year course for juniors and seniors to assist young women in the transition from primitive farm, mill, and ranch homes to modern electrified homes. The Winifred designed course stressed personal hygiene and health as well as the etiquette and behavior expected in the larger world. She encouraged women to attend college.
Her prep school education in China, farm girl experience, college sorority, plus ten years of Depression tested homemaking gave Winifred unique insights into the problems that might be faced by young Montana women entering the modern world. Women of that era still remark how Winifred touched their lives.
1946 Believing they would never leave their beautiful mountains, Winifred and Jack designed and built a modern three bedroom rambler. It had an integral art studio facing the mountains. It also had a modern layout for kitchen and family room with picture windows and efficient appliances and cupboards. The home represented an achievable showpiece for students in her classes because Winifred and Jack had built the entire home with their own hands. No carpenter, plumber, electrician, painter, roofer or other craftsman, except they themselves, worked on that showpiece home.
1950 Jack was appointed union representative to the Whitefish Division's Safety Committee.
During a safety contest between all Great Northern railroad divisions, Jack, with help from Winifred, designed a series posters in cartoon format depicting safe and unsafe work practices. The Whitefish Division improved so much that the posters were distributed railroad-wide and were also published in a union and management safety journal.
As a result, Jack was asked to enter railroad management as Safety Supervisor for the western half of the railroad. With no complaint, Winifred left a rewarding career, her dream home, and her mountains to move to Spokane, Washington, beginning a new career as the wife of a railroad manager.
1954 John Eric graduated from Gonzaga University with a degree in engineering and was accepted for graduate study at Harvard.
1955 Jack received a promotion to become Director of Safety for the entire Great Northern Railway reporting to a vice president in St. Paul, Minnesota. Winifred and Jack moved from Spokane to St. Paul.
1956 Billie Jo graduated from Eastern Washington University with a degree
in Art.
1959 John Eric received a Masters degree in Business from Harvard.
1956-1967 During Jack's tenure as Director of Safety the Great Northern won several national awards for the best record in safety. Winifred and Jack were received by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy in the White House.
Jack was assigned his own private railroad car complete with living quarters and a cook. Winifred sometimes accompanied Jack to the West Coast in the private car. As they traveled through northern Montana, they reflected on the hard times they had seen, particularly their first trip from Denver when Winifred and Eric had traveled coach and Jack had ridden in freezing boxcars on whatever freight trains he could catch going north.
1960-1968 Winifred began art classes in an after hours course sponsored by the University of Minnesota Fine Arts Department. She developed a style of realistic modernism. Jack also accelerated his painting activity. Both became active in St. Paul art circles, and their joint production of oil paintings averaged about 100 per year.
1968 Jack had a heart attack which forced his retirement.
1969-1977 Winifred and Jack moved to Fairwood near Renton, Washington. Both became active in local art groups. Together they painted nearly 1,000 paintings finding a ready market for all except those they kept for their personal collection.
Winifred and Jack found time to know their grandchildren all of whom lived in the Renton area.
1977 Jack died of a heart attack.
1979 Winifred moved to the Wesley Terrace retirement home in Des Moines, Washington. She participated in many activities, and painted many miniature oil paintings. To stay in shape during her seventies and early eighties she ran the stairs to her sixth floor apartment a minimum of ten times per day and rode a stationary bicycle five miles.
1983 Winifred and her sister Mildred traveled back to China including Canton where they were born eighty years before. Winifred was not impressed with modern China, because in her opinion things seemed almost as bad as when she left before World War I.
1986 Winifred was accidentally knocked down by a store employee while shopping at The Bon. Her left hip and left elbow were both badly broken. Although she recovered partially, she could no longer run the stairs nor ride the stationary bicycle. She began to lose interest in oil painting, but her art activity increased in another way.
1985-1991 Winifred "recycled" an average of 5,000 greeting cards per year to benefit the nursing wing of Wesley. Each year she devoted over 2,000 hours of labor to this activity. Cards were sold once per week to other residents of Wesley Terrace at an average price of 23 cents.
Winifred applied an artist's touch to the reworking of each card. Her standard for a recycled card was that it must look brand new, and, if possible, it should look even better. She developed techniques for cutting out or covering signatures and combining two or more cards into one "new" one.
By now her arthritis was advancing, and she considered the hours of labor spent over a cutting table to be the most daunting challenge of her life.
1992 Winifred's arthritis forced her to move to the Assisted Living wing of Wesley Terrace. She could no longer do art work or cards, but spent much of her time reviewing poems, classics, bible verses and hymns, most of which she had memorized in her youth.
1994 Winifred could no longer walk forcing a move to Wesley Homes Health Center. Though totally bedridden, Winifred never lost her ability to spell, and in her last year of life played at least one game of scrabble per day.
1996 In her final month her interest narrowed to three things which she clutched in her arthritic hands night and day. One was a small package containing a tiny silver cup for her youngest great grandchild's first birthday. Second was a small pocket album containing pictures of all her great grandchildren. Third was a packet which opened to display, in all the colors of the rainbow, twelve art pencils.
Winifred died on 25 May , 1996.
Winifred is survived by her son, John Eric; her daughter, Billie Jo; four grandsons, Jack, Jim, Greg and Eric; two granddaughters, Kathi and Janis; three great grandsons, John, Jake and Cameron; two great grandaughters, Rachel and Mika-Lyn; one brother, Ray; and one sister, Mildred.
Winifred was preceded in death by her husband, Jack; her granddaughter, Lynn; two brothers, Al and Bill; and one sister, Lillian.
A service of worship in memory of
Winifred Elisabeth (Alf) Andrew
is being held at 3:00 p.m. on Monday, May 27, 1996 at:
Fairwood Community United Methodist Church
15255 SE Fairwood Blvd
Renton, WA 98058
(206) 228-4577
Rev. Flora J. Bowers officiating
Remembrances may be made to your favorite charity or church.
Family Members
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
Advertisement
