Biography

Nancy Maryann Shumate By Louise A. Jackson

(A note from the author: I was simply one of Nancy’s friends to begin with. We were members of a group who met once a week to play word games and visit. She was living an isolated life but seemed to find it easy to trust me because I reminded her of her mother. Her mother died before I met Nancy but I heard that Fern talked a lot and was a writer. I am both of those things and was fourteen years Nancy’s senior. She invited me to her house, something she rarely did for anyone, and she gradually began to come out of her shell. I ran interference in social situations when she was unsure. I took her to places she would never have gone alone. She had almost become a recluse after her mother’s death. One day, when in the hospital for some tests, she found out, to her physician’s surprise and with no former ill health other than a slightly elevated temperature, that she had a rare form of Stage Four cancer and would likely not live more than six months. She called me, told me the news, and said, “I can’t go home and be by myself tonight. Can I come to your house?” Of course she could. Later, when she recovered from a bout of double pneumonia and was told she could no longer live alone, that it was either a rehab facility or a friend, I took her into my home and treated her as I would have treated my own sister. As a result of some good doctors and my encouraging care, she lived for two and a half more years with a good quality of life in spite of the chemotherapy. During our time together, often in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep, I gradually learned about her life, her triumphs and her fears. This biographical sketch is based on those interactions.)



Nancy Maryann Shumate was born July 20, 1949 in Springfield, MO, the only child of Roland Shumate and Fern Nance Shumate. She and her parents lived near the homes of an extended family, many of whom worked together to run a family greenhouse and floral shop located next door to the Roland and Fern Shumate home. Grandma Nance lived a block away to the south and Grandma Shumate lived a block to the north. Roland Shumate’s sister and her husband and son lived down the street. Uncle Joe Nance, his wife, Wilma, and their two children, Jon and Lauren, lived a few houses away, across the street.

Lauren, or “Laurie,” as she was called, was less than a year older than Nancy and the two girls grew up together, more like sisters than cousins. When Uncle Joe bought Laurie a miniature Pinscher puppy, he got one for Nancy too. The two played together from morning till night, often under the greenhouse tables. Older brother, Jon, treated them equally. Photos show him on hands and knees, allowing the girls to “ride” on his back. Nancy said they only played with each other; there was no neighborhood gang and she never attended a nursery school.

Roland Shumate was a medic in WWII and spent his war in Europe, running out to provide aid and comfort under the hail of machine gun fire, a backpack of medical supplies his only protection. When he returned home, he married Fern Nance, an independent career woman. Fern was one of the earliest female journalists in Missouri, writing for the Springfield Press, an afternoon newspaper. In this capacity, she interviewed such celebrities as Jack Dempsey, Will Rogers, and Amelia Earhart, when their flying machines put down to refuel on the way from St. Louis to Tulsa or Oklahoma City. After the morning Springfield Leader merged with the Press, and the afternoon reporters were laid off, Fern Nance began to work and write with Ozark folklorist, Vance Randolph. She also wrote novels and novellas – anything to scratch out a living during the Depression. Her novels were published by Alfred Knopf under the pseudonym, Nancy Clemens. She was forty when Nancy was born and that was to be their only child.

According to Nancy, her father was deeply disappointed that his only child was a girl and not a boy. His civilian job was as a prison guard in the Springfield Federal Medical Penitentiary and he loved to hunt during his off hours. Nancy didn’t want to hunt. She was a bright, sensitive child who loved books, music and art and quailed under her father’s verbal attacks. She came to realize, toward the end of her life, that her father probably returned home from the war with what would now be called PTSD. The condition wasn’t recognized at that time and Nancy and her mother bore the brunt of his mental stress. Nancy was never to have more than an uneasy relationship with her father and, seemingly as a result of his bullying, never valued her own abilities. She always felt academically and socially inferior, even when she graduated summa cum laude from Southwest Missouri State University, now Missouri State University. When I pointed out that an accomplishment of that magnitude indicated a certain amount of above-average intelligence, she simply said, “I worked harder than the others. That was all.”

Fern, on the other hand, loved her daughter deeply and spent a great deal of time with Nancy, reading to her, buying her books and taking her on trips. Fern also set up Nancy in a Pen Pal relationship with a third grade in a Hopi Indian reservation in New Mexico. When Nancy was ten, the family traveled to New Mexico to visit the reservation. The tribal elders were deeply appreciative of the correspondence Nancy had kept up. They actually took Nancy down into the kiva, a rare honor, especially for a female child. They gave her a Kachina doll as a going away present and she kept it all her life.

Additionally, because Fern was an avid birder and had begun the first Audubon Society in Springfield, Nancy became a birder also and learned to be a skilled nature photographer. When I first met her and was invited to her house, I noted a sign on her bedroom door, labeled “The Aviary.” Her framed bird photographs covered the walls.

As Nancy and Laurie got older, they began to help out at the greenhouses together, doing whatever small children could do. The local elementary school was less than a block away from the Shumate house and all three cousins attended from kindergarten through fifth grade. Laurie was a year ahead of Nancy and paved the way for her younger cousin throughout the elementary school experience. Nancy faced a real social problem when Laurie went to junior high, leaving her cousin behind. With no one to follow in social situations at school, Nancy began a lifelong pattern of “living on the social edges.” She used her photographic skills to take photos of most social events she attended. I finally realized that her camera skills enabled her to be with a group but not an integral part of the group. When I made this observation to her, she confirmed it.

Junior and Senior High School were lonely times for Nancy. Laurie became a “swan” – a social butterfly. She was attractive and had beautiful clothes. Nancy was an ordinary girl, what we would call a “nerd” today, and her mother didn’t think clothes mattered that much. Among all her other social insecurities, the high school principal was her great-uncle. Nancy and her great-uncle were the only two people in the school with the name “Shumate.” She said she always felt the other kids looked on her with suspicion as a possible informant because of this relationship.

In college, Nancy majored in Secondary Education with a specialty in European History. Her shy personality wasn’t meant for the high school classroom and she realized this after a difficult student teaching experience. Not feeling able to teach, she applied for and was accepted into the state’s social work program. Her kindness and work ethic enabled her to do well and she was soon promoted, eventually being sent to Judge’s School in Reno, NV for six months. After that, she spent years as a “hearing officer” for the Attorney General’s office in the state capital. She was assigned to decide if a person was eligible for state aid and/or disability payments. Lawyers and volunteers both told me that, when Nancy sat behind the judge’s desk, she became a different person – one who listened with compassion but stood no nonsense.

“When you came before Nancy,” a friend who was a volunteer told me, “you knew you had to bring your ‘A game’ or you were lost!” I read a letter sent to her by the state’s attorney general, stating that the opinions she wrote were the clearest and best reasoned he had ever seen.

In the course of her work for the state, she had occasion to help many of her co-workers, writing up cases for them when they fell behind, encouraging them when they felt overwhelmed and generally supporting others when life felt too much to bear. When one of her friends lost her youngest son to an automobile accident and was on the verge of suicide, according to what the friend told me after Nancy’s death, Nancy stepped in, took her on a camping and birding trip and helped that friend realize she could still go on.

Because Nancy’s parents were older than most when she was born and because she was an only child in the post-war period, she was expected to live at home and take care of Fern and Roland as they moved into old age. Her work with the Attorney General’s office required a lot of traveling so Nancy often hired a friend to cook for her parents and see that they were okay until she could get home at night. Eventually, in order to cope, as her father’s health and mental state continued to deteriorate, she placed him in a rest home. Later, as things got still worse, the doctor said the best thing for Roland’s terrible pain was to withhold nourishment. (He was being fed via a tube at this point.) “His death will follow soon after,” the doctor assured her, “and it will be the most merciful thing you can do.” It actually took seven tortuous days and Nancy was deeply troubled, having to make the decision all by herself. By this time, all the relatives had either died or moved away so she was on her own entirely.

Her mother continued to live at home but, eventually, Nancy was again overwhelmed by all she had to do and felt forced to ask her mother to go to a nearby care facility as well. “Just for a short time,” she told her. “Until I can get caught up at work and can be home again.” By this time, Fern was on oxygen 24 hours a day. Nancy often got up in the night to be sure the air was still flowing as it should. Unfortunately, the nurse’s aide in charge at the care facility failed to monitor Fern’s oxygen intake well enough and Nancy arrived one evening to find her mother at death’s door because the oxygen tank had been empty for some time and no one had noticed. Nancy was completely devasted by the loss of her mother – the one who had always loved her when she felt no one else did - and the one Nancy had loved deeply in return. Her sense of guilt was overwhelming.

I think it was at that point that Nancy, reared in the Baptist Church but barred from Sunday School after she questioned the teacher about how the findings in Olduvai Gorge fit with the Old Testament description of the earth’s creation, began to take an interest in the Catholic faith. She told me she felt it would be a tremendous relief to be able to confess that she had essentially “murdered” her parents (as she saw it) and to be forgiven. She read about Sir Alec Guinness’ adult conversion to Catholicism and his joy in this new-found faith and it seems to me that’s the reason Nancy wrote to him-- to find out more. Only something of this nature – something very near to Sir Alec’s heart—would have led him to actually write to her, in return, as many times as he did.

Nancy’s giving nature and her sense of her own unworthiness led her to send Sir Alec a number of thoughtful and expensive “thank you” gifts, which obviously made him quite uncomfortable. At the same time, she was thrilled to be in correspondence with the famous actor. She mentioned it to me quite early in our acquaintance, somewhat offhandedly, as if it were no big deal (when it obviously was). Nancy took instruction for a year but could never come to believe in what the Catholic Church taught. She lived and died an earnest seeker.

Nancy didn’t want a funeral but I was determined her ashes would not be buried with no ceremony at all. One other good friend and I went to the cemetery when the funeral home called. I sang one of Nancy’s favorite hymns and read a poem from a card someone had sent me after my own husband’s death ten years earlier. Later, we had a memorial get-together. Friends came from all over the state. If Nancy had heard their heartfelt tributes, she would have said, “They’re just being nice.” But it was more than that. Her life mattered - to rich and poor, secure and downtrodden. One former co-worker said, “She was the first person who ever made me feel as if I was worth anything at all.”

She was self-effacing to the end.

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