Carol Noell: Anna Ruth Channels Noell

Anna Ruth Channels Noell

Genealogical Notes on the Clendenin Family of West Virginia
Dumfrieshire, Scotland to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to Augusta County, Virginia

Anna Ruth Channels was born 25 Nov 1924 in Point Pleasent, West Virginia. She was the youngest of three children born to French and Lillian Gates Channels.

As a child, Anna Ruth was “hit by a Studebaker” when crossing the street in front of her school bus. The door handle struck her in the head. She recovered but had severe headaches, attributed to the accident.

On June 19, 1947, after a brief courtship, twenty-three year old Anna Ruth Channels married forty year old Lowry Ward Noell at her home in Marmet, West Virginia. At the time they met, he was working at Blossom Dairy in nearby Charleston. Lowry was so in love with Ann, as he alone called her. His words describing the first year of their marriage survived in a scrapbook scroll he made of brown lunch bags. From the scroll, we know Anna Ruth had “major surgery” in Huntington, West Virginia the day after her wedding in June 1947.

In September, 1947 they took the night train to Lowry’s family home in Alexandria, Virginia and a promising new life together. Shortly after the move, she became pregnant for the first time. Anna Ruth and Lowry were excited about the impending birth of their baby, due July 26, 1948. The scroll says she dreamed she had five boys.

Lowry had been away from the Washington area for several years and had trouble finding a good job, so he first settled for work as a route agent for Embassy Dairy. In June, 1948, he was hired as an accountant with the United Mine Workers of America Welfare and Retirement Fund in Washington, D.C. His job included evaluating the adequacy of medical care delivered to sick and injured coal miners.

A baby daughter was born prematurely and died March 21, 1948 at Alexandria Hospital in Alexandria, Virginia. Lowry’s Lunchbag memory scroll abruptly ends with no mention of the event. He never spoke of the first pregnancy to anyone. A $10 funeral home receipt for the infant’s removal and cremation was found with the scroll after his death in 1993.

The events that led to the tragedy of the prefrontal lobotomy seem to have begun about this time. Anna Ruth’s headaches were now so severe that Lowry later said he “had to give her shots of Demerol 2cc’s”.

Anna Ruth became pregnant a second time. She was considered a high risk pregnancy and her prenatal care was referred to the Washington, D.C. practice of Dr. Raymond Chinn, who was also Barbara Bush’s physician for the birth of one of her sons.

A second baby daughter, Carol Ann was born at Garfield Hospital in Washington, D.C. on October 11, 1949. She was 4′15″. Dr. Chinn declared the baby small, but healthy, alert and amazingly curious. Lowry later said he was very relieved.

Six weeks after the birth, Anna Ruth became pregnant for the third time. She was unable to care for her newborn, so baby Carol was placed with a kind paternal cousin of Lowry in Virginia.

Lowry took his wife to George Washington University Hospital for evaluation and hopefully, treatment of her debilitating headaches. He said he was told by a panel of twelve physicians that a prefrontal lobotomy was the only solution for permanent pain relief and that Anna Ruth would commit suicide from the pain if she did not have the surgery. As a bonus, they said she would not worry anymore and that for this reason alone, some very successful business executives had the surgery when they retired. She was advised to terminate the pregnancy but refused.

In early 1950, a Transorbital Lobotomy was performed on twenty-five year old Anna Ruth Channels Noell at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C.

At about age six months, baby Carol was moved to her mother’s family home in Marmet, West Virginia. Anna Ruth’s brother Harold flew to Washington and brought the infant back, the first time anyone in Marmet had flown on a plane. Everyone in town went to the airport to see him off to rescue Anna Ruth’s baby. Harold and his wife Daphine had three children and lived in a small two bedroom yellow house on McCorkle Ave. in Marmet. Carol was lovingly absorbed into the family as the fourth child.

Soon after, a lobotomized and pregnant Anna Ruth was returned to the family home in Marmet for “rehabilitation”. She was given one of the two bedrooms, the four children had the second. The task of caring for Anna Ruth fell on the shoulders of Harold’s wife Daphine.

Anna Ruth was unable to communicate verbally, feed or toilet herself. She is remembered as screaming so loudly that the Channels children were afraid to enter the room. She was violently combative and strong enough to do significant damage if Daphine was not careful to protect herself, the unborn baby and everyone else in the household.

On August 27, 1950 Sandra Lea Noell was born at Charleston General Hospital. She was the most beautiful baby, weighing a healthy 8+ lbs. She came home in Daphine’s arms, the fifth child to care for in addition to Anna Ruth. It is said she hand rolled Sandy’s diapers at night while she was “resting” in the living room.

Anna Ruth’s two babies moved to Virginia with Harold and Daphine, regarded as the two youngest Channels family siblings. At some point they were returned to Marmet and their mother. The social experiment in mothering was a total failure in spite of help from other family members.

I clearly remember Sandy falling into a floor furnace and of being so hungry I climbed on a chair and foraged the breakfast table debris, giving Sandy a stick of butter to eat and drinking the maple syrup.

Anna Ruth would not allow anyone to “help” her. Lowry highly praised Anna Ruth’s cousin Lois Ann. They would send Anna Ruth to the movies and Lois Ann would clean the house. Anna Ruth did not seem to notice when she returned.

Though Sandy and I were two and three years old, Lowry still prepared baby bottles of formula each night. He put them on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator so I could get one for each of us while he was at work.

Welfare was preparing to take action, so we were returned to Harold and Daphine in Martinsville, Virginia. The Channels family presumed it was now a permanent placement. During the weeks that followed, Lowry put his West Virginia affairs in order. He quit his job with the UMWA quietly packed up, then told Anna Ruth he would go alone to pick up the girls and bring them back home.

In July 1953, Lowry drove to Martinsville and took us away with him. I am told it was a heart breaking, near violent departure…in Daphine’s heart, we were her daughters.

Lowry said he was prepared to leave the county with his daughters if necessary. Instead, he took us home to Alexandria. Our grandparents were in their 60’s and 70’s and grandmother Noell had been very ill several times. They declined to take us to raise, no surprise.

At first, Lowry lived with us in a home with a family in Alexandria named Attilis as a boarder. In August, Sandy had a happy third birthday party there. We stayed there for only a few weeks. The Attilis family already had two or three young children and I believe we moved away because it was just too much.

Lowry was rehired by the UMWA in Washington. He traveled to the coal fields of West Virginia. We did not live with him again until 1959.

The next placement was with a family named Hess. We stayed there only a short time because Sandy was severely whipped by the grandmother.

We were in the backyard, locked out of the house. Sandy ate a plum and had an allergic reaction. She broke out in hives and got very sick. She “made a mess” because I could not get her to a bathroom.

I will never forget daddy’s arrival that day. I stood in the doorway of the dining room when he gently placed Sandy across his lap and examined the bloody whelps. I thought (or hoped) he was going to hurt Mrs. Hess even though she was an old lady. But, I remember most clearly that it was somehow my fault.

We were removed from the Hess home that day and placed with an elderly woman named Mada Sinclair, the childless widow of a high ranking military officer. She lived in a third floor apartment on Mount Vernon Parkway facing the Potomac River. She was used to having maids and a cook so she had no cooking skills.

Sandy and I were placed in her spare bedroom. It was very elegant, certainly not designed for young children. We had a little table and chairs at the window. This is where we were fed. My job was opening the window and scraping the food on to the shrubbery below while Sandy kept watch. Mada didn’t move around much, so I was never caught.

Fortunately, there was a drug store with a soda fountain across the street. The waitress was named Nora and she fed us whenever possible. It seems we went there almost every day. I know she told our father about the situation at Mada’s home.

However, there was a lasting benefit from living with Mada. She had fixed ideas about the raising of young ladies. We were immediately christened at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Alexandria with Mada as one of our sponsors (Godmother). She molded us into proper “Virginia girls”, teaching us to repeat “horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow”.

We lived with Mada at the time of Hurricane Carol August 25-31, 1954. We must have been away celebrating Sandy’s birthday on August 27 when the storm struck. I remember daddy left us in the car while he made his way to the big front door of the apartment building. When he opened the door, it flew off it’s hinges in his hands and sailed across the front lawn toward us. It made our daddy look very strong.

I was later called “Hurricane Carol” sometimes, probably not without reason.

I “flunked” the “proper Virginia girl” test and got myself kicked out of Mada’s home when she eventually discovered I was using her lipsticks to draw on an oriental rug beneath the double bed in our room. She was really mad and daddy had to find somewhere to put me immediately.

Daddy packed up left with both of us right away. He was out of child care options in Alexandria, so we traveled about fifty miles west on Rt. 50 to Leesburg, Virginia. He went to the Loudoun County child welfare agency was referred to Mrs. James Monroe Church. I do not believe he took the time to call first, but drove us straight to the farm.

Mr. and Mrs. Church were an older couple who lived on a one hundred acre farm outside Leesburg. (Rt. 7 Box 252) The Church’s had raised six children of their own and had lots of grandchildren come visit every Sunday afternoon and for longer visits during the summer.

Grandmother Church had fostered about fifty other children, very few of them private pay like our father. There were already two older girls living there at the time. He was desperate so Mrs. Church agreed to take me but not a second young child, even sweet Sandy, meaning she would have to go back to Alexandria with daddy and live at Mada’s all by herself.

Grandmother Church was standing beside me when Sandy and I were separated for the first time. I do not remember being aware she was actually leaving with daddy until they were getting in the car together. Grandmother held me back when I tried to catch the car as I watched it travel slowly down the long gravel road.

Grandmother was very kind but I was scared I was of making a mistake, being called bad again and getting kicked out of this home too. So, I pretty much shut down.

I ate only jelly bread at first. Remembering Mada’s cooking, I was afraid to try them because I didn’t recognize any of the abundant good foods grandmother Church served. Suppose I hated it and she made me eat all the food on my plate anyway?

In the newest foster home, I was alone and afraid all the time, especially for Sandy. Who would take care of her? Suppose she had to actually eat Mada’s cooking? She was my baby from our crib and bottle days and I missed her desperately. Despite less then eleven months difference in our ages, I clearly remember when she was put in my arms for the first time. Sandy was given to me to love and take care of forever. I was incompetent but she never held it against me.

Daddy returned with Sandy to visit the farm every Sunday afternoon for about six weeks. The tearful, wrenching scene was replayed at every departure until Mrs. Church capitulated and said Sandy could live there too. We were almost five and six years old.

In 1956, Sandy and I started first grade together but in different classrooms. We were treated as poor, pitiful motherless children by our teachers. Sandy and I never viewed ourselves as poor or pitiful. We received from those nice ladies the bonus of extra time in the reading circle. Then on the long bus ride back to the farm, Sandy and I taught each other what we learned each day.

We liked school and best of all, we discovered the wonder of the Leesburg elementary school library. To think, as many books as we wanted to read (as soon as we learned how). And, we got to take some of them home with us as long as we were careful. I was allowed to touch all the books I could reach by asking for the job of straightening the bookshelves in the library before school.

Sandy and I did not see our mother again until Christmas vacation 1956. We flew alone to Charleston on American Airlines, in the care of a friendly stewardess who gave us an AA pin to wear each time we flew. When we deplaned, we saw a group of grownups waiting on the tarmac. Without hesitation, Sandy ran straight to Daphine’s arms and was scooped up in a tight hug. Our mother, Anna Ruth started to cry. I hugged her tight and it seemed to make her feel better.

Daddy came to visit the farm every other Sunday afternoon. Sandy and I sat side by side on the front porch, reading while he sat and visited with the Church family. I never once got in trouble while reading beside my sister.

The divorce of our parents was brutal. I know grandmother Church testified in a child custody hearing in Arlington, Virginia. Men did not receive custody of little girls without proving the mother unfit. Daddy retained a famous lawyer to do the deed and eventually he prevailed.

Daddy had taken us away to Virginia in July 1953 and the divorce was not final until April, 1959. We were allowed two weeks with our mother in West Virginia each summer. Lowry was ordered to pay Anna Ruth $10 a month for ten years.

There was a continual stream of vicious comments made before, during and after made every visit by our maternal grandmother and father. They hated Lowry, who was blamed for the damage done to Anna Ruth, then taking away her little girls. The WV cousins grew up thinking “that SOB Larry” was our dad’s name. We were told by daddy and to “take everything Ann says with a grain of salt.” He said he took us away because “welfare was getting ready to” and “I had to because all the girls on McCorkle Avenue were pregnant by the time they were fifteen”

Sandy and I spent most of our lives on the farm in a healing state of “benign neglect”. We had each other, our books and lots of space. We were allowed to remain somewhat invisible yet connected to a home and family we readily came to love.

We had no sense of family duties. In foster care, it is easier to clear the table and do the dishes if the younger kids are out of the way. We learned to hoe weeds, pick up white potatoes behind a tractor and cart, check the lights used to warm baby chicks, run down escaped headless chickens in chicken killing and listen to hog killing. We had the run of the farm and were allowed to steer the tractor and truck.

We stayed on the farm in Leesburg until our father remarried July 16, 1959 and brought us to Alexandria live with him for the first time in our memory. The very same month they married, Anna Ruth taught her eight and nine year old daughters to smoke Camel cigarettes while they stayed up all night, played games and listened to her tell sometimes wild stories.

Somehow, Lowry got lucky and convinced the loveliest woman ever to marry him and take on raising his daughters. Her name was Dorothy Clift Boyd. She was forty-seven years old and grandmother of three.

Our new ma was wonderful. Sandy was especially happy to have a mama like everyone else we knew. It took me a while longer to stop viewing the poor woman as a threat. We lived “cooped up” in a small 2BR apartment in Alexandria, but we had twin beds in our own room and a window overlooking the beautiful grounds of the Episcopal Theological Seminary and Boy’s School.

In time it became understood, Sandy was mine. No one forgot that I was responsible for her, especially in our teens when I got in trouble for both of us.

Our father, was by now an embittered fifty two year old “tough guy”, angry, rigid and controlling. His new marriage and custody arrangement was Lowry’s first experience with full-time fatherhood, ever.

I was a ten year old with an attitude but Sandy remained a sweetheart and managed dad perfectly. Many times we were loudly awakened and ordered out of bed to go to the living room, sit on the couch and get yelled at for whatever misdeeds we were accused of that night. The moment Sandy started to cry, she would be soothed and allowed to return to bed. Then, the fun began. I had learned not to cry by tuning him out. He became frustrated and sometimes these little visits went on for a while. Sandy often asked me in later years why I didn’t just cry and get it finished a lot sooner.

Daddy never knew that Sandy lived with fears of abandonment and loud, angry men for the rest of her life. She was a single parent for years and used to express puzzled, angry feelings about dad’s brief every other Sunday afternoon visits to see us on the farm.

Lowry Noell returned to work for the United Miner Worker’s Welfare and Retirement Fund in Washington until he retired to Florida in 1974.

His job often involved travel to the coal fields and assuring the best medical care possible for miners. Since this was possible outside Appalachia, he was pleased to later participate in opening ten Miner’s Hospitals throughout the coal fields of Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky.

Four year BSN nursing Scholarships to Morehead College in Kentucky were offered to the daughters of UMW members who would be willing to remain and work in the Miner’s Hospitals. In 1966, I wanted to do that more then anything, but daddy said no, the scholarships should be saved for miner’s daughters. Fair enough.

I next considered applying to the Washington Hospital Center School of Nursing, but daddy said no, I would get in trouble for sure. The drinking age in D.C. was eighteen. He finally approved Petersburg General Hospital School of Nursing in Petersburg, Virginia. The school was small, about 85 students. Many were from rural Virginia, did not drink and/or were engaged to boys back home.

Daddy did not realize that a few miles away was Fort Lee with 40,000 men leaving for or just returning from Viet Nam. The town girls were not allowed to date military men, so the rest of us had a really great time at the Fort Lee Officer’s Club. My active social life was curtailed by academic probation at the end of my first year. Time to get serious if I ever wanted to become a nurse.

Sandy became Sandi, an accountant and superb businesswoman. In 1991, she accepted a position in the Atlanta hospital where I worked for almost 20 years. She wanted to learn healthcare services and TQM. It was wonderful to see each other several times a day. In late 1993, she moved to a subsidized senior living center in Atlanta where our parents had lived out their lives. She was CFO/Assistant Administrator of Assisted Living.

By 1994, I had retired and worked for her from home, compiling the first Policy and Procedure for Assisted Living. During that time, Sandi and I worked together once a week. We had so much fun.

We each had one child. I had a daughter named Kimberly in 1976 and Sandi had a son named Joseph in 1980. We vowed to not have more children then we could raise alone if need be. The two children were raised as much like siblings as possible. We lived only three miles apart so the children were often in the same schools. They turned out well.

On Sunday evening, March 15, 1998, we had a spaghetti supper at my home. Sandi told us of a huge promotion she was offered and had accepted. It would be formally presented to the board on Wednesday. She was so excited to have achieved exactly what she trained herself to do. We had a wonderful private chat like always before she left to prepare for the following week.

On Monday, March 16, 1998, Sandra Lea Noell Nardi-Noble was killed in an Atlanta rush hour accident. Her son was a high-school senior.