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By Naomi Yocom
New Era Staff Writer SHE HAS
FACED revolutions and world war, epidemics and uprisings, but Mary Engle Richardson cannot
face eating dinner at the early hour of 6 p.m.
So, with
typical resourcefulness, she eats a substantial hot luncheon and plans to go out for
dinner or have a light snack in her suite. Then she focuses her day on mid-afternoon tea,
a social event to which she invites friends and neighbors at Homestead Village retirement
community, where she lives.
The tea ritual,
in the midst of her exotic and beautiful art and artifacts, is a beloved reminder of Mrs.
Richardsons 35-plus years in Africa "half a lifetime, she says.
And what a
lifetime!
Mary Engle was born and raised
in Lancaster (she declines to give the year of birth) and graduated from Lancaster General
Hospital School of Nursing in 1935.
She became a public health
nurse, was commissioned during World War II, and served overseas in Africa, Egypt and
Greece.
After the war, she returned to
Lancaster and, on the G.I. Bill, earned consultant status in maternal and child hygiene at
the University of Pennsylvania. She returned to Africa and married the Nova Scotia- born,
Africa-raised engineer who had been pursuing her for three years.
In Nairobi, the capital of
Kenya (at that time still under British rule), she raised two children plus a
stepdaughter, while using her nursing and administrative skills, trying her hand at
business, and maintaining an active social life with locals and a steady stream of
visitors from Lancaster. She returned to Lancaster for the birth of her daughter (her son
was born in South Africa). During :he mid-50s, when the Mau Mau uprising of
Africans who wanted to end colonial rule in Kenya was at its worst, she took the
children to California to stay with relatives, and worked there for a year before
returning to her husband in Kenya. Then, in the mid-60s, she brought the children to
Lancaster where they attended school and established residence for citizenship, while she
taught at the Lancaster General Hospital School of Nursing.
She then returned to Kenya,
which by that time had achieved independence and welcomed her talents and those of her
husband.
Her husband died in 1970, and
once more she came to Lancaster, this time to work(in a doctors office) long enough
to ensure her Social Security; then she returned to Kenya.
Finally, in 1986, she sold her
home in Kenya, moved to Lancaster, and, no longer seeing well enough to drive, decided to
live at Homestead Village.
"A large part of my heart
and soul remains in Kenya," she says, "but here I am also at home."
What powered this small,
smiling women to launch on such an adventurous life?
She was the second of seven
children in "a solid, conservative, God-fearing, supportive family," she says.
However, she was a maverick, questioning both the religious and educational verities of
her background. In an effort to bring her into line, she was even sent away to a religious
boarding school when she was 15. It didnt work she continued to go her own
way.
After finishing high school,
she worked for a time "Several people remember me from when I worked for
Edison Electric," she says and she worked in her fathers bakery. She
then went to Lancaster General Hospital for nurses training, after which she paid
for her academic education at Messiah College by serving as a college nurse. She also took
some teaching courses at (then) Millersville State Teachers College.
However, she wanted to be a
nurse in the U.S. Public Health Service, and to do so she had to have a degree in
education. So she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. To earn her way, she worked
as a nurse at the university hospital until, she says, a federal scholarship freed
her to concentrate on her studies. She graduated with distinction.
"I didnt take
notes," she discloses. "I just sat and listened. In all my education, I never
took notes."
With that statement, she
reveals an extraordinary ability to focus, listen, organize and remember, which would
stand her in good stead in her multinational life.
She became a Public Health
Service nurse shortly after the beginning of World War II; when the PHS was made a branch
of the military, she was commissioned and sent overseas. She arrived in North Africa in a
blacked-out convoy, and recalls the subsequent train ride across the continent from
Algiers to Cairo, and thence to the Sinai Desert, through the burned-out, blackened hulks
of tanks and planes left over from the battles with Germanys Gen. Erwin Rommel.
For a while, she worked in a refugee camp, El
Shatt, which was so close to the Suez Canal that she could talk with the people on the
ships going through. She remembers it was so cold at night, shed have to wear five
layers of clothing.
One time she negotiated her schedule and worked
nights so that for Christmas she could go to Paris. Too impatient to wait for appropriate
papers, she got a ride "with some nice young lads" who were flying over. Of
course, when it was time to return, she didnt have the necessary documents. So she
was made an impromptu "courier," and returned to home base in the nick of time.
Meanwhile, mutual friends were trying to get her
together with Maj. Alfred Granville Richardson, an engineer who was in the British Air
Force. The night before she was to be transferred to Greece, they met, had dinner, danced
and parted.
She settled into her job in a unit outside
Salonika where she worked with two military doctors, one an Indian and the other a Punjabi
(Pakistani). The doctors were among a group she invited to her quarters to celebrate her
birthday. Not realizing it was for- bidden by their religion, she offered them wine; not
wanting to of fend her, they accepted and drank.
At that moment, Alf Richardson
arrived at her door.
Richardson had been born in
Nova Scotia but, the son of a regular in the British army, he had been raised in South
Africa. Because of his background, he was acutely color conscious, and, she says, "He
wasnt very approving of me having such familiarity with the colored,
even though they were doctors."
But he set aside his prejudices
and spent his leave chauffeuring her around as she established clinics and worked with the
Red Cross. Somewhere along the line, the prejudices evaporated.
"Alf was," she says,
"adaptable. When he grew up in South Africa, the blacks would get off the
pavement for the whites. But in Kenya, the time came when he worked with them, and he
would address them as mister, and we would have them for tea. And when he came
over here he fit into the American culture. He fit in everywhere he went, my
husband," she says, her smile tender. "He was a perfect host as well."
However, at the time they met
she wasnt interested in romance. She was still concentrating on her profession, and
at the wars end, she returned home, went on inactive duty and continued her
education on the G.I. Bill "Alf wrote to me," she says. "Then he got sick,
and I felt guilty, so I started a correspondence."
In 1946, he invited her to
Africa, where he was now in business, to marry him.
"I didnt know what I
wanted to do," she recalls. She had worked long and hard to achieve consultant status
in maternal and child hygiene. "I had reached the level where I could function
happily, and I did," she says. However, she continues, "Time was passing, I was
in my 30s, and I had another priority: marriage and children."
She liked Alf, she respected
him. she thought he would he a good husband and a good father. Undecided, she bought a
round- trip ticket and, as far as anybody was concerned, went to Africa to visit a
missionary sister in Rhodesia, and. oh, yes, to see Richardson.
Ten days later, they were
married. "We made a good marriage. We were partners. We worked together. We were a
team," she says.
They planned to stay in Kenya
for 10 years, but at the end of six years, when the contract Richardson was working under
ran out, he started his own drilling business, and they stayed on.
She had such a good time
showing visitors around. she decided to start a travel business. but after leading two
tours. she realized that commercial tours were not for her. Later, she owned and ran a
small coffee plantation, "which paid for my daughters schooling in
Switzerland," she says.
Though maintaining her American
citizenship, she "fit into the system," she says, as the country changed around
her. In fact. one American who came to Nairobi told subsequent newcomers, "First you
take your card to the Embassy, and then you go see Mary Richardson."
"I knew so many people, I
was there so long I could help them."
The Richardsons traveled a
great deal, and. during Kenyas long struggle for independence, maintained homes on
both sides of the world.
Mrs. Richardson also influenced
health care on both sides of the world. having trained hundreds of nurse-midwives in
Kenya, and an almost equal number of student nurses at Lancaster General Hospital.
Still energetic, she keeps busy
despite her failing eyesight and a recalcitrant ear infection that prevents her from
returning to Kenya for a visit.
She is a volunteer for Meals on
Wheels, she belongs to several womens clubs, auxiliaries, alumni associations and
social and intellectual organizations. and keeps up long-distance membership in the
service-oriented East African Womens League.
She can travel enough to visit
her children her son, an artist. lives in Atlanta, Ga.; her daughter. a scientist
and motivational speaker, lives in Canada. She also stays in touch with her several
grandchildren.
And. she says. she has told her
minister that when the time comes, she wants half her ashes to remain in Lancaster, her
original home, but hopes that the other half will, like the other half of her heart and
soul, join her husbands in their beloved Kenya.
(Originally printed in the
Lancaster New Era, Thursday, October 17,1991
Reprinted December 2000,
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