User:Hypergrove/Grace A. McClure

Works

Books

• The Basset Women
• Juan Jose Herrera (unfinished manuscript)

Biography

Born Grace Alma Paulette in Topeka, Kansas, on July 4, 1918, while her father (Robert Paulette) was in Europe as an infantryman in World War I, she was the oldest of three children (her two brothers, Robert and Charles, were her "charges" during her young years).

A little background on her family:

Her mother, Jessie Griebie Paulette, was the oldest of five children (three sisters and a brother). Jessie's birth family was centered in a then small farming town of Farmington, Minnesota (now just a suburb of the Twin Cities), where their family had run the town's only general store since the mid-nineteenth century. Many in Jessie's family were inordinately proud that they had one ancestral line back to the original settlers in Massachusetts. Jessie herself was totally unimpressed by this fact, always stating that "everyone should travel on their own bottom" -- an attitude her daughter thoroughly held to be true. Jessie was a schoolteacher in her youth, and taught in Wyoming, "back when men wore guns on their legs rather than up on their belts" [as she always delighted in telling her wide-eyed grandchildren in their pre-teen years -- a statement that was probably more for the sake of the wide eyes she got rather than for its truth -- Jessie was firmly in the tradition of Western story tellers who always tell the God's honest truth, give or take a lie or two.] Jessie died in the 1960s.

Her father, Robert J. Paulette, was a graduate with an engineering degree who met Jessie up in the 'wild country' in the early 20th century when Jessie was teaching. Jessie married him, moved to Topeka, Kansas for a government water engineering position, where Grace Alma was born. He went off to the war in Europe prior to his daughter's birth. After the War, Robert returned to Topeka to continue the engineering work, and then moved to another public water position in Salinas, Kansas, where Grace's two brothers were born. There is a monument in Salinas, Kansas, to Robert Paulette for his work in water reclamation and control benefiting the county and surrounding farming area. Robert died during the late 1930s, just after he had taken a job with the federal government working on increasing infrastructure employment in the Midwest.

In the 1970s, during some other genealogical research Grace was doing for a possible book on some families in the Midwest, Grace discovered that her father was the direct descendent of the younger (i.e., non-titled) son of the Lord Pawlet family (who was the Marquise of Salisbury or Shrewsbury and had been involved with Elizabeth I in the imprisonment of Mary Queen of Scots and the then political battle over an ethics-based refusal to kill Mary without a signed execution warrant from Elizabeth I). The younger son, Charles Pawlet was among the early settlers of Jamestown (not in the first wave), and he is the plaintiff in litigation over religious issues in the early Virginia records. Two of his descendants (evidently named, Charles and Robert -- common names in that family) left Virginia to "go West," splitting up at the Mississippi, with one brother going south to found Paulette, Mississippi and the other brother going into Kansas to found the family out of which Grace was born. The only relevance to this whole issue was that Grace was always amused by all this background, since her mother had always laughed at ancestor worship but had often been wounded by a feeling in her family that she had, in marrying Robert Paulette, married "beneath herself," and Jessie would have been very happy to throw her husband's 'superior' ancestry back at her family.

Most of Grace's education was in Salinas, Kansas, up through high school. She went to two years of college at Kansas University, and all her life regretted not finishing her college education. She met her husband, Donald Vincent McClure (born in Coffeyville, Kansas, on June 9, 1916) when both were working in the same office in St. Louis, Missouri. "Don dated all the girls in the office until he got around to me -- and we used to laugh about that." They married in October 1941. He was Roman Catholic, she was Episcopalian [which Grace called non-papist Catholicism], but as part of the marriage process, she "converted" to Roman Catholicism. All her life, the issues that divided what she called the two branches of Catholicism were of far more crucial importance to her than to her husband, who himself was a devout Catholic but doctrinally uninvolved.

Their first child, Stephen James, was born on September 25, 1942, before Don joined the army and went over to the European theater of World War II 9he spoke German for some reason and ended up in Third Army Intelligence capturing and questioning German snipers left behind as Patton swept through], which occurred within about the year after Stephen was born. Grace spent the war years living with her mother and her son in Farmington, Minnesota, to which Jessie had returned after her husband's death. Grace worked in the family general store.

After the war, Grace and Don returned to St. Louis where Don became a government law enforcement employee for Treasury, but through an interagency task-force working against organized crime in St. Louis, decided that tax enforcement was the way to fight such organized crime, and he joined the Internal Revenue Service in its "Intelligence Division" [Today the buzzword is not "intelligence" as it was after the Second World War, but "criminal investigation," the current name of that part of IRS]. He always told his children that it was his job to "catch cheaters." While in St. Louis, hey had four more children, from February, 1947 (Paul Kenneth), April, 1950 (Mary Sharon), February 1952 (John Douglas) and, then in Washington, D.C., in November, 1954 (Gregor Thomas). In 1953, Don was transferred to IRS central office positions as head of Program and Policy of the Intelligence Division.

In 1957, Grace became a real estate agent and eventually a real estate broker with her own company in Northern Virginia. When Don died of leukemia in November 1960, she was left to raise the four younger children alone (Stephen had already gone off to school and his own career). After several years in Northern Virginia, she moved to the Maryland suburbs of DC where she worked either as a real estate broker or as an administrative supervisor for various companies. Don was the love of her life and she never remarried (although she had at least two other long term 'significant' relationships as they would be called in today's parlance). At age 81, she still wondered aloud whether "Don would be proud of what she had been able to do with her life."

In 1972.73, when her youngest was grown and out of the house, she sold everything and "retired" to Florida. After two years, she called her family and said "there are just so many bridge hands you can play," a surprising statement since she loved the game. She sold everything again and bought a mini-motor home and set off to see the country for a couple years while she decided what to do when she grew up. She stayed on the road for 16 to 17 years, eventually trading in her mini-motor home for a van and trailer "because she was tired of taking her house to the grocery store." She owned no property during this time, and only had mail drops {mostly in California] as she ranged the West from Baja California to the Arctic Circle. Eventually, she parked her trailer in Tucson, Arizona (which she called the best little city in the Southwest) and travelled in her van throughout the Southwest. Then she bought a home in Tucson and finally settled down. [Her oldest son now lives in that home.]

It was while she was on the road that she learned, through the National Park Service while in Colorado, of the Bassett women, particularly Josie Bassett, and of Brown's Park, Colorado. Josie's cabin preserved in Dinosaur National Park [?] sparked her mind. She researched all she could about the Bassett family and wrote The Bassett Women, and was proud to have a university press think enough of the book to publish it.

During her research on the Bassett family and through her interviews with surviving family members, she learned the story of Juan Jose Herrera [known as "Mexican Joe" in her book on the Bassett family], tangentially related to the Bassetts, Brown's Park, South Pass, and Las Vegas New Mexico where Herrera became known to history in general as one of the leaders (with his brothers) of "Las Gorras Blancas" who were trying to preserve traditional middle class Hispanic political and property rights in Miguel County, New Mexico -- a process that not only involved night riding but a shootout in the streets of Las Vegas and a case in the United States Supreme Court on these rights. She was in the process of assembling material to write a book about Herrera when she died, in Tucson on May 22, 2001.

Grace was intellectually alive and mentally supple until the month of her death. For instance, in the last year of her life, at age 81, she read Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond and spent a long time exploring all the changes in her own intellectual landscape that the ideas in that book required her to make. She was someone who could always think ideas through and understand their implications for long held beliefs, some of which the challenge of new ideas made explicit rather than hidden within her past. Thought, science, data, information, reason -- these were the stars in her world. She never lost her understanding of deep spiritual matters, and her ability to pose and face intellectual challenges turned her into a much less doctrinally certain of any formulas over which human beings seemed so eager to struggle.

In the end, it was politics and history, not religion or spirituality, that got her intellectual juices flowing. As she realized that she was near death's door in the Spring of 2001, her big regret was that she would not see the Democrats regain the Presidency.

Always a challenging woman, she was worth knowing.