INDEPENDENCE TWP. — As B. Louise Boddie Dawson faded in a bedroom of her home, she couldn’t speak about the experiences she’s had these last 99 years.
She had recently taken a turn for the worst, and her family was preparing for her death. One of her three daughters, Felicia Dawson-Batcha, and her family were there, husband Mark and their daughter Kimberly.
For the last 10 months, Felicia’s been her mother’s caregiver as a stream of home health nurses and others from the Department of Veterans Affairs come and go and phone calls come in to arrange for various needs.
A man was cutting the grass outside Friday while Felicia bustled about, sharing family pictures and mementos of a life well lived, one that included military service of both Felicia’s mother and her father, retired Army Lt. Col. Emmett C. Dawson Jr., who died Aug. 27, 1995.
Until recently, B. Louise Boddie Dawson would have been able to share her story. Her condition didn’t allow her to do so Friday, but her daughter shared a trove of documents, certificates, pictures, college transcripts, writing assignments and other materials that fill much of the Dawson home on a property in what was once known as Murdocksville, which is now at the borders of Independence, Findlay and Robinson townships.
The small house sits in Independence Township, and the larger farmhouse, where Emmett C. Dawson Jr. was raised from the age of 12, is in Robinson Township (Westmoreland County).
“I feel very privileged and honored that I’m able to do this,” Felicia said. “I look at it this way: It’s the circle of life.”
The life and times of B. Louise Boddie
During her mom’s decline, Felicia has learned more than she ever could have imagined about her family as she unearths boxes upon boxes of items: a certification of military service for her mom, then B. Louise Boddie, noting her service from July 20, 1944, through May 10, 1946, during which time she achieved the rank of second lieutenant.
Before these last 10 months, Felicia knew some of her family’s history, but not as much as she knows now that she’s been able to go through so many mementos.
“People of that generation didn’t talk very much (about what they did),” Felicia said.
Her mother was born March 28, 1919, in Fort Valley, Ga.
B. Louise Boddie’s father died four months before her birth, she wrote in a paper she completed for a writing class she took at Howard University after her war service. Louise’s mother was ill from two months before her birth until six months afterward, so the baby was given to her maternal aunt, Louise wrote.
Those beginnings, and the events of the rest of her childhood, left her with a feeling that she was “the unhappiest person in the world,” she wrote in the college composition, titled “My Early Life.”
“My aunt died of pneumonia when I was 8 years old. I believe this is when my unhappiness really began,” she wrote. “It was at this time that my sister and her husband took me.”
She grew into an adult in River Rouge, Mich., and was raised in “economic security,” she wrote.
“I believe they thought this to be the important factor in a child’s life. There are a large number of people who are victims of such opinions,” she wrote. “Subsequently, it is believed that the most important things for a child as well as an adult are the emotional needs. The emotional needs are love, devotion and understanding.”
Those are traits she bestowed to her daughters, Felicia said.
Louise’s experiences left her with an inferiority complex she didn’t overcome until she passed her nursing certification after graduating in 1943 from Freedman Hospital Nursing School in Washington, D.C.
“The first thing that made me realize that I was not abnormal or maladjusted was the report of the state board examination for nurses in the District of Columbia,” she wrote.
About 500 nurses took the test, and about 100 failed it, she said.
“I concluded that since I was one of the 400 nurses who passed the board, then I must fall in the class of the normals instead of abnormals. From that day until now, I have never felt inferior nor superior to anyone,” the paper concludes.
Her mother kept all of the papers she wrote for that class, which she took simply to fill her time in the 1940s after her war service.
B. Louise Boddie served in the Army as a nurse at Camp Papago Park, a German prisoner-of-war camp near Phoenix, Ariz., and Camp Beale, Calif., where she was a neuropsychiatric nurse.
She enlisted on a whim when a recruiter visited a hospital, she told her daughter.
For her service, she received the American Campaign Medal and the World War II Victory Medal.
The story of Emmett C. Dawson Jr.
When he died, retired Army Lt. Col. Emmett C. Dawson Jr. wasn’t afforded the military honor guard that should have been afforded a man of his service, his daughter Felicia said. Through some oversight or another, it wasn’t a part of his funeral.
That won’t be the case when B. Louise Boddie Dawson enters eternal rest. Thanks to longtime veterans advocate Jerry Fisher, of Brighton Township, and members of the Beaver County Special Unit, led by Carl Hughes of Hopewell Township, she will be afforded the military honors she has earned when she dies.
“I think she’ll be happy,” Felicia said Friday.
She hopes other veterans don’t “slip through the cracks,” as her father did.
His career is as distinguished as his wife’s. According to a remembrance written by a neighbor, Gorman Armstrong, who died in 2003, Dawson spent his early life in Carnegie, then his teen years in Murdocksville before graduating in 1930 from Findlay High School.
“This is to honor our neighbor and friend. This gentle man lived among us and was always quick to pass along a good word,” Armstrong wrote.
Dawson was the grandson of a slave, and his parents were “in service” to the Bell family, whose large farm encompassed much of the area at the intersection of Allegheny, Beaver and Washington counties that’s now occupied by Pittsburgh International Airport and surrounding areas.
“Many of us remember with pleasure visiting the elder Dawsons in their restaurant on Route 30 beyond Raccoon Park,” Armstrong wrote.
They used “super secret” processes that transformed chicken sandwiches into “gastronomic experiences,” he wrote.
Felicia showed pictures of the roaster chickens the Dawsons raised and how the area looked during snowy winters and nice summers, when it was rolling farmland and not an area in the midst of pipeline work and drilling rigs, as it is now.
Her dad went on to what was then called Penn State College and graduated in 1934 with a bachelor’s degree in agricultural education. He also participated in the ROTC program at Penn State but was denied a commission because he was black.
After graduating, he came home, raised chickens and worked various other jobs until World War II broke out. In 1942, he was called to service in the Army and went to officer’s training school in Iowa. In 1943, he became a second lieutenant, and his first assignment was to Arizona — where he first laid eyes upon Louise Boddie, according to Armstrong’s account.
“She had just finished a tennis match and was rushing into the barracks. She ran into him in her haste. Later that day, Louise was introduced to Captain Dawson,” Armstrong wote.
They met again in 1948, in Washington.
“Emmett had become a gentleman farmer and Louise was working at Freedman’s Hospital doing research into tuberculosis,” the story, as recorded by Armstrong, relates.
It was Louise who popped the question, and they were married Sept. 3, 1949, at the Dawson homestead in Murdocksville. They lived in Sewickley, and Louise was a nurse at the hospital there until the Korean War started. Norma, their eldest daughter, was born in 1950.
Emmett was called back into service and was stationed at Augsburg, Germany, where he commanded a transportation company. His wife and daughter joined him in Germany by 1952, and on Dec. 7 of that year twins Felicia and Frances were born.
They lived in various locales as she grew up, Felicia said. Among them: Fort Eustas, Va.; Yokahama and Okinawa, Japan; Fort Knox, Ky.; Stuttgart, Germany; and Washington, D.C., Felicia said.
During that time, her father also served in Korea while the family remained in the U.S. He retired in 1971 after earning the rank of lieutenant colonel and was awarded the Army Commendation Medal for his service.
Her parents retired to Murdocksville, Felicia said, where both were active members of Hebron Presbyterian Church.
They made the best of life
There’s more to the story, of course, as both Emmett and Louise led lives best described as extraordinary.
Back “home” in western Pennsylvania in the 1970s, Louise, who also worked as head nurse at the former Dixmont State Hospital in Sewickley, went back to college to study psychology, Felicia said.
But during the winter of 1976, she was involved in a horrific crash involving a drunken driver that left her facing injuries she still endures, Felicia said.
That halted her formal continuing education for a while, but she ultimately earned another degree, a bachelor of arts in psychology, from Carlow College in 1986 when she was 67.
She also volunteered with the American Red Cross and otherwise kept busy, Felicia said.
The Dawson girls, now women, are also successful: Norma’s a lawyer, Frances is a nurse and Felicia has achieved renown in medical research: She’s discovered new antibodies in the blood and worked with Dr. Thomas Starzl in his pioneering transplant surgeries. She’s now a substitute teacher in Houston.
“My parents taught us their work ethic,” she said. “My mom is a pretty remarkable person. We were always told, you never fail until you quit. I’m pretty proud of them. They made the best of their situation.”