William H. Underwood

Bill Underwood of Denver, Colorado, died of congestive heart failure on August 7, 2016 at the age of 91. He had achieved his goal of living past 90, unlike his two siblings, who both died at 89. Although he spent much of his life as a civilian employee of the armed forces, his true life centered around his love of drama, classical music, and history, and his late-developing but abiding love for his wife and her descendents. Outside of work, he was involved for much of his life in amateur theatrics, primarily as an actor, and also volunteered as a radio announcer of classical music. His rich, beautifully modulated voice served him well in both these activities, as well as for another favorite pastime, reading aloud. He read to his family all his life, and in his old age read to fellow residents of his assisted living center. Marrying late, at just shy of age 50, he was passionately devoted to his wife and to her children and grandchildren from a former marriage. In his last days, he was delighted to learn that he would soon be a great-grandfather.

Bill was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, on Feb. 23, 1925, and named William Henry Underwood Jr., after his father. His mother was Lois Underwood, born Dorothy Lois Phillips. He was their third and last child, after his brother, Richard Gwin Underwood (born Aug. 31, 1919 and later married to Virginia L. Hunt), and his sister, Mary Sue Underwood (born Mar 22, 1921 and later married to Andrew McDaniels). He and his family lived through very lean times during the Great Depression. After his family moved to Chickasha, Bill attended Chickasha High School. A passionate but discriminating reader from early on, he had a special interest in history; before graduating from high school, he proved to his astonished older brother that he had read every history book in Chickasha’s public library, which Richard tried to catch him out by testing him from the books at random.

The outbreak of World War II delayed his entry into college when, near the end of the war, he joined the U.S. Navy (he turned 18 in February 1943), serving in a construction battalion. He was stationed on Midway Island in the North Pacific toward the end of the war (well after the 1942 Battle of Midway), where, apparently he had a run-in with a tank. While driving in a fire truck, he ran into a U.S. tank; naturally, the fire truck didn't fare well in the encounter.

After the war, in 1946, he enrolled in the University of Oklahoma (OU), with a major in history, but transferred to Oklahoma City University (OCU), in fall 1946. After taking a year off between 1949 and 1950, he graduated on August 22, 1950, earning a B.A. in history with a minor in government. Apparently he had wanted to be a history teacher, but changed his mind. While at OCU, he was a member of Pi Gamma Mu, an international honor society in the social sciences, and of the student senate, and also belonged to the International Relations Club. He demonstrated his lifelong love of drama by taking a class in Shakespearean interpretation. He returned to OU as a graduate student for a single semester in spring 1952. During the early 1950s, he often took roles in plays put on by an Oklahoma City community theater group, the Mayde Mack Mummers.

He was recalled into the Navy during the Korean War, serving as a boatswain’s mate, third class, on a supply ship, the USS Comstack, cruising in Japanese and Korean waters. He served his term but didn't reenlist when it was over, saying he didn't mind serving but he didn't believe that South Korea was capable of winning, so he wouldn't continue to serve for no purpose.1

According to his nephew Darrell McDaniels, Bill tried to reenlist at the beginning of the Vietnam War but was turned down as too old.

Beginning in the 1950s, Bill worked as a civilian supply specialist for the U.S. Air Force at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City. He had about eighteen years in when he was transferred to McClellan Air Force Base northeast of Sacramento, California, in about 1972–73.

While there, he looked up Joyce (Hunt) MacFarlane (sister of Virginia Lee Hunt, his brother’s wife), who was living in San Diego at the time, and they fell in love, marrying on November 28, 1974, in Sacramento, California. Bill, formerly a lifelong bachelor, was three months’ shy of fifty when they married; Joyce just barely forty-nine. She had two daughters, Ann and Sarah, from a former marriage, and one grandson, Juan, who was Ann’s son. (Sarah later had a daughter, Lindsey.) Joyce described this courtship and wedding in a letter to her sister, Virginia, written on Jan. 26, 1975:

Bill and I agree—our getting married was the great event of 1974. I’m sure we were as amazed as anyone else, especially about never having seen one another in any other light than as just friends. Not the faintest ray of any other notion, and then daylight. It was hard to believe after 28 years. Late bloomers. Being relatively used to it at this point, we still find ourselves lapsing into delicious recollection and breaking into gleeful giggles. As for our basic attitudes, they are in many ways similar. Radicals are pretty much looking for the same thing whether they are headed right or left. That isn’t to say we don’t hassle, but as Bill explains it, our hearts are good. Don’t you think that is a winning way of putting it?

. . . We had a neat wedding—in the minister’s study. Clara Engeseth [a maternal cousin of Bill’s] was Bill’s best man (that’s what she said) and Sarah was witness from my side of the family. We wanted Ana and Juan too, but we couldn’t get them plane reservations. Sarah said she wanted to make sure she got to this wedding since she missed my first one. I suddenly got very talkative just before we got underway—I couldn’t stop myself; I really tried. We were lined up and ready and I was telling Webb (the minister) about Sarah’s wanting to be sure she got to this wedding, etc., when Bill finally come to my rescue with a “Hush, Joyce,” and the thing began. The ceremony, in the current custom, was something we put together from a number of ceremonies plus an original word or two from ourselves. The minister assumed we were forgetting our lines every time we paused to let our words register, and pressed us along with prompting. Our wedding was cutting into his Thanksgiving so he wasn’t as into it as we were. We took some movies before and after, which are not great. Then we went to San Francisco for our wedding trip. I suppose it was the company and the occasion which opened my eyes but for the first time, I understood why everyone is so enthusiastic about that city. We have been back since, and it continues to shine.

Bill retired about 1975, having got his twenty years in, but then, on October 28, 1977, he took on a two-year contract to work for Bell Helicopter International in Iran as a systems analyst in the Army Aviation supply system. In a letter (dated 29 September 1977), he wrote to Virginia Underwood about this decision. "I enjoyed retiring early, and I have enjoyed retirement and I have never regretted it,” he wrote. “Joyce has been very sweet about it but nevertheless it hurts me to see her still holding down a demanding job every day while I enjoy reading, acting, etc. So I have accepted this job primarily for the money I hope to save from it, so that Joyce might be in a position to retire earlier. Bell has a contract with Iran and my job will be as a systems analyst in the Army Aviation supply system; I was hired because of my Air Force experience." Again according to Darrell McDaniels, Bill didn't complete this job because of the revolution in Iran. Apparently he left after about thirteen months, claiming he did so two days before the Shah of Iran fled the country. Sadly, this meant that the good money he had earned, which if he had completed his contract would have been exempt from taxes, was taxed after all, so he did not earn as much as he had hoped.

Bill and Joyce had many good years together. In November 1980, after Joyce’s retirement, they moved from Sacramento, California, to Asheville, North Carolina, where Bill in particular took part in several community activities, joining the Friends of the Ashville-Buncombe Library System and the Chamber Music Society of Asheville, volunteering as a DJ for a classical music program on a local radio station, and acting in many local theater productions for various theatre groups, including the Montford Park Players, the New Arts Theater, the Asheville Repertory Company, and the Smokey Mountain Repertory Theater. Bill took on many lead roles, earning good reviews and occasionally performing with family members, as when he and his granddaughter, Lindsey MacFarlane, performed together in Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” in 1983, and when he and Joyce performed together in Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame” in 1984. When Joyce’s daughter Sarah moved with her family to Colorado Springs, Colorado, Bill and Joyce relocated to be near them.

After several good years in their new location, however, the family suffered a series of tragedies. In May 2000, Joyce’s grandson Juan, Ann’s son, died from a fall from a ladder while painting a friend’s house in Juneau, Alaska. Joyce began suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. Then in early fall 2007, Sarah died unexpectedly of heart failure. The next year, in May 2008, Ann died of complications from brain cancer in Colorado Springs. Finally, in January 2013, Bill lost his beloved Joyce to complications from Alzheimer’s after thirty-eight years of marriage. In the face of these tragedies, Bill and Lindsey were a comfort to each other, aided by Joyce’s nephew Stuart Hunt and his wife, who also lived in Colorado Springs and gave invaluable help. After Lindsey moved to Denver, Bill moved to a nearby assisted living facility, and was delighted to walk Lindsey down the aisle when she married her longtime partner, Michael Arenas.