Lonnell Elaine Weaver Busbee

Lonnell Elaine Weaver Busbee of Collierville, TN, died in Cordova, TN, on January 6, 2014 after a long illness, but more importantly, following a long, full life.She graduated from Onondaga Academy in 1938 and Syracuse University Normal School in 1941. Following graduation from Normal School, she taught school (1940 through 1942) at Taylor Number 7, a one-room schoolhouse in rural Cincinnatus, NY. She taught 14 students, grades one thru twelve in a small building heated only by a wood stove that she had to light and maintain daily as part of her daily responsibilities. She recalled welcoming spring when the day’s recess included a game of baseball using “cow patties” from the adjacent field, noting the “importance of using seasoned, not fresh ones for purposes of running the bases.”

The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, she backed up her 1936 Chevy to enable her students to hear FDR’s radio broadcast. They didn’t know where Japan was and like many children they didn’t understand what entering a war meant. When asked if she wasn’t concerned about the resultant car exhaust going into the classroom, she said it was most important that they heard the President “and a little smoke wouldn’t hurt ‘em.” She also served as District Ration Book Administrator for the area, an “other duties as assigned” responsibility that went along the singular schoolteacher.

During WWII, in the absence of any male family members, Lonnell chose to serve in the W.A.V.E.S. She attended boot camp in Manhattan, NY, and then trained for six months in Newport, Rhode Island, which she described as the coldest place she’d ever been. When asked where she wanted to serve her country, Lonnell responded “the-as-yet-not-a-state Alaska”. In their infinite wisdom, the Navy sent her to that other not-yet-a-state, Hawaii. It was there while working the nightshift at the Navy hospital in Pearl Harbor, that she met a jitterbugging, cocky young sailor. They married in 1949 in Key West, FL, following a two-day bus trip from Syracuse, NY with her mother, during which Lonnell expressed her own civil disobedience by consistently drinking from the “colored” water fountains on the bus route south of the Mason-Dixon.

In the early 1970s, having invested more than 20 years as a stay at home mother, Lonnell returned to the workforce, retraining as a nurse in a class where she was 30 years older than her classmates. Having completed her nursing degree, she worked at Arlington Developmental Center in the 1970s and at Whitehaven Care Center in the 1980s and retired in 1982.