Louise Norton Compher

A memorial service will be held Sunday, August 22nd at 4pm at Forest Hills Presbyterian Church, 709 W. Linebaugh Ave, Tampa, FL 33612.

In lieu of flowers, please make a donation in Louise's memory to Abe Brown Ministries. http://www.abebrown.org/donate

On Monday, Mother became alert and responsive as we talked with her and I introduced her to a very maternal, gracious hospice chaplain of Afro-Caribbean descent, who began to sing to her the old hymn, “Count Your Blessings”. As the chaplain completed a couple of phrases and then paused, Mother continued on her own with the sacred lyrics:

“Count your many blessings, name them one by one…and it will surprise you what the Lord has done.”

As with anyone else, in life Mother had plenty of challenges. It was not easy being raised as an only child and experiencing with her family the economic distress of the Great Depression. Nor was it easy being the mother of 5 boisterous sons, while serving actively in the traditional role of minister’s wife and moving as a family 4 times to new and different locations, cultures and expectations - from the mountains of Virginia, to East Tennessee, then to Richmond, and finally to Florida.

Yet beyond these and other stressors, Mother experienced and continually expressed much joy and gratitude…she lived with great faith and counted her blessings often …

In her birthplace of Petersburg, VA, she enjoyed her cousins, Dorothy, Margaret, and Audrey, who were like sisters. She completed high school there and moved with her parents to nearby Richmond, VA, where her father set up Planters peanut franchises. She went away to Blackstone Jr. College; and following completion of her associate degree, she attended secretarial school. Shortly thereafter, she was hired by Travelers Insurance and loved being a working young adult for three years, typing, taking shorthand, and learning to open basic insurance policies for new clients.

For fun in the evenings, she took tap dancing lessons, which was the rage of those times. On weekends she often put on her jodhpurs and enjoyed horseback riding in the country with her girlfriends.

Central to her many blessings from a very early age was her active engagement in the Presbyterian Church. Indeed, she was something of a child prodigy, memorizing and reciting the Children’s Catechism at the age of 4 ½ years and appearing in church magazines. (Needless to say, some of us boys, Keen and I in particular, were drilled in the same catechism, but not so early.) On this past Monday, as she rallied, I asked her if she still remembered the first few questions of the catechism, which she then recited for me.

I asked her, “Who made you?” “God, “she answered. ”What else did God make?”… “God made all things,” she continued. And question #3, “Why did God make you and all things?” “For his own Glory.”

Not surprisingly, Mother met her husband, Marvin, at a gathering of young adults in her family’s Westminster Presbyterian Church in Richmond. As the family legend goes, they both stayed after a Sunday evening program to clean up the kitchen and wash the dishes. By the way, brother Steve acted out this scene humorously as a clown at her 100th birthday celebration 5 years ago, finishing this scene with Dad’s favorite love song, “Let me call you sweetheart.” Dad used to say that since first meeting our Mother in the dishpan, he had been in hot water ever since. Mother would laugh heartily to that and continue the story by saying that Dad walked her home that evening. And as we know “the rest became history” and 5 sons were born over a 14-year period: first Keen, then Vic, Bill, Steve and Danny, whom we all recognize as a key reason for her reaching the age of 105.

Mother loved having 5 sons – or so she said! Even when women in one of their churches were wishing for at least one Compher daughter and wept at the announcement of yet another son, Mother replied that that was ridiculous. She insisted that she’d always asked the Lord for 5 sons, and that’s what he had blessed her with.

Mother accepted her role to be a traditional “minister’s wife”, as a kind of “calling”, often hosting guests and members of the churches in our home, leading women’s circles, conducting Bible classes and teaching Sunday School. She believed that children learned best and that you held their attention best through visual stories. She enjoyed creating flannel-backed figures and then moving them around on felt board, as she narrated Biblical stories. Sometimes she would practice these simple presentations with us boys at home – although mostly she and Dad enjoyed reading stories to us.

Mother and Dad loved traveling; they thoroughly enjoyed spending time with their adult sons; 5 grandchildren, Heather, Kevin, Amanda, Cedar, and Sarah and daughters-in-law, Judie, Charlene, Cindy, and Leslie; and her 2 great grandchildren, Coen and Skye Louise (named after her). Indeed, they traveled so frequently on economy fares to Washington state, Texas, Colorado, and Pennsylvania, that we thought they would put Delta Airlines out of business.

They were both very open to many cultures and to people of all races; they enjoyed teaching opportunities in Brazil, spent 8 summers in England doing pastoral exchanges and made many friends there. Mother had a supporting and leadership role in all these adventures, as they led several guided tours to the Holy Land, to Egypt, and to Europe. Indeed, Mother’s (and Dad’s)

openness to new places, new people, other countries and cultures made a profound impression on all of us.

Florida was an early vacation destination. As a 4-year-old in 1949 during the family’s first trip to Florida, I remember Mother’s wonderment at the pastel colored houses, the Spanish moss, the magnificent flowers, the canopied live oaks. They were thrilled to have a “call” to Forest Hills Presbyterian Church in 1965, and loved their time of joint ministry there.

She counted all of these experiences and people as blessings. And so, I think she would want this occasion today to be one in which we count our blessings with her. We were blessed by her creativity, adventurous spirit, her deep spirituality, and her people skills. We celebrate her life well-lived today and will keep her in our memory for years to come.

May we all give thanks and celebrate her Presence, her Life and her Being. And may we keep her with us in our memory.