by Robert Amedee L’Ecuyer

People I Admire 

 There were a lot of people I admired because I was involved in public life. There were always people doing good things that I liked. The opposite is true, too, there were people I learned not to trust. 

With Bob Stump, I trusted his instincts. That went all the way back to my early twenties when I met him. Stump was very personable and he knew how to converse. He wasn’t a laughing guy. He had a sense of humor but that wasn’t why people wanted to be around him. He was a serious man and worked his way up in everything he got into. 

His dad had been a member of the legislature, and his uncle was a doctor in Sun City. Stump thought about becoming a doctor himself, but followed his dad instead. He was a member of the minority party, the Democrats, in the Arizona State House of Representatives. He worked his way up into leadership in the House. Then he was elected to the Arizona Senate, and he worked his way up to President of the Senate, too. Then he ran for Congress and won, and I watched him work his way up to become a member of the powerful Armed Services Committee in the US House. 

By that time he’d changed parties, and I did too. He knew how to get people together. He was among the most conservative of all the members of the US House, but he figured out how to work with Mo Udall. Stump and Udall worked together, and then they both branched out to work with others. Even when Stump was a Democrat, he was working with Barry Goldwater and Paul Fannin. It was a different kind of politics than it is today. They didn’t exclude each other like they do now. 

Obviously Stump was interested in agriculture but he was conservative so he was not trying to make the government more powerful. He developed influence around commerce, and in a way he did make it more powerful by promoting private enterprise. Farms are private enterprises, so they got interested in government and politics because it was about land use, water management, and property rights. 

Different kinds of agriculture happened in different parts of the state. Cotton, wheat, cattle, and horses. Horses were a big deal because they were still used for farm work back then. They had big families and hired lots of  people. That’s all changed now too. Now it’s a tractor and big powerful machines. 

Stump did have a blindspot, though. He had grown up with a family prejudice against Black people. He didn’t trust them, and it was so deep and irrational that it just wasn’t something he could do. If you worked with him you knew about it, and you found ways to work around it. Later, it did become difficult for him to deal effectively in the US House because Black members had grown in stature in the Democratic Party. 

It was just easier for him to become a Republican. He saw more opportunity there, and he could avoid the discomfort of dealing with his Black colleagues directly. His bias didn’t apply equally. He worked with a Chinese gentleman that got elected to the Senate. He had worked with and for Mexicans throughout his career, and pushed opportunities to them because of it. His bias was just about African American, and not necessarily others. 

I learned from Bob Stump that the further up you went in leadership, the more you had to listen and adjust to the various other opinions. He didn’t always succeed. When you were lower down the line, you didn’t know as much or have to adjust your view as much. You could hold strong, unpopular opinions and it didn’t matter because nobody cared that much. 

I saw it in Kyrsten Sinema. She was  quite liberal in the beginning but her attitude adjusted in the Senate. Those politics have changed so who knows if she will be rewarded for it. I am noticing that those who are dominating now are either far right or far left. That doesn’t necessarily come with a majority or a mandate.

The idea that you look for opportunities to do something for anybody you have contact with, that’s an idea that is encouraged in my church. One of my patrons was Stan Turley who was Speaker of the House and President of the Senate, and there are lots of other LDS members in Arizona politics. Stan looked after me. I received invitations to political events through him and became one of his confidantes. He had plenty of people to talk with but he chose me.

It was an unusual choice. I had been an extremely active Democrat, and of course he was one of the principal Republicans in the state. So why would he trust me? Maybe because I was not rigid in my politics. Most members of each party were suspicious of anyone not in their party, for obvious reasons. 

When I was a Democrat in a key position, I did  things to help Republicans and that was unusual. When I became a Republican I occasionally did something to help a Democrat and that was even more unusual. I think he looks at me in a different way. The fact that he did anything for me was just special. 

When I knew I wanted to ask Claudelle to marry me, I was not a member of the LDS church. I went to Stan Turley and asked him if I was to marry an LDS woman, what did I need to know? He said, “I can’t answer you now but let’s go to lunch next week.” We went to lunch in downtown Phoenix and when I arrived he handed me a brown paper package. Inside it was a leather bound Book of Mormon with my name printed in gold. He said, “The answer to your question is in that book.” So that was part of my introduction, I read the Book of Mormon. 

The truth is, I was going to marry Claudelle anyway and it was some years before I became a Mormon. I was technically a practicing Catholic but I didn’t practice all that often. At the beginning of our marriage we thought we could exchange, go to Mormon church one Sunday and Catholic the next. But she wasn’t too comfortable and it led to us becoming inactive. 

After we’d been married sometime, I realized she needed to go back to church. We made a deal that I would go to the sacrament meeting if she would go back to church. Kim found out and started to go with us too. They went for the full three hours and I  just went for one hour, at the beginning. 

The next month I heard that one of the other hours was going to be devoted to genealogy. I had an interest but I wasn’t deeply involved at that time. I had a bunch of information from Finamore on my mom’s side and I was intrigued enough to go further. 

Marcia Allen and Maria Hoops conducted the meeting and they were good at getting me more interested. They taught me how to research family history. In the beginning everything was on 3×5 cards over in the Mesa library. I searched through the cards to see what connections I could make. 

I started with the L’Ecuyer line. I knew my grandfather Amedee’s name but not his mother and father, Ferial and his wife was Matilda Drolet. That was a big jump because it gave me a connection to French Canadian history. Dad didn’t talk about them much and I had even lived in Canada for two years and didn’t know anything about it. 

My dad was five years old when his father died. His father was from a French-speaking family and his mother was from a German-speaking family. My grandmother didn’t establish a strong relationship with her husband’s family. When he died, they got even more distant. For instance, his Aunt Anna lived 12 miles from his hometown but he never visited. One time we were driving in the car, and my Dad pointed to a house and said, “That was my Aunt Anna house.” I was in high school and never knew he had an Aunt Anna. 

Years later I was contacted by one of her grandsons, a retired Air Force colonel, who was my second cousin. They were French in culture but he wasn’t exposed in the same way that Louella was. She was old enough that she knew her French Canadian family. Dad didn’t. So I found out that my ancestors were French-speaking pioneers in Quebec. 

Later on I went there with my cousin Jerry’s son John. He was practicing medicine in the Midwest so we met in the airport in St Louis and flew to Montreal. We met a third cousin who gave us a lot of information about our French Canadian history that went back to the 1600s in Quebec. He took us to see the graves of the whole family. We visited at least a dozen graveyards while we were there. 

I discovered that the information on the stones wasn’t always what was written on the 3×5 cards. You learn to test any information and not take it for granted. One time Claudelle and I found a member of her great grandfathers’ family that we didn’t know existed. There was a memorial in a graveyard in Wisconsin but he was actually buried in a Civil War battlefield in Tennessee. Visiting cemeteries was something new and that became something we did together. 

Having succeeded with my dad’s family I began to wonder about my mother’s. I knew a lot about my mother’s four sisters. Finamore (the second oldest) had done some family history and she gave me some information about the Shepherd family. Her father was Jack, and his given name was Albert Tilden Shepherd. Her mother was Bertie Atchison Shepherd. Mom was born in Lone Jack Missouri, but she was less than 10 years old when Jack died. 

Jack’s death certificate gives the cause of death as a disease but Aunt Pinky says he was killed on the operating table by a drunk doctor. That’s not in the record anywhere but Pinky was a teenager, old enough to hear the stories and know what was going on. The doctor lied on the death certificate but she found out what actually happened. 

The 3×5 cards eventually became a computer program, which keeps getting more sophisticated every year. The new capacity for research leads me to look for new things.  Working on my sister Mary’s husband Jerry (now passed) I found out his middle name, which was previously a secret! 

One of my principal interests is to see how I can expand the connections. It goes beyond immediate family and I go wherever the research can lead me. The history is in the US and Canada, and of course, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and Germany. We even have family members in Holland. I’ve learned a lot about Europe and how to do research in Portugal and Spain. 

My first reaction is to be interested. But I did come to realize things that affected me in my childhood that I just didn’t know about. Probably one of the most profound insights is about women and children. My grandmother was one of nine children. Women don’t have that many children anymore. Ingrid, Jackie’s daughter, married Ted Fogel and they decided not to have children. That was something within her control. If that had not been available, would they have married? They were the two top grads at UCLA. They both had plenty of opportunities. He worked for the California Attorney General his whole career and she had the freedom to do what she wanted to do. She’s 11 years younger than I am. I grew up in the end of a generation and she was in the next one, and that changed her life a lot. 

My dad had a second brother Leo, a talented musician who had a mental breakdown and died in a hospital in Topeka. Mental illness was not something that anybody talked about in those days. I’m sure by today’s standard he could be treated but that wasn’t so then. When my mother had the psychiatric collapse, my dad put her into the state hospital because that’s what happened to his brother. Should he have done that? I’ll wonder all my life. 

Aunt Finn’s first husband’s name was Ray Fisher and her second husband was Lawrence Long. Turned out that they hid their marriage and she used a false name on the marriage certificate, so that people wouldn’t find out. She was a teacher and married women weren’t allowed to teach. They never changed the marriage certificate, and she used Finamore Shepherd all her life. 

There are the stories that everybody knows and the ones you find out. It’s not always bad, they just don’t talk about it. Little details that you find out, and one thing leads to another. Every community of any size has a library and the genealogy section is always the most active part of the library. 

That leads me back to the people I admire. Across the 39 states we traveled, somebody would always take an interest in helping us research. Sometimes they would spend an entire afternoon working on our project. We didn’t know that when we started, and it gave us a sense of connection to people, the world, and its history. I love history, politics and culture so getting involved in that way was always fun. I appreciate and admire the people who still do that.