Phyllis Jean Tracy (1930–1998)
Single Mother for Nine Years
Phyllis Jean Tracy is your great-grandmother. She was the older daughter of Hanford Wesley Tracy, the ice-plant engineer who came down from St. Martins, New Brunswick, and Florence Gladys McDonough, who had crossed the same Bay of Fundy path as a little girl and grown up in Providence. Family records say Phyllis was born in Providence on May 1, 1930, not long after her parents married. Social Security later recorded that same birthday under the name she carried at the end of her life: Phyllis T. Gordon.A Cranston GirlhoodBy the mid-1930s the Tracys had settled in Cranston, Rhode Island, where Hanford rose to chief engineer at the Bowen Ice Plant and Florence kept the household steady through the Depression and the war years. Phyllis grew up on that Cranston street. In 1936 a younger sister, Maitland, arrived—born in Massachusetts, named for an aunt, and brought home to the same household. She went to Cranston High School. One of her teachers there was Gerald “Jerry” Gordon, who taught business classes, and that’s where she first knew him. Family records still place Phyllis unmarried and living with her parents as late as 1950. By 1963 her marriage papers would list her as a clerk, but we don’t yet know where she worked or what jobs she had before that. That chapter is still mostly blank, waiting for a directory or a story someone remembers.Marriage, Divorce, and a Second StartSometime after 1950 she married Carl Theodore Hansen, Jr., the Missouri flyer who would one day retire as a Lieutenant Colonel. They had a daughter. The marriage did not last. Phyllis and Carl separated not long after their daughter was born, and when they were divorced on December 13, 1956, in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia, the court was only making official what had already happened. From then on Phyllis raised her little girl on her own, for about nine years, until she married again in 1963. Carl’s story—Navy, Air Force, Air National Guard, helicopters over Seneca—belongs on his own page. What belongs here is simpler and harder: Phyllis was still in her twenties when that chapter closed, and she started again.Her father, Hanford, died in August 1962. On February 7, 1963, she and Gerald H. Gordon, the same Jerry Gordon who had been her business teacher at Cranston High, took out their marriage license. On it she is Phyllis Jean Hansen, a clerk living in Cranston, and it was the second marriage for both of them. On February 18, 1963, they were married in Cranston, and one of the two witnesses who signed was probably her sister, Maitland. They weren’t married by a minister or a rabbi but by a judge: the spot on the license where the officiant’s religious denomination goes appears to read “Associate Justice.” Phyllis was Christian and Jerry was Jewish, so a civil ceremony was most likely the easy, sensible choice, one that belonged to both of them equally. Jerry was born October 30, 1912, nearly eighteen years before she was, and after the marriage she took the name Gordon. Her daughter was about nine then, and Jerry was a father to her from that age into adulthood. His children from his first marriage became an important part of our family too. Phyllis and Jerry were married for more than twenty years. Social Security places both of them in Warwick, Rhode Island, at the ends of their lives. Gerald died on October 7, 1987. Phyllis’s mother, Florence, died in Warwick on February 19, 1995. Phyllis’s last home was still Warwick, but on February 12, 1998, while she was visiting her daughter and me in Newton, Massachusetts, she died at sixty-seven. Family records place her burial at Pawtuxet Memorial Park in Warwick, on Harrison Avenue, in the same family lot where Hanford and Florence rest.
Phyllis and Jerry’s Rhode Island marriage license, issued February 7, 1963; they were married in Cranston on February 18, 1963. Certified copy, family papers.
From 1963 on she was Phyllis Gordon, and that’s the name in her Social Security record: Phyllis T. Gordon. Our family tree lists every wife under the name she was born with, so on the tree she’s Phyllis Jean Tracy.