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PAUL GEORGE BODE
Contributed By BarbBode1 · 24 September 2014
TRANSCRIPT OF A TAPE MADE ON FEBRIARY 1, 1981
PAUL WAS BORN DECEMBER 14, 1919 WAS THE SON OF
DIETRICH ADAM AND CLARA BIXLER BODE
My name is Paul Bode. I am the son of Dietrich Adam and Clara Margaret Bixler Bode. I was born on the 14th of December 1919 in a snowdrift. I remember hearing said that the snow was so deep that Dr. Rothner delivered me at home rather than at the hospital.
Dad Bode and Rev. William Ohlrich, a mission house Seminary chum of my dad’s and uncle of Marjorie’s, married me to Marjorie Louise Wellman, New Knoxville, Ohio. I was married on the 18th of June 1944. In my marriage to Marjorie we had two sons, Mark Wellman who was born on 29th of June 1950, and Arthur Palfrey born on 12th of October 1953. At the present time son Mark is in Columbia, South Carolina, where he is home agent for the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company and Arthur is at Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he is getting his Ph.D. in clinical pathology.
Marjorie died of cancer, after a five and a half year illness on 20th November 1975. Arthur was there the night before she died and stayed with her all night. She died at 5 the next morning and it changed his mind about his career in Medicine. Instead of getting a regular MD, he will have a Ph.D. in clinical pathology and spend his life in fighting cancer.
I was married after a three-year hiatus to a wonderful gal from Mississippi, Ann Douglas Morrison, from Shelby. We were married in Pass Christian, Mississippi, in Trinity Episcopal Church on the 27th of December 1978. Ann has three children, Betsy who is now a clinical psychologist in Miami, Florida, Scott who is a freshman at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, and a wonderful little gal named Candy who is thirteen years old and she is living with us in Columbia, South Carolina.
I have spent practically my whole life in independent schools as a teacher, coach, guidance councilor, assistant headmaster and headmaster. I started teaching in McCauley School, Chattanooga, in 1941, and I was there on Pearl Harbor day. The day after, on Monday the 8th of December, 1941, I went downtown Chattanooga to Marine recruiting, tried to enlist in the Marines because at that time I was a weight lifting coach at McCauley School, I was also lifting in the Tennessee State Championship, and I thought the Marines needed me. But the Marine desk sergeant looked me over and even though I was very well built, he was 6’3”, weighed 250. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Son, you’ve got too much education. You’d better join the navy.” I spent 27 years in the Navy, four years in World War II in active service, the remaining in the reserve.
After the war, I went to the Hawaiian Islands to teach and they recognized the Naval Reserve at Pearl Harbor August of 1946. That’s when I shipped over and spent 27 years in active reserve, going on reserve cruises in the summer, taking correspondence courses and going to drills.
My first head mastership was in Houston, Texas and in order to became the headmaster, I had to become Episcopalian. So I left my father’s church, the old German Reformed, Evangelical-Reformed now the United Church of Christ, and became an Episcopalian and Ann and I both attend the Episcopal church here in Columbia, South Carolina, where I’ve been headmaster at an elementary school named Wildwood.
Now we had heard from my father and other people in the Bode family certain things and aspects and anecdotes about the Bode family and I’ve just written a few down that I know something about. I heard from my dad that when he did some research on the Bode-Fiehler family, he found there was an ancestor who went way back named Henry Fiehler and according to dad he ran with the barbarians against Rome and that had to be many, many years ago. And dad said we in the Bode--Fiehler family, Bixler, Lane and so on were always of pure German stock except there was one Hungarian who slipped in and dad decided not to investigate that branch of the family any further because he found out that this Hungarian spent a lot of time in the hoosegow. I heard from my dad that we had a Fiehler who served in the Spanish-American War and I think as a boy I heard some stories about a fight on San Juan Hill.
My first wife, Marjorie, attended Ohio State where one of her professors was a Dr. Boyd Bode and my dad, I know, went to visit Dr. Bode to see if there was any kind of relationship but my dad was not able to find any.
In my college and university work, I studied science and mathematics and I remember distinctly Bodes law in astronomy concerning the orbits of the planets. This goes back to the seventh century. So the Bodes are somewhat famous in the field of science.
It’s interesting that Ann and I now live in Columbia. South Carolina, where son Mark lives, where he is the manager of a home agency for Mass. Mutual. All of the Bodes in Columbia and there a lot of them, spell their name Bodie and Ann and Candy and I and Mark and Chris and our grandson Craig are the only Bodes who spell their name Bode.
I have wonderful memories of the Bodes. As a child when my dad and mother were at the orphanage in New York City, dad was a superintendent and mother was a matron. I used to be allowed to take the all-night coach from Penn Station to Pittsburgh and spend some wonderful weeks in the summer with my favorite uncle Fred. I’d get to see Dana and young Fred and Mary Ann and Miriam and the whole gang. I thoroughly enjoyed those times and sometime Dana and his dad and mother and the gang would come to the orphanage and uncle Fred would get up on the monkey bars and stand on his hands and walk across and we would all jump up and down and cheer.
I spent 40 years in prep schools. I had thought at one time I‘d become an industrial physicist and I was working on a Ph.D. but instead because of the war came along and I gave up my fellowship at the University of Virginia to join the navy. I did not continue after the war in physics but stayed on in independent schools and this is now my 40th year in independent schools. At the University of Virginia I was working on a very, very hush project. While I was taking my course for a Ph.D. in physics, we had a very special project going on. We had an ultra-speed centrifuge and we didn’t quit know what we were doing. We didn’t know until after the war that we were working on the atomic bomb. We were trying to separate the isotopes of uranium by ultra high-speed centrifuge. I was working in a room with superheated steam and was living on salt tablets and one evening I just passed out, spent two weeks in the infirmary of the University of Virginia. I had developed a kind of reaction to the salt and I became very, very weak. I remember distinctly the night after I got out, I went downtown Charlottesville and saw a movie called “This Above All.” this was a British propaganda film where the British were saying to the Yanks “Come on and join us. We need you.” So the next day I hitchhiked from Charlottesville to Richmond and got a commission in the navy, gave up my fellowship and never finished my doctorate in physics.
I took another Masters at Harvard in Secondary School Administration and spent my whole professional career, in independent schools, thoroughly enjoyed it coaching, teaching, being headmaster and just teaching children what life is all about and getting for the big, bad world out there.
For three years after I lost my wife, I was somewhat despondent, lost a couple of head masterships because I couldn’t keep my head on straight. I was down in Mississippi in Pass Christian where I was headmaster of two Episcopal schools and after a long time of living alone, I fell madly in love with a beautiful blond gal from a first-rate, top-drawer Mississippi family, Ann Douglas Morrison, and we have lived happily ever after. Betsy. and Scotty are not with us, Mark and Arthur are grown but candy is with us and she’s a wonderful little gal who is a leader, not the world’s greatest student, but a wonderful girl who has all kinds of friends. WE always have a house full of company either boys or girls or both.
I have done a lot of work in the Episcopal Church as a lay reader, vestryman, schoolteacher, choir member. Ann and I are very, very devoted to the Episcopal Church and as I had mentioned previously, we were married in Trinity Episcopal Church down in Pass Christian, a church that went way back into the nineteenth century, that was blown away during the hurricane Camille that almost destroyed Pass Christian. Many lives lost including the life of the rector’s wife but the church rebuilt and Ann and I were married in the new Trinity Episcopal Church in 1978, and we returned there this past Christmas and were there on New Year’s Day for service and all the poinsettias were still on the alter and the church looked just as it did two years ago when we were married and Candy was an acolyte and Mark was the best man and Betsy was the maid of honor. We have had a good life together.
I have had a wonderful life including all those marvelous years at the orphanage. Ann and I are thinking about our early retirement. It was recently in fact last week for the first time in my life I developed a little heart trouble, a little murmur, and a leaky valve. Ann and I are considering something in the near future returning to Mississippi and spending our golden years there. I am very proud to be a Bode, am so glad that Dana and Warren came to visit us so that we could put some of this down on tape and I wish Dana and Warren and all the others in developing this history of the Bode family and I hope to see all the Bodes soon and if you have a chance, come visit us down in Pass Christian, Mississippi, where Ann and I spend our years in retirement.
PAUL GEORGE BODE
NOTES TAPED ON JULY 21, 1980
BY CAROL ANNE BODE MARTY
Paul was married to Marjorie Wellman who was a member of the New Knoxville Church, which our father, Dietrich Adam Bode had served. Paul has, after his time in the service been a teacher in private schools and he was a head master in various schools mostly in the southern part of the United States, in Texas, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and so forth. Their two children are Mark Wellman Bode and Arthur Palfrey Bode. Marjorie succumbed to cancer after a long illness of six or seven years and Paul after a couple of years of going it alone, married a lovely woman whose daughter was in one of Paul’s schools. The woman’s name is Ann Coopwood and Paul is raising Ann’s younger daughter, Candy, and they are at this time in Georgia near Paul’s son.
Incidentally, Nelda, Paul and Lorna had gone to Catawba College in North Carolina, which was part of the old Reformed Church group of colleges, whereas Margaret, Arden and I, myself Carol, had gone to Heidelberg College, which is in Tiffin, Ohio.
