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  • The girls: Danielle King, Fritzie Edwards, Dottie King and Michelle Tracy pose with the family pet during a family get-together Sunday afternoon.

    MET 050712 MOTHERS DAY.jpg

  • Reflection: Dottie King reflects on childhood memories of her mother as her family meets for an early Mother's Day celebration.

    MET 050712 KING REFLECTION.jpg

  • Daughter: Michelle Tracy talks about her childhood memories of her mother Dottie King and her grandmother Fritzie Edwards during an early Mother's Day celebration at the King home.

    MET 050712 KING DAUGHTER.jpg

  • Newest: One-year-old Peyton King visits with her grandmother and great-grandmother during an early Mother's Day celebration.

    MET 050712 PEYTON KING.jpg

  • Family: Photos on display in the King house.

    MET 050712 FAMILY PHOTO.jpg

  • Lynn Lee: A photograph of Lynn Lee Tracy sits in the living room of the Dottie King family home.

    MET 050712 LYNN LEE PHOTO.jpg

  • Family: Danielle King (left), Michelle Tracy, Peyton King, Dottie King and Fritzie Edwards pose for a family photo Sunday while celebrating Mother's Day.

    MET 050712 KING FAMILY.jpg

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May 13, 2012

MOTHER’S DAY: Fritzie & Dottie: Suddenly widowed mother kept her daughters united

Brian Boyce The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE — A mother is a child’s first teacher, and Dottie King, now a leader of teachers and students, shares with her mother the same lesson about motherhood.

“It’s everything,” both said independently.

Celebrating Mother’s Day a week early because of family schedules, Dottie, the very busy president of St. Mary-of-the-Woods College, wore the same style of shorts and blouse as her daughters at her home last Sunday. Grandchildren played with their dads outside, and other members of the big family ate and chatted.

Dottie, the mother of six, and her sister, Penny, lost their father on Christmas Eve of 1962, when he was killed in an automobile accident. Dottie was 2, Penny was 6 months.

Regardless of the lifestyle changes that event created, there was never a question as to the unity among mother and daughters.

“So I think family was very important,” Dottie said as she sat at her dining room table, her mother, Fritzie Edwards, next to her.

Supporting children as a widow in the 1960s wasn’t easy, but Fritzie said that’s what mothers do.

“You really have no choice. You have a job to do. You have two children you love dearly, and you do the best you can,” she said.

And family unity was particularly important for Fritzie, the daughter of divorced parents. Originally from South Dakota, she, her brother and mother moved about the country frequently, and the vision of a stable family held a particular shine for her. At the age of 14, she met John Schriver, whom she would ultimately marry.

“He was my best friend,” she said, recalling how she first knew him.

Schriver served in the U.S. Air Force, and the two married in 1959.

Fritzie remarried after Schriver’s death, but the bond between daughters and mother was already in place and shaped the woman Dottie herself would become.

Remarking that nothing one loses in life is ever truly lost, Dottie said the sum of experiences one has continues to shape their paths. Half a century later, she admits a little wistfulness while watching her grandchildren play with their fathers, the same feeling she had watching her own girls play with their dad.

“I don’t really remember my dad, but I remember missing my dad,” she said.

Dottie married at the age of 19. Her daughter, Michelle, was born 16 months later. More than anything, Dottie wanted to be a mother, and given her father’s untimely death, she’d learned early to avoid taking time for granted.

 And she did like to learn.

“I always, absolutely loved school,” Dottie said, explaining she knew from an early age that education would be her career.

In the third grade, she wanted to teach third grade. In the fourth grade, she wanted to teach fourth, she recalled amid laughter. That pattern remained in place through college, which she attended while her husband both worked and watched the kids.

Dottie earned her undergraduate degree at Indiana State University with plans to teach high school math, a field dominated by men and one in which she saw more opportunity. But Michelle was still very young, and when ISU offered Dottie the chance to get a graduate degree, she opted to remain in school rather than go straight to the workforce. That graduate degree segued into a doctorate, and ultimately an adjunct professorship.

“And so I stayed there [at ISU] for 17 years,” she said.

The adjunct professorship allowed her the best of both worlds in terms of balancing career with kids. Working three days a week, summers and holidays off, she was a working mom with a lot of family time.

“I do think women can work and be really good moms, but there’s a trade-off,” Dottie said, explaining the importance she placed on her own mother’s status as a stay-at-home parent.

Now grown and married with children of her own, Michelle is “Mrs. Tracy” at Northview High School, where she teaches English while doubling her duties at Clay County’s alternative school.

And, like her mother, Michelle made the decision to become an educator early in life.

“Because my mom was a teacher,” she laughed, seated at the dining room table with Dottie and Fritzie.

Dubbed the “second mother” by her family, Michelle, the eldest child, used her siblings and stuffed animals to arrange play classrooms at home while in elementary school herself. Borrowing texts from her mom’s classrooms, she created lesson plans and used the chalkboard in the same manner she saw.

“I love working with kids,” Michelle said of her decision to become a teacher. “But it definitely came from my mom.”

It couldn’t have been all that easy, though. Michelle graduated from Northview High School and attended ISU, where her mother taught, earning an undergraduate education degree in 2004 and a graduate degree in counseling in 2009.

Her teaching career at her alma mater also overlapped her mother’s tenure as a member of the Clay Community School Board, which included time as president. But more than the boss’ daughter, she was also her siblings’ teacher.

“When they run out of lunch money and need some, it’s a good thing. But when they’re late to first hour and I tell Mom [Dottie], it’s a bad thing,” Michelle chuckled, explaining that siblings Michael, Danielle and Jordan have been Northview students since she’s been there. Brothers Shawn and T.J. on the other hand just heard the stories.  

The ability to juggle family dynamics runs in the blood, though, and Dottie observed a lot of similarities between mothering six children and presiding over the nation’s oldest all-female Catholic college.

Diversity of interests, the need to prioritize, knowing when to nurture and when to be decisive — they are all part of the same makeup, whether one’s biological children are 14 years apart in age or whether one’s colleagues teach physics and poetry.

“The college is a lot like that,” she said of the dynamic family with children in activities ranging from sports to band, both the family named King and the one named St. Mary-of-the-Woods College.

In the end, it’s all about motherhood by another name.

“Like Mom said, it’s everything. It sounds so generic, but it really is,” she said.

Despite the tragic car crash in 1962, Fritzie’s childhood vision of a stable family was in full living color Sunday afternoon. The grandmother of 10 and great-grandmother of six said those relationships define her.

“Motherhood, grandmotherhood, great-grandmotherhood. It’s everything to me. It’s my life,” she said.

For Michelle, now a mother herself, the lessons passed from one woman to another remain a constant.

“I’ve learned a lot of things from them,” she said of her mother and grandmother. “We all take care of each other.”

Brian Boyce can be reached at 812-231-4253 or brian.boyce@tribstar.com.

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