Grammy and Granddaddy at their house in Fairway

Lucille Lacaff Marshall, our maternal grandmother, was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. The second of five children (the others were Theodore – always called Bunce – Cordelia, Mortimer, and Frank, Jr.), she was the daughter and granddaughter of bankers and always was delighted to tell people she was descended from Revolutionary War veterans as well as Hannah Cole, a Missouri pioneer.

She loved telling stories about girlhood trips to Banff and Lake Louise; but until she began having small strokes late in her life, she never mentioned other stories from her childhood, like the time a St. Louis hotel clerk checking in the family demanded that her fair-haired French-German parents send her to the basement to sleep with the other black servants. Grammy, who grew up during the bitterest years of Jim Crow, had light brown skin (“olive-complected,” as they used to say), and fiercely curly and frizzy brown hair; one of Carla’s Ghanaian friends, idly looking at a childhood photograph of Grammy, her younger sister Cordelia and her cousin Maurine, pointed to Grammy and asked, “And who is this adorable little black child?”

She married our grandfather, Jack, a blond-and-blue-eyed daredevil who flew barnstormers in the 1920s, in the 1930s worked for Howard Hughes down in Texas at what would become TWA before returning to Kansas City to open his own flying school, could take apart and put back together anything ever made by human hands, and tell just by looking at a blueprint whether a machine would actually work the way the college-educated boys in his engineering department had designed it. She loved purple-flowered dresses, tending her complicated garden, and large gatherings of friends and family at their house in Fairway. She was semi-famous for burning at least one menu item beyond recognition, no matter the occasion; but nobody could make desserts and sweets like Grammy and we have the recipes to prove it.