Acknowledgements

I am indebted to a number of people who contributed—some knowingly and some unknowingly—to my creation of this story of my mother’s life.

My thanks go to all who provided letters or photographs, who helped get the material into usable form, and whose enthusiasm and encouragement kept me plugging away at this daunting project.

Carli Scott

Source Materials

I’ve woven together my mother’s narratives from a number of sources.

Letters and Reports

Most of the text comes from Mom’s letters and reports. To quote from email she sent me in 2010:

As you know, I have been addicted to long letters and reports for years. After my marriage, I sent regular, long letters to Mother and Dad. Of course, the letters got longer once we moved to Belize.

Mom’s typical letters were a few pages long. Except when etiquette required a hand-written note, they were typewritten—partly because she could write more efficiently that way and partly because she thought (with good reason) that many people would have difficulty deciphering her handwriting.

Mom corresponded regularly with her father’s brother Frank Van Brunt. Uncle Frank seems to have kept all his correspondence; after he died, the letters Mom wrote him were returned to her. So, although she hadn’t kept her own copies, she acquired a large collection of her letters to Uncle Frank dating from 1952 to 1964. Toward the end of this project, I came across an email from which I learned that it was Mom’s Uncle Walt Van Brunt who had returned the letters to her.

In addition to letters to individual relatives or friends, she typed more general letters with carbon copies, which she sent to a number of people, adding a hand-written, personalized note to each. She kept copies of many of these letters.

Mom’s longer reports, also typed with carbon copies, were more like news stories, describing significant events such as trips, major moves, or hurricanes. Luckily for me, she kept one copy for herself. Her email continues:

I don’t have copies of most of them, but managed to save a lot. Eventually I secured them in binders, planning to go through and reread them in my declining years.

I wrote all of these on typewriters…I think I made four or five carbon copies so I could send them to various members of the family. My file copies are reasonably legible but could do with some editing. I simply typed the text and only rarely corrected anything. I have found misspellings and occasional missing words.

In the early 1990’s, Mom got a laptop computer and started writing letters and reports with word-processing software, which allowed her to correct and polish her letters and reports before sending copies to various friends and relatives.

Anecdotes and Essays

Mom’s computer contained many short files with material that she could copy and paste into different letters. I characterize Mom’s colorful descriptions of amusing events as anecdotes, and her reminiscences about family or life in Belize as essays.

Memoir

After she started using a computer, I (and possibly other relatives) urged Mom to write an autobiography. She worked diligently on the project, composing some parts from memory and others by adapting the stories in her collection of letters and reports. Instead of a full autobiography, she concentrated on her early years in Belize, starting with my Dad’s first trip there in 1954 and ending in 1962, a few months after Hurricane Hattie. Because of its limited scope, I refer to this work as Mom’s memoir, although she tended to call it her book or autobiography.

Wedding Story

In late 1992 Mom wrote the story of her wedding. She had finished the first draft of her memoir and may have decided to expand its scope. Or, probably more likely, she simply thought it made another good story that my brother, Alex Scott, and I would enjoy reading some day.

Recap of Life

In 1993, Mom wrote a recap of her life after she graduated from college. It appears that she sent this recap in letters to a number of friends with whom she hadn’t communicated for years. The recap may have been her contribution to a larger project organized by her classmates to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of their graduation from Ohio Wesleyan University.

Family and Early Years

In the summer of 2007, Mom’s sister, Mary Robinson, organized a family reunion at Higgins Lake in Michigan, where she and Mom had spent summer vacations as girls and then returned to years later for summer vacations with their own children. During the reunion, various cousins and I encouraged Mom to record stories about her older relatives for the younger generations. In 2009, she produced a draft describing her family and early years entitled Memories of My Parents, which she hoped Mary would edit and add to.

Collection Process

I started with my own collection of some of the letters, reports, faxes, and emails that Mom had sent me over the years. After her death, I found many more in her file cabinet and on her computer. Her computer files also contained essays, anecdotes, drafts of her memoir, the wedding story, recap of her life, and Memories of My Parents.

Family and friends who learned of my project provided additional material. My stepdaughter, Kristin Eukel, forwarded emails that Mom had written to her. My sister-in-law Karen Rindfleisch sent me the letters that Mom had written to Karen’s late son, Andrew, while he was fighting cancer. Raoul Clarke, whose family and grandparents where close friends of the Scott family when we lived in Sarasota, sent me numerous missives that Mom had mailed, faxed, or emailed to his parents, Polly and Dil Clarke, and to him and his wife, Linda. Knox Hurst, my cousin Charlie’s oldest son, sent me a letter that Mom had written to him and his wife, Stacy.

By chance, my sister-in-law María Scott came across the notebooks in which Mom had collected her copies of various letters and reports. María scanned and emailed me the ones that were missing from my collection. Later, María found a box of very old papers, which she saved for me to look through on my subsequent visit to Belize. Some of the sheets were barely legible, others were on the verge of disintegration, and the lower right corner of many had been eaten away. This material included Mom’s copies of more old letters (some missing pages) in addition to drafts of a couple children’s stories, an essay, a poem, and an unfinished short story.

Photographs

To illustrate Mom’s writing, I used photos from my own albums, postcards of Belize that Mom had assembled into a notebook one year as a Christmas present for me, and some of Mom’s old family photos that I brought back after her funeral.

I also used a “picture book” Mom had assembled in the 1950’s to show relatives in the U.S. what Belize was like. It consisted of several sheets of typing paper to which she had attached Polaroid photos and postcards, above typewritten descriptions.

Others provided me with additional photos. Mom’s friend Betty Flinchum sent me photos she had taken on her visits to Mom in 2012 and 2014. My second cousin Katy Jenkins gave me a photo from the 1930’s of her mother (Mom’s beloved cousin Helen Anne) with Mom and her sister, Mary. My cousin Scott Bryan sent me a photo of the family at my brother’s christening. Long-time school chum Judith Bodden sent me old photos of her uncle, Bert Foreman. Adrian Roe, my friend since early childhood, sent a photo of his father-in-law, Buzz Bradley. My sister-in-law María sent many photos of family, friends, and travels from Mom’s albums. Long-time family friend Raoul Clarke let me borrow his mother Polly’s albums of their visits to Belize in 1964 and 2000 so that I could copy photos and postcards from them.

I used photos of the Fort George Hotel from A History of the Fort George Hotel, printed in 2003 on the 50th anniversary of the hotel’s opening.

I found other relevant photos on the web, as indicated briefly in their captions. Additional details follow:

Collaborators

This work has been a family project, and I am forever grateful to all who helped. I couldn’t have done it on my own!

Most of all, I thank Mom for creating such a colorful record of her journey through life and for having the foresight to keep copies of much of her work.

I’m am particularly grateful to Mom’s Uncle Frank for keeping her letters and to her Uncle Walt for sending the letters back to her after Uncle Frank’s death.

My sister-in-law María spent a great deal of time looking for relevant material in Mom’s binders, boxes, and photo albums, and then either scanning and emailing me letters, reports, and photos or else putting them aside for me to peruse on my next visit to Belize.

My husband, Tom Rindfleisch, copied Mom’s computer files and scanned hard copies of older letters and reports. He greatly reduced the amount of material that I needed to retype, experimenting with various optical-character-recognition programs and converting many of his and María’s scanned documents into editable text files. He also scanned numerous photographs and postcards and then edited and enhanced many of the resulting blurry, faded, or lined digital images to produce clearer illustrations for the website.

When I was uncertain about a person, place, or event that Mom referred to or that I found in an old photo, my brother, Alex, was able to provide details that I don’t remember and to ask friends in Belize about things that neither of us remembers.

Alex, María, my cousin Margaret O’Neill, and Mom’s friend Betty Flinchum read chapters I had “finished” as soon as I posted them online; they each reported typos and other errors, enabling me to correct the chapters before others read them.

My cousin Charlie Hurst takes the prize for first to report a typo in the book form of this collection. I got a phone call from Charlie around 9:00 am one morning to thank me for the set of books I had sent him. He said he was parked outside the Post Office, where he had just picked them up. That afternoon at around 2:00 pm—only five hours after receiving the books—Charlie sent me a text to report that I had spelled his sister Margaret’s last name as “O’Neil” instead of “O’Neill” on page 377 of Book 1. Thanks to Charlie, I was able to fix the typo in the preceding paragraph on this webpage, in the PDF of Book 1, and in all copies of Book 1 printed after 2020.