Following Arch’s death in 1959, she continued her church-related activities—she was a member of Woodstock Park Baptist Church for over 80 years, serving in many church offices and as a Sunday school teacher. She also began to travel as a way to stay in touch with her increasingly far flung family, which now includes 74 direct descendants. Faith and I enjoyed her visits with us and our daughters—Karen and Miriam–over the years in Newport, Rhode Island, Stamford, Connecticut and Bowie, Maryland. Her travels eventually took her to all fifty states and many foreign countries, including several visits to the Holy Land, the last when she was 99 years old.

Her extraordinary health and determination enabled her to keep her own house in Woodstock Park until she was 101.

On one occasion, when she was in her Nineties, Faith and I had been over to dinner, after which she got out the photo albums. Eva Connors was thrifty. She noticed we were squinting at the photos with the light from what was, at most, a forty-watt bulb or two. Getting up quickly, she left us engrossed in the photographs. Not paying much attention to what she was doing for a moment or so, when we looked up we were astonished to see her get up on the table to put in a stronger light bulb. Instinctively, we stood up and urged her to get down and to let one of us—you know who that would be—get up there to change the bulb. Reluctantly, she got down, not really needing our help. “Tracy,” she said with her very special smile, “You’re going to make an old woman out of me.”

After she moved to Riverside Presbyterian House [in Jacksonville’s Five Points neighborhood] she became the best known of its residents as a result of several news articles that profiled her humor and practical philosophy.

Four years ago I was asked by the Gold Star Mothers to speak to them on the 54th Anniversary of the Congressional Resolution that established their organization for American mothers having a son or daughter killed in the line of duty. In Arlington National Cemetery, a stone’s throw from the Tomb of the Unknowns, Faith and I joined the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other dignitaries to honor those who had suffered the supreme sacrifice of motherhood in the loss of their sons and daughters serving in our Armed Forces.

I brought them greetings from one of the oldest of America’s Gold Star mothers, Eva Haddock Connors. I told them the story of her youngest son, Air Force Lieutenant Archie Connors. Just a few years older than I, to me he was bigger than life, a handsome, dashing hero with a devilish sense of humor. I described for them how he was killed in action while covering the rescue of a downed Navy pilot. I was thinking of both Archie and his mother when I reminded them that courage consists not in hazarding without fear, but in being resolute in a just cause.