![]() ![]() When her grandchildren came along, she insisted they call her grandmother. She bought her last car in 1967 and got books from the county library and a used-paperback exchange.įor some reason, she wouldn't let her yard men trim trees or prune shrubs, allowing the greenery to choke walkways and crowd her house. She never had a dishwasher, but she did have a maid until the day she died. But, to her children, some of the joy slipped from Alice Ryan's life.Īfter Rhoda left for college in 1958, Alice settled into an unpretentious familiarity with old things, content to keep her house without air conditioning and in its 1930s style, her son said. ![]() died of a ruptured appendix in 1950, his wife inherited a paid-for house and stock and cash worth $1.5 million, Probate Court records show. Snakes slithered into the pool, and Alice nonchalantly threw them out. Her children also remember her as fearless. ![]() Yet, to indulge her sweet tooth, she allowed herself no more than two squares of a Hershey bar twice a day. Heavy as a young girl, she, as a woman, never tipped the scale past 100. In season, Alice plunged daily into the cold pool water to swim laps, determined to keep her figure trim. The girls were debutantes, even Rhoda, the youngest, who said she found the lifestyle stifling. The children ate with Lillie in the kitchen until they were old enough to eat with their parents in the dining room, Katherine recalled. "She was there, and she was very loving and mothering." "Lillie raised us," Katherine Stribling, now 62, said of nanny Lillie Turner. They had a cook, a maid and a nanny for their children, Joe Jr., Katherine and Rhoda. They dined with other well-connected Greenville couples at the just-opened Poinsett Club and held a membership at the Greenville Country Club. She never worked, not as a young married woman or as a middle-aged widow. A few years later, they built one of the city's first private swimming pools. Designed by architect Willie Ward, the house was one of the biggest in Greenville. They wed in a small ceremony at her parents' house in 1934, took a three-week honeymoon to Bermuda, and came back to build the Tudor house on two acres on Woodland Way. He was vastly different from the men of Alice's social scene: Catholic, rich and perhaps even more intriguing, a Yankee, raised in Troy, N.Y.įriends such as Dobbins remember them as dashing. She returned home in 1929, and later that year as other rich families lost fortunes in the stock market crash, her life of parties and wealth remained unchanged.Īt about the same time, a handsome Irishman named Joe Ryan arrived in Greenville to manage a Southern office for his family's textile business. She attended Converse College, the prim woman's college in Spartanburg where until just a few years ago, young ladies wore demure dresses to white-linen and fine-china Sunday dinners. "Spoiled rotten" was how Alice described herself in later years to her children. "Men thought she was the cutest thing they ever saw," remembered her friend Harriet Dobbins. She drove a convertible roadster and joined house parties on Pawleys Island. Refined.īut young Alice was a girl who knew her own mind and was used to having things her way. The house and its residents evoked Southern decorum, friends recall. The family lived in a magnificent Victorian home on the site where the Thomas McAfee Funeral Home now stands. By then her father's law practice, established barely a decade after the Civil War ended, was flourishing. "She almost turned into a recluse after that."Īlice Haynsworth's life of privilege began on the day she was born in 1908. "She was, I'd say, very much in love with my father," said Joe Ryan Jr., 64, the oldest child who was 15 when his father died. Alice was 42, the mother of three children not yet grown. Friends and family say her life changed forever when her husband, Joe, died at 45. It was an ending far different from the beginning. ![]()
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