Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Many years before I was born, and before my father, Rolland Everett Meyers, married my mother, Lurilien Graham, Neal and his two brothers occupied a special place in my father's life. Their own father, Dr. Neal McLain Draper, had died relatively early in life, and his widow was left to raise their three sons. She was my aunt, born Florence Mabel Meyers, and was my father's second eldest sister. Their parents, William Adolph Meyers, and Annie Eliza Whitehill, had produced a large family of twelve children and lived in Jennings, an early suburb on the northwestern edge of St. Louis, where their father had an insurance business and served as justice of the peace for many years. My father, who was still a bachelor at the time, took it upon himself to be a surrogate father to the three Draper boys whenever and however he could. "Unc", as they called him, thought the world of his young nephews, and they in turn thought the same of him. Over the subsequent decades, my father always took a fond interest in what Neal and his brothers were doing, and I know that he was proud of them and of the accomplishment and success that marked all of their lives. Peace be with you, Neal, my first cousin, and may eternal light shine upon you.
