‘Endurance’ is apt title for York native’s latest book

Editor’s note: This is my foreword to “Endurance,” the third volume of Sandra L. Kearse-Stockton’s memoir “480 Codorus Street.” The author is a native of York and retired as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army about 15 years ago. “Endurance” can be ordered from sandralkearsestockton.com.

The rain was falling and the flood waters were rising.

Tropical Storm Agnes had started dumping on York County, a torrent that would persist for 24 hours in late June 1972.

Sandra L. Kearse-Stockton placed her four children in travel mode, meaning the clothes on their backs. When the 23-year-old mom stepped into the backyard of her home in public housing, the water was up to the knees of two of her youngsters. She placed a third child on her back, and she cradled her infant son in her arms.

This brave band of waders was beyond afraid, the water coming down so hard that visibility was at zero. At one point, Sandra asked her two trudging children to put their hands in the pockets of her shorts. They wouldn’t get separated that way.

To keep her daughter on her back, she repositioned Karmentrina’s short legs around her waist. And then put the youngster’s feet inside the band of her shorts to help her hang on.

This mighty and scared band made it to Sandra’s sister’s house and alerted her about what amounted to an Agnes-inspired York County-wide flash flood.

She then plodded to her mom’s — Nanny’s. There, she would find safety and well-being, as Dorothy Smallwood had offered so many times over the years. And would do so in times of family peace and panic thereafter.

This is a typical word picture — hands in pockets, feet in waistband — that Sandra L. Stockton has painted in the pages of her three-volume “480 Codorus Street” memoir.

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Never a word of self-pity

I first became aware of Sandra from a newspaper story in 2009 at about the time she retired as a lieutenant colonel in the Army. Her career was impressive, and even more so when I learned she had risen in the ranks as a military nurse. It was no longer rare in 2009 for a woman to reach the rank of lieutenant colonel. But it’s something that not many women with a family accomplished at that time. Further, the first Black women reached that rank only recently, in the mid-1960s.

I’ve noticed Sandra’s name coming up in conversations and genealogical research several times since, often in connection with the many family members who have been part of the York County community for years: the Kearses and the Smallwoods and the Dorms, among many others.

So when the first book in Sandra’s trilogy came out, I wanted to understand her story more fully. I met Sandra at a book signing, then interviewed her and wrote in the newspaper about her life and times. Her story is one of perseverance and success against the difficult backdrop of childhood abuse, teenage motherhood of four children, death of her husband shot in front of her and the children, the loss of her mother and sister in a horrific fire and the later shooting death of her grown son.

And yet you’ll never detect a word of self-pity in Sandra’s writing and presentations. When she writes about racism, she’ll tell you how she fought back — not how she gave in.

Not that she ever gave in.

She tells her stories of difficult moments and welcome redemption in the same winsome and compelling voice, told in a compact style that reminds you of a busy military nurse as she lines out duties to her reports at the outset of a new shift.

How did she persevere?

“I don’t yield,” she said in an interview.

In reading the scores of stories that tell about her lifetime found in “480 Codorus Street,” the reader will conclude: “No, she doesn’t. Not an inch.”

A soul-wrenching moment

This third volume tells the story with the deepest meaning to Sandra, a moment that pierced her heart and challenged her soul.

She was on duty in South Korea in 1992, when she received a call.

Her children were on a conference line. Her mom’s house in York was on fire and firefighters had just carried out two bodies. And then they were identified: her mom and her sister Dottie Mae.

“I remember dropping the phone and screaming uncontrollably,” she writes. “One of my roommates was home. She came running to my room. She was trying to talk to me and I just looked at her and said my mom and sister just died in a fire. She picked up the phone and the girls were still on the line. She told them that she would take care of me. She did.”

She soon called her husband, Aaron, then in the Air Force and a key part of Sandra’s story.

“He was hesitant to speak and I said, ‘I know my mom and sister have perished in a fire at Mom’s house,’” she writes. “He was crying and I could tell in his voice that he wanted to take that pain away from me.”

In an interview years later, she reflected on this moment, the shooting death of her son, Keenan Wynn Kearse, in an attempted robbery in his Maryland apartment in 2007 and other challenges: “You never know which way God is going to make the river flow.”

Story touches many levels

Kearse-Stockton’s story reaches readers at multiple levels. Ethnographers — social scientists who look at social interactions and cultures — will find considerable material to mull in this detailed work about a poor, close-knit urban family coming of age in the 1960s.

Military historians will learn how one woman and her family navigated the Army and Air Force — discriminatory schools for children, the scarcity of affordable housing and inequities residing in military command structures.

But the main benefactors of this labor of love will be people who just love good stories, stories that surprise, move to tears and, taken as a whole, end well. The three “480 Codorus Street” volumes are profoundly about family.

Further, “480 Codorus Street” will appeal to those who like stories well told, bearing life lessons. Consider these three examples from the pages of this memoir.

One is a Thanksgiving scene, the first meal in which Aaron is present. Sandra frets that her outspoken family would not be on their best behavior at the table in her mom’s house — an unfounded fear as it turns out.

The fare consisted of turkey with stuffing, ham, sweet potatoes, collard greens, homemade biscuits, mashed potatoes and gravy. Apple and sweet potato pie made up dessert.

“I had so much food on my plate and knew I had better squeeze it all in,” Sandra writes, “for I always told my children that it would be a sin to throw food away because people in foreign countries were starving.” Poor people in this Pennsylvania town felt rich when they had family around and did not forget their own good fortune.

That same holiday season, Aaron was trying to assemble a tricycle late on Christmas Eve. It was hot, so he took off his shirt — bare chested in December. “We could not control the heat in the projects,” Sandra writes, giving a glimpse about how public housing impinged on the agency of its tenants.

Seeing that Aaron needed help in putting together the tricycle and with bicycles awaiting assembly, Sandra called on a friend to come over. The friend, Barrion, arrived and the task was completed. In this story and countless others, the memberships that Sandra was part of and the communities she fostered helped in matters big and small.

And we go back to Agnes after the tropical storm’s wrath subsided, leaving Sandra’s home in public housing filled with mud, 2 feet deep on the first floor. Friends and family came by to shovel out the rented apartment, in an overall scene marked by dead rats, old tires and trash.

The water had reached the top of her apartment’s second floor steps but miraculously left those upper bedrooms intact.

After the band had cleared the bulk of the mud, kinsman Lee Smallwood, later a powerful York city councilman, was ready to finish the cleanup with a hose, which emitted brown water.

“Lee hooked up the water hose and started to wash out the rest of the mud,” Sandra writes, “from the stairs down through the entire house.”

That story aptly represents the life of Sandra L. Stockton found on these pages.

When you’re faced with life’s challenges — more than any one person should ever encounter — take the gifts of friends and family that God gives you. Then start on that first step.

Then work on the second.

Then the third.

And then on down through the entire house.

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Sandra L. Kearse-Stockton is the recipient of the 2023 Legion of Honor Award from the Four Chaplains Foundation of York. She will be honored at a prayer breakfast on May 10. To register for the breakfast, please see www.fourchaplainsyork.org.

Jim McClure is a retired editor of the York Daily Record and has authored or co-authored nine books on York County history. Reach him at jimmcclure21@outlook.com.

This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: ‘Endurance’: apt title for Sandra L. Kearse-Stockton's latest book