The Long Road From Jacinto, Mississippi:
Celebrating the Life of Yvonne Kerek

It was a life of adventure, of seeking and finding the interesting and the beautiful in life, at times in defiance of what may lie ahead. Even her birth was a bit of a precarious affair, as her mother declined to go to the hospital, and by the time a doctor materialized in their isolated rural abode in northeastern Mississippi, he had to give the family a choice: it’s either the baby or the mother. Both won’t survive. Choose one. Date: July 6, 1936.

But they both were survivors, and by the time Yvonne would have begun to learn language with a charming southern drawl, her family had long moved on from Jacinto. She grew up to be a Yankee girl, a woman of many talents and interests, with an awe of nature’s miracles and an insatiable appetite to explore them. She lived a rich and rewarding life of imagination, discovery, and accomplishment.

In the early days, the road was bumpy, figuratively and literally. During World War II, her father would press his small family into their 1938 Plymouth sedan and hit the road toward the west, hoping to find employment. A surviving list of their consecutive addresses in several states in those days fills a page. Yvonne would have to change schools sometimes more than once during a school year, and to face the disadvantages of being the “new kid on the block”.

But the summers were always set aside for Yvonne and her brother Kenneth to spend on the Richardson farm in Jacinto, just up the small hill from her birth cabin. The six or so years of summer vacation at grandmother Arrie Dell’s and grandfather Papa Doc’s place were the happiest and most formative in her young life, spending the days playing with Ken and their first cousin Jack, exploring the farm, or following grandmother around in her kitchen or garden. Decades later (2011) she wrote down her vibrant recollections of those childhood summers in the book “Memories of Jacinto”, which also includes the results of her meticulous research into her ancestry, tracing the Richardson and Mullinex families back to the 17th century.

As a “city kid”, Yvonne was fascinated by all the curiosities you can find on a farm and became an avid collector of nature’s castaways like unusual nuts, leaves, and dauber nests, which she eventually displayed in her own “museum” in an abandoned old shed. This collector instinct accompanied her through her life, in part into exotic bazaars and markets, in pursuit of “interesting” relics like Mosque toppers and exorcism medallions and Napoleonic cannon balls, which became part of her home’s décor. Stunning seashells too, collected on beaches from Florida to the Emirates, fueled her fascination. But even more so, she became a passionate collector of fossils and a well-informed amateur paleontologist, a pursuit that slowly turned her home into another “museum”. Her attraction to fossils reached back to the creek bed running through the backyard in Oxford, Ohio, a happy home in Locust Street for her family for some 20 years (1968-88), where she would casually pick up 400+ million year-old horn corals as fun curiosities. By the time of her years of retirement in Florida, Yvonne’s ardent interest in tracking down, identifying and displaying fossils knew no limits.

Her passion for hunting down interesting fossils showed another side of her character—a lack of fear or concern for the dangers she faced at times when challenging forbidding boundaries, like a sinkhole in Florida, rogue waves on Hawaii’s rocky coast, steep ravines in the desolate Badlands of Nebraska. She survived such encounters thanks to her incredible luck— perhaps the same asset that pulled her through her birth fiasco and several dire threats to her health during her lifetime.

Professionally, Yvonne was an educator, a leaning that she first tested as a teacher at her former school, Davison High School in Michigan, after graduating from Kalamazoo College in the late 1950’s. At the time she was still exploring other career paths including joining the Air Force, but the prospect of becoming a teacher for life “stuck”. After her marriage to Andrew Kerek in August 1963 and the couple’s move to Oxford, Ohio, where Andy started his new job at Miami University, Yvonne too landed a teaching position at Lakota High School, and for years to come, and at different venues, she taught at several grade levels, including special classes for learning-disabled children. While teaching during the daytime, each semester she also regularly enrolled in an evening class at Miami’s Education School, and in due course earned a Master’s Degree in Educational Psychology, followed by a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership in 1991. With the doctorate in hand, the following year she taught education-related courses full time at Defiance College in Ohio, and after moving to Egypt with Andy in 1992, she taught part time in the Psychology department at the American University in Cairo, where Andy was provost.

Memories of the seven years that Yvonne and Andy spent in Cairo (the first year with the kids as a “Fulbright family” in 1979-80) held a special place in Yvonne’s heart. They both remembered their time there as “the best years of our life”. Daily life in a truly exotic country with a rich history, among spirited, welcoming people, offered them a view of the world that changed their lives. For Yvonne, prime food for the spirit was the majesty of the desert—the milieu of the soul-liberating vista to escape to from the tumults of the city—but not the least the lure of the scattered relic fragments still to be found in the sand from pharaonic times, adventures that earned her the epithet “Sakkara Bag Lady” from her treasure-hunting friends. But wherever “treasures” were to be found in Cairo, Yvonne was there, often visiting her shop-keeper friends in the sprawling Khan-El-Khalili bazaar to check out new indigenous silver-jewelry supplies from the villages, or venturing out to the city’s giant Friday flea market, where you could find anything—sometimes quite valuable “junk” too—that Cairo had thrown away.

For Yvonne, her escapades and a treasure trove of experiences in Egypt would have been hard to beat for rewarding and lasting memories, but her travels in the world mostly with Andy during their almost 60 years of marriage and companionship also remained an endless source of nostalgic reminiscences. Her first trip abroad at age 19—a year-long stay with her father at an American air base in Morocco, where he worked—had already whetted her appetite for travel abroad; with Andy, they visited some 50 countries on 5 continents, including frequent trips to Andy’s native Hungary and year(s)-long residences in Germany and the United Arab Emirates, in addition to Egypt. They returned much better educated about what the rest of the world was like, but also with fond memories of often hilarious adventures. Later on they collaborated in gathering a sampling of salient episodes from their travels in an unpublished book “The Camel’s Revenge: 101 Funny and Funny-Ha-Ha Travel Stories from Around the World”. testimony to the truism that when you travel, “anything can happen”. A similar token of their meanderings is the pictorial collection “People We Met Along the Way”, featuring Yvonne’s talents for portrait photography.

Her artistic talents would deserve a separate chapter. Even as a young girl, she would often be summoned to sing to entertain the guests at Sunday gatherings at her grandparents’ place in Jacinto, and at least one (albeit poor quality) surviving recording from the 1950s of an aria from La Traviata testifies to her beautiful soprano voice at the time. But her talents for art were wide-ranging, even if she did not push them beyond experimentation. Among her paintings and drawings, the iconic covered bridge of Oxford, Ohio is especially noteworthy, along with her landscape depiction of Lake Balaton in Hungary. Her eyes for composition and arrangement come through in the folderful of prints from a black-and-white photography class she took at Miami University, and her snap shots of moments in the natural world, like those of a “flying” dolphin in Estero Bay, FL, are priceless. Her skills in pottery show up in a small pot she spontaneously created in the workshop of a local professional potter in the Hungarian village of Nadudvar, at his invitation, in addition to pieces she had made earlier for members of her family (including a cute turtle). And her dabbling in silversmithing resulted in an attractive collection of silver jewelry, which gave her the opportunity to use some of her fossils and other collected stones for fillers.

Yvonne was also an avid reader, as well as a researcher and writer. One of the great tragedies of her life was a stroke in 2015 that completely wiped out her ability to read and that subsequent therapy could not restore. Years before then, she would always have a book by her bedside, including murder mysteries, and, while in Egypt, she was so tickled to meet and get to know Barbara Mertz, author of the Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels mysteries, whose every book she must have read. When asked to sign one of Yvonne’s well-worn paperbacks, Barbara jotted down “Stop loaning my books”.

But Yvonne wore out other books as well, most notably the 24 adolescent novels that she used as texts for analysis in her doctoral dissertation titled “Changing Family Structure and Teen Attitudes/Behaviors as Reflected in Selected Works of Adolescent Literature 1950-55 to 1980-85”. With several decades of experience in the trenches, she was the right person to address this subject. Yvonne was also a diligent note keeper during travels, and at least a dozen well-worn handwritten notebooks full of spontaneous comments and acute observations are waiting to refresh memories.

Throughout her life, Yvonne was a loving and caring mother to her and Andy’s two children, Michael (“Bundy”) and Viki. The decline of her health in recent years, and especially months, only strengthened the bonds and the children’s loyalty to and support for their mother. When the end came in the early hours of Sunday, January 22, 2023, all three members of Yvonne’s immediate family were by her bedside to wish her peace. She will no doubt approve that, 86 years later, a sampling of her ashes will reunite with the earth of Jacinto, Mississippi and of Locust Street, Oxford, Ohio.