Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 20, 1993 TAG: 9306200115
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GENE WEINGARTEN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
You apologize for arriving unannounced; you were afraid that if you called ahead she would not have agreed to see you. You want to talk about private matters more than a half-century old. You want to ask about W.J. Blythe, her first husband. If he is the father of her only son, that means her son is the half brother of the president of the United States. A brother no one knows about, not even the president's mother.
She puts down the quilt she is sewing and asks you politely if you would mind repeating that. You do, and she smiles and says, okay, she supposes it can't hurt, now.
Apple Valley, Calif., is a cozy oasis. The wooden sign above the door of the stucco ranch house says "The Coffelt's." Adele Gash Coffelt, 75, looks like someone's favored grandma. On the wall in a hallway is a photograph of her only child, Henry Leon, born in Sherman, Texas, more than 50 years ago.
Is he W.J. Blythe's son?
"Yes."
Adele Coffelt says she knew W.J. from the time they were children, they were good friends and she married him at 17. He was 17 too. They lied about their age and traveled 40 miles to Madill, Okla., to get married.
She was definitely not pregnant, she says. No truth to that at all. It may be that she and W.J. were keeping too close company and her father wanted them to marry to avoid scandal. That could be true, she says. But she was not pregnant.
Exactly why did they marry?
"Well, I wasn't madly in love with him, or anything like that."
She sits back on the sofa, and says she doubts anyone could really understand who did not live through those times.
"All I wanted," she says, "was a home."
When she and W.J. were 17, an opportunity arose. W.J. was in line for a job at the dairy that would have given him meager living quarters on the company grounds. A home! And so they got married. Just like that.
"Young and dumb is what we were."
The job and the apartment never came through, and Adele moved in with the Blythes. Adele says she liked W.J. - "he was a clean, pleasant, decent person" - and might have stayed with him for a long time if they'd just had some privacy.
She and W.J. shared a bedroom with brother Earnest Blythe and his wife, Ola Maye.
"I don't require a whole lot. I never wanted to be rich, but I never lived with so little," Adele Coffelt says. "We were poor, but they were poorer than we were."
She says the Blythes treated her well, and she liked and respected all of them, but she felt she was a terrible burden on them.
After a few months, Adele went to visit an aunt in Dallas. W.J. was supposed to come for her in a few days. Instead, she says, a package arrived in the mail. It was all of her clothing.
"That's how it ended, right there." Adele Coffelt is smiling. "I stayed in Dallas." She got a divorce the following year.
Coffelt says that after her divorce, she returned to Sherman several times and would spend time with W.J. On one of these trips, she says, her son was conceived. She stayed in Sherman to give birth.
When she is told that someone in the family said W.J. was not the father, she is thunderstruck.
"It wasn't anybody but W.J." Pause. "Why would anyone say that?"
The public records support her version of events. In the Marshall County Courthouse in Madill is a marriage license dated December 1935, under a handwritten notation, "Don't publish." It registers the marriage of W.J. Blythe to Virginia Adele Gash. Bride and groom are listed as being 18 years old. The divorce petition, on file in Dallas, is dated one year later. Henry Leon's birth certificate, on file in Austin, is dated Jan. 17, 1938. It lists W.J. Blythe as the father.
"I'm not proud of everything I did in my life," Adele Coffelt says, "but I am not sorry, either." In fact, she is deeply grateful to W.J. for giving her a child. In 1939, just before her second marriage - a happy one to the police chief of Brawley, Calif., that would last more than 30 years, until his death - she was in an auto accident that shattered her pelvis. She could never bear children again.
"People without children," she says, "are miserable."
When her baby was a few months old, she says, W.J. visited her in California. He hugged her, held Leon, "and was as nice as he ever was." It was the last time she ever saw him.
There is a TV in the Coffelts' living room, and at this moment Bill Clinton's face flashes on the screen.
"Doesn't mean anything to me that he is W.J.'s son," Adele says. "He doesn't look that much like W.J. But I wish him well. He'll always be welcome in this house, you tell him that if you talk to him."
A big smile.
"But I didn't vote for him."
When W.J. Blythe later married Virginia Cassidy, he took a new name. He became Bill Blythe, the only name his new wife ever knew him by, and it was as Bill Blythe that he started a family.
For four months, Bill Clinton's mother declined to discuss her first husband for this article.
Finally reached by telephone and asked about Bill Blythe's other life, she said it was all news to her. Blythe never told her about his marriage to Adele Gash, or any other marriages or children he may have had along the way. She also said W.J.'s family never told her either, even after his death.
"I'm 70 years old," said Virginia Kelley, "and things sometimes slip my mind. But as far as I can remember, no one ever told me."
What does she think of it?
There is the briefest of pauses.
"I don't know what to think," she said. "I loved him very much. He was a wonderful person to me. For his own reasons, he did not mention it to me."
Adele Coffelt did not discover that the father of her son was also the father of Bill Clinton until a relative sent her a clipping from People magazine, during the presidential campaign, mentioning the name William Blythe. And so, of course, her son did not find out about his famous half brother until then either.
Henry Leon Ritzenthaler - he changed his name from Blythe when his mother's second husband adopted him - is 55. He lives in Paradise, Calif., with his wife, Judith, a hairdresser. He has two children. The former owner of a janitorial service, Ritzenthaler was forced to retire some time ago because of a heart condition.
Late in the campaign, he and Judith wrote to Bill Clinton, care of the Governor's Mansion in Little Rock. Ritzenthaler says he introduced himself, included a copy of his birth certificate, and requested any information the governor could give them about the Blythe family's health history.
"I don't want any money out of this or anything," Ritzenthaler said. "All I would like to do is meet the man. I would be honored to get to know him a little. To find out after 55 years that I've got a brother eight years younger than I am, well, that's kind of nice."
Not to mention that he is the president of the United States?
"It's very nice."
Ritzenthaler says he never heard back from Clinton or his office, but that he doesn't take it personally.
"In the business he is in, I'm sure he was busy and under a lot of pressure. I would just consider it an honor and a privilege to get a phone call or a letter from the man, saying, `Hey, I know you're alive.' "
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