Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 17, 1993 TAG: 9310140152
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By TOM JACKMAN THE KANSAS CITY STAR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
She was 18, deeply in love with the young traveling salesman - and unaware she was his third wife. Before long he'd marry again, before divorcing Anita.
The child from that fourth marriage would one day be elected 42nd president of the United States.
W.J. Blythe was a traveling salesman imbued with a wandering, easy spirit. He won women's hearts with a salesman's casual charm, but never stayed long enough to nurture the families he created.
He married his third wife less than a week after divorcing his second. And he married his fourth wife, President Bill Clinton's mother, before divorcing his third.
Time buried the Blythe family secrets deep. It was this summer, for example, that Clinton discovered he has a half brother and a half sister, who was born in Kansas City, Mo.
But the history of his father, the peripatetic salesman, has remained as elusive as Blythe was to his wives.
Records gathered by The Kansas City Star from six states and recent interviews with far-flung relatives and friends reveal the picaresque life of a man more comfortable on the road than at home.
But Anita Ellen Blythe doesn't dwell on her first husband's shortcomings. In an interview at her comfortable mobile home in south Tucson, Ariz., she recalled a genial, caring man.
"He was a gentle, conscientious, beautiful person," Anita Blythe said recently. "He knew I was young and naive. I think that's why he took me under his wing. He was so kind and sensitive that he felt sorry for me."
And correspondence between Anita and W.J. Blythe, presented here for the first time, reflects that sincere disposition.
Blythe's handwriting is unsteady, and his grammar isn't always perfect. But the sentiments seem earnest.
"The war has about drove me crazy," he wrote in 1942 as newspapers reported Gen. Douglas MacArthur's desperate defense of the Philippines. "Tell everyone hello and kiss the baby for me."
Anita Blythe still misses him deeply. Though she remarried after her divorce from Blythe in 1944, she later took his name back as her permanent surname.
"He was my first and only love," she said.
Raised on a dirt-poor Texas farm during the Depression, W.J. Blythe left school in the eighth grade to help support his family with a job at a dairy.
By the time he was 20, he was selling car-alignment equipment in the South and Midwest: Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Missouri. His company, J.H. Pereue Equipment Co., was one of many car dealers and service stations along South Third Street in downtown Memphis, Tenn.
As streetcars began to vanish from Memphis in the 1930s, Pereue Equipment jumped into the specialization field, offering alignments for new motorists and training for mechanics.
When Blythe visited the home office, he found it at the De Soto Auto Hotel, a 1,000-stall parking garage, and repair and body shop. And after work, he'd have to walk only a couple of blocks to visit the crackling blues and jazz scene along Beale Street.
In 1940, Blythe's travels brought him to Missouri, where he met Wanetta Ellen Alexander. Outside his immediate family, she probably knew him the longest.
Wanetta, who changed her name to Anita years ago, vividly recalls her time with Blythe and how he affected her.
Anita's family had moved from Kansas City to Fort Scott, Kan., when she was 12. She described herself as an extremely naive teen-ager.
"I didn't know beans from apple butter," she said.
But she did know that Kansas was a dry state in 1940. So at age 17, she and another girl skipped choir practice one day and drove across the state line to a Nevada, Mo., roadhouse to have some fun.
The jukebox was playing and the drinks were flowing. A handsome man soon stepped up and asked her to dance. Anita had never danced before, so she politely declined.
But not long after that, "Alexander's Ragtime Band" began to play on the jukebox. The young man approached her again.
"You are going to dance with me," said the man, who introduced himself as Bill. The coincidence - that her name was Alexander, the song was about "Alexander," and this man had demanded to dance to this song - was too romantic to ignore.
They danced.
"He was a living doll," Anita said. "Young, good-looking, good clothes, smart, classy."
He was a shade under 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighed 180 pounds, with blue eyes, his brown hair combed straight back.
Anita mentioned that she'd be moving to Kansas City soon, and Blythe filed it away.
The next time he was in Kansas City, Blythe looked her up.
Kansas City was a magnet for salesmen in the 1940s. The bustling rail center around Union Station allowed them to easily pick up orders. And in an era when a good brake job cost $5 and a trip to the movies still meant two features and a stage show, the city gave salesmen the chance to relax before returning to the road.
Soon, Blythe and Anita were spending up to 10 days at a time together, whenever he was in the Kansas City area. Blythe was Anita's first boyfriend.
"He taught me a lot about just normal things, how to be a lady," Anita recalled. "I looked up to him."
The two stayed at several hotels in the city - usually on Blythe's expense account. But the one she remembers most was the Netherlands Hotel at 3835 Main St., now an apartment building.
In the early 1940s, the Netherlands was an attractive spot for a busy young salesman out to make a good impression. The 10-story hotel towered over neighboring Westport and featured a fine restaurant, a rooftop garden and a full complement of bellboys, maids and doormen.
When time came to get back on the road, Blythe sometimes took Anita with him on his sales trips. They'd drive his robin's egg blue Buick down to Carthage, Joplin and Springfield in Missouri, towing a bulky wheel alignment and balancing contraption made by Manbee Manufacturing, a now-defunct Chicago firm.
While Blythe made his sales calls, Anita would wait in the car, sometimes for hours under the blazing sun.
Visiting auto-repair shops and dealerships, the couple traveled as far as Tulsa and Oklahoma City, but never to Texas.
"He probably had a reason for not taking me there," Anita said.
At least two of them: an ex-wife and a son.
In December 1935, Blythe had married for the first time, to Virginia Adele Gash, now Adele Coffelt. Both were 17.
Coffelt told The Washington Post that Blythe had hopes of getting a promotion at the dairy job he held before going on the road for Pereue. The promotion would have enabled him to live in a small company apartment.
The job and the apartment fell through, and the couple moved onto the Blythe family farm in Sherman, Texas. Coffelt said she and Blythe shared a room with one of his brothers and his wife.
"I never wanted to be rich, but I never lived with so little," Adele Coffelt told The Post.
Several months later, while Adele was visiting an aunt in Dallas, Blythe mailed her a package with all her clothing. Adele stayed in Dallas and obtained a divorce in September 1936, according to Dallas County records.
But Adele returned to Sherman occasionally and visited Blythe. On one of those trips, she told The Post, they conceived a son, Henry Leon Blythe.
That son, now Henry Leon Ritzenthaler, was born in Sherman on Jan. 17, 1938. Ritzenthaler, who never knew his father, said in a recent phone interview that he wasn't told about Blythe until he was 14, years after Blythe's death.
Blythe's life was never short of complications.
By the fall of 1940, Anita, his 17-year-old girlfriend in Kansas City, was pregnant. Blythe was still traveling, but he regularly stayed in touch.
Blythe would call Anita at her mother's home, at 3205 McGee St., and Anita's mother told him he should do the right thing. Eventually, he agreed.
But first, Blythe had to deal with another personal entanglement - he was married to Minnie Faye Gash, the sister of his first wife, Adele.
Records in Bryan County, Okla., show that W.J. Blythe married Minnie Faye on Dec. 29, 1940, in Durant, Okla., just over the state line from Texas.
Adele Gash Coffelt said that Blythe married her sister "to keep from having to marry a girl who was pregnant. That's what my sister told me."
That woman was probably Anita in Kansas City.
Anita Blythe, who has only recently learned of W.J.'s marriage to Minnie Faye Gash, said she knew at the time that Blythe wasn't eager to marry her.
Nevertheless, court records show that on April 28, 1941, William J. Blythe and Minnie Faye Gash Blythe were divorced in Little Rock, Ark. Gash could not be reached for comment for this story.
Five days after divorcing his second wife, W.J. and Anita were married in the Jackson County courthouse in Kansas City.
Anita said Blythe showed up about 30 minutes before the ceremony on a rainy Saturday in the chambers of Justice of the Peace Joseph J. Dougherty. Anita's mother and her attorney, Kansas City lawyer Gregory Hodges, were the only witnesses.
A week later, Blythe was on the road again when Anita entered St. Mary's Hospital to deliver her baby. Sharron Lee Blythe, now Sharon Pettijohn, was born in Kansas City on Mother's Day, May 11, 1941.
The next day, W.J. Blythe sent a telegram from Texarkana, Ark.
"Sure am glad that you are all right," the telegram said. "How is the baby ... will try to come up this weekend ... I love you always. Love, W.J. Blythe."
Anita stayed in the hospital for two weeks after Sharron was born. Blythe wrote her frequently, including a letter from Little Rock on May 18 that said, "Darling I will try to send you some money after this week for you and the baby until I am able to bring you down."
About three weeks after Anita gave birth, Blythe came back to Kansas City for his young bride and daughter. They headed south, a journey Anita still remembers, feeding and diapering the baby in the back seat of Blythe's Buick.
"I was young and dumb," Anita said. She was 18 at the time. "I had to be to get pregnant."
For reasons Anita can't remember, they settled in Monroe, La., in the north-central part of the state. The apartment they rented was furnished, but it was still a "dump," Anita said.
"I didn't know how to take care of a baby," Anita said. "And he Blythe was there very seldom."
Soon, Anita began to suspect that Blythe was cheating on her.
"With whom, I don't know," Anita said, "but I know there was a lady at one of the nightclubs."
After about six months of marriage, she left him. Blythe reluctantly put her and the baby on a train back to Kansas City, where she and her infant daughter both had long crying spells.
"I should never have left then," Anita said.
Blythe continued to write, though, discussing his job and his military status. In January 1942, he noted that he had written her previously, "but you did not answer."
She had moved in with her mother in a small house at 3334 Garfield Ave. The wood-frame homes in the modest neighborhood rented for about $35 a month.
Sometime in January 1943, Anita apparently wrote to Blythe. He wrote back on Jan. 28, saying he "was very very glad to here from you. How is Sharron, sure would like to see her and you."
The letter also states, "I am going to Calif. Maybe then if you still want to we can start all over again ... Love, Bill."
His offer of reconciliation didn't hold.
Later in 1943, Anita recalls getting either a letter or a phone call from Blythe.
"He said he'd fallen in love with a nurse in Louisiana, and he wanted a divorce," she said.
That woman was Virginia Cassidy, Bill Clinton's mother. She and Blythe married on Sept. 3, 1943, in Texarkana, Ark.
But Blythe hadn't yet bothered to divorce Anita.
The war that was driving W.J. Blythe crazy caught up with him in the spring of 1943.
There was no way to get away from it. The front pages of every paper featured war news from the Pacific to North Africa. Radio shows featuring big band music alternated with panel discussions on topics such as "The Effect of the Blitzkrieg on the Economic Order."
And U.S. war casualties were nearing 80,000, half of them missing in action.
A letter to Anita in 1942 suggests that Blythe had considered joining the Coast Guard, but that never materialized.
Military records show that on April 24, 1943, Blythe joined the Army. He entered active service on May 3, 1943, in Shreveport, La.
About five weeks after his marriage to Virginia Cassidy on Sept. 3, 1943, Blythe was shipped to Europe. As a mechanic in two different base auto-maintenance battalions, Blythe participated in one of the bitterest campaigns of the war: the liberation of Rome on June 5, 1944, and the sprint north to the Arno River in pursuit of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring's retreating Army Group C.
Back in the States, Kansas City coped with the war. The city buried its heroes, the government prosecuted food-rationing coupon counterfeiters, and movie star Dick Powell spent a week at St. Luke's hospital to recover from a severe cold he caught while making appearances for the USO.
And Anita Blythe filed for divorce in Independence, Mo. Court records show the petition actually was filed sometime before Blythe married Cassidy on Sept. 3, 1943, but Jackson County records show the divorce wasn't granted until April 13, 1944. Anita was awarded custody of Sharron, and Blythe was ordered to pay $42 a month for child support.
Blythe finished his Army career as a technician 3rd grade. He arrived back in the United States on Dec. 1, 1945, and was honorably discharged on Dec. 7. He returned to Hope, Ark., Virginia Cassidy Blythe's hometown. She soon became pregnant.
Sometime after coming home from Europe, Blythe returned to Kansas City to see Anita and their daughter. Anita recalled that he walked with a limp and used a cane, though his military records do not indicate that he had been wounded.
Blythe carried an armful of stuffed toys for Sharon, Anita said. The most memorable was a large gray elephant, about a foot long and 18 inches high.
"Sharon had that for a long time" as a reminder of her father, Anita said.
That was the last time Anita and Sharon saw him.
Blythe soon landed a new job in Chicago, and planned to move his new family there. But driving back to Hope the night of May 17, 1946, he encountered a rainstorm in southern Missouri.
Missouri Highway 60 was slick. Blythe's Buick skidded off the road. It overturned and threw him from the car. An hour later, his body was found in a watery ditch. He'd drowned in the darkness.
Three months later, on Aug. 19, 1946, William Jefferson Blythe IV - the future president - was born.
When Virginia Blythe remarried, to Roger Clinton, her son later took his stepfather's name. Virginia now uses the surname of her fourth husband, Richard Kelley. She told The Star last summer that she knew nothing of Blythe's other marriages.
Sometime in the 1950s, Anita called Blythe's old company in Memphis to find out why he hadn't contacted his daughter. A man asked who she was, and Anita said, "I'm his ex-wife."
The man replied, "Which one?"
He told her Blythe had died years earlier.
Though Anita never forgot her first and only love, she wasn't prepared for the surprise of 1992. As Bill Clinton was on the verge of clinching the Democratic presidential nomination that summer, Anita Blythe watched his televised biographical film.
When a picture of Clinton's father flashed on the screen, "I about fell out of my body," Anita Blythe said.
She said her daughter, now 52, was dubious.
"I said, `Sharon, I was there.' "
She called Clinton's mother in Hot Springs, Ark., and found her "evasive and quiet."
"She said, `Oh yes, I expect a lot of them to crawl out of the woodwork.' "
Anita Blythe said she isn't looking to capitalize on the fact that her daughter apparently is the president's half sister. But she'd like for Clinton to meet Sharon.
"That's all I want," she said. "I don't want them to treat my daughter like a stepchild or a nobody. She is a beautiful somebody. And, like it or not, we are a part of history."
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB