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Kiefer Chronicle, Creek Co. OK
July 21, 1916
In Memoriam - Died at his home in our city
Thomas J. MCANDREWS, aged fifty-three. It was the editors good fortune
to have known him long and well, and we only knew him to esteem him more
highly as the years passed by. Today we miss his kindly smile and friendly
greeting; we long in vain to hear his ring of jovial laughter and to feel
again his genial prescence. Only today we sat before the bier in the church
near the scene of his labors and happy days. We stood by the open grave as
the last sad rites were performed by his fellow brother Masons, and as the
clay of earth closed above his silent resting place, we said with the poet:
"Not dead, but sleeping." "Night came releasing him from labor - When a hand
out of darkness Touched him and he slept."
The funeral services were held at the M.E. church at twelve o'clock
(midnight)Wednesday by the Oklahoma Consistory
Number One, Scottish Rite Masons, with Acting Wise Master Frank Greer, of
Guthrie, officiating and paying a beautiful and impressive tribute to the
deceased. The ceremony conducted was beautiful and impressive bringing out
that great thought that he that doeth all things well, makes no mistakes.
The human link snapped asunder is forged anew in Heaven. On Thursday afternoon
the A.F.&A.M. Blue Lodge held their service with Mat Shoptaw, Worshipful
Grand Master in charge. They conveyed to their listeners the true meaning
of brotherly love and that death was only the sleeping of the outer body.
The casket was covered with the most beautiful floral designs loving fingers
ever wrought, all of which spoke of peace, purity and immorality. The music
rendered was such as to soften all hearts and to misten all eyes. At the
close of the service.
Thursday an unsual large procession followed the funeral car to our city
of the dead at Sapulpa. At the open gate we say "farewell." May God's purest
angels guard his slumbers.
He was a devoted husband and a kind and indulgent father and to his friends
the soul of fellowship. But the greatest of all, he was a man. And as a man,
it is those who knew him most love to contemplate him. He believed in the
Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.
To the wife, three daughters and son I would say: that poet nor artist has
never been able to portray the grave colors of brightness and beauty. Bryant,
in the "Hymn of Death" could not make the subject beautiful; and yet the
cemetery with its marble and its dead, the chair that has no occupant, the
fancied echo of the silent voice, and the vacant place in the home, social
and lodge life, are mellowing and uplifting to their influence. They bring
the best of human nature into the fullness of vigor crowding back the sefishness
and imperiousness of men, and impressing them with the duty of recognition
of the value of friendship. It is the gloom of the church yard that reveals
to us more clearly the beauty of life. It is the broken ties at the grave
that prompts us to a fuller appreciation of the tenderness of the ties that
are not yet broken; and so while we mourn the loss of our dead we may rejoice
that there is no light behind it, no sorrow so poignant that there is not
a balm in the ____ ________.
Submitted by Rita Buford [email protected]
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