| born 15 Sept. 1933 in Louisville.
Married 1st Richard Ashford Lee at West Point, N.Y. on 27 Aug. 1955 2nd Stephen Fassett At the age of 8 Frances decided she preferred being called "Kitty" and since then the General's daughter's word is a command. "My own checkered career started after graduation from Vassar when I married Richard Ashford Lee. Despite his English sounding name, Richard came from a prominent Puerto Rican family, half of hispanic descent, and half English and American. His grandfather on one side had been a U.S. army doctor named Bailey K. Ashford, much revered in Puerto Rico for having discovered hookworm as the cause of tropical anemia. (In Puerto Rico there's a major avenue and a major medical center named after him.) On the other side, his grandmother, named Catalina de la Concepcion de Mercedes Tapia de Lee, was the daughter of a famous Puerto Rican playwright, named Alejandro Tapia, for whom a large theatre there was named. The Tapia/Lee side of the family was colorful. One of Richard's aunts, Consuelo Corretjer, was a leader of the Communist party in the days before Fidel Castro�s victory. She frequently visited Cuba, where the contents of her luggage evoked the official response for contraband. Richard's father, Wally (Waldemar), who ran a family company called "Casa Lee", was an energetic community leader with an irrepressible sense of humor. I liked him a lot, so he and I got along famously. But my marriage to Richard just would not work out, so after years of what my lawyer summed up as irreconcileable differences, I left the island. My first cousin, Betsy Padin, also lived on the Island. She became a well recognized artist, also married a Puerto Rican. My Stay in Puerto Rico did earn me a couple of degrees from the Puerto Rico Conservatory though. And I gave a few piano concerts on the island as well as in the Dominican Republic and in the States. |
After leaving Puerto Rico I met my future husband, Steve Fassett, a self
taught audio engineer and record producer.
But repeated bouts of rheumatic fever as a child had weakened Steve�s heart so much
that he had to drop out
of school in the fifth grade and was educated at home from then on. He
was picky about his subject matter, was prodigiously knowledgeable about
opera, literature, and poetry, but arithmetic brought on fits in him,
so balancing his checkbook was agony for him.
No one in his family had thought he would survive into his twenties but he surprised them all by getting a job in New York City with radio station WQXR, where he did weekly broadcasts on the subject of opera. I think it was there that he met his first wife, Agatha Illes, a Hungarian who had known Bela Bartok and wrote a book about him after they moved to Boston. In Boston he established his own recording studio in the basement of his house, and there recorded actors, poets, and musicians of all kinds, including folk singers like Joan Baez who were performing barefoot around Harvard Square at the time. My happy marriage to Steve was unfortunately brief and he died four and a half years later. I carried on some of his unfinished record projects, the one that occupied me the most being the performances of Roland Hayes, with whom Steve had had a warm friendship and long professional relationship. I knew Hayes during his very last days, when Steve and I would go and visit him. and his wife Alzada. Hayes would go into raptures about how nice everyone had always been to him, forgetting that when he and Alzada moved into their house in Brookline, Mass., people threw stones through their windows, and how in Georgia people had burned down his farm. Anyway, after a lot of effort on my part, and with some resistance from some record companies and very little cooperation from Hayes' daughter Afrika, I finally was able to complete the project with a CD put out by the Smithsonian. That was in 1990. Meanwhile, in 1986, with some money inherited from my other aunt, Katie Whitelaw I had bought an old movie house in Maine and in 1990 I moved there and co-founded a non-profit performing arts organization called Waldo Theatre, Inc. There I kept busy producing various theatrical events, running art shows, and concertizing here and there in Maine, in Massachusetts, and on one occasion on a Russian riverboat making its way from St. Petersburg to Moscow. That was in 2003. Waldo Theatre, Inc. still exists, but the expense of keeping the theatre open was quickly running me into the poorhouse, so in 2006 I donated the building to the organization and moved to California, where I try to live within my means. |
| Frances Young Nicholas and Richard Ashford Lee had issue:
(Ni3-5-4-1-1) Frances Allen Lee, born 1956, died 2010 in Colorado leaving a daughter, Samantha. (Ni3-5-4-1-2) Edward Ashford Lee, born 1957 professor of informatics in Berkeley CA, author of The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines. published in 2020 by MIT Press. (Ni3-5-4-1-3) Maria Catalina Lee, born 1959. |
My daughter Francie was very beautiful and very bright. She had graduated
first in her class from a prestigious girls' boarding school called Dana
Hall in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and then went on to graduate with honors
from Yale. She then married Ray Barboza, a Puerto Rican blacksmith, rock
singer and composer who later went on to work for the FBI. He and Francie
were divorced after a couple of years.
They weren't right for one another, but I always liked Ray and he still calls me "Mom". In Boston Francie got a job with the budget department at MIT, followed by an MBA from Simmons, followed by a job in the budget department at Boston College. At some point she met her next husband, David Davis, and after their marriage and the birth of their only daughter, Samantha, they moved to Colorado, where Francie was hired as assistant budget director of the University of Colorado in Boulder. Her husband Dave was a talented artist but he and Francie weren't meant for one another either. Francie took to the bottle for consolation, but after her divorce she got "off the sauce" and never touched another drink. At some time after that she renewed acquaintance with her former Boston College employer, Mike Callnan. He became her devoted companion and moved to Boulder to take care of her after her diagnosis from brain cancer. Francie and I had traveled a lot together. She was full of fun and a spirit of adventure. In India we watched tigers and rode on elephants and took pictures of one horned rhinos. In Kenya we went up in a balloon and capsized onto a termite mound on the way down. In Vietnam a tour guide became infatuated with her and wrote a poem which he read to our entire tour group. It ended with these two lines: "I could never be her lover, for she is traveling with her mother." |