Some families hike or collect beer cans together.
For Corinna Fowler Mathews, the family hobby is a bit more esoteric — parliamentary rules of order.
Mathews turns 105 on Friday and will celebrate with beer and oysters.
Many things can be said about her years as a Navy wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and 81-year member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a group tracing their lineal descent to the patriots.
But as her health wanes in a Greenwood Village nursing home, Mathews still draws her identity above all else from one long-lost ancestor — her grandfather Henry M. Robert, author of “Robert’s Rules of Order.”
“The defining thing for her always is that she’s her grandfather’s granddaughter,” says daughter Shirley Chapman.
“The General,” as the family refers to Robert, had many achievements, including his work building the defenses of Washington, Philadelphia and several New England ports during the Civil War. But it’s his writings on parliamentary procedure for which he is most remembered since his death in 1923.
He wrote his famous handbook after an 1863 meeting he was asked to lead in New England degenerated into chaos.
“My embarrassment was supreme,” he wrote.
Anyone who has attended city council, school board or homeowners association meetings has followed, or attempted to follow his codified, often maddeningly slow procedures designed to ensure that everybody — majority and minority — gets heard. At millions of proceedings, the rules have kept even the most petulant politicians and hotheaded of HOA members from bloodshed.
“It’s the single most effective method of group decisionmaking ever devised,” says Colette Collier Trohan of the American Institute of Parliamentarians.
Health problems have muddled Mathews’ memories of Robert. But letters from him, her own writings and stories retold by her daughter detail a relationship with the man she lived with much of her childhood.
Robert was obsessed with his work, assigning his teenage granddaughter to edit his later writings at his home in upstate New York.
“Everything has been sacrificed to the book (ROR),” he wrote her in 1914.
Two years later, he sent a revised copy with the following message — not exactly your typical letter from a grandparent:
“Grandfather hopes you will never use your knowledge of parliamentary law for selfish ends. Always use your knowledge for the benefit of others . . . Be courteous and show others that parliamentary law is a great help not a hindrance to the prompt and proper attendance to business in a meeting. . . . With love, Your affectionate grandfather.”
Mathews went on through her 90s to volunteer as a parliamentarian and teacher of her grandfather’s principles. Her daughter worked as a parliamentarian by trade. And a great-granddaughter is part of the board that helps revise Robert’s book every decade.
“To know that there are living threads that go back to the person who wrote the book, that’s very special for us,” Trohan says.
With her mother fading quickly, Shirley Chapman recognizes that — at least in her branch of the family — the General’s legacy of propriety and order will be hers to carry on.
“For today,” she says from her home in Centennial, “I’ll think I’ll start by cleaning my porch.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
