After 64 years, Ann and Walker Uhlhorn ponder love and letting go
Ann and Walker Uhlhorn in their home on Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023, have been married for 64 years. (Mark Weber/The Daily Memphian)
Thomas Merton — writer, theologian and activist — knew love was the truest destiny.
“We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone — we find it with another,” he said.
As a Trappist monk, Valentine’s Day didn’t mean to him what it means today to Ann and Walker Uhlhorn, married 64 years.
They found love and life’s meaning within days of meeting. Six months later, they were married in 1958 and setting off together in California with the courage it takes to be young, in love and off on an adventure far from home.
Their lives are colored now with the same raw courage, at 86 and 84, as they ponder inwardly, in the quiet of their days, how to simultaneously love and let go.
Ann was diagnosed with lung cancer in November. Because of the tumor’s location and advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), even a biopsy is risky. She has decided against treatment. Instead of a purse when she goes out for dinner or Mahjong, she carries the 10-pound oxygen console and the cord that is her lifeline.
“My doctor said he understood my decision. I think it’s what he would have told me was best,” she said.
Walker is gallant and supporting, but quiet.
“I think it is probably harder on me,” he says.
In a book of memories, this photo stands emblematic of the regard between Ann and Walker Uhlhorn. (Jane Roberts/The Daily Memphian)
In a book of photos taken over years, he’s either close or smiling at Ann, the 19-year-old University of Michigan student he met here after he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and married before his ship sailed in January 1959.
Five years later, when she was pregnant with their first child, he left his military career with its months at sea to be a father and husband who could be home at night.
The Uhlhorns have spent their lives physically and emotionally close, sitting, as they spend their days now, on a loveseat in their East Memphis home, with the art of their shared adventure on nearly every wall.
“We decided to get married after knowing each other a week or two. I know it wasn’t any more than that,” Ann says, the oxygen console huffing methodically at her side.
‘When can I pay you back?’
In the late spring of 1958, Walker Uhlhorn was home burning off some vacation before he left for his ship in the Pacific. He had gotten a temporary job at the Highway Patrol office, then on Yates.
One day, a young woman came in to take her driver’s test. Walker administered the test, but she had forgotten to bring money to pay the fee.
“I offered to loan it to her,” Walker says.
“I said, ‘When can I pay you back?’” Ann said. “He said why don’t you go out with me tomorrow night?’” For 65 years, that has been the punchline of the story of their courtship.
They dated several weeks before Walker left for sea the first time.
In the meantime, her soon to be father-in-law, former state representative Walker ‘Tick’ Uhlhorn, came with a ring and his wife, got down on one knee and asked Ann if she would marry them, proposing in proxy for their son.
This image is of an old family photo of Ann and Walker Uhlhorn’s (center) rehearsal dinner, which is displayed in the couple’s home. (Mark Weber/The Daily Memphian)
The Uhlhorns were married by Christmas, and the next day, started off driving to San Diego, where Ann would live in officers’ housing while Walker was at sea.
“I can remember saying to myself, ‘What have I done? I don’t even know him,’” Ann said.
Longtime friend Brian Pecon, the first senior vice president of flight & international operations at FedEx, meets the Uhlhorns every week for dinner.
Their relationship has always struck him as close, partly because their physical stature is similar, he said.
“They do things together. Sitting down for supper, for instance, one will say, ‘Here, try some of this,’” he said. “They exchange.”
Joined at the hip
“They have always done everything together,” says Cheryl McCormack, a friend for 50 years. “A lot of times, Ann would say, ‘Oh, I can’t go to lunch. Walker wants me to be home with him.”
Janie Morris, another friend, laughs about the time, three or four years ago, that she invited Ann to her lake home for the weekend.
“She politely declined because she and Walker had never spent a night apart,” she said. “A lot of the husbands and wives in this group of friends are close, but none of us are joined at the hip like they are.”
Daughter Pearson Crutcher thinks her parents were apart one night when Ann served on the vestry at Church of the Holy Communion and attended an officers’ retreat.
“Dad was not happy. He was very, very lost.
“My parents have always been close. They did everything together. I’m very big on girls’ trips and stuff like that with my friends. Mom has never done that.”
Safe at home
The Uhlhorns were a household name in the Mid-South in the 1970s and ’80s. They founded Uhlhorn Security, which started as a home alarm business when no one had home alarms and grew to be one of the top home and business security companies in the region.
“When there were stories in the newspaper about people who had been burglarized, I would call them and ask if we could help,” Ann said.
In the early days, every alarm call after 5 p.m. was forwarded to their home phone.
They sold the business in the 1990 to Honeywell, which for a year had told Uhlhorn it intended to enter the market as a competitor if he refused to sell.
“Dad said, ‘OK, competition is OK,’” Crutcher said. “Then they came back and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
Walker Uhlhorn was 53 and not ready to retire. To keep his hands in business, he invested in Enterprise Bank — which later became Cadence Bank — and served on its board.
In 1991, he founded The Society of Entrepreneurs, an honorary circle of the influentials who built the companies that together employ hundreds of thousands of Memphians, ultimately responsible for much of the wealth and innovation that accrues here.
The society is an outward expression of how much Uhlhorn values the virtue of capitalism and wishes to teach it to others, says Jeff Webb, who grew Varsity Spirit out of his Memphis apartment into a publicly traded company and was an early inductee.
“It was a brilliant idea, especially in the early days; you had the Chamber of Commerce, but there was no kind of organization of small business people that were bound together by these entrepreneurial drives and values. It is something that has been important for the city.”
But Walker Uhlhorn’s life was largely his own. Ann was one of the top female golfers in the city. He loved golfing with her.
To make it more interesting, for the next two decades or more, they planned world trips around the courses they wanted to play, including St. Andrew’s Old Course in Scotland and dozens of others in Australia, Europe and Africa, making friends with the people that luck and circumstance put in their path.
Because golf usually involves foursomes, the Uhlhorns were often paired with people, giving them, even for a few hours, some of the most interesting people of their lives.
One was Pepe Willie, manager of musician Prince’s early career in Minneapolis. The three met on a course outside Orlando.
“I love them both so much,” Willie said by Facebook instant message. “We played golf together at Orange Lake resorts, and believe it or not, Ann kicked my butt every time.
“Walker is a soft-spoken person and dangerous on the old course. LOL.”
The Uhlhorns’ daughters would hear of these long-distance adventures by phone, shaking their heads at the circumstances they could only imagine led to the events.
“Once when they were in Africa, they told us they had been invited to a caddy’s wedding and gone to a cattle market,” Crutcher said.
The Uhlhorns met Willie once a year for years in Orlando, enjoying him outside the retinue that often accompanied him.
“They were not overly impressed about Pepe because they didn’t know who Prince was,” Crutcher said. “We were all, ‘Oh, my gosh, you’re hanging out with the guy that hangs out with Prince.’”
The world’s our oyster
The pair kept track of their trips on a world map that is now dotted with more than 100 colored pins. The white ones — nearly 55 of them — are the places they golfed.
The Uhlhorns remember each of these trips, noted by the dots on a map that hangs in a spare bedroom in their East Memphis home. (Courtesy the Uhlhorn family)
“A lot of people want to go to Europe or on a trip and be in the finest hotels,” Ann said. “That’s not what we were up to.
“In fact, we didn’t stay in hotels. We stayed in bed and breakfasts. They were always very nice people.”
Ann Uhlhorn made her first hole-in-one (she has seven) at a course in Egypt. Congratulations from the course, written on pressed papyrus, hang framed in the hall outside their bedroom.
“They were taken that I’d had good luck,” she said.
The Uhlhorns, from the beginning, always bet on their golf games. The loser, at Ann’s suggestion, made the bed the next day.
“We did it that way because what was money,” she said. “I’d have to borrow from him to pay my debt.”
Walker, who has made three hole-in-ones, admits he’s made the bed most of their life.
“She didn’t knock the ball out of the fairway very much. She’d didn’t knock it as far, but she could knock it straight,” he says with just a trace of a smile.
Love and the unknown
Ann has been on oxygen a year. In November, doctors found a large mass in her lungs that had spread to her lymph nodes.
They do not know how far advanced the cancer is — or how fast it is growing — because it cannot be biopsied.
“I can’t feel anything. Maybe someday I’ll know about it,” Ann said.
Friends, including golfers they met on trips, are checking in more frequently now. The Uhlhorns’ exchange student from Mexico — Bernarda Suarez Rios, who lived with them seven years starting in 1983 — will arrive Feb. 16.
Neither says much about the length of their days, their worries or the future.
“I don’t think it’s easy to be ill,” Ann said. “It’s just how you manage it.”
Topics
Ann Uhlhorn Walker Uhlhorn Valentine's DayJane Roberts
Longtime journalist Jane Roberts is a Minnesotan by birth and a Memphian by choice. She's lived and reported in the city more than two decades. She covers business news and features for The Daily Memphian.
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