Nobody ever had to tell Andrew Loudon to call his grandma.
The Lincoln lawyer happily — and punctually — phoned his Nanny Loudon every Sunday afternoon until her death in 2008.
He called his Grandma Kerr every Sunday, too, at the assisted-living home in New Wilmington, near the western Pennsylvania town where Loudon lived as a boy.
His calls to Betty Kerr continued for 20 years and she always answered the phone the same way: Hello, Andrew.
The woman who could set her clock to a call from her grandson was 92 when she died on June 25.
That first Sunday without punching the 724 area code has come and gone.
“I enjoyed every minute of those wide-ranging conversations,†Loudon wrote in a Facebook tribute. “I will miss our Sunday afternoon phone calls.â€
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Calls that began after the deaths of his grandfathers, one in 1997, the other in 1998.
“I knew both of them were pretty lonely after their husbands passed away,†Loudon said last week. “And I thought, why not just give them a call? It started a great tradition.â€
And Loudon is a man who likes tradition.
The 45-year-old golfs every Wednesday. He heads to the dry cleaners every Saturday morning. And early Sunday afternoons were always catch-up-with-grandma time.
In those 20 years of weekly phone calls, he graduated from his landline to his Blackberry — which Grandma and Nanny had a hard time hearing — to his iPhone 6.
The calls followed a pattern.
The weather in Nebraska, which in two days’ time would usually make its way to Pennsylvania.
What the minister said that morning in church — both grandmas were deeply religious and lived in the same Presbyterian-run care center on a college campus.
A few words about politics, stalwart Republicans all. (Although there was the election of 2012, when Kerr cast her ballot for Barack Obama. “She threw us a curveball,†Loudon said.)
Loudon wasn’t yet a father when he began dialing Pennsylvania once a week. (This fall, Kristen starts at UNL and John will be a junior at East High.)
But when he became a dad, the calls always included maternal queries about the kids. “They were intensely interested in what their great-grandchildren were doing.â€
Loudon was a teenager himself when he moved to Lincoln with his parents and siblings, his dad a minister who’d accepted a call to preach at Eastridge Presbyterian.
“I’d lived blocks away from one set of grandparents and 15 minutes from the other set,†Loudon said.
They’d gone to Pirates games together, attended church and sang hymns together. Loudon had spent countless hours in play at their homes, learned about the Great Depression and the days of World War II through their stories.
Suddenly, 900 miles separated them.
So he did something about it. Starting in high school and all the way through college and law school, he wrote letters — “hilariously long letters†— and mailed them back east.
“I missed talking to them in person, so I wrote them long letters from out on the Great Plains.â€
The calls that followed were a natural segue after his grandmothers were widowed.
The conversations were never stilted and, once a year, the grandson, his wife, Anne, and the kids tried to make it back to New Wilmington to keep the bond strong.
“I did a lot of listening,†he says. “They spoke more than I did and I really wanted to to hear what they had to say.â€
As a preacher’s kid, Loudon grew up visiting with older people in the congregation. He made a good friend that way, Agnes, born in 1898.
That ease helped him in his job as an estate planner at Baylor Evnen, where he has many older clients. People who are sometimes surrounded by silence or with only the sound of the TV for company.
After his farewell post on Facebook, complete with a photo of a “cheesy prop phone from my office,†his friends expressed sympathy for his loss and love for his tradition, the memories it made and what those calls must have meant to his grandmothers and to him.
He felt the love.
Loudon will still get up and go to church on Sundays and share a meal with his family, then slip away for golf late in the day.
And the faithful grandson who loves traditions will still head to a quiet place in the house and pick up his phone.
“My parents moved to Florida,†he says. “I call them every Sunday.â€