Catherine Landers

Lieut. Catherine M . (Titus) Landers (Ret)
WWII Bronze Star

With family members at her side Catherine M . (Titus) Landers passed away quietly the evening of February 12, 2012 at the Pilgrim Rehabilitation Center in Peabody, Massachusetts after a period of declining health.

Catherine was born in Melrose, Massachusetts on August 14, 1920. She was the eldest of seven children of the Late Kirk H. and Harriet E. (Chesley) Titus, Jr. Catherine was preceded in death by her siblings Joseph (Bill), Kirk (Bud), Fletcher (Babe), Elizabeth (Betty) Tatro, and Paul. She is survived by her brother Sidney of Austin, Texas.
For most of her life Catherine resided in Wakefield, Massachusetts, she delighted in pointing out several of the houses that her father and brothers built in town including her little house of sixty years behind the Greenwood School. She graduated from Wakefield High in 1936. Using a gift of money that her Grandmother Titus pulled from a cedar chest, Catherine was able to attend and graduate from the Melrose Hospital School of Nursing as a Registered Nurse in 1942.

Catherine after graduation from nursing school attempted to join the Army to serve in WWII. Being a small woman under five feet tall, the army initially rejected her. When the country's need became bigger than her size, Catherine was able to join the US Army as a Second Lieutenant. After training in Texas, and in spite of Army restrictions that she only serve in New England, Catherine boarded the Queen Elizabeth, now a US troop carrier, and sailed for England. After the invasion of France on D Day, she followed the soldiers to France where she ran a ward in a field hospital outside of Paris. For her service in the European African Middle Eastern Theatre Campaign she was awarded the Bronze Star. She was later promoted to First Lieutenant. Catherine liked to kid her brothers, who also served in WWII and or Korea that they had to obey her as she outranked them all. While she was preparing to follow the troops to Japan after the German surrender, the Japanese surrendered, and so ended Catherine's service to her country. The nation no longer needed a woman less than five feet tall.

Her Brother Babe introduced Catherine to her future husband John Landers . They were married on August 29, 1947. They purchased a house on Madison Ave in Greenwood. In the early 1950's with a third child due, Catherine and John decided with the assistance of her father and brothers to build a new house on the vacant lot next door. Catherine pulled out drawing of her dream house, a two story colonial, but her brothers convinced her that everyone was building "ranch houses". That was one of the last times that Catherine would give up on her wishes. With the birth of their fourth child Catherine spent the remainder of her life devoted to raising her children Sandra Lewis (spouse Joseph), John, Jr or Jay-Jay (spouse Jasper Lawson), Barry (spouse Wendy), and Celeste Wentworth (spouse Bruce). In addition to her children, she leaves her grandchildren Jeremy and Sabrina Wallace, Barry (spouse Noelle) and John Landers (Spouse Vania Tareco), Kathleen and Jennifer Wentworth, and great grandsons Austin and Griffin Landers .

Following the death of her husband John in 1975, Catherine established the Landers Family Fund Scholarship at the Citizens' Scholarship Foundation of Wakefield to honor her late husband and his cousin Miss Katherine Landers an elementary school teacher in Wakefield. Like the pulling of money out of her grandmother's cedar chest, the Fund has been helping young people attend college. To continue Catherine's support of higher education, the family has established the Lt. Catherine (Titus) Landers Fund for Nursing at CSF of Wakefield

Near the end her life Catherine became an early financial supporter of the Wakefield World War II Monuments Committee's campaign to replace the aging wooden WWII monument with a new granite structure. She wanted to make sure that the six Titus veterans and all the other Wakefield service men and woman of World War II would be permanently remembered. While she was not physically able to attend the moving Veterans Day dedication and view her paver stone, WWII committee member and Wendy's father Arthur Wessels was always kind in sharing with Catherine the progress of the monument in pictures and stories.

At Catherine's request the ceremony and burial at Forest Glade Cemetery in Wakefield in the Veterans Section will be private.


Read Catherine Landers's Obituary and Guestbook on www.mcdonaldfs.com.

Service

Private