When I had arrived a few minutes before 10, I found a handwritten note taped to the door, telling me that when we set up the interview a few days earlier, Mrs. Chancellor had forgotten a doctor's appointment. She said she hoped we would be able to reschedule.
I was more than willing to wait.
This interview and the frail 93-year-old woman who greeted me were vital to The Buck Starts Here, the book I was researching on Harry S. Truman and the City of Lamar.
On one of the key dates in Truman's history, August 31, 1944, when he returned to Lamar to deliver his vice presidential acceptance speech from a platform on the west side of the Barton County Courthouse, Mrs. Chancellor's late husband, former Barton County State Bank President Richard Chancellor, who at the time was her boyfriend, was being held captive in a German POW camp.
As I sat on her sofa and prepared the recording device I was going to use during the interview, she brought me some papers, which she described as a first person account of a bombing mission in 1943 in which her husband's plane crashed and he and his men were listed as missing in action as they traveled perilous waters filled with German U-boats to return home. The account had been written by the plane's bombardier who thought she might like to read the story of her husband's heroism after Richard Chancellor died in 2000.
I read the first couple of pages. It was a gripping account and well-written, but I was anxious to begin the interview, so I took photos of the pages.
"Richard always intended to write his story, but he never did," she said.
For the next hour and a half, I listened as Mrs. Chancellor told me about Richard Chancellor. She spoke of the first time she met her future husband in 1940, when she was a student at Marceline High School and Richard Chancellor's nephew was one of her teachers.
The teacher and his wife invited her to have dinner with them, with the teacher saying he wanted to introduce her to Richard because he thought she would make a good wife for him.
"There I was only 15 years old and I hadn't had any thoughts of getting married or being anybody's wife.'
The dinner went well, she recalled. She was immediately taken with Richard Chancellor, but as their young romance was developing, she, like tens of thousands of women across the United States found herself left behind as her boyfriend went to war.
After she graduated from high school, Ione Williams did her part for the U. S. war effort, working on a production line at Pratt and Whitney in Kansas City making bomber engines.
During those years, she lived through the ordeal after he was reported missing in action, was filled with pride as he was honored for rescuing his men after the plane crashed during that mission and then once again was filled with dread when she learned that the man she loved had crashed behind enemy lines and had been captured by the Nazis.
It did not take long after his liberation in April 1945 for the couple to marry. He returned to Missouri on June 2, 1945. Three weeks later to the day, Richard Chancellor and Ione Williams exchanged wedding vows.
She told me the story of her wedding and then pointed to an area in her living room.
"We were married right there," she said, a smile covering her face as she relived the memory. The wedding had been held at the home of Chancellor's parents, a home that six years later became her home until her death Wednesday.
While Richard Chancellor became a Lamar community leader, serving in city government and helping with the growth of Barton County Memorial Hospital, Mrs. Chancellor, in her quiet way, was also serving Lamar, working as a registered nurse at the hospital for more than two decades.
Our interview ended much too soon.
It was a few months later as I was writing the portion of the book about Richard Chancellor that I had my first chance to read through the bombardier's account of Chancellor's heroism.
I was surprised to see that there was much more to the papers I had not had the time to read that day. Out of the 15 pages I photographed, only the first 11 were written by the bombardier.
The last few pages were from a short-lived effort by Richard Chancellor in 1996 to tell his story.
And while he was never able to get to the part of the story about his captivity, he wrote about an event that was far more important in his life- the day he met Ione Williams.
"I was quite impressed with her," he wrote. "It was the beginning of a beautiful and lasting romance."
Today, on the 75th anniversary of their wedding, they are together for eternity.
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