Joe and Ann Phillips built a 50-year marriage on trust, honesty, freedom—and stolen tires. Read more about the storybook romance they lived and the actual stories Ann started that Joe wants you to finish.
See a slideshow of their life together.
The App State English Department is pleased to tell the story behind the Carolyn Ann Phillips Creative Writing Competition. Carolyn Ann Phillips was an App State English Department alumna who passed away from colon cancer in May 2020.
Although Phillips never published, she wrote many poems and multiple unfinished short stories, excerpts of which serve as creative inspiration for student submissions. Submissions should relate to the excerpt and can be specific, like continuing the story or featuring characters from it, or broad but thematically similar.
Creative Writing faculty judge submissions based on the quality of the prose and the writer's explanation of how the pieces are linked. The prize is a $2,900 scholarship applied to the following school year. The portal for submissions closed on April 10th, but the competition will take place in perpetuity.
Phillips was not only a writer but a deeply dependable and caring individual. She served as a eucharistic minister, was a mother of three, and wife to Joe Phillips for almost 50 years.
Read a fuller version of their rich and varied life together below.
Strapped for cash, with only $100 and a 1958 Chevrolet V8 with balding tires to his name, Joe Phillips had to find a way to (metaphorically) reinvent his wheels. Unable to afford new tires (literally), Phillips devised a simple plan: he’d just steal them.
He set that plan into motion by skulking around three local gas stations hunting for tires, and though he didn’t find any at those first three stops, angry shop owners found him. They threatened to fire shots in his direction, and promptly called the cops, reporting Georgia’s newest petty thief.
After fleeing, Phillips made his way to a different gas station “way out in the boonies.” There, he managed to wrangle all the tires he needed — sans gunshots and cops this time — and hid them in the woods like buried treasure.
A month or so passed, and, with the coast clear, Phillips returned to his plunder, but this time he wasn’t alone. To help with the retrieval, he was accompanied by his new love interest, a plucky young woman named Ann Phillips. Despite her disapproval of the theft on moral grounds, Ann came along anyway. He never knew how, exactly, she reconciled her aiding and abetting a petty thief because they never spoke about it again. But that summed up the gorgeous contradiction-in-terms that was Ann. She was a good Christian, but she was no snitch.
This story illustrates the three ingredients necessary to sustain their 50-year-marriage: trust, honesty, and freedom. Joe said the two had few similarities outside of “being pretty liberal,” yet they had a marriage that many dream of and few ever attain.
The two met when Ann was working as a receptionist at the Georgia Tech clinic and Joe was a regular there, due to a near-constant battle with the nasty bacteria streptococcus pyogenes, colloquially known as strep.
“Somebody told me about her and said ‘she might like to go out with you.’”
Joe jumped at the opportunity. The saying “opposites attract” finds new layers of meaning in the context of Joe and Ann’s early relationship. Joe was an undisciplined, long-haired hippie aspiring to be as cool as James Dean, but soon to play the role of medic in the army instead. Ann was the poster child of Protestant work ethic and discipline: primarily raised by her grandmother, brought up in the Southern Baptist Church, and an old-soul owing to a childhood spent reading books while bedridden by asthma. Despite these differences, they became quickly enamored with one another and married just a few months after their Robin Hood tire adventure.
Although only 21 when they married, life didn’t spare them any curveballs. One month into marriage, they received the news that Ann was pregnant but shortly after, Joe received his draft notice. These competing pressures threatened to overwhelm the marriage, but with their core pillars of trust, honesty, and freedom intact, that hard season refined their marriage until it was tough as flint, but beautiful as a diamond.
Following his training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, Joe and Ann packed all their belongings into a station wagon and moved to San Antonio, Texas. More trials followed when a heavily pregnant Ann broke her leg, an accident that meant 130-pound-Joe had to carry 150-pound-Ann up and down the hospital steps for appointments prior to the birth of their first child, Joey. Just as Ann relied on Joe’s physical strength to carry her up and down those stairs, Joe relied on Ann’s dependability to carry him through the even darker tragedy just on the couple’s horizon.
Father Jim, the priest of their church home at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, described Ann as deeply dependable.
“If Ann said she was going to be there, she was there,” he said.
That dependability was a lucky break for Joe because, just two days shy of their 36th wedding anniversary, on December 10, 2006, while in Puerto Rico, as Joe was enjoying his favorite sport (paragliding), a sudden wind slammed his glider — and his body — into a mountain. The accident left him paralyzed from the waist down.
Ann had never shared Joe’s love of paragliding, but she didn’t use the accident as a chance to say “I told you so,” either. Instead, she doubled down on her loyalty and dependability, filling in gaps in Joe’s medical care.
“She was a bulldog,” Joe said of Ann.
She stayed on top of the nurses and the doctors at all times, refusing to let things go, and dogging the staff until they prescribed him the proper medications.
“If it weren’t for her care and the way she ramrodded the nurses,” he said, “I wouldn’t be alive today.”
Ann was not unidimensional, however. She was as kind as she was dogged; a woman who contained multitudes.
“She got along with anybody. She just didn’t have prejudices.”
Her deep care for others was apparent in many aspects of her life, but perhaps none greater than her part-time role as a Eucharistic minister, delivering the Eucharist — consecrated bread and wine — to those bedridden or living in nursing homes. She was active in her local community and helped open the House of Hope food pantry. She had an “inquiring mind,” constantly asking Father Jim, her priest and friend, questions he couldn’t answer. And, she was funny.
“Father Jim, do you know what your most frequent answer is?” Ann once asked him.
“No, what?” said Father Jim.
“Sure beats the heck out of me!”
For all of her pluck and verve though, Ann had a soft underbelly, which made her sensitive to others’ judgements, particularly around her disability. Because of her severe childhood asthma, Ann received Social Security Disability, which made possible a scholarship to Appalachian State University. Joe’s mother — who came of age during the Great Depression when Social Security was new and sentiment against disability provisions ran hot — didn’t know this about her daughter-in-law.
“Social Security would be just fine had they not included disability,” she ranted one night over dinner.
Ann froze, shame flooding her cheeks. She didn’t say a word as she cleared the table, but her relationship with her mother-in-law was never the same.
“Ann really thought it was a degradation of her, because she would have never been able to get a college education without it,” Joe said.
Ann’s father died of colon cancer, and, despite her belief in an afterlife and the comfort she took from that, she was afraid to die, afraid — particularly — of dying from colon cancer. Because of this fear, she had her colon examined every five years, as prescribed, without fail. One day in April 2018, only two years after her latest colonoscopy, she felt a pang in her stomach. At the time, Joe didn’t think much of it, but he insisted she go to the hospital anyway. Characteristically Ann, she drove herself.
A few hours later, Joe got the call from Ann and it wasn’t good news. In fact, it was the worst possible news: stage-four colon cancer.
“The diagnosis changed everything,” Joe said.
The next day Ann had surgery to remove a large tumor, but doctors were too late. The cancer had already spread into her abdomen and the tumor turned out to be inoperable. Joe still wonders how the cancer ate her up that fast.
As her nature demanded, Ann fought. And fought hard. But shortly after starting chemotherapy, she hit a wall. On a hot night in July, 2018, she suddenly awoke at 2 a.m. barely able to speak or move. Joe called 911 and that call saved her life.
Ann spent the next two weeks in the hospital and made what Joe described as a “remarkable recovery”. He visited every day, bringing her “Coca-Cola shaved ice” and the occasional smuggled beer.
“I was astounded because she had never cared for beer,” Joe said. “I don’t believe I had ever seen her even taste it before.”
But beer is what she wanted and Joe would have stolen the moon if Ann had asked him to.
Months later, she attempted chemo again, and, at first, it seemed to work, but the side effects grew too intense to manage again, and in 2019, they made the impossible decision to forgo treatment. Surprisingly, the six months that followed were glorious and relatively pain free.
“It was a more or less normal life,” Joe said.
But in early May 2020, the cancer came back and she deteriorated fast. Hospice nurses set up a hospital bed in the couple’s spare bedroom, a room they’d shared for five decades. Thanks to Joe’s training as a medic, he was able to care for Ann largely on his own. It was a sacred time.
By the second week of May, Ann began to drift in and out, eventually settling into a coma. Joe’s back injury made it increasingly difficult to care for her alone so on May 17th, he called in Hospice to help the next day, but that day, for Ann, didn’t come. Near 2 a.m. on May 18, 2020, he went to check on Ann and found her gone.
“I felt awful that I had not been beside her,” Joe said. “But, it gave me comfort to know that I had cared for her myself to the very end.”
He’d fulfilled his vow of “till death do us part”. It was a small mercy.
Among the multitudes that Ann carried within her was a talent for writing and a deep appreciation for art, but these were aspects of her life and character she kept largely to herself. Joe didn’t know she even wrote until she off-handedly mentioned one day that she was working on a story called “My Mouse.”
“Ann wrote to please herself,” Joe said. She wasn’t performative, he explained. She loved art for the art itself.
He had to beg and beg Ann to let him read “My Mouse,” until she finally relented.
“It’s some of the best fiction I’ve ever read,” he said, careful to note that, “of course, I am biased and not a literature expert.”
Still, his praise holds.
The story has no ending, but Joe loves it anyway and as Ann battled her cancer, Joe once again encouraged her to finish her stories. In typical Ann fashion, she went her own way, gifting him (and the young writers at App State that would one day read and respond to her work) — not an ending, but an opportunity, an opportunity to share in the fun of writing and extend her work and spirit beyond the grave.
The unfinished stories became the seed of the Carolyn Ann Phillips Literary Competition scholarship, which originally challenged aspiring writers to submit their own endings to Ann’s stories and has since evolved to an open invitation to write original stories in Ann’s style.
One of the unfinished stories Ann shared with Joe was titled “Celtic Cross Chronicles,” influenced by her interest in Scottish history and The Tarot, originally a 15th-century Italian card game that later became a divination practice that allows participants to hold hard questions still long enough to look at them from multiple angles.
“This may seem contradictory with Ann’s strong interest in the ministry and training she undertook,” Joe said, “but that is just how it was.”
For her story’s research process, she practiced on Joe.
“I will never forget when a certain card came up. It was a man face down on the ground with numerous swords stuck in his back. I was a bit taken aback and I remember saying, ‘that doesn’t look too good.’ After a short pause, Ann came up with a bunch of benign explanations for what it might mean, but I was skeptical. … This was before my paralyzing accident. Now, I don’t put stock in supernatural phenomena or seeing into the future, but there is sometimes this little whisper in the back of my head — Hmmm, I wonder, maybe … Naaaa.”
Joe carries his own inscrutable questions, the most haunting of which is why did she pick me. More than 50 years now and still no answer but maybe that’s not a failure of understanding.
Maybe that’s just what love looks like when it refuses to end.
Photo of Carolyn Ann Phillips and Joe Phillips at their wedding, cutting the cake
