Illness

The Moores battled a series of disabling diseases, starting in the late 1960s.

Dorothy had a stroke and wasn't expected to live. She had an aneurysm at the base of her brain and needed brain surgery, the doctor said in a grim meeting with the family at the hospital.

"Dad thought about it, walked around and said no, that's not what we're going to do," Bobby recalled. He returned to Taiwan, where he was stationed, thinking he wouldn't see her alive again.

Dorothy came out of the coma, asking for a cigarette. She had no memory and little mental ability. "She basically had the mind of a 2-year-old," Bobby said. "I remember seeing her and it was crushing."

Moore, a devoted husband not given to outward displays of emotion, drove regularly to a rehabilitation center in Des Moines to visit a wife who didn't recognize him. About a year after the stroke, recounted son-in-law Jim Watt, Moore walked into her room and she greeted him, "Hi, Bob, how are you doing? How are the kids?"

Her memory was back, a recovery doctors could not explain.

The Moores' daughter battled an illness that afflicted her body more than her mind. In the 1970s, Nancy developed multiple sclerosis, a disease that attacks the nervous system.

At first, when she started falling down for no apparent reason, she thought she was just clumsy. The disease progressed, though, until she sometimes had difficulty getting around without a walker. She had to give up her beloved piano and missed her children's high school graduation ceremonies.

Nancy and her husband were "street rodders," driving classic cars and attending shows with other collectors. Jim bought a wheelchair to help Nancy get around at the car shows and an adult tricycle to ride around their suburban Kansas City neighborhood. They had a car outfitted with hand controls, so she could keep driving.

A thin woman when she was healthy, she became frail as the disease progressed.

As much as possible, Nancy tried to live unaffected by the disease, making dinner nightly, doing her housework and enjoying as many activities as she could, especially when the MS was in remission. She walked on her own whenever possible.

"I saw her when most people would be in a wheelchair and she was trying to walk," Bobby said. "It was something that she kept saying she was going to beat."

She tried every treatment that promised hope. She tried chiropractic. She tried acupuncture. She spent two weeks in Miami, taking shots of cobra venom.

"She was strong-willed," her husband said. "She got that from her dad."

While Nancy battled MS in the early 1980s, her mother battled cancer. First Dorothy had jaw cancer, forcing the removal of half her jaw. Then she developed cancer of the esophagus.

Her decline was excruciating for the family. But Dorothy never complained of the pain. She died May 3, 1982, at the age of 71.

Two and a half years later, on Dec. 13, 1984, Nancy left her home on an icy morning, apparently to drive to the post office to buy some stamps for Christmas cards. She lost control of her car on the ice and slid into the path of an oncoming car. She was able to get out of the car and initially declined help, but rescue workers insisted on taking her to the hospital. She died there of internal injuries. She was 48.

As difficult as Dorothy's death was for Moore, it was expected. But to lose his daughter was devastating.

"So many times," Bobby said, "he made the comment, 'You're not supposed to outlive your children.'"

Another Illness

Friends and family of Bob Moore talk easily and enthusiastically about his military record, his playfulness, his story-telling ability, their admiration of him.

Reluctantly, they tell of his lifelong struggle: Moore was an alcoholic. He and his wife drank heavily, at times starting in the morning.

Protected in the bosom of an admiring hometown, the Moores' drinking didn't become a scandal. Only a few townsfolk interviewed for this story mentioned the Moores' drinking.

"Bob did drink," son-in-law Jim Watt said, "but he never did it in public and he never to my knowledge was drunk in public."

The drinking problem appeared to have its roots in the traumatic events of Moore's youth. "One of the things that would start him drinking was when people would bring up the ax murders," Bobby said.

Bobby remembers as a teen-ager driving his father to the Veterans Administration hospital in Omaha to dry out.

Nancy at times would decide not to visit her parents because of their drinking and once asked her husband to tell Moore she didn't want him drinking around the children.

"Everyone tried to get him to stop," said grandson Patrick Watt of Dallas. "That was probably the hardest thing for my mother, to handle him going through the alcohol."

The drinking strained, but didn't shatter, Moore's relationship with his children. "I think as a little girl he was everything to her," Nancy's daughter said. "And he still was even in the midst of the drinking problems and still up until the day she died."

Eventually diabetes forced Moore to stop, or at least curtail, his drinking.

"Toward the end there, I think things got better," Mrs. Parnacott said of her grandfather. She remembers when he would visit and take the family out to eat. He'd say, "If you want a drink, you can have one, but I'm not having one," she said. "I think he wanted to stay around a little longer."

Story Continued