Blending a Family

The Rev. Harwood “Woody” Bartlett and his stepdaughter Amanda Bolster have discussed their blended family for WABE-FM’s StoryCorps Atlanta. Bartlett had three children and Carol P. Lowthian had two children when they married in 1983. The children were ages 10 to 15.

In the warm and often humorous conversation, Bartlett remembered a counselor’s advice regarding the stepchildren: “She said to me, ‘Don’t expect to be loved,’ and I said, ‘Oh.’ That was exactly right. There was no reason you should love me: I’ve been hanging around your mother, taking her away from you.”

Bolster remembered the family’s annual “Christmas showdown” on whether the tree would use large lights or small ones.

Bartlett is a retired Episcopal priest and a founder, with his wife, of Georgia Interfaith Power & Light.

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit project in oral history. It has collected more than 40,000 interviews from nearly 80,000 participants. All the conversations are preserved at the American Folklife Center, a research arm of the Library of Congress. StoryCorps episodes play regularly on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and on local editions by NPR affiliates.

Photo by WABE-FM, Atlanta

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