faith! - Grace Allen

Grace Allen’s long life has seen a lot of ups and downs – much like the musical tabletop carousel that sits in her living room year-round. The whimsical music box plays both Christmas carols and the carousel song, joyfully, like Grace lives her life.

Grace, who turned 91 on April 28, found the carousel in a New Orleans gift shop in 2007, while on a football trip to watch the Gamecocks play. “I could hear it playing in the entranceway, and I just had to have it.”

Grace is a longtime sports fan, but that interest expanded later in life after she married Sam Allen, a huge Gamecock supporter with season tickets to football, basketball and baseball games.

Grace and Sam Allen had been longtime friends. After Sam’s first wife Carolyn died, the two discovered one another anew, and soon married. That union lasted 19 years and was Grace’s fourth marriage. At the age of 65, it was also perhaps the most unexpected.

Throughout Sam’s and Grace’s marriage, the couple packed in a lot of family celebrations and trips to the beach. Grace’s beloved daughter and only child Patti Trotter, her three daughters and their children were warmly welcomed into Sam’s family. They also packed in a lot of Gamecock sports, noted by Grace’s extensive Gamecock collection. She has collectible Gamecocks of all types and styles from every country in the world. They sit in a curio cabinet not far from the carousel she so dearly loves.

Throughout Grace’s life, the church has remained a constant. Even when she was a young girl, just finishing college and moving to Charlotte with a girlfriend “to seek our fame and fortune,” Grace looked for a church home right away and found one in a nearby Presbyterian church.

“I’ve always been a person who needed the Church,” she said.

“Without my faith, I would not have made it through” almost 90 years, motherhood, her marriages, a couple of business ventures, a pandemic and a recent (successful) battle with breast cancer, she says.

“I thank the good Lord that I am in remission,” Grace said.

While Grace’s faith began in a home she refers to as a “mixed marriage of a Baptist and a Methodist,” Grace eventually found her way to the Episcopal Church during her first marriage, when she and her husband Bill Hooper were living in San Antonio, Texas. That union involved multiple moves to Atlanta, Jacksonville, back to San Antonio and eventually to Columbia.

After moving to Columbia, she and Bill visited a number of Episcopal churches, but St. Martin’s stood out when the late Sarah McCrory greeted Grace and her daughter, who was five at the time, as they were looking for Patti’s Sunday school class. Sarah didn’t just offer directions, she walked the two to Patti’s class, and introduced her to the late Frances Tupper, a longtime St. Martin’s Sunday school teacher. Patti and Frances remained friends until Frances’s death in 2020.

“When we got out of church, I think Sarah introduced us to half the church, and I said to Bill, ‘Well, I’ve found my church.’” St. Martin’s sustained Grace when her marriage ended in divorce, and later through other difficult moments.

She was away from the parish for a period of time after she and her second husband, Cleve Barber, an Army major from Beaufort, moved to Lake Murray. While living there, they became founding members of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, and Grace served as their first female senior warden.

Seven years after they were married, Cleve died of a massive heart attack. The couple had just returned from a beach trip to Hilton Head.

Not wanting to live at the lake as a widow, Grace moved back into town and returned to St. Martin’s.

A number of years later, she met her third husband, Col. Edward J. Collins, through mutual military friends. Sadly, Ed died of cancer just two years after the couple had married, but not before they enjoyed many occasions of dancing, and not before she introduced him to the Episcopal Church. Former St. Martin’s rector Jim Abbott just about had Ed converted from Roman Catholicism to the Episcopal Church.

“If he had lived a bit longer, he would have been the best Episcopalian,” Grace said, smiling.

St. Martin’s was ever-present for Grace throughout the tragedy of Ed’s death, once again illustrating for her why being part of a faith community is so important to her.

“Without my faith, I would not have made it through.”

After Ed’s death, Grace threw herself into work, training to become a travel agent. She eventually opened her own agency, taking groups to all seven continents and on any number of cruises. Her favorite trip was to the Holy Land.

“I have a Madonna that is ‘supposed to be’ carved from wood in Mary’s yard – but you know how that ‘supposed to be’ goes,” she said with a grin. Still, it’s one of the favorite Madonnas in her collection. (Right next to her beloved Gamecocks.)

Grace realizes her life experience is a bit unusual – perhaps even a bit magical like her carousel. She is grateful for every morsel of it.

“Every morning I thank the Good Lord for another day,” she said. “I am especially thankful for my St. ­Martin’s family, and for Mitch and Caitlyn.”

Grace Allen has been a member of St. Martin’s since 1981.