Like most of the nation and world, Mia Littlejohn and her family - including her visiting grandfather Richard Fielder - spent most of Sept. 11, 2001, glued to the television watching as events unfolded in New York City as the twin towers of the World Trade Center came down.
As viewing fatigue set in that evening, they decided to take a walk in the Forest Hills Cemetery in St. Elmo. It has continued to be a peaceful place for walking and reflection for Littlejohn and her now growing family, and that moment with her grandfather remains a very special memory for her.
"We wanted to find a place to detach and look out over the city," she says, "and he told us stories about being a codebreaker in World War II."
And what stories he had to tell. Fielder made a career writing scripts for such classics as "Gunsmoke," "Marcus Welby, MD," "In the Heat of the Night," "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour," "North and South, Book II," "George Washington" (the mini series) and "The Waltons," among many other works.
Fielder, 95, died two weeks ago in Dallas in a hospital and had homes in Los Angeles and Colorado. Although he has seven children, eight grandchildren and six great grandchildren spread around the country and around the world, he will be buried at Forest Hills on Saturday in a private affair attended by a few of those members.
"I come from a large Irish-Catholic family, so getting them together and agreeing on anything is impossible, but everyone agreed this was the place," Littlejohn said.
Forest Hills opened in 1880 and is the final resting place of Civil Wars officers, entertainers, industrialists and even a U.S. postmaster general. It is very near Littlejohn's house, and she said she loves walking there.
Fielder was born in Philadelphia, the son of Frank Fielder and Mae Desmond, owners of the stock theater company there called The Mae Desmond Players. Desmond was renowned for her story telling, a skill she passed on to her offspring.
"We are a family of storytellers. We loved to hear my grandfather tell stories. We would ask him to tell us again the story of the time he was going to have lunch with Alfred Hitchcock and got hit by a car and went to the hospital and forgot to call my grandmother [Octavia] until the next day."
Or the time he wrote a horse into a scene for a live broadcast of the Kraft Television Theater production of "Fire and Ice" in 1958. As Geraldine Page began her climactic speech, the horse began to empty its bladder, drowning out her dialogue.
Littlejohn, a local culinary consultant and strategist in Chattanooga at Proof, says her grandfather was always a bigger-than-life figure.
"I remember going on set for 'George Washington' and he had on his leather jacket and sunglasses. I got to sit in the director's chair. He was super cool and everywhere we went, people knew who he was."
She remembers that even when her immediate family lived in Norway and her grandfather visited, the local papers did a story on him.
"And, he would spend hours taping all of these 'Fraggle Rock' videos for us and send them back to us because he didn't think Norwegian TV was good enough. He would send boxes of them."
Contact Barry Courter at bcourter@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6354.