- Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images
- Becky Sauerbrunn (number four in blue) is going to the Women’s World Cup.
Elizabeth Nusslein Heibel gave birth to 13 children and died in 1898 at the age of 46. Her husband, Peter Heibel, had come to America from Germany with an eighth-grade education when he was 22; he’d wrangled cattle in Texas, run a tavern on the Saint Louis levee, and founded a prospering box company in the same city. The loss of his wife posed a practical problem for Peter and his ten surviving children: someone had to run the household, and the children had no interest in a stepmother. If Peter had been tempted to provide them with one, they talked him out of it. Elizabeth Barbara, the second oldest of the four daughters, dropped out of school and took over the house, and Peter never remarried. She was 12 at the time. I knew her years later as my grandmother, my Nana.
But time sweeps on, and someone at my distance can admire the sweep. Last week Rebecca Elizabeth Sauerbrunn, who played her high school ball in suburban Saint Louis, her college ball at the University of Virginia, and her pro ball in Kansas City, was named to the U.S. national soccer team. This June she’ll compete in Canada for the Women’s World Cup championship. I wonder if she’s ever given her great-grandmother Rose a thought—we don’t dwell on those fading photos of ancestors we never knew pasted in family albums. We barely glance. But I can remember one as I watch the other, and I think of Becky Sauerbrunn as a worthy chip off the old whatever.
