“She had been in good health,” Butch Callery said of his wife, Joyce, who died of a sudden heart attack on July 6.
Callery was seated in a recliner in the Villa Hills home he shared with Joyce for the last decade of their 52-year marriage. He reached out to The River City News because he wanted the newspaper to know about the tribute Joyce received on the floor of the Kentucky House of Representatives during a recent special session of the General Assembly. He was eager to show that the state legislature accepted a reading about his wife, which noted her as a “highly regarded lady”, “a faithful member of Holy Cross Church”, “an avid golfer”, and “a devoted family woman who was known for her warmth and good humor.”
Butch Callery is still doting on Joyce.
And she was his biggest fan, too.
It all started, naturally, at a softball game – all the Callerys are competitive athletes – where he was coaching, and she was playing. “She played major league softball – the Dukettes,” Callery said. “She went to the world tournament.”
Still doting.
For him, there was a quick attraction. For her, not so much.
“I called her up a couple days (after the game) and said to her, do you remember me? She said no. I said, I was that handsome guy you were talking to,” Callery remembered.
The charm wasn’t instant. “She said, call me back later.”
Persistent, he did, and a couple days later Joyce agreed to go out with Butch. “Her sister was going out with somebody and they wanted to know if we wanted to go to a drive-in and watch a movie. I think that was a first date, at the Dixie Drive-In,” Callery said, smiling. “And she fell asleep!”
He laughed. And then bragged more about how good an athlete Joyce had been.
Shocking loss
He remembered a time when Tom DiBello, director of the Center for Great Neighborhoods, fielded a struggling team at the organization. One league night, at the old Cappel Field, the Center only had eight players, and needed one more. DiBello asked Callery if Joyce could play.
And boy, could she.
“She hit three home runs in the game – and they only scored four runs!”
“Those were nice moments,” Callery said, not yet a month removed from losing the woman who had been at his side for nearly five and a half decades, from that first sleepy night at a local drive-in, to two different mayorships in two different cities, and finally to what was expected to be a shared retirement full of trips and grandchildren.
On that Saturday, July 6, Joyce started to have chest pains. Butch, who fifty-two years earlier had asked her father’s permission to take her as his wife (“He said, are you going to take care of her? And he liked me, so that was a good thing.”), called for an ambulance.
At the hospital, doctors discovered that Joyce had a blocked artery. She had had a heart attack, but it looked like everything would be fine after some rest overnight.
“They said I could some Sunday morning and take her home. I left at 7 p.m. on Saturday. And at around 9:15, they called and said she was in code blue,” Callery said.
He made calls to the kids, and the family rushed back to the hospital.
But it was too late.
“She was gone,” Callery said.
“I was ready to throw up, you know, how can this be? She had always been healthy and liked to work in the yard. She played golf four times a week.”
The family broke down in shock and tears.
“It was a really big blow to our whole family,” Callery said. With Joyce, there are four children, eight grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. “You don’t know how it could happen, but it did. One of those things.”
From Latonia to Villa Hills
Butch and Joyce Callery started their lives together in a rented home on Frazier Street in Latonia. After a couple kids, they needed more room. They spent the majority of the married life on Aberdeen Avenue in the same part of town.
“The neighborhood was great. It was like Americana. Everybody looked out for everybody and we just enjoyed living there,” Callery said.
Joyce mostly kept the house together and focused on the kids, though she did occasionally work, including a long stint at McAlpin’s before it became Dillard’s. “When it changed to Dillard’s, she said, can I just quit? I said sure,” Callery said. “We missed the discounts though!”
Callery’s public life started while they lived there. He successfully ran for the city commission in the early 1980s, and in 2000 was elected Covington’s mayor. He served two terms, but in 2008 lost his reelection bid.
“Joyce was a little upset I didn’t win a third term and she said, let’s look around.”
The couple looked all over Northern Kentucky and came close to buying in Edgewood, but after a couple possible sales fell through, they landed on Orchid Lane, in a ranch-style home in Villa Hills.
“She fell in love with this house and did a lot to improve it,” he said.
Little did they know, Callery would soon be mayor again.
Villa Hills had been enduring another round of city government turmoil, its second such period of the decade. Citizens wanted stability.
“All these people came to me and wanted me to run for mayor of Villa Hills. I told them no. But Joyce went out with a bunch of the ladies here, and then said, if you want to run, I’m OK with it,” Callery said. “I said, if I’m going to run, I’m gonna be in it to win it.”
He won it.
Irvin T. “Butch” Callery was mayor again.
Most of his first term was an overwhelming success, with improvements made to infrastructure and a unified council mostly voting in unison. But a proposed mixed-use development on the site of the St. Walberg Monastery, where the Benedictine Sisters live and which they wanted to sell to fund their retirement, divided the city again.
Callery’s support for the nuns and the project doomed his reelection bid, and in 2018, he lost his seat along with nearly every member of city council.
Joyce stood by her husband.
“She handled it well because she said, you’re doing the right thing. You’re protecting the nuns. It will create a money source for them,” the former mayor said. “She always defended me. She always did that.”
Plans for the future
On the brightside, with no cities to run anymore, the Callerys were looking to the future.
“In a way, I’m relieved I’m out of office,” Callery said, emphasizing that he wouldn’t run again.
Instead, he and Joyce were hoping to visit places that had previously eluded their busy schedules.
“We talked about places we were gonna go, like the Biltmore. We were gonna do that in September,” Callery said. “I guess we’ll never do that.”
Joyce loved people, her husband said. “She would always try to help people who were having problems. She was a person who was there. Like an angel really.”
He paused.
“I still can’t believe she’s gone.”
Keeping Callery company are his grandchildren, who fill the home and keep Grandpa entertained. On Friday, Callery was preparing to host his grandkids for the premiere of the Disney movie, The Descendants 2.
“I have at least one kid every of day of the last month stay here overnight,” Callery said. “They want to make sure I’m OK. That’s nice.”
Now, Callery plans for the future on his own.
“I want to get through the next few months. I don’t have any real plans,” he said. “Knowing me, I’ll get back to work in a few months.”
A stone remembers Joyce Callery outside the home she shared with Butch, and in the garden and landscaping that she tended to (RCN)
Callery noted that he went shopping for a headstone for his wife, and because there was a sale, he went ahead and bought his own, too. “The guy said they would go up in price in a week,” Callery said.
“I always liked the black ones with white letters,” he said. Joyce’s headstone will have golf clubs on it – she loved to golf, and organized many golf outings for charitable purposes at Twin Oaks in Latonia. Butch’s will have baseball bats, a nod to his softball and baseball days.
They will rest forever together someday in Mother of God Cemetery in Fort Wright, near the Covington border, and not far from where their lives really began together.
“We’ll be just a couple feet from Covington.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story identified the Sisters of Notre Dame as the residents of the St. Walberg Monastery. It is the Benedictine Sisters who live there.
Written by Michael Monks, editor & publisher
