Joy Ann Stevens was born in 1937 in Michigan, the daughter of Paul and Mildred (Sandwick) Stevens. In 1940, Joy was living with her parents and older brother Richard in Dalton Township, Muskegon County, Michigan. Her father was working as a die setter for a steel furniture manufacturer, and her mother was employed doing clerical work in a department store. In 1950 the Stevens family – then including Joy’s younger brother Philip - were living on Whitehall Road in Dalton Township, Muskegon County, Michigan. At that time, Paul was a foreman in the office equipment industry, and Mildred was a bookkeeper working in a department store. Joy attended North Muskegon High School, where she was a member of several groups including the Girls’ Athletic Association, the Norse Star newspaper staff, the pep band (she played the cornet), and the student council.
After graduation from high school, Joy went on to study at Michigan State University, where she was on the honor roll for the 1955 fall term; she was also honored in the spring of 1956 for “achieving all-A academic average”. In July 1959, her degree from MSU was announced in the Muskegon Chronicle: “Joy Ann Stevens, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Paul J. Stevens, 1217 Mills Avenue, North Muskegon, B. A. art education (with honor).”
Muskegon Chronicle, 6 March 1968: “Laos Crash Kills Local Naval Pilot. A Twin Lake pilot and eight other crew members lost their lives in the crash of a naval aircraft Jan. 11 over Laos in southeast Asia. Killed was Lt. (j.g.) Philip P. Stevens, son of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Stevens, of Twin Lake, who was one of the pilots. The crew members originally were listed as missing Jan. 11. The Stevens family was notified Feb. 23 that their son and the others had been killed. Funeral services were being arranged today. Whether the plane was downed by enemy fire or developed mechanical difficulty has not been determined. Graduated by North Muskegon High School and the University of Minnesota, Stevens enlisted in the Naval Reserve in June 1965 and was called into active duty in September the same year. He was a member of St. Mary’s of the Woods Church in Lakewood. Born here July 26, 1942, he leaves is parents; a brother, Richard of Union Lake, and a sister, Joy Stevens, of Farmington.”
Between 1968 and 1980, Joy was married to Clare Edwin Warren, also a Michigan native. Clare had been first married in 1946 to Betty Taylor but was widowed when Betty died in 1963. In 1980 when Joy’s father died, she and her husband Clare Warren were living in Milford, Michigan. I first met Mrs. Warren in about 1980, when she was my elementary school art teacher at Stiles Elementary School in Rochester Hills, Michigan. My mom, who was first a member of the parent-teacher association and later an administrative assistant for the gifted and talented program, would often sit with Mrs. Warren at staff meetings and knew her quite well. Mrs. Warren was my art teacher from third through fifth grade, and then I worked with her again in high school as she was often hired by our theatre group to do printing.
Mrs. Warren was a very talented artist; she was a creative teacher, and we did a lot of art projects that didn’t require us to be talented to finish with a nice product. None of her assignments required much in the way of supplies, either, which was probably out of necessity in those days. Once the district had sold school buildings and crammed its elementary students into three buildings (from five), there were no special rooms for art or music. The teachers usually had a cart (the music teacher would push a piano on wheels from room to room when necessary) with the supplies they needed for that day’s project. I remember in fifth grade we were given a piece of very cheap drawing paper, and we used our own crayons to fill the paper with color. Then we colored over the whole thing with black and used the point of a pair of scissors to scrape away the black in a design of our own choice. A lot of our other projects involved gluing tissue paper (formed over our pencil erasers into cup shapes) to outlines of things. With what Mrs. Warren had to work with, our art time was used very well.
Mom was always fascinated by Mrs. Warren taking notes in staff meetings. She was left-handed and had come up with a way to write left-handed without dragging her hand through the ink or pencil that she had just written. She turned her notepad upside down and wrote the words in cursive both upside-down and backward with her left hand. When you turned the paper right side up, it looked just as though a right-handed person had written it. Mom always said she made it look completely effortless.
When I was a junior in high school, I was the business manager for our theatre group during the production of our one-act play, The Runaways. The program I designed was made to look like a newspaper, and once I had all the pages ready for printing, Mrs. Warren did the two-color printing (black and blue on gray). I believe she had her own print shop in her home. I thought it was cool to be working in a professional capacity like an adult with an adult who knew me as a child. Mrs. Warren continued in her capacity as elementary school art teacher, traveling between the three buildings every week, at least until I graduated from high school, and probably significantly later as well.
Muskegon Chronicle, 11 November 2001: “On May 27, 1968, Mildred and Paul Stevens of Twin Lake went to East Dalton Oakhill Cemetery and bought three grave sites. Paul Stevens was buried there in 1980. Mildred was buried beside him last June. But the grave they bought for their son, Philip, remains empty even though he’s been gone – as of today – 33 years and 10 months. Philip Stevens’ resting place since his Jan. 11, 1968, death has been a mountaintop in Laos. Now, there is finally hope that the U. S. Navy aviator who died in the Vietnam War will be laid to rest next to his mother, who wanted him returned to the nation whose uniform he so proudly wore. A highly specialized search team in March combed the ledges of Poulouang Mountain – where Stevens and the other eight members on his flight crew crashed – and retrieved some remains. The site, because of its remoteness and ruggedness, had not been disturbed. The team is to return to Laos in February when the weather is favorable for further searches, according to Lt. Jerry O’Hara of the U. S. Navy’s Killed in Action Body Recovery team in Honolulu. The recovery is undertaken by the military’s Joint Task Force-Full Accounting Office, which since its formation in 1992 has embarked on about 600 searches and digs looking for lost soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. The effort – restricted to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – includes the expertise of archaeologists, forensic and mortuary specialists, and linguists operating on $100 million annual budgets. So far, the remains of 500 soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines have been found. Most have been identified. It takes up to a year to identify the remains, O’Hara said. It is not yet known if Stevens’ remains were among those already taken off the mountain. Stevens’ sister, Joy Warren, of White Lake, northwest of Detroit, said searchers have recovered her brother’s “dog tags” and sent pictures of the site to family members showing airplane parts and personal effects of the crew on ledges. She and her brother, Richard Stevens of Commerce Township, also near Detroit, a few years ago gave blood to match DNA with remains and identify them. She said they have heard nothing from the military since. …Mildred Stevens was 92 when she died in June. She lived just long enough to know that Philip might one day be buried on U. S. soil. She always wanted more information on what happened to her youngest child. She was told that a crash location and some remains were discovered. But in the end, as age took its toll, family members did not show her pictures from the site showing boots, pieces of uniforms and other evidence of the crash. “My mother kept up with the correspondence that came from the government,” said her older son, Richard, who now lives in the Detroit area. “She knew they were searching. She was happy that they were looking for him. It’s too bad my mother didn’t live long enough to see them find him.” …Joy Warren said no decision has been made on where Philip will eventually be laid to a final rest. Meanwhile, family members do what they are used to doing. They wait.”
According to Philip’s findagrave.com memorial, “Lieutenant Stevens, U.S. Naval Reserve, was a member of Observation Squadron 67 located at the Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand. On January 11, 1968, he was a crew member of a Lockheed Neptune Observation Patrol Aircraft (OP-2E) on an armed reconnaissance over Laos. The aircraft crashed on the northern side of a 4,583-foot cliff about 15 kilometers northeast of Ban Nalouangnau, Khammouane Province, Laos. His remains were recovered on July 10, 2001, and identified on May 20, 2003. His name is inscribed on the Courts of the Missing at the Honolulu Memorial.”
Joy’s husband Clare Warren passed away in 2011, at the age of ninety-seven years. I believe Joy Ann Stevens Warren now resides in White Lake, Oakland County, Michigan.
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