OTTUMWA — The moment she speaks, you know she is not an Iowan, though she has been here quite awhile and has been around the country. There is an English (almost British) accent here!

Valerie Godfrey grew up in Rhode Island and her ancestors are English and followed many of the customs of the early settlers of our country and still do. Like drinking tea from bone china cups (with milk) at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. each day. This practice Valerie still follows in her own home, too. She prefers Lipton’s orange pekoe tea and uses about 100 bags per week.

“I really like English breakfast tea from Celestial Seasonings, but feel it is too expensive to use every day,” she says.

Her husband does not share this activity with her “because he doesn’t like tea and calls it swamp water,” Godfrey says.

A graduate of Rhode Island College in Providence, R.I. she was teaching second grade at Maryville, in North Providence when she attended a dance one night and met a young man in the Navy Officer Candidate School in Newport. He also was a teacher. The year was 1964 and before he finished the officer training school and many outings later, Roger Godfrey had asked her to marry him and accompany him to Florida to Officer Flight Training School.

Valerie Godfrey says she did not start cooking until after she was married, though she had watched her mother cook. Her father had heart problems and required care, so Valerie had much of the responsibility for her younger brother and sister. One of the things the children liked to do was to clam and she often took them to the beach, which she says, “no one is ever very far from the beach in Rhode Island.”

After marriage, she used the Betty Crocker Cookbook for Two. After raising two daughters and two sons, she says she is now back to that original cookbook. As she would taste other foods at dinners or potlucks, she would ask for the recipes and has collected quite a file of good foods over the years. Fortunately, she says, Roger is not a picky eater. The first dish she made (often) was chicken and noodles, she says, laughing, “and Roger’s mother made the noodles.”

They have moved around during the service and Valerie said she had a teaching contract in California when they reassigned her husband to Washington state and she was unwilling to break her teaching contract which she had just signed, so she stayed in California. Then he was sent to Vietnam, so she was alone more than two years, which were difficult.

When he returned, he was offered a job as a teacher in Minnesota where many of his family lived and they moved again. She was able to complete her graduate degree at Morningside College in Multicategorical Education and began teaching special education classes, as they moved around Iowa, finally landing up in Ottumwa, where she taught in the Ottumwa Schools, retiring in June 2003.

Valerie’s 85-year-old mother lives in Rhode Island and has tea daily. Valerie’s father died when he was 42. Valerie tries to visit relatives in the East annually and renew her love of the beach and ready access to fresh clams and fish. But she has learned to adapt her recipes to landlocked Ottumwa, because after all the years of enforced roaming, moving is not in the Godfreys’ plans.

“We love Ottumwa and want to stay here,” she says.

Valerie and her retired pilot/educator have six grandchildren around the country.

This bubbly warm former teacher is very active in her church as president of the Women’s Circles, active in the sewing/quilting mission group and is trying to teach interested members to knit. She recently held a mother-daughter banquet (a first for the church) which she cooked all but the side dishes and so many attended, it made money!

CLAM CHOWDER