Service:

Saturday, December 14th 11:00 a.m.

Tantallion Country Club 300 St. Andrews Drive Ft. Washington, MD 20744

Amanda L. Ramsey was a special woman. Her keen intellect, regal charm and grace, and unforgettable inner beauty endeared her to the many who came to know her. Amanda was born to Jesse and Leola Provitt in Cleveland, Ohio on 25 October 1938. As a young child, Amanda moved to Phenix City, Alabama where she was surrounded and nurtured by her mother’s large extended family who all lived close to each other. There she attended the Catholic-run Mother Mary Mission and thrived under the academic discipline and love of excellence demanded by the Nuns who taught there. Amanda left the Mission with a good education and a real and lasting love of the Lord.

After graduation, Amanda attended Arkansas AM&N University in Pine Bluff, Arkansas where she blossomed intellectually and socially, becoming both an AKA and one of the most popular students on campus. She excelled in the school’s Drama Department, and quicky earned the role of leading lady in the department’s many theatrical performances. Even today, old classmates still remember her stunning performance and the rave reviews she got as Cleopatra in the play ‘’Ceasar and Cleopatra.’ The head of the Drama Department encouraged Amanda to take her talents straight to Broadway after graduation, and she would have loved to, but for practical reasons she chose to become a public-school teacher first.

After graduating from Arkansas AM&N in 1961, Amanda first taught English, Speech and Dramatics at a high school in Little Rock for a year, then moved back close to home and taught high school in Columbus, Georgia. A year later she moved back to Cleveland to teach, and was assigned to Rawlings Junior High, located in one of the roughest, low-income neighborhoods in town. Amanda said she cried when she got that assignment, but years later proudly maintained that teaching the students at Rawlings had been the highlight of her teaching career.

In the meantime, her longings for Broadway came to an abrupt end at a Labor Day weekend party in September 1965, when she met Air Force Second Lieutenant Joseph Ramsey, who had arrived in town for a new assignment just days earlier. They hit it off that evening, got engaged in early November, and married on 19 February 1966 – a bond that would last for 58 years. In the years to follow, Joseph and Amanda were blessed with the birth of Joseph III, who was born in March 1970 in San Antonio TX. Subsequently, Amanda and ‘Joey’ would accompany Joseph to a total of 14 different assignments in places such as Biloxi MS, San Antonio TX (3 times), Montgomery AL (2 times), the Pentagon (2 times), Denver CO, and Dhahran Saudi Arabia. In addition, Amanda also taught high school in several of the locations where they were stationed.

In any event, Amanda’s strong support was definitely helpful in terms of Joseph’s career progression. She insured that their homelife was warm and pleasant, never allowing anything to distract Joseph from his duties. And she participated fully in the activities of the Air Force officers’ wives, often being the first to volunteer for any activities that involved ‘supporting the troops.’ Joseph’s Air Force buddies used to joke that Amanda had more to do with his early promotion to Colonel in 1984, than he did.

When Joseph ended his 27-year career in August 1991, the family moved back to their home in Fort Washington, MD. Amanda was able to resume her passion for high-fashion modeling, a hobby-turned profession she had started back in the 1970s, when she both taught and performed runway modeling for the Barbizon agency. In addition, she and Joseph also did a lot of international traveling to places like London, Paris, Geneva, and most memorable to Dakar Senegal and Johannesburg – where they dined with Nelson Mandela and his family.

But tragedy slowed everything when their ‘Joey’ died of an aortic aneurism in October 2013. Amanda was devastated, and likely would have borne the raw pain Joey’s passing forever. Fortunately, as odd as it may seem, Amanda memory had begun to fail at that time, and as that impairment progressed, she gradually forgot that Joey had died, at all. Instead, her mind somehow became fixated on an earlier time, when Joey had been living happily in Los Angeles. So instead of Amanda living out her days perpetually depressed, Amanda awoke most days with a smile, convinced that her ‘beautiful son’ would surely be coming home to visit ‘any day now.’

GOD is GREAT! And, when GOD found her sleeping near life’s end at 2:53 PM on 30 November, he reclaimed her spirit, body and soul for a well-deserved eternal peace. Can I get a witness?

Memorial Service

Dec

14

National Gold Club

300 St. Andrews
Fort Washington, Maryland 20744

11:00 AM