William Emmett "Bill" Fitts

View Funeral Webcast William ‘Bill” Emmett Fitts, 87, husband, father, grandfather and friend, died peacefully at home just outside of Spring Hill. Funeral services will be conducted Monday at 11:00 am with visitation one hour prior at Grace Episcopal Church in Spring Hill. The Reverend Joseph Davis will officiate. Interment will follow in Rose Hill Cemetery in Columbia. The family will visit with friends Sunday from 2:00– 5:00 P.M. at Oakes & Nichols Funeral Home in Columbia. The family suggests memorials to the Grace Episcopal Building Fund, 5291 North Main Street, Spring Hill, TN, the Myasthenia Gravis Foundation, 355 Lexington Avenue, 15th Floor New York, New York 10017, the Land Trust for Tennessee, PO Box 41027, Nashville, TN 37204 or a charity of your choice. Condolences may be extended online at www.oakesandnichols.com. Born February 9, 1932, in Anadarko, Oklahoma, Billy as he was known to family as the third and youngest child of Marguerite Elizabeth Dutcher and William Emmett ‘Emmett’ Fitts, both of longtime Anadarko families.  Bill remembered fondly his parents as hard workers and good people who had left high school to get married at sixteen and seventeen, farmed and worked in the cotton field and also ran a small grocery store in Anadarko. When he was ten years old the family moved to Oklahoma City, where they ran another grocery store living in the back.  Bill remembered studying behind the counter late into the night often falling asleep there.  At the age of thirteen, Bill’s eleven years older brother and idol Robert ‘Bob’ Brooks, had survived WWII and days before he was to return home at the age of twenty-two, was killed when his Jeep went off the road on his way back to camp. Bob’s death was a defining moment for Bill because Bob had encourage Bill to study hard and had written letters to their father from the front in Italy encouraging him to allow Bill to attend college and leaving Bill half of his life insurance to provide for that.  Bill attended and graduated Classen High School where he was a shy student who worked for his grades while also working almost full time at C R Anthony’s department store in the shoe department.  With the encouragement of one of his teachers, Mrs Ackerman, and the dream of his brother, Bill attended Oklahoma A&M, now Oklahoma State University.  Bill worked his way through Oklahoma State, continuing at Anthony’s and working in the cafeteria in a girls’ dorm, graduating with a B.S in Accounting.  He took a position in Bartlesville, Oklahoma with Cities Service for two years and then pursued a job in San Tome, Venezuela with Gulf Oil. That was the start of his almost thirty-year career overseas.  While living in Venezuela and travelling through the Andes Mountains in Peru, Bill met though did not date “the best thing that ever happened to him”, Alice Ann Mitchum of Spring Hill, Tennessee. Bill returned to the U.S. to Denver, Colorado to be close to his surviving sibling, his sister and her family and to work for Martin Marietta.  It was in Denver that his path crossed again with Alice Ann who had independently relocated to Golden, Colorado, and there they married on June 9, 1962. When Bill proposed he asked her if she would go live anywhere in the world with him. She said yes and so, three months after their marriage, Bill's new job with Oasis Oil took the newlyweds to Tripoli, Libya where they each become involved in the expatriate community, with many friends who remained in their lives to this day.  It was also in Tripoli that they become a family, first with the birth of their daughter Alicia and then with the addition of their son Robert two years later. Evacuation from Libya during the Six Day War with Egypt led the young family to return Stateside, living first in Tulsa, Oklahoma where their third child Stephen was born and then in Nashville, Tennessee where Bill worked for Genesco.  A job opportunity with Occidental Petroleum later moved the family back to Tripoli, Libya for four more years before taking them to the east coast of England and then to London, England for six years and Aberdeen, Scotland for three years. After Bill's retirement in 1983, the couple initially made their home in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma before settling just outside of Spring Hill.  Bill had married into Spring Hill and grew to love the community and the hills in which it sits.  He and Alice each believed and were a force to be reckoned with together that we are stewards of this land, here only temporarily, and so made a decision together to place much of their home farm under conservation with the Land Trust for Tennessee.  In his last months especially, knowing that Cherry Ridge Farm will remain an undeveloped oasis in the middle of seemingly endless development and that we were adding additional acreage to our easement brought him peace. Bill used to say that it wasn’t where you started that mattered, it was where you went along the way and where you ended.  He started with his treasured Oklahoma roots and ended in his much loved adopted home in Tennessee, travelling and working and raising his family in a great many places along the way.  He and Alice led an adventurous life overseas always maintaining a sense of home where ever they were and instilling in their children wings with which to see the world.  We thank you Dad for both the roots and the wings.  The friendships discovered and nurtured over the years and miles became the latitude and longitude which their expansive global lifestyle all the smaller.  And when they settled on the hill in Spring Hill, new friendships and the opportunity to spend more time with family provided much joy and contentment as they explored retirement and new adventures.  They loved to travel and continued to do so for many years doing home exchanges in Wales, Vancouver, and Europe.  And they loved to come home to the hill reveling in the seasons and in sharing it with friends and family.  Bill also enjoyed antiques, both shopping for them and refinishing them often frequenting hole in the wall auction houses especially during his time in Scotland.  He also enjoyed riding and showing Paso Fino horses, gardening, and any number of projects around Cherry Ridge Farm.  Bill had lived with myasthenia gravis for twenty three years.  Bill is survived by his daughter, Alicia Fitts of Spring Hill; son, Steve Fitts of Spring Hill; grandchildren, Andrew Powell Fitts and Brooks Mitchum Fitts, both of Raleigh, North Carolina; nephew, Tom (Sandy) Guinn and niece, Patricia (Jeff) Wipf along with great nieces and nephews and numerous cousins. He was preceded in death by his wife, Alice Ann Mitchum Fitts, his son, Robert Brooks Fitts, brother, Robert Brooks Fitts, sister, Doris Marie Fitts Guinn, and nephew, Billy Guinn. Active pallbearers will be Tom Guinn, Bob Campbell, Jason (Nick) Davis, Johnny Davis, Brooks Fitts and Andrew Fitts. Honorary pallbearers include Butch Veazey, Pat Campbell, Wayne Laney, and friends from the Stinky Stupid Sheep Society.