Lee Marshall
Lee never thought she would ever travel or see any other part of the country except the one in which she was raised: Bellerose, Queens, Long Island. She thought she’d be living in the same house forever, the one she had lived in for 23 years.
“The Lord must have been laughing at me,” she says today.
Leanore Janet Schaefer was born on May 24, 1939, in Jamaica, Queens, to William George and Gladys Pearl Pittman Schaefer. Her one and only sibling, Arlene, was just a few years older. When she was only a few months old, the family moved to Bellerose in Queens.
Lee (as she became known in her teenage years) was a brown-haired, brown-eyed ball of energy. She constantly kept her parents on their toes. When she was four, she heard the Gospel clearly at a Bible club held in a library in Elmont. She distinctly remembers the conviction she felt that day, knowing she had been sinning “at least since she was three”, and wondering “if God could forgive her sins” if she waited until she was five to be saved. When she came forward, the worker questioned her mother if she should deal with her.
“She came on her own,” Mrs. Schaefer replied.
Leanore received the Lord as her Savior that day. She began singing on the radio at a very young age, standing on a chair to reach the mic. In grade school, she became active in Good News clubs which she held at her house during the school year. The family attended the Bellerose Baptist Church, only a short walk from their home. At eight years of age, she was baptized along with her family.
As a teenager, Leanore was very active in reaching out to the 6,000 students at PS #33 in Jamaica. She and a friend would stand at the door of their school and pass out tracts as fast as they could to the students arriving for the day. She was a faithful member of a HI-BA club. (”Born Again” Club) In her youth group at church, the young men were the leaders of the group, and they planned their own activities which sometimes included the guys building toys and the girls sewing clothes for an orphanage. Throughout the week they would go on visitation, and on some Saturday nights, the teens would pass out tracts in downtown Manhattan.
Upon graduation from high school in 1957, Leanore enrolled at the West Suburban Nursing School in Oak Park, Illinois. She enjoyed her studies and especially taking Bible classes from the professors at Wheaton College who came to teach at West Suburban.
After a year and eight months of nursing school, Leanore was told she would not make a good nurse; she should go home and get married. At first she debated over whether to attend Moody Bible Institute. Then her mother demanded that the school give her daughter credit for the classes she had passed, and someone told Leanore that Brooklyn Hospital took transfer students. Though she had to repeat some of her work, in 1961 she finished her schooling. She took a job at the Booth Memorial Hospital in Flushing, then transferred to Long Island Jewish Hospital.
Leanore had almost given up on the available young men in her city. She was somewhat angry at God for moving her back to Long Island, away from Illinois, the place where so many good Christian guys congregated. The New York guys always catered to her and seemed to be such push-overs. She had had enough.
Her great love for children and nursing caused her to decide to go to Papua New Guinea as a missionary nurse. She had been accepted by a mission board in 1962 and had agreed to work at Camp Joy in upstate New York for the summer as the camp nurse. But the Lord would not give her peace about going, and she told the camp directors she could not come. They insisted she had to have a boyfriend, but she told them firmly that she did not.
Just after she canceled her plans to work at Camp Joy, she met John Marshall at a Bible study at a friend’s house. Unimpressed at first, she soon changed her mind when they began dating in July. By August they were engaged, and they married on November 10, 1962. The camp directors at Camp Joy never believed her that she had not had a boyfriend!
For the next fourteen years, Lee followed her husband from one pastorate to the next — from Missouri to West Virginia to New York. When the Lord called her husband into full-time evangelism in 1976, it did not take long for Lee to say goodbye to their three-story parsonage on Long Island.
For almost thirty years, Lee has helped encourage hundreds of ladies through ladies meetings, her teaching tapes, and the prayer club she started in 1992 for families with five or more children called “Blessed with 5 and Still Alive”. Over the years she has helped more than fifty other young people who came to travel with the family for one reason or another.
Lee is a grandma to thirty grandchildren. She enjoys knitting, crocheting, music, and is finishing a midwifery correspondence course — a long-time desire of hers.