Grandson of John Tyler, 10th U.S. president
Lyon Tyler Jr. did not meet his paternal grandfather as he was growing up in Virginia in the 1930s. He never had the chance to hear his stories about t he t i mes when George Washington was president and of going to Monticello, where he listened as a family friend — Thomas Jefferson — played the fiddle.
Tyler Jr. was practically the living embodiment of almost the entire history of the U.S. Until his death on Sept. 26, he had been one of two living grandsons of John Tyler, who was president of the United States from 1841 to 1845.
A mere three generations of the family connected the 18th century to the 21st. John Tyler, the future president, was born in 1790. His son Lyon Gardiner Tyler was born in 1853. He remarried at 70 after his first wife died.
Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. was born Jan. 3, 1925, in Richmond, Va. He was 95 when he died at hospital in Franklin, Tenn., from Alzheimer's disease.
He grew up surrounded by relatives in Virginia. “I heard too much about presidents growing up,” he said years later. He recalled meeting a woman “when I was probably three or four years old,” who asked if he was going to be president some day.
“And I said, `I' ll bite your head off.' She said, `And what will you do with the bones?' and I replied, `I' ll 'pit 'em out!”
He was 16 when he entered the College of William & Mary, where his father had been president for some 30 years. He served as a Navy officer during the Second World War and remained in the Navy Reserve for many years.
He studied law at the University of Virginia, and was later director of the Virginia Civil War Centennial Commission. In his late 30s, he changed course in life and went to Duke University, from which he received a doctorate in history in 1967.
Over his career, he taught at various universities until his retirement in the early 1990s. Tyler often gave talks about his grandfather, who sided with the Confederacy after failing to negotiate a compromise that would avoid a civil war. In his later years, Tyler Jr. was said to bear a striking resemblance to him.
Lyon Tyler Jr.'s wife of 43 years, Lucy Jane Pope, died in 2001. Survivors include their daughter and his 91-year-old brother, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, the last surviving grandchild of President John Tyler.