Carrie D’Andrea

The biggest piece of advice that I learned over the years is to not be judgmental. Not to criticize and say “I'm better than you” or “I know more about life than you.” It's hard not to do that. My mother always told me not to brag. Part of me wanted to brag about my father and say he is a famous person and because of that you should be nice to me. But it’s important to be humble and say, “Yes, he was a great person.” He never wanted people to be praising him for his work because he felt his work was never done. Remembering to be humble has been useful in my life.

Carrie D’Andrea

My name is Carrie D’Andrea and I was born in May 1940. My mom and dad met while they were working at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. My mother had a degree in chemistry and my dad had two PhDs in zoology and physiology. During the Second World War my father was asked by the US Government to help develop something for the soldiers to carry in their backpacks in case of emergency for food and supplies. He invented K-rations. They were named after my father, Ansel Keys, and are still being used by the military today.

As the war was coming to an end, people were concerned about starvation around the world. So my father and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota were asked by the government to do some research. They used volunteers and while they were starving they also had to work, because that was true of starving people around the world. These men had to walk 23 miles every week, take classes at the university, and maintain their living quarters. This study is still being used today as a basis for research.

After my father got finished with his starvation study, he noticed a lot of people were dying of heart attacks so he began to do some research. He became the first person to identify the connection between cholesterol and heart disease and eventually ended up on the cover of Time magazine. He was very famous. One thing that is hard about being the daughter of somebody famous is wondering “What about me? Don't you want to know about me?” But it was also an honor because his work involved people all over the world.

My life started out pretty uneventful in my early school years. In the summertime we swam all the time, we played kick-the-can, dodge ball and we had a game we made up called six steps. You had to sneak around the house and not get caught. And if you got caught you had to go back to start over again in five steps, four steps, three steps, two steps, and finally one step. When you were out of steps then you were “it” and you started all over again. It was a lot of fun.

Things were going along pretty smoothly until I was in fifth grade and my father came home one day and said "We're going to go and live in England for a year." I didn’t want to go, but I had no choice. When I was in school in England they had a swimming pool. Since I grew up on a lake I was a really good swimmer. One day we were having a swim meet and I decided that I was going to show off by diving in and racing from the shallow end of the pool. I hit the bottom of the pool and smashed my nose and got a big scrape. I won the race but I learned that it wasn't really a good idea to show off.

After moving around a lot in my school years, we eventually moved back to Minnesota and after high school I went to Macalester College. My freshman year I met my husband. I graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in French education and in psychology and got a job teaching job teaching French in a junior high school. And after our first son was born, we moved to Washington D.C. where my husband worked in the fifth basement of the Pentagon during the Vietnam War, and we had our first daughter. When she was 11-months-old we moved to Denmark, then we moved to Chicago and then Sweden. That's where my youngest daughter was born. We were there four-and-a-half years before we moved back to the United States. We have now been married 45 years.

When I got back here, I decided I would go back to graduate school and get a graduate degree in psychology counseling because I want to work as a therapist. After I graduated, I got a job at Abbott Northwestern Hospital. I worked with children that had severe mental illness and were hospitalized. And then eventually I worked for Park Nicolett. Up until three or four years ago, in my spare time, I played tennis two or three times a week. My big passion right now is quilting and I am also an avid photographer.