LOGAN, Utah (KTVX) – Kay Andrews died at age 97 in December 2019, but her legacy as a warm and caring grandmother has endured and taken on a new life thanks to social media.
Images of Andrews’ grave at a Utah cemetery have gone viral on social media and the news this week thanks to the engraving on the backside, which adorably lists the recipe to “Kay’s Fudge.”
Her youngest grandchild, Emily Andrews, knew that her grandmother’s grave, located at Logan City Cemetery, had been talked about before, but wasn’t expecting it to blow up in discussions this week.
“I knew that the headstone had been circulating on Pinterest for like a long time now. Since my grandpa passed away, when I was 8 years old, I knew it was kind of internet famous. But yeah, I didn’t expect it to be on the news this week,” Andrews said.
Andrews remembers her grandmother as “warm to everybody,” always laughing and enjoying music. Although she had more than 30 other grandchildren to care for, Andrews found a way to leave Emily with a fond recollection of her.
Memories of canning fruit with her grandmother and staying over at her grandparents’ house during the summertime are dear to her. Andrews also remembers her grandmother being the kind of person that would always have Tootsie Rolls in her bag for the children.
Every year on the first day of school, Andrews and her husband, Wade, who passed away in 2000, would take Emily and her cousins out for ice cream at Dairy Queen.
When it came to making treats of her own, Andrews was a master of making fudge. Her granddaughter still remembers the now world-famous fudge being “really good.”
However, until recently, folks who have seen the recipe and tried to follow it on their own haven’t been able to get it quite right.
“Actually, the recipe was written wrong on the headstone for many years, I think people just have had their own recipe,” Andrews laughs, adding that the ingredients and directions have since been corrected on the tombstone.
Andrews, who lives in Salt Lake City and works in the fashion industry, also remembers her grandmother, who studied fashion design in New York, instilling a love of clothing and sewing in her.
“She gave me my first sewing machine,” Andrews remembers of her grandmother. “Now I work with fashion, so it’s kind of fun to have that passed down.”
To the Andrews family, the story that has been passed down the most is the story of how Kay and Wade met. Having gone on just one date at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City before leaving to fight in World War II, Wade was immediately smitten by Kay.
According to Kay’s obituary, the two exchanged letters for nine months during his service. Wade even named his B-24 bomber plane the “Salt Lake Katy.”
“They were soulmates,” Andrews says of her late grandparents, adding that the story of how they met has probably been told “a million times.”
While there is a saying that some people take secrets to the grave, in Andrews’ case, she proudly had the recipe to one of her most beloved treats engraved on her grave, for all to see. That recipe has now been seen by people all over the world.
“It just goes to show like how loving she is and how much she loved people and she was always doing things for her neighbors and her church too,” Andrews says of the recipe on the headstone. “It reflects on her as a person.”
Andrews thinks that her grandmother would love her fudge’s recent surge in popularity.
“I think she would be thrilled that people can have a taste of her recipe,” she imagines. “That’s what she was all about, sharing with people, so I think she would love it.”
