The actress Grace Andrews married Conro Fiero in Medford in 1910. When their orchard crop failed in 1914, he found a diplomatic job in Washington, D. C., and she worked as a code-breaker at the State Department.
Following the First World War, Fiero worked for Buda Motor Company in Paris and London. Then he worked for White Motors in Africa, including Nigeria, the Gold Coast, South Africa and the Belgian Congo.
They next landed in Toronto, where Grace returned to the stage and starred in a play titled “The Three Weddings of a Hunchback.” She called it “a wonderful comeback after so many years at the bridge table.”
They moved to New York, where Conro invented a razor blade vending machine that didn’t sell and Grace earned royalties on a new kind of garter she had invented.
Conro died in 1939 and Grace returned to Medford and bought a home on 10th Street. When her garter royalties ran out, she moved first to the Medford Hotel and then to a nursing home, where she died in 1974.
She once said, “It was always feast or famine with us—the Ritz or a park bench.”
Sources: “Grace Andrews Fiero,” Table Rock Sentinel, March 1986, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 3-12. Print; , “Fiero Funeral Held January 20,” Mail Tribune [Medford, Ore]. 23 Jan. 1939, Print; “Mrs. Fiero, 87, Former Actress, Dies in Medford,” Ibid. 10 May7, 1974. Print.
