Legacy of Love
My mother was a formidable personage, not as a result of a privileged upbringing or wealth or any of the background attributes that usually result in outstanding people.
She was the only child of a mother who was about to place her in an orphanage because her marriage had failed, but mother's grandparents made it clear that their daughter would never again be welcomed into their home and family if that happened.
So, my mother was left with her grandparents, German immigrants of no special means or talents, and she grew up with a house full of aunts and uncles. Her mother lived there as well, and later visited from time to time between two subsequent unsuccessful marriages.
My mother was usually referred to as “The Kid,” and while she apparently had no special place in the household, she was accepted and raised as one of the crew.
The German head of the household had been a trolley operator in the Beaver Valley who, in a collision with another trolley car, lost a leg. That was in an era when such an injury meant only that there was no place available for him in the trolley business, and so he became a tailor.
That only pointed out that there were many avenues to a life of dependency and no visible paths to success except self-determination.
Fortunately, mother was personally strong enough to make her own way, finishing elementary school then taking a trolley across the river to Rochester High School. After graduation, she should have had a university education but there was no money for or tradition of higher education in the family. In fact, she was the first of that household to have a high school diploma.
So she was fortunate to be accepted for nurses' training at the old Children's Hospital, Pittsburgh. The nurses' training program was one of the few avenues open to girls and of special value to her because those young people in that training program were actually paid to be there.
As there were no extra household funds for my mother's “spending money,” she took a yearlong job as timekeeper at a lumber yard before entering the nursing school.
While a student at the Children's Hospital program, she became friends with a Zelienople student whose boyfriend had a close friend who had a repair garage and auto dealership in Cranberry Township, and so my mother met the man who subsequently became her husband and my father. Her student-friend and the boyfriends remained good friends until they died.
Mother never had a full-time nursing position, probably because she was adequately cared for in her marriage, but she did take care of some patients who needed her talents and training from time to time. After my father's death, she served as camp nurse at several locations, as a part-time nurse at a home for children with special needs and problems, and was the nurse on hand during the University of Pittsburgh's marching band camp held several weeks each summer at Camp Kon-O-Kwee, Fombell.
She was active in community events, and during World War II, she taught home nursing courses for the American Red Cross and was an airplane spotter. Who remembers what that entailed?
Interesting word usage, accurate spelling and reading were always important to my mother. She constantly upgraded her vocabulary and expected good grammar in her household.
Letters she wrote to me when I was away at school always contained descriptives that would be unusual if used by most folks with her limited educational background. Crossword puzzles apparently helped in this regard, but her choice of reading material was a prime source of her interesting vocabulary.
She and my father were always ready and more than willing to take care of my children if my husband and I needed them, and later, during the years when I worked for the Butler Eagle, she was always available as a sitter if I had an evening meeting to cover for the paper and my spouse was otherwise occupied.
Despite her mother's plans to abandon her as a child, my mother stayed close to my grandmother and took personal care of her in her final years, even though her mother did little to show any appreciation of her attentions.
Mother was a widow for 17 years, never complained about it, but occupied her time with a variety of activities. She and my father had been frequent travelers, but their destinations were not always places she wanted to visit. So she and her widowed friends went to places she could not convince my father to visit.
In fact, she died suddenly and unexpectedly at one of those destinations, a great shock to her traveling companion. But we in her family were glad she did not die a lingering death, and that she was where she wanted to be doing what she wanted to do, with friends of her choosing.
