Remembering her parents and meeting Dad
MSE: Memories
Reflections of Wife, Mother, and Teacher One Lucky Woman
I was smitten. When this young man said that no such thing as “altruism” existed, he affected me in some strange new way. No one had ever engaged me in a philosophical conversation but he was nearly twenty, four and a half years older than I—and probably knew lots about everything. Nonetheless, we disagreed about his statement, about hairstyles, money, and raising children. He thought Eli Culbertson, the bridge expert, was right that others than their parents should raise them from three years on. (Now why would a bridge expert know anything about this?)
And concerning money—my family fared better during the 30’s depression than his. Dad, a utilities man and executive with the telephone company, never lost his job during that time. On the other hand, my Colgate friend’s father lost everything but his charm and convictions. Incredibly my school chum, Ellie—the one from whom I learned a lot about friendship, colorful language and sex, told me that his father had been one of the world’s richest people and had once written a personal check for eighteen million dollars. She also said that he was a scoundrel.
According to my oldest sister, Helen, when my friend presented me with an orchid before escorting me to my Junior Prom, she dubbed him “extravagant.”
Where the money to buy it came from remains a mystery to me. He had told me that his family’s inebriated, gambling butler supported his father from his racetrack winnings. A butler? Remember, jobs were hard to find in those days. Sometimes, the money question irked me. For instance, at Smith College after hours, he’d throw pebbles at my dorm window asking me to “lend” him a twenty to help him back to Colgate. I suspected—correctly-- that he and his buddies would return to Rahar’s, the local Smith beer joint to have a good time. Still I was crazy about my daredevil, imaginative and courageous beau; traits demonstrated as time went by.
Through an up and down courtship I’d return his fraternity pin or engage in some other emotional outburst. None of which ever seemed to bother him. Throughout his Texas Aircorp training possibly my most serious doubts occurred when he procrastinated in writing to my father about his hopes of marrying me. Even worse, when my father did receive a letter, I learned that his best friend, Hank Coakley, had written it for him. (Unfortunately, Hank was killed in an air crash about a year later.) Two hours before our wedding I pondered still if this were this right step for me, for us. But he was bound to leave soon for overseas in his B-26 Bomber; we had to have what time we could together. “And so they were married,” as the saying goes.
When the telegram from the war office came the next summer of ’43, Father Rodman, the builder of John Carroll University and worldly Jesuit who had performed our wedding ceremony, said to me, “Twenty years old! You are the youngest widow I’ve ever known.”
WWII, not about to end that year or the next, found me at home 2721 Chesterton Road in Shaker Heights with my father, mother, gentle sister Catherine, five years older than I and two younger sisters Dibbie and Susan, five and seven years younger than I. My brother Bob lived in Arizona where he had gone to college and where he had remained, I believe mostly because his eczema could be better controlled in Arizona’s dry climate. Helen, my oldest sister who easily stepped into the roll of family matriarch later when our parents died, lived in Louisville with her husband Charlie Wood, an orthopedic surgeon and with their son Frank, my Godchild who later became an orthopedic surgeon. Frank had been born September 19, 1940 as I packed for my freshman year at Smith. Since he was the first grandchild—I do believe that’s the reason—Mom left me to finish packing by myself. Dad celebrated—a fact noticeable by the large shaving mirror in his bathroom, shattered to a kind of sunburst pattern.
Living again with the family, I experienced the same sheltering atmosphere of my childhood, which began in St. Louis, Missouri. Dad was born in Prescott, Arizona 18__into a hardy cattle ranch family. After graduating from UCLA, instead of joining his roommate Dean Witter in a new business enterprise, Dad opted to work for the telephone company. Like army personnel, telephone people were often transferred from city to city or state to state. Soon Dad found himself in Missouri near Hannibal where Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn got into so much trouble AND where my mother was born and lived until at eighteen she married Dad.
My mother, born Helen Carolyn Settles in 18__.She was a lady who always wore white gloves, a woman with deep religious faith that sustained her all her life and one who was beloved by all her sons-in-law. Music was her source of pleasure. So well do I remember her playing the wondrous Mason and Hamlin baby grand piano in our Columbus home on Iuka, then later our Shaker Heights home on Chesterton and finally her Kemper Road apartment in Cleveland—just a block away from where I live in Moreland Courts at Shaker Square with my husband and my computer.
Her first four children were born in St. Louis; then, after living about five years in Cleveland the last two were born in Columbus where she took up golf.
possibly as a respite from the care of her six children.
Very much a hand person, not unlike Madame LeFarge she knitted constantly. Along with friends like Kitty McCampbell, they sat chatting and knitting, sometimes pretending to listen to me practice the piano or play mushy songs like “Aura Lee” or “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms”. Possibly Mom had hopes that I learn to play the piano and love music as she did. She even treated me to a concert given by Paderevski. Alas, little more came of it than my learning to play Irish tunes for some of my father’s political buddies he joyously brought home after celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. It was on those days I learned how the Irish celebrate that day.
Mother made quilts of professional quality and beauty. Also, she crocheted on a small needle little squares that made up a quilt which my sister Dibbie recognized always as an heirloom to covet. I hope her daughter, Farley, now has it. I picture my mother sitting on the sun porch in Cleveland working on these bedspreads, but I had absolutely no idea of their beauty or value.
A strong heritage from mother for all her children is our love for flowers. The flowers I’ve loved through the years are the ones remembered from her gardens: delphinium, nasturtiums, zinnias, coral bells, bleeding heart, daisies, and roses. Getting married in her garden was the sanctuary for me.
These days in San Jose, California sister Sue fights her gardener to keep nasturtiums so she can put them in the same copper basket that mother did. Brother Bob, surely our best, most serious gardener, arranged for mother in Hamlet Hills—the nursing home—a grow lamp lighting a bower of violets, all types. They gave mother such joy and the staff as well. Bob visited Cleveland often to see her, always bringing new varieties of violets. He and I had an awful lot of fun on those visits, the first time in years that just the two of us could be silly together and talk about everything in the world—even hell and redemption.
Much earlier,in 1945 Mother and the two youngest girls to Milwaukee because Dad had accepted the presidency of the Wisconsin Bell Telephone Company. In 1946 he bought a huge house and before they could finish decorating it to their tastes, by that fall he was dead of lung cancer.
A widow in her early fifties, Mom sold the house and returned to her favorite city—Cleveland. There she established a whole new life through her weaving and the friends made through this new interest. I think of her always while setting the table at Christmas time until Valentine’s Day with the good looking red and white mats she wove for me.
Mom, who loved sweets, made glorious coconut cakes, lemon meringue pies and plum pudding—with hard sauce. Not hard to understand why she always had to fight a weight problem. Though she never lost her sweet tooth, she finally did lose weight—a lot, as she fought her battle with Krohn’s disease and lost, dying in 1977, her rosary in hand.
Before that time, between the years of her return from Milwaukee about 1950 until her seventieth birthday in 1965, mother graced our Northfield home often during cookouts, holidays, and summertime leisure. Watching the swimming she sat under an apple tree—the one our raccoon climbed and tossed its fruits at random. Always there to help out when the kids were sick, ran away, or simply left home, her wisdom and calm were invaluable to me. She was such a star at the family reunion that we celebrated for her seventieth birthday at Arrow Cottage. Then again, in 1972 at our older son’s wedding, guests would ask, “Who is that wonderful little old lady who is enjoying the slot machine in the kitchen?”
I knew that our family physician, Dr. Rowland, had told mother she was the stable one in her marriage. But it wasn’t until she died that I fully understood her strength and courage, nor how important she was to me and to our whole family. I give thanks for any shred of her character that I might have inherited.
Now Dad is a different story. I always knew how much I loved him and dreaded the day he would grow old, sit on a park bench and totter along with a cane. That day never came as he died when he was sixty years old. In vain, he had tried many times to stop smoking. I still see him, unlit cigarette in one hand, other hand fumbling in his shirt pocket. I was twenty-four when he died; mother died at eighty-two when I was fifty-four—thus my missing thirty years of getting to know and understand Dad.
Words that come to mind describing my father are affectionate—demonstrably so, intelligent, outspoken, honest (My father-in-law spoke highly of my father, especially his honesty.), volatile, humorous, sarcastic, cautious and loyal to family, both to his mother and sister and to his wife and children. The concept of loyalty to family and its importance Dad discussed often, saying that when the family unit disappears, the quality of life disappears. Love of family has motivated Cy and me through the many years of our marriage and we have tried to impress the need for it on our children. I think I inherited many of my father’s attributes, both the good and the bad.
Memories of Dad include his crying at times cars killed our dogs, working carefully as he hand crafted his fishing rods or as he strung lines over the balcony of the stairway at our home. He loved to hunt and enjoyed companions as disparate as Father Donahie, pastor of our church in Columbus and Elmer Lindseth, CEO of of The Cleveland Illuminating Company in Cleveland. Despite claiming an agnosticism, Dad somehow found companionship with clergy including Father Rodman, mentioned earlier as the priest who married Cy and me. In the summer of 1946, Father Rodman traveled to Milwaukee to have a scotch with my father and to baptize him in the weeks before he died.
Dad had several huge trunks in the Chesterton Road basement. There he showed me keepsakes of his family and of his life growing up. Together we read wonderful letters he wrote to his mother and sister, Tat-- such letters as a description of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. He spoke of love and yearning for his mother and sister saying how much he wished he could have given more to support them financially. His hardworking parents’ considerable funds had dissipated through the squandering of brothers, the wandering of some, and paying lawyers (Clarence Darrow) for defense of a nephew’s murder charge.
Finish Dad’s profile later (p. seven of yellow pad)
My Siblings--
Bob: I have dearly loved all five of my siblings but in different ways and at different times. Most of my memories begin in Columbus. There, Dibbie and Susan were just two pests; after all I had been the baby for five years, then along came Dibbie. In Columbus, probably from age 10 to fourteen, Bob, two and a half years older, was the most important to me of the five. he was the closest to me in age, and since I was a complete tomboy, tagging after him and his friends was the right ticket for my tastes
Mention: taxidermy, jigsaw puzzles—the beginning of his arts and crafts, fishing with Dad, kick the can, flag
Later jewelry, now talking about stained glass work,
Gardening.
Catherine:
.
Reflections of Wife, Mother, and Teacher One Lucky Woman
I was smitten. When this young man said that no such thing as “altruism” existed, he affected me in some strange new way. No one had ever engaged me in a philosophical conversation but he was nearly twenty, four and a half years older than I—and probably knew lots about everything. Nonetheless, we disagreed about his statement, about hairstyles, money, and raising children. He thought Eli Culbertson, the bridge expert, was right that others than their parents should raise them from three years on. (Now why would a bridge expert know anything about this?)
And concerning money—my family fared better during the 30’s depression than his. Dad, a utilities man and executive with the telephone company, never lost his job during that time. On the other hand, my Colgate friend’s father lost everything but his charm and convictions. Incredibly my school chum, Ellie—the one from whom I learned a lot about friendship, colorful language and sex, told me that his father had been one of the world’s richest people and had once written a personal check for eighteen million dollars. She also said that he was a scoundrel.
According to my oldest sister, Helen, when my friend presented me with an orchid before escorting me to my Junior Prom, she dubbed him “extravagant.”
Where the money to buy it came from remains a mystery to me. He had told me that his family’s inebriated, gambling butler supported his father from his racetrack winnings. A butler? Remember, jobs were hard to find in those days. Sometimes, the money question irked me. For instance, at Smith College after hours, he’d throw pebbles at my dorm window asking me to “lend” him a twenty to help him back to Colgate. I suspected—correctly-- that he and his buddies would return to Rahar’s, the local Smith beer joint to have a good time. Still I was crazy about my daredevil, imaginative and courageous beau; traits demonstrated as time went by.
Through an up and down courtship I’d return his fraternity pin or engage in some other emotional outburst. None of which ever seemed to bother him. Throughout his Texas Aircorp training possibly my most serious doubts occurred when he procrastinated in writing to my father about his hopes of marrying me. Even worse, when my father did receive a letter, I learned that his best friend, Hank Coakley, had written it for him. (Unfortunately, Hank was killed in an air crash about a year later.) Two hours before our wedding I pondered still if this were this right step for me, for us. But he was bound to leave soon for overseas in his B-26 Bomber; we had to have what time we could together. “And so they were married,” as the saying goes.
When the telegram from the war office came the next summer of ’43, Father Rodman, the builder of John Carroll University and worldly Jesuit who had performed our wedding ceremony, said to me, “Twenty years old! You are the youngest widow I’ve ever known.”
WWII, not about to end that year or the next, found me at home 2721 Chesterton Road in Shaker Heights with my father, mother, gentle sister Catherine, five years older than I and two younger sisters Dibbie and Susan, five and seven years younger than I. My brother Bob lived in Arizona where he had gone to college and where he had remained, I believe mostly because his eczema could be better controlled in Arizona’s dry climate. Helen, my oldest sister who easily stepped into the roll of family matriarch later when our parents died, lived in Louisville with her husband Charlie Wood, an orthopedic surgeon and with their son Frank, my Godchild who later became an orthopedic surgeon. Frank had been born September 19, 1940 as I packed for my freshman year at Smith. Since he was the first grandchild—I do believe that’s the reason—Mom left me to finish packing by myself. Dad celebrated—a fact noticeable by the large shaving mirror in his bathroom, shattered to a kind of sunburst pattern.
Living again with the family, I experienced the same sheltering atmosphere of my childhood, which began in St. Louis, Missouri. Dad was born in Prescott, Arizona 18__into a hardy cattle ranch family. After graduating from UCLA, instead of joining his roommate Dean Witter in a new business enterprise, Dad opted to work for the telephone company. Like army personnel, telephone people were often transferred from city to city or state to state. Soon Dad found himself in Missouri near Hannibal where Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn got into so much trouble AND where my mother was born and lived until at eighteen she married Dad.
My mother, born Helen Carolyn Settles in 18__.She was a lady who always wore white gloves, a woman with deep religious faith that sustained her all her life and one who was beloved by all her sons-in-law. Music was her source of pleasure. So well do I remember her playing the wondrous Mason and Hamlin baby grand piano in our Columbus home on Iuka, then later our Shaker Heights home on Chesterton and finally her Kemper Road apartment in Cleveland—just a block away from where I live in Moreland Courts at Shaker Square with my husband and my computer.
Her first four children were born in St. Louis; then, after living about five years in Cleveland the last two were born in Columbus where she took up golf.
possibly as a respite from the care of her six children.
Very much a hand person, not unlike Madame LeFarge she knitted constantly. Along with friends like Kitty McCampbell, they sat chatting and knitting, sometimes pretending to listen to me practice the piano or play mushy songs like “Aura Lee” or “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms”. Possibly Mom had hopes that I learn to play the piano and love music as she did. She even treated me to a concert given by Paderevski. Alas, little more came of it than my learning to play Irish tunes for some of my father’s political buddies he joyously brought home after celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. It was on those days I learned how the Irish celebrate that day.
Mother made quilts of professional quality and beauty. Also, she crocheted on a small needle little squares that made up a quilt which my sister Dibbie recognized always as an heirloom to covet. I hope her daughter, Farley, now has it. I picture my mother sitting on the sun porch in Cleveland working on these bedspreads, but I had absolutely no idea of their beauty or value.
A strong heritage from mother for all her children is our love for flowers. The flowers I’ve loved through the years are the ones remembered from her gardens: delphinium, nasturtiums, zinnias, coral bells, bleeding heart, daisies, and roses. Getting married in her garden was the sanctuary for me.
These days in San Jose, California sister Sue fights her gardener to keep nasturtiums so she can put them in the same copper basket that mother did. Brother Bob, surely our best, most serious gardener, arranged for mother in Hamlet Hills—the nursing home—a grow lamp lighting a bower of violets, all types. They gave mother such joy and the staff as well. Bob visited Cleveland often to see her, always bringing new varieties of violets. He and I had an awful lot of fun on those visits, the first time in years that just the two of us could be silly together and talk about everything in the world—even hell and redemption.
Much earlier,in 1945 Mother and the two youngest girls to Milwaukee because Dad had accepted the presidency of the Wisconsin Bell Telephone Company. In 1946 he bought a huge house and before they could finish decorating it to their tastes, by that fall he was dead of lung cancer.
A widow in her early fifties, Mom sold the house and returned to her favorite city—Cleveland. There she established a whole new life through her weaving and the friends made through this new interest. I think of her always while setting the table at Christmas time until Valentine’s Day with the good looking red and white mats she wove for me.
Mom, who loved sweets, made glorious coconut cakes, lemon meringue pies and plum pudding—with hard sauce. Not hard to understand why she always had to fight a weight problem. Though she never lost her sweet tooth, she finally did lose weight—a lot, as she fought her battle with Krohn’s disease and lost, dying in 1977, her rosary in hand.
Before that time, between the years of her return from Milwaukee about 1950 until her seventieth birthday in 1965, mother graced our Northfield home often during cookouts, holidays, and summertime leisure. Watching the swimming she sat under an apple tree—the one our raccoon climbed and tossed its fruits at random. Always there to help out when the kids were sick, ran away, or simply left home, her wisdom and calm were invaluable to me. She was such a star at the family reunion that we celebrated for her seventieth birthday at Arrow Cottage. Then again, in 1972 at our older son’s wedding, guests would ask, “Who is that wonderful little old lady who is enjoying the slot machine in the kitchen?”
I knew that our family physician, Dr. Rowland, had told mother she was the stable one in her marriage. But it wasn’t until she died that I fully understood her strength and courage, nor how important she was to me and to our whole family. I give thanks for any shred of her character that I might have inherited.
Now Dad is a different story. I always knew how much I loved him and dreaded the day he would grow old, sit on a park bench and totter along with a cane. That day never came as he died when he was sixty years old. In vain, he had tried many times to stop smoking. I still see him, unlit cigarette in one hand, other hand fumbling in his shirt pocket. I was twenty-four when he died; mother died at eighty-two when I was fifty-four—thus my missing thirty years of getting to know and understand Dad.
Words that come to mind describing my father are affectionate—demonstrably so, intelligent, outspoken, honest (My father-in-law spoke highly of my father, especially his honesty.), volatile, humorous, sarcastic, cautious and loyal to family, both to his mother and sister and to his wife and children. The concept of loyalty to family and its importance Dad discussed often, saying that when the family unit disappears, the quality of life disappears. Love of family has motivated Cy and me through the many years of our marriage and we have tried to impress the need for it on our children. I think I inherited many of my father’s attributes, both the good and the bad.
Memories of Dad include his crying at times cars killed our dogs, working carefully as he hand crafted his fishing rods or as he strung lines over the balcony of the stairway at our home. He loved to hunt and enjoyed companions as disparate as Father Donahie, pastor of our church in Columbus and Elmer Lindseth, CEO of of The Cleveland Illuminating Company in Cleveland. Despite claiming an agnosticism, Dad somehow found companionship with clergy including Father Rodman, mentioned earlier as the priest who married Cy and me. In the summer of 1946, Father Rodman traveled to Milwaukee to have a scotch with my father and to baptize him in the weeks before he died.
Dad had several huge trunks in the Chesterton Road basement. There he showed me keepsakes of his family and of his life growing up. Together we read wonderful letters he wrote to his mother and sister, Tat-- such letters as a description of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. He spoke of love and yearning for his mother and sister saying how much he wished he could have given more to support them financially. His hardworking parents’ considerable funds had dissipated through the squandering of brothers, the wandering of some, and paying lawyers (Clarence Darrow) for defense of a nephew’s murder charge.
Finish Dad’s profile later (p. seven of yellow pad)
My Siblings--
Bob: I have dearly loved all five of my siblings but in different ways and at different times. Most of my memories begin in Columbus. There, Dibbie and Susan were just two pests; after all I had been the baby for five years, then along came Dibbie. In Columbus, probably from age 10 to fourteen, Bob, two and a half years older, was the most important to me of the five. he was the closest to me in age, and since I was a complete tomboy, tagging after him and his friends was the right ticket for my tastes
Mention: taxidermy, jigsaw puzzles—the beginning of his arts and crafts, fishing with Dad, kick the can, flag
Later jewelry, now talking about stained glass work,
Gardening.
Catherine:
.