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My mother was top of the heap. A feminist before the word was coined, she tackled any task. She even got paid for putting her arms around men. Now before you jump to any unsavory conclusions, she was a tailor, and with tape measure in hand, she put her arms around men’s waistlines. Some of you may remember her from her years at Neville’s, St. Clair Gunderson’s and then St. Clair’s in Winona. That line about getting paid for putting her arms around men got her on the Breakfast Club radio show in Chicago one year. She was selected for an interview by Don Something-or-other. Mom was tickled to death because Burt Lancaster was also on the show.
Not only did she do the womanly arts well: sewing, knitting, baking, canning, etc., but she mastered wallpapering, gardening, fishing (like a pro), camping, early on writing the Minneiska news and any other task that crossed her path.
Always a groundbreaker and usually by necessity, she could do anything and everything, which made her a very hard act to follow. That’s probably why Dad remained loyal to her memory after she died — 14 years before he did.
The last time I saw her alive was Mother’s Day l971, so Mother’s Day to me is a bittersweet occasion. She and Dad came to Rochester to observe the day. We took her to Quarry Hill Park, where the Nature Center, of which Harry was to be the director, was being built. Both my parents were avid birdwatchers, and on that day, Mom saw her first scarlet tanager. She was thrilled to pieces. I remember noting that Dad was helping her on the walk. That seemed out of the ordinary, but in the excitement of the day, I dismissed any thought about it. After all, nothing could reduce Mom to needing assistance.
Two days later the awful call came that she was found dead in the doorway of their home on West Fifth Street in Winona. But in typical fashion, she had already done the laundry, ironed everything, planted the garden, cleaned radishes, mixed up cookies, baked bread, cooked rhubarb sauce and was painting the front porch — all this by
1 p.m. when an errant blood clot shut all systems down. A passing motorist saw her fall and summoned help, but it was to no avail. We have never known who the good Samaritan was, but we are grateful for his efforts.
The daughter of farmers, Mom had taken up the role of co-mother with her sister Violette in their tender teenage years when their mother died from tuberculosis, leaving five children. Mom told stories of their struggle to keep the family cared for and, in particular, one hilarious episode when the two girls were feeding a threshing crew. This involved trips to the cool
cellar, where foods were stored. Neither admitted what/how they discovered a bottle of syrupy, sweet Kimmel, but they got to tasting it, not knowing that it was intoxicating. She said the dinner turned out a little less than Betty Crocker’s standard.
During the Depression, when jobs for Dad were scarce because he was a carpenter and, then as now, building was slow, Mom took a tailoring course. Under the auspices of one of the self-help programs, WPA or something or other, this program laid the groundwork for her later employment when she stretched from doing alterations to tailoring. This also enabled her to meet our family’s needs. She took hand-me-down clothes and made them into clothing for us kids.
Likewise she kept us fed when things were tight with her gardening skills and found imaginative ways to make more from less. Maybe others remember asking, “How many pieces of bacon can we have, Mom?” I’m pretty sure that Mom’s excuse that bacon didn’t agree with her was her way of sacrificing her portion for us.
Mom had only an eighth-grade education in a country school but went on to be a student at the business college located in downtown Winona. While in school, she worked as a maid for the Bailey family, whose home was on the corner of Broadway and Lafayette. After completing her secretarial training, she worked at the J.R. Watkins Co. in their stenographers’ pool. Someplace in my souvenirs I have a picture of her and a bevy of other secretaries in a wintertime parade. They were all dressed in plaid skirts, heavy woolen sweaters and snappy little tam hats.
On the anniversary of her death on May 16 in 2000, I was standing on our back deck on our home in Alma, Wis., thinking about Mom, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of red. And there it was, a brilliant scarlet tanager. Coincidence? Maybe.
Happy Mother’s Day to all.
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