Week 19: Mother's Day - My Three Mothers

 

Week 19: Mother’s Day – My Three Mothers

Three mothers?  My dad outlived three wives during his life of 99 years.  Mother’s Day always gives me pause to think about each one of these wonderful women and the positive effects each one of them has had on my life.

Beth

My mother was Elizabeth “Beth” Layton Cook, born in Queens, New York in 1911. She and my dad met in the string section of their community orchestra in Jamaica, New York in 1938. She was 27 and he was 30. She played the viola and he, the cello. They married in the Queens Reformed Church, on Jamaica Avenue in 1939. My dad would tell me later that it was a match made in heaven.

Dad bought a small, new house in 1939 at 32 Lloyd Street in Hillside Heights, Nassau County on Long Island, New York. It was a perfect place for me to grow up. It had a back yard with a garden, a picket fence for me to walk along the top of, a sloping roof over the cellar stairs giving me direct access to the roof, and a big Sycamore tree to climb in the front yard. What else could a boy want?

 I do have many warm and wonderful memories of my mother.  I knew she loved me. There were plenty of hugs and kisses. If there was a booming thunder storm or a scary dream, I was always welcome to run to her bed and crawl under the covers for safety.  I remember her taking me to Dr. Schmidt’s office around the corner when I got sick, Bohacks grocery store for groceries, and a wonderful butcher shop with seemingly knee-deep saw dust on the floor. I remember her trying to, oh, so patiently, teach me to play the violin and then the piano at about age five. I had to have disappointed her. I just couldn’t catch on to remembering which note was which or where to place my fingers. She finally dispensed with music lessons and cut me loose to play outside. I remember her taking me by the hand and walking me to Herricks school for my first day in first grade. I cried, not wanting her to leave me with all those strange people, but after consoling me, she tore herself away to start me being able to operate on my own. Unfortunately, other details are a bit fuzzy. I was just beginning to get to know her as a person when she went away never to return.

In the early spring of 1948 she and my dad sat me down in the kitchen and told me that she was going to have to be away for awhile. She was going to go to a special hospital to recover from something called TB. She would not be able to have any visitors because TB was very contagious. According to my father, the doctors and nurses never told her she would not recover. That seems a bit cruel to me today, but maybe it was for the best. She passed away on July 6th, 1948, three months after being hospitalized. I had seen her once during those three months. She had been brought to a third floor hospital window and my grandparents and I had been able to see her at the window and wave to her from across the street. I can imagine how that must have torn at her heart.

She was only 36 when she died. In 1943 Selman Waksman discovered a compound that acted against tuberculosis, called streptomycin. The compound was first given to a human patient in November 1949 and the patient was cured. If only she had had a little more time.

Mom (Beth) and Dad, c.1939

Between Mothers

With the passing of my mother Beth, I stayed during the day with the Molinet family down the street during my second grade school year. I walked to and from school with Jimmy Molinet and his older sister, Madeline.  During my third year in grade school, my Aunt Grace invited me to come live with her, my three cousins, my Uncle Jim and my Grandfather McLaughlin for that school year. Meanwhile she introduced my dad to a lady friend named Vera, who sang in the choir at The First Methodist Church in Hollis, New York. My dad was very interested, being definitely in the market for a new mother for me.

Vera

Vera’s full name was Vera Eileen Carpenter. She was born in 1921 in Marion, Ohio. She told me that as soon as she graduated from high school in 1939, she bravely said goodbye to her parents in Marion and headed for New York City where the lights were bright and good jobs were plentiful. She said she had no desire to stay in a small Mid-West city and be a waitress in a restaurant.

Vera made a successful jump. She worked on Pine Street in downtown New York City for the George B. Buck Company, “working individual retirement accounts.” Mr. Buck was one of the country’s first actuaries. In 1912, he co-founded the first company to specialize in setting up company retirement plans. His first major achievement in 1913 was producing the first actuarial report for the New York City Police Pension Fund. After that, every major organization in the country wanted his services. Today, computers work retirement plans for millions of Americans. In 1939, huge rooms full of mathematically savvy women did all that work with mechanical adding machines and early tabulating machines made by the Burroughs Company. The process remained largely the same until the 1960s and early 70s as commercial computers became commonplace in businesses such as banking and accounting.

My dad and Vera wed in April, 1950, at the Hollis Methodist Church. She seemed interesting to me because she was not from New York like all the other people I had met up until that time. At the age of nine, I found her far away state of Ohio to be very intriguing. She stopped working in New York City when she married my dad so she could devote time toward setting me on the right path for success in school and life. She organized our home, got me to dress well, eat right, bathe regularly, employ good table manners and get my homework done. She also instilled in me the expectation that I would be going to college, no ifs, ands, or buts.

The fun part of life began with Vera organizing our first of many two week vacations during the summer of 1950. She got my dad to pack up our old 1941 Ford and hit the road for Niagara Falls and Marion, Ohio. My cousin, Bill Collins, was invited to be my traveling companion. We crossed the bridge from upstate New York into Canada and stayed overnight across the river from the world famous Niagara Falls, near the spectacular Canadian Horseshoe Falls. Decked out in yellow rain slickers, we sailed into the spray at the foot of the falls on the little ship, “Maid of the Mist.” We took pictures of everything.  We left Niagara, New York, drove across northwest Pennsylvania into northeast Ohio, and changed direction toward the southwest, ending up in Marion a few hours later to visit my new grandparents, Dana and Dessie Carpenter, and a bevy of new aunts and uncles who welcomed us warmly. Everything we saw was exciting to me.  Grandpa Carpenter worked as a maintenance man in the Marion Power Shovel Company. This was the company that had supplied steam shovels for digging the Panama Canal. In the early 1950s they were making the biggest power shovels in the world for strip coal mining. There were steam locomotives still pulling freight and coal along a main north-south rail line about a mile from the Carpenter’s house. Bill and I walked the rails and watched trains squash pennies that we left on the tracks. We went horseback riding, ate the tallest ice cream cones I’d ever seen, drank the best root beer I’d ever tasted, and visited The Harding Memorial where the 24^th President of the United States and his wife were interred. This entire whirlwind trip wound up with a two day return drive to our home on Lloyd Street, Long Island. My eyes had been opened to the thrill of travel…and it still hooks me today, 71 years later.

Vera returned to work at the George B. Buck Company about five years later. She loved New York City, the people she worked with, and the extra money helped us continue improving our lifestyle, bit by bit, to include a new house in nearby Roslyn Heights on Long Island. I loved the move. I felt we were “moving-on-up.” She continued to push me to do well in school but gave me a lot of freedom to be myself. In a short eight years, Vera had put me on the right track. I was off to college in September 1958. The next 37 years of our relationship seems a bit of a blur as I look back on it now. I came home during summers while in college, wrote and called infrequently during my next twenty years in the Army but periodically visited in Roslyn and then the folks new home in Maine, taking my young family with me, until Vera passed away in 1995. As I look back, I know that my first stepmom, Vera, had a huge, positive impact on my life during my formative years from age 9 to 18. She wasn’t a hugger and kisser, her love language consisted of words and gifts. Thanks Mom, I don’t know where I would be today without you having been in my life!

Vera always said, “When I am gone, cremate me. I don’t want to be stuck in some claustrophobic box. I’d like my ashes spread in the ocean that I’ve always loved.” My dad had a friend who was a commercial fisherman with a big boat. One day in the summer of 1995, the fisherman friend took dad and my mother’s best friend Edith six miles offshore. They quietly spread Vera’s ashes across the gentle swells, spoke not a word, dropped a single rose and headed back for port. I used to joke with Vera and say, “After you’re gone, I’ll always be able to go to the beach anywhere and talk with you.”

Dad and Vera, c.1958

Barbara

After Vera died in March 1995 at the age of 73, my dad was a youthful 86 and full of life. He didn’t like the idea of living alone and began courting Barbara Joy, who he had known for years while singing in the choir of Christ Church in Kennebunk, Maine. Barbara shared a lifelong passion for music with my dad. Her husband had died and she, too, was tired of living alone. They married in the United Church of Christ in Alfred, Maine in 1996 where they had purchased a very nice, shingled bungalow for their new lives together.

Barbara’s son, David, and his wife, Torrey, lived a mile away with their sons, Tim and Nick. We were very happy about dad’s new family, and they were equally happy with him.

Barbara, at age 78, was completely at home with sitting on my dad’s lap and giving him a hug and a kiss any old time. This was what my dad missed during his 44 years of marriage with Vera. Life had again come around full circle. I got to know Barbara well during trips my wife and I made to Maine once or twice a year. She was easy to talk to and know. She, like Vera, was different from all the New Yorkers I knew growing up on Long Island. She spoke with a heavy “down-east” accent. She grew up on an island by the name of North Haven. North Haven was across West Penobscot Bay from the mainland with the nearest towns being Camden and Rockport, Maine. The only way on or off the island was by ferry. Everybody on the island knew everybody else’s family and business. There were no secrets. Signs of Native Americans living on the island go back to 3,300 B.C., the date being determined by carbon dating and artifacts. The original white settlers, arriving in the mid-1700s, were all farmers and fishermen.

Barbara had a lot of stories. She told me an interesting story about being a little girl on North Haven. Well-to-do families liked to spend their summers along the shores of Maine before the days of air conditioning because it was so much more comfortable than spending sweltering summers in places like Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and even London, England. There was a big summer home that belonged to a family named Morrow on a hill near where Barbara’s parents lived. She had been invited to play with a little girl that lived there, and spent a good bit of time playing outside that big house. One day in 1926 or 27, an older girl came out to push the playmates on the swings in the yard. That girl turned out to be Anne Morrow who later married the famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh, in 1929. Barbara further claimed, and I believe her, that she saw Lindbergh pick up Anne from North Haven in the sea plane that they then used to fly around the world in 1929 to raise awareness of the importance of aviation.

Barbara began fading in 2002 because of failing health, and died in 2004. But she added immeasurably to my father’s happiness and longevity. They had been married for almost eight years. My dad lived for three more years passing away quietly among family and friends in 2007.

Barbara and Dad, c.2001