You Know Ma!

"I'm going to Hell, you know," Grandma Mary announced at a family gathering shortly after her 90th birthday. "I'm going to Hell, because that's where all my friends are." We stopped talking. My youngest aunt rush over to Grandma Mary. Teary eyed she tried to dissuade her mother from going to hell.

Grandma Mary learned her catechism in one of those eras where your final state after death seemed to depend more on being proper than doing good. Mary was no good at being proper.

I spent more time with Grandma than my younger brothers. The three youngest can barely remember her. So I keep the stories alive and re-tell them, especially when I sense that one or the other is getting uppity.

My mother and her sister, our family's incarnations of Rosie the Riveter, worked at the Coolerator in Duluth plant making stuff for the Second World War while the men fought overseas. My cousin and I spent our days on Grandma's farm. Today we say, she provided day care. Actually it was week care. We played in the Big Tree. We chased away the ducks so we could wade in the Pond. Grandma poured the fresh cows milk in bottles because my cousin only drank store milk not cows milk. My uncle named Janice, my cousin, 'Minnie Sharp Teeth' and he called me 'Chief Poo-in-the-Pants'. We stayed at Grandmas farm before REA brought in electricity and my uncles replaced the 1918 Fire Relief shack with a new house. So I remember washing by a kerosene lamp and waking on winter mornings to see frost covering nails poking through the roof of the sleeping shed.

Mary immigrated to Minnesota from Poland impersonating another girl from her village. Unwilling or unable to continue with her plans, the young woman decided not to leave. Mary had relatives in Minnesota: a mother and some siblings. She closely matched the description of the other girl, so Mary made the journey. Grandma always had two family names and two birthdays in the new country: her own and the person she replaced. For official purposes she explained that a hassled immigration official on Ellis Island messed up.

I wonder? Was the other girl sick? Had a young man proposed? I often ponder what opened the door to Duluth for Grandma.

Mary bore 13 children in two different batches. According to an elder aunt, she chose three different men to help although she finally settled on Casimir my grandfather.  My grandmother bore my mother and her next older sister only 3 months apart! Enrollment in the catholic school demanded births of all children admitted to the school be after Grandma met and married Casimir.

This same eldest aunt told me that the first three children had 'been taken away'. When I asked by whom and why, my aunt responded, "By the social workers. You know Ma!" She went no further. I didn't know Ma, I guess. I met only one of these elder three. I thought her the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated member of our family. This aunt lived in Minneapolis. She spliced commercials into programs shown on television. The industry used film back then. Later she moved to Los Angeles to continue her work. Wow!

Mary had no schooling. She could neither read nor write. A Jesuit school educated Casimir, my Grandfather, well in Poland. He wrote with a wonderful handwriting. I have never figured out if Casimir was Mary's first, second or only husband. He was, I think, some of the reason Mary planned on hell. The church frowned on women with a story like Mary's.

Grandpa lost his job at the Steel Mill during the depression. Family said that he never worked again.

Grandma had a family to feed. She applied industry and ingenuity to this task. Relief distributed commodity foods during the depression. Grandma Mary collected extra or spoiled foods from the neighbors that chickens would eat. She raised her own chickens during those years. One problem, however, she lived in an apartment right in downtown Duluth – exactly where SMDC has built its new cancer center. Even during the depression the City Fathers frowned on raising chickens in a downtown apartment.

Mary trained my young aunts and uncles to handle the Public Health inspections. Each child would grab two chickens, press them close to their bodies with their arms to keep their wings from flapping, and hold their beaks so they would not squawk. The children then ran with the chickens deep under the front porch out of sight.  

One visit Mary forgot the old hen she had assigned to hatch a clutch of eggs.  Grandma placed the nest and chicken under the stove in the living room to help keep them warm. During the inspection, Mary denied the report the Public Health official brought from a neighbor that she kept chickens. Just then the hen got off her nest and, in view of all, left the room.

Grandma brought her children to the social worker at the Relief Office to get shoes. Another aunt still clenches her teeth remembering the humiliation of Relief Shoes. The social worker gave you new shoes, but you returned the old ones to show you had truly worn them out. Other kids noticed when you had Relief Shoes.

The children began earning money as soon as possible. One uncle found a wagon and went about collecting bottles, cans and anything else he could sell. Grandma found places for the girls to clean house or cook for pay. My mother hated her first job she because the lady, "Looked down on us and thought herself better than me." She said other things which are quite politically incorrect today.

While the children attended, St. Mary's Star of the Sea, the Polish school, the pastor would enforce discipline by asking parents to stand during mass and call them to task for the misbehavior of their children. With 10 children, Mary stood a lot. Mary never attended school. However, all her children boys and girls, completed High School, fairly unusual for that time.

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps enabled Grandma Mary to move from the city to the country. Her older boys served in the camps and sent their money home. Mary saved this money and bought the farm. Before you think it too unkind of Grandma leaving the boys with no money, know, for example, that my uncle Frank would pick blueberries on the Fernberg Trail where he worked in the CCC camp. He brought the blueberries to Ely and traded them for beer and booze.

Mary didn't have much when she lived on the farm. She sold milk to the creamery. She raised chickens and turkeys. (Yes, my childhood was tainted by the sight of bloody chickens flapping wings and running headless around the barnyard.) She made cottage cheese. She often had cheesecloth bags hanging over the back of a chair dripping whey into a pan. Mary picked mushrooms. She dried her apples, storing them on long strings. She made butter and headcheese.  Grandma Mary turned cabbage into sauerkraut. (She kept a cat. I remember because a kitten nearly drowned in one of her kraut crocks.) However she seldom baked. She bought day old bakery: day old bread and day old cow-pies, a flat, round sweet roll, which I loved. Grandma planted a big garden and grew a lot of what she ate. Grandma liked her coffee. Of course, she could not grow coffee, but I believe the 5 pound can she received as a wedding present lasted her a lifetime.

Grandma brewed a lean cup of coffee.

She knew she couldn't continue all that work into her old age. Her eldest son, Frank, was her retirement plan. He would keep her out of the poor house. The plan went well for 25 or 30 years until my uncle took an interest in women in his middle age. My cousin swears he saw Grandma Mary chasing one of Frank's women down the road with a broom. I don't know if this was the one who married him or not and moved him to Oregon. When finally her health turned bad and diabetes claimed one of her legs, Mary landed in the poor house – now called a nursing home.

Grandma Mary obviously embarrassed my mother. My Mother refused to answer questions or tell any stories of her childhood. I relied on the stories of aunts.

My birth order blessed me, first among five, with knowing Mary. It keeps me from being uppity.

So is Mary in heaven or in hell with her friends? With age I have enough wisdom to realize I neither can nor must decide the answer. Besides, I suspect I no longer really understand the terms of that question.