My Grandmother Emily

My Grandmother Emily

Today, I ran across some big words that needed research to get the full meaning of the article. My thrift shop dictionary, a Thorndike Barnhart, failed the test. There were three words and none were in that dictionary. I need a more comprehensive, large print, dictionary.

It reminded me of Grandmother Emily Stevenson, my father’s mother. She lived with us on our farm for about a year when I was about ten years old. By that time she was already suffering from senile dementia, but still had her wits about her half the time. She had been an avid reader before the onset of her disability, and made it a point to learn a new word every day. She kept a dictionary at her side as she read or listened to the radio. This was in the year 1932 when radio was still finding its place in the scheme of things, and there was much innovative programming. There were many fifteen minute programs of such things as real ethnic folk music from foreign lands, soap operas like ‘The Goldbergs” that aired such ethnic jokes as would not be tolerated for a minute on daytime TV in later years, until Archie Bunker made his debut. On Sundays there was a program featuring classical music that we all listened to together, and my father would test my sister and me in recognition of the sounds of various instruments.

I digress. My grandmother listened to the best of the radio programing while sitting in a rocking chair near the mahogany library table where our Capehart radio sat in all its splendor. My mother also encouraged her to knit cotton dish-clothes to help keep her motor skills alive. Mother loved her mother-in-law from the time she married my father. She was only seventeen years old, and although she had a some experience of trial and error cooking and of keeping house, she was ill prepared for the work that awaited her back in the cottage on my grandfather’s farm. She was expected to board three hired men and do their laundry by hand, as well as care for my father. There was a cast ron wood-burning stove, no running water into the cottage and toilet facilities were out back in one of those narrow, wooden structures with a half-moon shaped hole cut into the door.

My grandfather was a civil engineer in Scranton, Pennsylvania who had become rich laying out spur lines for mining companies in the west. He also appeared frequently in court cases to give his expert opinion about cave-ins that occurred in many anthracite coalmines in that area. His farm was as much a hobby as a moneymaker. Granddad raised purebred Holstein cattle, and won world records for their prize-winning milk production. Those records were really won by several of his six sons who milked some of the best producers in the herd four times, yes, I said four times a day. One of my uncles escaped by joining the Navy during WWI but was killed in a plane crash at Pensacola. Three more left the farm to go to college where they all became engineers of one sort or another. As the youngest living sons, my father and my Uncle Bob stayed on at the farm until my father had what they used to call a ‘nervous breakdown’. Four-time-a-day milking will do that!

After he had a rest, my father and Uncle Bob went to work for a rich man in Connecticut who was somebody important in the American Book Company. He too, owned farms as a hobby; not one, but two. Purebred Jersey cows were raised on both farms. The manager of the farm in New Canaan, where the brothers first worked, was an older man who had two beautiful daughters. My father and his brother did not overlook the girls, 17 and 18 years old, and it wasn’t long before the two brothers married the two sisters. Thus, I have double cousins. Because of both men's extensive experience in raising record breaking, purebred cattle, it wasn't long before my father was put in charge of the farm in Wilton, and Uncle Bob was given the job of manager of the New Canaan farm, putting my mother’s father out of job. Both boys were blamed, and the rancor of my maternal grandfather curtailed forever very much contact between the families.

Contact on my father’s side didn’t happen often, either. Granddad was always busy. He traveled a great deal, always taking his secretary, an attractive dark-haired woman, who appeared with him in snapshots taken in remote places where he was directing the building of a spur rail line.

In the 1920s, the time from when I remember him, whenever he dropped in to see us he always drove a yellow convertible, and made a dashing figure in his fine suits, and white goatee beard. My parents were saving to buy a farm, so there were no frivolous expenditures, and few toys for children. My father’s people didn’t believe in celebrating Christmas, and Daddy refused to let Mother tell us any Santa Claus fables. That would be lying to children! I was too young to know we were being deprived of anything. There were always odd things around to make into pretend toys. Visitors often brought us little gifts, and made a big production of looking for them in their bags. When Granddad visited, and we looked expectant, I can still feel the hurt my grandfather caused when he called my sister and me the "Gimme kids."

I now see my grandfather as flamboyant, arrogant, and cruel. He made two sons hold my aunt while he whipped her with a horsewhip for some light-hearted prank she pulled in her teens. He was also unfaithful to my grandmother, who had borne him eight children; six boys and two girls, and all of whom turned out to be successful people, although alcoholism played a role in both my father’s and Uncle Bob’s behavior all their lives.

Even when my grandfather became ill, with cancer I think, in addition to taking Grandma Emily with him, he also took the ‘secretary’ when he bought a house in St. Petersburg, Florida. Grandma continued to live with him during this humiliating period. She was always gracious and soft-spoken, accepting the situation, and never giving her husband an accusing word. Granddad died at that house a year later.

My grandmother was born Mary Emily Miller, a daughter born to the third wife of a Baptist minister. She was a lively girl, and by the tales handed down about her, she was something of a tomboy. She was smart and her father sent her to college at Ithica NY where she was to major in home economics. I think it was just two months into her education there when, at Halloween, someone dared her to dress up in men’s clothing as a costume, possibly for a party. Remember, she was a minister’s daughter for whom many things like dancing and dating boys would have been unthinkable. She took the dare, was caught, and was expelled from college. What shame and humiliation that must have caused her!

At the risk of making this story too long, I think you might like to know more about my Grandmother Emily’s family. She had a grandfather; I don’t know how many ‘greats’ would have preceded his name, who fought for freedom from the English in the American Revolution. When victory was won, instead of being paid in money, he was given a tract of land in an area that became Clark’s Summit, Pennsylvania, on the  western frontier. Then, this ancestor walked to Pennsylvania, cleared some land, built a house, and returned to Connecticut to find a bride. There must have been wonderful stories about this time, but they were not handed down to me.

Pastor Miller, Grandma's father, married three times, meaning he wore out two women before he married Grandma Emily’s mother. A half brother, son of the first marriage, fought on the Union side in the Civil War, was captured and died at the infamous Andersonville prison.

I don't recall any stories about Grandma after expulsion from college until she met and married my grandfather. He must have been considered a good catch. He was already wealthy, and had a 400-acre farm, and a big house. My first memories of visiting the farm include eating at a large table where a man did all the cooking and a hired boy did the serving. This would have been about eight years after my father married my mother, and brought her to the cottage where so much heavy work was expected of her. Grandma Emily came to her rescue, and patiently taught her all the things her volatile mother had failed to teach her. I still have some of her recipes. She was also very helpful when Mother had her first baby only a year after she was married. The baby, my sister Jane, was large and almost killed mother before she entered the world. The birth did great internal damage to Mother that was not corrected until ten years after she had a second daughter, me.

After Granddad's death in 1929, the big farm in Pennsylvania was sold, much of it at auction. I was there, and even as young as I was, I was aware of Grandma’s anguish at losing her home, the very foundation for her existence!  Afterward, she was moved around among the homes of her married son’s and daughters. It wasn’t long before two of the homes were no longer available when two of my uncles also died. Grandma began to lose her faculties for periods of time, and neither her married daughter, Aunt Helen, nor Mother’s sister, could take her, so she came to live with us.

By this time, my father was a full-blown alcoholic with big financial problems, this being the time of the great depression. He was able to conceal his condition outside the family, but everyone on the farm knew about it, and was affected by it, especially my mother. Mother welcomed Grandma Emily, for all the trouble it was to watch and care for her. Daddy tended to be nicer with his mother around. Grandma was bothered by my father’s verbally abusive remarks to Mother, and I think her mental capacity diminished because of it. She began running away, and Daddy would have to drop everything to look for her. She would throw her shoes out the window, and she was incontinent.

Daddy hired a practical nurse to care for her, whose name I still remember, Miss Nicely. The arrangement didn’t last long. I won’t go into the details, but due to my father’s decisions, without consulting his sisters and brother, my Grandma Emily died at aged 72 in the Connecticut mental hospital. I think her condition today would have been treatable with drugs. She didn’t have Alzheimer’s; it was something of a lesser nature.

As I grow older myself, the more this seems to me to be a terrible end to a gracious lady who endured so much during her life. I want to remember and honor her here, so that the superior person she was will not be entirely forgotten.