Mother's keepsakes

The house where my mom was working was quarantined, so one of her boy friends (my dad) brought her a candy bar from town.

Mother saved this match some boy threw at her in 1932, and the cigarette another guy was smoking that got soaked somehow during their horseplay.

She saved these straws she had used to drink a bottle of pop her boy friend (later to be my dad) bought her. Again, 1932.

Here's an excerpt from a letter to Mother from her sister in 1938 containing this shocking bit of information: My aunt did laundry on Sunday! True confessions.

My parents sold our home in Harlem for $5,000 and we moved to the Crestview subdivision in Kansas City, North. That was a big step up for us, even though Crestview was made up of cheap pre-fab houses. Those houses are still standing, though.

Here's the Crestview house.

This was taken, I believe, at my Uncle Carl's farm. My dad is in front with my cousin, Royce, on his lap. I was obviously having one of my frequent pouting spells... that's me next to Daddy. Maybe I was jealous. My lovely sister is standing directly behind me.

The more I look at this picture, the more I realize it's priceless!

It's been a perfect day to rummage through my mom's keepsakes. I notice I did an entry on some of these same things last February, so I guess it's a typical wintertime activity for me.

Click on any of the images to make them bigger.

More stuff from my mom

I'm just about done with the strolls down memory lane, at least for this round of reminiscences. It's supposed to get up around 70 degrees today; Cliff may have put in for the day off to ride the Honda.

I've put the old yellowed memories away for now, but I'll show you just a few more things that take me back into the past.

This was on a page of Mother's 1930 diary; I wonder if it's the same recipe she used over the years. I've never made divinity, it seems like too much trouble; but I did enjoy hers every year at Christmas.


Mother went through a phase of entering me in any singing contest available. I remember this one well: a little boy from my one-room school and I sang a duet, "Mr. And Mississippi"; we had patches on our clothes, and the boy had a hobo bundle on a stick, to carry over his shoulder. We'd alternate verses and then sing the chorus together. I still remember all the words to that song.

See? There I am, number 9! I have a feeling I wasn't as talented as Mother thought I was, since I don't recall ever getting first place. Or second or third, even.


I found this picture of myself that I don't recall ever seeing before, probably because my hands look awkward and I'm not smiling hugely; so perhaps it was never framed and put on display. I must have been around three years old, judging by the amount of hair. It took me a long time to have enough hair so that people knew I was a girl.

This next one is really a whole story in itself: In 1962, Mother went to the bathroom to urinate, got up, and happened to look down before she flushed: she saw blood. A lot of it. She went to our wonderful Dr. Edwards, who referred her to a urologist. He discovered a polyp in one of her kidneys and had her admitted to the old Kansas City Osteopathic Hospital.

Tests were run, and it was discovered that her other kidney wasn't functioning well enough for the cancerous one to be removed. She was sent home to die, it would seem.



I don't recall how the whole process went, but I do know Mother decided not to accept the death sentence. She went to K.U. Medical Center where her kidney was removed. The cancer was contained in that one kidney, so it hadn't spread. That wrist band is from her stay in K.U., and Dr. Burroff was the man who did the surgery.

She recovered from that surgery in time to watch me graduate, and her remaining kidney served her well until her death in 2004, forty-two years later. I have no idea whether Osteopathic Hospital was wrong about her remaining kidney, or if prayers were answered that jump-started it. People of all denominations had Mother on their prayer lists; I recall a Catholic neighbor telling us she was asking St. Jude for help.

And now, back to the present.

Romance was blooming in 1932

My mom liked to save a souvenir of every single flirtation, real or imagined, that she had as a youth. Now I can understand her keeping these things as a young, single girl. But to know she saved them for her whole life just blows me away. They weren't forgotten; she knew where they were and what they represented, even as an old woman. I think perhaps that when she held one of these keepsakes, it brought back the carefree days of youth, and she remembered how wonderful it was to have the boys vying for her attention. Click to make the pictures larger.

A candy bar my dad gave my mom before they were married, and twelve years before I was born. Notice she even told the story on the envelope in which it was stored. Knowing how little they were paid, five cents for a candy bar was a pretty big investment!

I wonder what they were quarantined for.

She saved two things in this envelope: a burnt match...

and a cigarette, which is now only a cigarette paper. Raymond was my dad's younger brother. I think my mom was trying to decide which brother she liked back then.

One sad evening my mom was stood up, I don't know by whom; and she was driven to write a poem.

I'm glad I got around to scanning these things today, because they're getting pretty crumbly.

The worth of a hired girl in 1930

Mother went to work for Virgil Russell in 1930. She was a "hired girl", which means she did anything that needed doing: Washing, ironing, cooking, babysitting. I have a few pages from her 1930 diary where she had first started this job, and she wrote about how homesick she was. I believe she went home on weekends. Virgil Russell was a cousin to my father, and it was at this job that Mother met Daddy and his brothers; they worked for Virgil also.

These pages, though, are ones where she kept track of her wages. I don't know how they figured her time. It is obvious that Virgil often couldn't pay her in full. Click on them and you should be able to read them.


I'm going through stuff like this, deciding which should go on our family tree site. I hope you find it as interesting as I do.

Among my mother's keepsakes

Evidently, cards for all occasions were given in person when Mother was a child, because very few of the cards she kept have stamps.

This one was given by my mom to her older sister, my Aunt Ruby.



This one just cracks me up. Obviously the cartoonist who created it figured if men gave women their right to vote, men would be reduced to nothing more than skirt-wearing sissies. Or is that a woman looking manly? What do you think?

A nice Thanksgiving card, sent by my great-grandmother to my Aunt Ruby.


And this one has a stamp! Funny though, it has no cancellation mark.


I love these glimpses of the "old days", long before my time.

And now, a page from a newspaper of 1934. Click on any of these to see them larger.

My parents had been married two years when this paper came out. Mother had many tales of hard times, the Depression, and the droughts they suffered in those days. She told me more than once that the Depression really didn't affect her and Daddy much because they were already so poor, they couldn't see a difference.

I wonder if my mom can peek down from her eternal home and see me enjoying all this stuff she packratted away.

Stuff my mother saved

Once again I've been going through the treasures my mom left behind, things she kept from long ago that brought back good memories. Times were so much simpler then, when my mom was courting. She'd save the strangest things, obviously to keep certain "romantic" memories alive. These are all from before she was married in 1932. Be sure to click on any of the pictures to make them larger.

When boys bought her a candy bar, she saved the wrappers.


In case you can't make out the faded writing on the envelope, she and Everett (whom she later married) and Bill (who later married my dad's only sister) made a bet about which of them weighed the most. The winner (the heaviest) got a candy bar. Mother won. Bill also got her an ice cream cone. Hmmm, I wonder why she was the heaviest?

What it says on this envelope: "Everett and Raymond went to Ridgeway the day we were quarantined at Virgils & brought me a candy bar. This is the wrapper.

Wow! Raymond, the last of the big-time spenders, bought my mom a whole pack of gum. Raymond, by the way, was my dad's brother.

All that's left of the cigarette is the paper, as you can see. Oh, but there was a match in this envelope too, with a different note on the inside of the envelope flap:

I can picture a lot of horseplay going on that evening, can't you?

I hope you folks get the same sort of chuckle I did, looking at these things and reading between the hastily-jotted lines.