She ran away from high school to escape a cruel stepmother. In a time when most women didn’t work and many women never worked she always had a job and always had her own money. One of her first jobs was hat check girl (yes, they called them that) in a nightclub run by the Chinese Tong. Before long, she found her first husband and soon trained as what was then, oddly I always thought, called a beauty operator, a trade she plied until she retired.
When she found her first husband philandering, she got her first of three divorces, in a time when fewer people divorced. Then she married the brother of a friend from beauty school, whom she found exceedingly dull, after the fact, and whom she almost immediately divorced. She bounced around some after that. While working in a Chicago beauty shop in 1934, Billie Frechette, girlfriend of John Dillinger, came in to get fixed up after a police beating and Mom worked on her as they talked about what had happened.
It wasn’t long after then that she met my father, a fry cook, a former bootlegger and a drunkard. That lasted until he ran off leaving her penniless with 2 year old and 6 year old sons. She moved us in with her sister and went back to work in a hair salon, after decades of running truck stops and diners with my father. By then it was the 1950’s and she started dating again. Soon, her friend’s brother, the spurned second husband, came back into her life and they remarried. He was a factory worker and they remained together for the rest of his life, about 30 years.
I only knew parts of this story until I was myself a grown, married man. Until then, to me, my father was her first husband. As far as I knew, the man I knew as my stepfather was her second husband. Mom was good at secrets. It was also only much later in my life that I learned that for all of her life, since first leaving home, she always took pains to have a secret getaway plan and money stashed away for it. When she threatened to walk out if she didn’t get her way, she really meant it. She was fiercely independent and I remember her making that threat often.
She was also highly demanding and one of the pickiest people I ever knew. Perhaps that helps account for the extra husbands. After years of preparing and serving food to others in the greasy spoons she ran with my father, she was the most exasperating person with whom to have a restaurant meal. I’ve never known anyone in my life who returned more plates to the kitchen. It got to the point that her older sister refused to go into a restaurant with her.
She was possessive, too. She prized her own things. When she remarried husband number two, he had his own house after being widowed from his second wife. It was full of nice furniture. On remarrying, they bought a house together, one big enough to house all of us as well as her beauty shop. But she made her new husband get rid of almost all of his furniture so she could have new things in her living room, dining room, etc. Mom seemed actually jealous of the widow.
Her possessiveness extended to her children. Mom was fiercely protective of older bro and me. Though we had been abandoned by our father, she fought to obtain and save for us Veterans Administration and Social Security benefits after his death in 1958. That money made all the difference in the world, allowing working class kids to get college and graduate degrees. But, when she remarried she explicitly informed our new stepfather that his relationship was principally with her, not with us, so he was allowed to do very little of what could be called parenting in most families. It was really weird. But it was really interesting, too.
My stepfather was a flaming racist. He worked in a factory in St. Louis where the better and higher paying jobs went to white guys and the lower paying jobs, in packing and shipping, went to black guys. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, sadly, the union looked the other way on this crap. Having grown up the son of a servant in the Augustus Busch mansion in St. Louis, and having himself chauffeured and caddied for the scions of other wealthy brewery families, he was always looking to find ways to feel superior to anybody he could, and race served him well in that respect. On his own, he remained, all his life, uneducated, uninterested in books, music, culture or ideas, and altogether just as dull as back when Mom had married and divorced him the first time around.
Mom didn’t have a racist bone in her body. She had been born in Philadelphia and some of that Brotherly Love stuff must have rubbed off, because in her entire lifetime, I never once saw her draw a negative inference against anyone based upon race. All my life she still had friends from her days working on the Tong nightclub, so I assume the same is true of her views on Asians. She did tend to remark that Asians and Westerners view human live differently, but I never knew for sure what she meant by that.
So, when the Civil Rights Era rolled around, stepfather found himself sitting at the dinner table with two rebellious teenagers and a spouse who opposed him entirely on the driving issues of the day. Much shouting ensued. Older bro started college in 1963, soon becoming entangled with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality and the Students for a Democratic Society. Since he lived at home while attending the local state university branch, dinner time turmoil increased exponentially. I didn’t become political until a little later.
Mom always had complete control of the household purse strings. The stepfather just handed over his check and carried a few dollars of gas money. I think she sometimes cheated on her taxes. I damned sure know she didn’t declare tips. She did well at it and invested in the stock market. She managed for them to retire comfortably to one of those seniors-only subdivisions in Arizona.
Mom’s self sufficiency and drive took a toll, though. Either she wasn’t particularly affectionate by nature or she just couldn’t find ways to express it. Even though I know she loved me as was proud of me, I can’t recall her actually saying so, ever. There weren’t many hugs. She kept a distance. There is nothing to be done now about such lost opportunities, She passed about 10 years ago at 96.
I often wish I missed her more. My adult daughters adore their grandmother for her independence, her courage, her perseverance, her open mindedness. I, on the other hand, am still working on a few issues with her, like why, when she wanted to date again, she put me under the care of the same cruel stepmother who had run her out of her own house way back when. But, for all of her virtues and any of her faults, it can truly be said that my mom was some piece of work.
Written with great difficulty, Mothers Day, 2016.