Mary Elizabeth. The General. Mayor of Brown Street. Grammie. She was my mother’s mother and the middle child of five siblings born to Jakim and Sophie, the first generation of their families to be born here in the United States. Both of her parents immigrated in 1904 and 1908 from Wulka Mazowieckie in Galicia which is now modern day Ukraine. Because of this and the neighborhood she grew up in, Mary could speak Polish, Yiddish, Ukrainian, English, and a little touch of Italian. While her friends and people in town called her Mary, she was Grammie to my brothers and me.
Mary met and married a handsome young man, Henry, (my grandfather, full of his own ancient native american mixed with English blood ancestry ) in the 1930’s. A first born son, my uncle, was born two years prior to my mother’s arrival in 1937. The family lived together with Grandmother Sophie in the downstairs portion of the 1840’s two-family house while Mary’s eldest brother, John, lived upstairs with his wife, also named Mary. Despite the same given name, identity confusion was kept to a minimum!
Grammie worked for over 30 years as a seamstress in a local garment factory. Her fingers were never idle as she sewed clothes at home on her black-enamel-with-roses, foot-pedaled Singer sewing machine, and crocheted anything from doilies to afghans to tablecloths for everyone in the family. She taught me how to knit, crochet, sew, and to make our favorite family foods: raisin bread and pootchie – a cabbage pea soup – as her mother had taught her. Mary’s backyard garden was always full of vegetables and flowers that she also taught us how to name and grow.
In her retirement and at the encouragement of her close friend, Marion, Mary became a Den Mother for the Boy Scouts and shared her grandmotherly skills and love with boys young enough to be her great-grandchildren. Grammie was a devout Catholic and ritually said her rosary and prayers. Her faith was very important to her and she consistently supported Boys Town and St. Jude’s Children Hospital. Ironically, Mary kept well her parent’s secret of their Jewish heritage, something she finally admitted to me a few years before she passed away at 92-years old. Mary’s beauty radiates in this her 1934 wedding portrait close-up.
Avi 