Mom, part 2...

Just one note before I start - the part of this that is italicized in black is quoted from the autobiography my mother wrote and didn't publish, DON'T TELL MY KIDS. Enjoy, Doc

One of the many things Mom learned from her father was the lesson of helping others. He played Santa for kids at local children’s homes. And when one of the aunts in the family became bedridden he went out and bought a television set for her on the installment plan.

Many years later he was dying in the hospital, and she went in to spend time with him every day, in spite of having a new baby. She was there for other family and friends when they needed help, even though she was raising her own family. When Rita Rooney, who was one of her closest cousins, was dying of cancer, she went over to take care of her every day until the time we came home from school. And when I was in fourth grade and in the hospital for some tests, while I spent most of my time reading comic books she was out pushing children up and down the halls in the burn carts and talking with them, children whose own mothers didn’t have time to come in and be with them.
 

Mom and her father on her wedding day

Mom had a gift for friendship, and it was sometimes cultivated for interesting reasons.

I prefer to  refer to myself as being on the clever side or one who was quick to evaluate life and its situations and put them in the proper perspective.  Especially when it came to eating.  I had that neighborhood pretty well assessed.  Friday nights Conways went shopping and always bought a carton of Pepsi and if you hit over there at the right time you were sure to be able to share their good fortune.
 
Then there was the Schoen family, quite an interesting group.  Their oldest daughter worked at Clark's Candy Company and every Saturday at noon she came home with a box of Clark Bars, which I was glad to relieve her of one or more.

Ah, but the Conways had something that the Schoen's didn't by the name of Kitty, and believe me this was no cat.  Where Kitty's and my friendship began I'll never know.  It seems like it always was and always will be.  We were a great team, what I didn't think of she did.  Kit had a real talent for making life more exciting.
                                                                                                                       (excerpt from PLEASE DON'T TELL MY KIDS)
 
Mom had another friend who literally became a Mother Superior—Jo Jo McMullen. They liked to hang out in the cemetery and smoke on lunch breaks at Mt. Assisi High School. Jo Jo became a nun and ended up teaching in Africa for some years, but eventually came back to her roots, Mt. Assisi, and her pal Smitty.

Mom with her friends at Mt. Assisi - Jo Jo is the blonde on the bottom in the center photo - Mom is in the dark letter sweater

For some reason, she and her friends liked to hang out in the graveyard and smoke...

One Christmas we played a game and Mom’s turn came to tell a story that would surprise her grandchildren. She told the story of going to a friend’s cottage at Lake Chautauqua one summer. It was a hot night, and the girls got tired of cards and decided to go skinny-dipping in the lake. Unbeknownst to them, they chose a spot right where the next car to drive in would shine the headlights on them in all their glory. Michael’s jaw dropped to the floor when his mother explained to him the exact definition of skinny-dipping. All he could say in a shocked tone was, “Grandma?”

College and Courtship
Mom lived at home and rode the streetcar in to Duquesne University. One of her favorite stories about Duquesne is the day she forgot what floor she was on in the Administration Building, and walked into the men’s bathroom. Sure surprised the guy who was in there. She seems to have let go of her stage fright long enough to participate in a Carnival show as a dancer. She dated a number of different young men during her freshman year, and then she met Dad.

Mom is the flapper on the left

The story is legend in the family. Mom and Dad met at Duquesne when he was a junior and she was a freshman. At the time, he was in the back seat of a car with Kissy Sommers, doing what you might expect, given her name. Needless to say, Mom was not impressed.

Going into the fall of his senior year, Dad put together a list of the girls he thought might be worth a date. Like a good accounting major, he intended to work his way down the list and see how it all added up. First on the list was Pat Smith. When he called her, she had no idea who he was until he said it was Harpo (his college nickname, given to him in honor of Harpo Marx, who also didn’t speak much). Once she realized who it was, she said she wasn’t sure she wanted to go out with him. Yep,  she remembered Kissy Sommers.
In the end, he persuaded her to go out for one date, and they never looked back. He threw away his list, she left college (it would take her until the 1980’s to finally finish her degree), and on April 18, 1953 they got married at Assumption Church in Bellevue.
 

The Wedding
A strange thing happened on April 18, 1953. It snowed. That’s not rice that you see on the happy couple, that’s snow. In the family lore, Mom had an unusual relationship with snow. Not only did it snow on her wedding day, through the years, Mic was convinced Mom had the power to make it snow, because it invariably snowed on the nights she wanted to use the car when we were in high school. Two days after Mom died, on the morning before everyone was to gather at McCabe’s Funeral Home we woke up to an early snow. It wasn’t even Halloween and we had snow. We were all convinced it was a message, just to remind us that Irish Mother Superiors can do amazing things.

(To be continued...)