Mom, Part 3...

This is the continuing saga of the matriarch of our clan, my mother. Enjoy...Doc

Family

It didn’t take long for Mom and Dad to get started on their own family. First to come along was Karen Michelle, also known as Mickey in her younger years, and now known as Karen and sometimes Mic. The Christmas picture on the right was to be one of the last Christmases the senior member of the clan would share with them. Fortunately, he did get to meet Mic (Mom was pregnant with her in this picture). It seemed sadly ironic that the newest member of the family arrived followed all too quickly by the departure of the oldest member. The family that William Claney Smith had struggled to raise by himself was now branching off into new families. His clan was growing, and he would soon join their mother to watch it grow from a very different perspective.
 

By trade he was a pipe coverer, and at a very young age he opposed the union on certain unpopular issues. As a result, he was almost totally ostracized for a time. However, he came back and became president of that union for fifteen years until the day he died.

Dad looked on life as a challenge, never complaining, rather thankful that God had given him the strength to meet these challenges...We felt ten feet tall when he put his arm around our shoulders, a twinkle in his eyes, and a lilt in his voice as he proudly introduced you as “his” son or daughter.

Mom's Father's Day article on her Dad, published in the PGNorth, 6/15/78

William Claney Smith in his work togs

I think from top left clockwise, Mom's Dad, brother Donald, Mom, brother David, maybe brother Milt

Mic was quickly followed by me, after which Mom and Dad waited four years before they could face having Kevin. Makes me wonder if I had anything to do with the delay?

During those years Mom and Dad moved a few times. They started off with their first apartment on South Euclid in Bellevue. They shared the house with Jack and Dorothy Roberts, and had a weekly card game which featured a 6-pack of Pepsi and a breakfast roll (I guess they figured they’d be too tired to eat it in the morning, or too hungry to wait till after Mass). Dorothy and Jack had two kids, David and Nancy, who were around Mic’s age, and who we saw periodically when we were older.

After Mom’s father died, she and Dad moved over to the Simplon Street house to live with Aunt Helen and Uncle Dave (Uncle Bill lived there for a bit, then moved out). This is where my memory begins to kick in. It’s a dangerous thing to have a child write the life story of a parent, because the things the child remembers are quite different from the highlights for the adults. Most of the time. In point of fact, Aunt Helen and I both have pretty good recall of how I ruined her nice new bedspread with a ballpoint pen. I was trying to write even then!
 

Mom, Dad, Mic, and me. You may notice that in one picture I'm on a horse, in another, I'm holding a dog. I started early...

Aunt Mary still lived through the back hedge, still played bingo, and thought she was Sarah Bernhardt reincarnated. In spite of her proximity, there was a day when Dad was left in charge of Mic and I, and everyone else was out. He put us down for naps, but Mic wanted  to be Daddy’s little helper, so she decided to give me a good powdering with the Johnson & Johnson. When Dad came up to check on us, by the time he had me cleaned up his navy blue pants looked like he had a serious case of dandruff, or had been in a snowstorm.

Aunt Mary (our great aunt) with the three of us kids - I'm the one with the Dalmatian family...

Simplon Street was where Mic and I had the measles and were kept in a darkened room, Uncle Dave got in a serious car crash and spent months recuperating, the Larkins lived across the street, and the Daileys next door. The house had a big front porch where we rode our tricycles and the adults sat and talked. It wasn’t a big house, but somehow it seemed to expand or contract to meet the needs of whoever lived there. Eventually we were all to move out to the suburbs, but for those early years, Simplon Street was the center of the family, an extended family that we were never to know again in quite the same way.

The Dougherty family was now in the form it was to maintain until the next expansion, when my sister married in 1974, fourteen years later...