I’m a bit late with this but yesterday was my mom’s birthday. I don’t know exactly when the picture above was taken. I would guess that my mom was in her early to mid-20s so it would have been taken around 1944 or 1945.
I’m not sure what I can write about her that I haven’t written about before. She was on the vaudeville stage since before she could walk. As a teenager and adult she had a lovely, trained soprano voice.
By her own account she “raised herself”. Her parents had been separated from when she was quite young and she was shuffled back and forth among her parents and various relatives. She told us she never knew from day to day where she would be sleeping.
She was the first person in her family to graduate from grade school. She went on to graduate from high school and then from college. She became a remedial reading teacher—what we would now call a teacher of special needs children. Her first teaching assignment was teaching the poorest of poor kids in St. Louis. She returned to that same school 20 years later when she went back to teaching in the 1960s. The kids there were still the poorest of the poor but the racial and ethnic mix had changed.
In her late 40s she went back to school and got a masters degree in education administration. She then went to work for the city in an incredibly thankless position—in charge of what was euphemistically called “staff balancing”, trying to allocate teachers to schools by race. After doing that for a few years she went back to teaching and taught until she retired in the 1980s.
Even in retirement she kept her hand in, volunteering in teaching former prostitutes to read.
Also, she was very pretty.
As I think I have mentioned before, I have a quirk of mind by which when I think of a person, I usually picture them the way they were when I first met them. Although at the time of her death my mom was old, fat, her hair had turned gray, and there were bags under her eyes, the way I always saw her was very much as she was in the picture at the top of this post. My youngest siblings are significantly younger than I and have no recollection of my mom at this age and don’t have my mental quirk. They think of her as an old lady.
Always makes me sad to see photos of people young, then old. Youth is so vibrant, so alive and energetic. And the way we can tell if the driver ahead of us in a car is young or old by only a silhouette of the back of their head. Beautiful mother.
What a meaningful bio on your Mom. Yes, she was also very pretty. But, what caught my attention was her warm smile and tender looking eyes. IOW, she looked like a really nice person.