Mothers' Day

Mothers' Day is coming this Sunday (May 11). Our mothers are our ancestors, after all.

My mother, Betty Marie Newton, was born in March, 1918, the time the first wave of the "Spanish Flu" started, here in America. Over 50 million people died in the next year as the pandemic swept America, Europe and Asia. (see Center for Disease Control article). So, one life started in a year of death and war -- she was never destined to be great in the world, but certainly great in my life.

She was the first child born into a middle class family. My grandfather was a chef, my grandmother a stay-at-home wife and mother who never learned to drive and never worked outside her home. Two years later her brother Leo was born. There would be no more children.

Growing up in Oregon City, Oregon, in the 1920s was a picture of small town life. At one time Oregon City was the territorial capital of the entire Oregon Territory, it was just a town on the river then. The dramatic horseshoe-shaped falls on the Willamette powered mills for flour, lumber, woolen goods and paper during its history. The electrical power generating plant built in 1888 at the falls was the first time in the United States that electrical power was transmitted long-distance.

Betty and Leo went began school in Oregon City, but in the 1930s the family moved to The Dalles, Oregon, on the Columbia River. Even as a young woman, Betty was showing her determined spirit to be different. In one picture of her, taken at the age of ten, she is sitting posed on a piano bench, with a defiant spit curl plastered in the middle of her forehead. She told me that her mother had forbidden her to wear it, and had combed her hair back that morning. As soon as grandma wasn't looking at the photographer, she redid her curl.

This spirit never left her. The stories she and my father told of the life they led in in the late 1930s, through the war years and even after I was born, attest to their free spirits. My dad was a moonshiner during prohibition, and they met at grange dances where he supplied the liquor. In 1943 they were married in Oregon City, at St. John's Episcopal Church. This church was apparently the only one in Oregon City that would marry a couple if the man was in the service. Their wedding picture shoes my mother in a nice suit, my dad in naval uniform.

Later, they went to San Francisco, then Iowa (the navy sent dad there for diesel engine training), then New York and Virginia. While dad was overseas she lived with friends on the east coast and worked at various jobs, including a pie baker for the (then) famous Toddle House restaurant. She always maintained that it was her own recipe for pecan pie that they used.

After the war dad joined the Operating Engineers Union in Oregon, and Mom worked in the county tax offices. After I was born, she was a stay at home mom until I was in school, then defying every unwritten rule of the 1950s, went back to work as an accountant and left me with a babysitter.

I remember her home cooking -- she and my father both were awesome in the kitchen. In the summers when she wasn't working, we often picked strawberries, raspberries, blackcaps and beans for spending money. Mom would work hard all summer, then spend her money on new furniture or to buy a car. We were one of the first middle class families in Oregon City ato own two cars, one just for the woman of the house.

She camped and fished and hunted, she played cards and drank with the men. She didn't have much use for traditional wives, but in her own way, she was an excellent one by the standards of those times: clean house, sewed my clothes, canned and froze vegetables, fruit and meat. She read widely and voraciously (as did my dad) and started me early on books. As an adult, I never would pick up a murder mystery -- having read all of Erle Stanley Gardner as a second grader, I thought they were children's books.

There are many, many more memories, but I would like to invite you to share yours. For now, Happy Mothers' Day, Mom.