Husband Allen Arthur Lowe
Born: 9 Nov 1893 - Boston, Massachusetts
Christened:
Died: 24 Jan 1964 - Glens Falls, New York
Cause of Death: Heart attack, had type 2 diabetes
Buried: - Spring Grove Cem, Northampton Massachusetts
Father: Joseph Allen Lowe (1865-1923)
Mother: Maryanne Susan Cauthers (1856-1946)
Marriage: 18 Sep 1920 - Northampton Massachusetts
Wife Helen Story Readio
Born: 1 Jul 1890 - Florence, Massachusetts
Christened:
Died: 23 May 1977 - Glens Falls, New York
Cause of Death: Stroke, cerebral vascular disease for 20 years
Buried: - Spring Grove Cem, Florence Massachusetts
Father: Charles Hiram Readio (Readyhough) (1858-1930)
Mother: Marion Frances Raymond (1858-1925)
Children
1 F Barbara Anne Lowe
Born: 1921 - Glens Falls ?
Christened:
Died: Living
Buried:
Spouse: Robert Joseph Dehais (1920-1989)
Marr: 12 Sep 1948 - Glens Falls, Church of the Messiah
2 F Kathleen Allen Lowe
Born: 25 May 1932 - Glens Falls, New York
Christened:
Died: Abt 17 Feb 2006 - Cedar Park, Williamson, Texas
Cause of Death: kidney failure, diabetic kidney damage, urostomy
Buried:
Spouse: Rev. Russell Drayton Smith (1919-2001)
Marr: 1955 - Glens Falls
General Notes (Husband)
My grandfather was an engineer, self educated. His father left the family when he was around ten, and his difficult, emotionally unstable mother forced him to drop out of highschool to support her. He got a college degree in engineering via correspondence courses. Described as firm, patient, persistent, laid back and a bit mushy, "a rascal", and he may not overly in love with telling the truth. He and my aunt apparently did considerable laughing at my grandmother's high strung ways behind her back. He worked as an engineer and manager at Sandy Hill Paper Company in Glens Falls. In early years of his marriage he worked for about four years in Quebec, Canada, in management at paper mills.
Photos of my grandfather as a young man show a spirited, fun loving and optimistic young man, probably something of a scamp, who greatly enjoyed the company of his daughters when they were small. Photos of him as a boy and a formal photo in his military uniform show a less than happy and stiff person. However, photos of him in laid back moments with his own troop, while he was in the military, show him in his undershirt, relaxed, and having a good time.
My mother says he used to take her to watch ball games in the park. My mother loved him dearly, and was hysterical when he had his heart attack adn then died, but I'm not sure she always liked him. My mother was an intense, passionate and rigid woman who took after her mother, I take after my mother in some of these ways, and I have personality conflicts with people like Grandfather.
He read widely history, poetry, classics, currrent writing, mysteries, and military history. He kept a long multivolume set on something like the Napoleonic wars on the headboard of his bed in the spare room behind the livingroom where he apparently slept at times. When my cousin visited as a boy and also slept there, he liked to read them.
He had adult onset diabetes, and died in middle age of a heart attack. I always understood that he died unexpectedly young in middle age, but actually he died at age 70, and had far outlived all of his recent male ancestors. His father died in his mid 50's of heart disease. My grandfather took good care of himself and his diabetes, and had the diabetes under control for many years.
The entire family were bitter at his “early” “premature” death, and blamed it on his diabetes. The family historical materials contained a vehement note hand copied from something about the dangers of neglecting diabetes, as well as its genetic nature. Nevertheless one gets the idea that the actual family mythology was that diabetes is a monster that necessarily kills you, so there’s no point in worrying about it. My mother got diabetes, denied that she had it, denied that my brother has diabetes as well, and failed to properly care for it, and died at age 72 of unrecognized diabetic kidney damage, which is not easy to accomplish. She did also have a urostomy, and mild backup of fluid into her kidneys may have helped cause the uremia that killed her, but her kidneys had the granular appearance that diabetes causes, and not the mixture of granular crystals and holes on the surface that chronic backup of the urostomy causes. Kidney damage is the most common fatal complication of diabetes, but easy to spot by routine tests, and regular physical exams failed to catch it, which is consistent with my mother’s habit of picking old foagy not very competent doctors and trusting them absolutely. The autopsy also found that her circulatory system was healthy, and two recent lines of her ancestry are inclined to live to be over 100. This was my definition of death by stupidity.
His World War I draft card, from Ancestry.com, dated 1917 or 1918, describes him as of medium height and stout, and living in Quebec, employed already as a foreman in a paper mill in Grand Mere, Quebec. He registered in Northampton. The card is only partially legible, but the answer to one question was “mother”.
My grandfather had a troubled childhood. His mother had a serious mood disorder for which she was hospitalized in her sixties. His father left them when he was about ten, took up with a theater crowd, wrote bawdy light opera, remarried without telling anyone and as nearly as I can tell without ever formally divorcing his first wife, and moved to New York City, where he lived near Greenwich Village. His mother was prone to extreme rages over very little, that impressed and terrified my aunt, who witnessed them as a child, and who found my mother’s physically violent and sometimes psychotic looking rages entirely normal.
My grandfather’s mother moved to Northampton to start a new life or avoid her ex-husband or whatever, and claimed to be a widow. They lived as nearly as I can tell from the census, by taking in boarders. Her husband seems to have concealed his whereabouts from her. When my grandfather was sixteen, she forced him to drop out and go to work to support her. However, his highschool teachers helped him continue to study. Finally my grandfather, atleast 23 years old, and having been unable to separate from his mother by taking a job as a paper mill foreman in Quebec, and having already registered with the draft in 1917 or 1918, I’m told actually not long before the war ended, though long enough to serve a winter with his unit, enlisted in the military, and then went home and told his mother, who threw one of her most “impressive” rages ever. After the war, he returned to the same paper mill in Quebec.
From photos, it looks as though my grandfather did serve in Europe, but had a fairly good time of it. There are photos of him relaxing with this fellows, all in their undershirts. He may have had some sort of commission as an officer, or maybe he was a noncommissioned officer. Somehow he ended up in charge of a unit. My aunt said that having never learned to drive, he managed to drive a jeep to purchase stockings or socks or something for Christmas gifts for his men.
He worked in a paper mill in Quebec, as a manager, at the time when he married, and his wife lived with him there for several years. When he left he was a Superintendent in teh paper mills. They got caught in the middle of a labor dispute, and this was not an aspect of the job that he enjoyed. He decided to go into sales work and left for Chicago.
Publications about Sandy Hill paper company (now International Paper), in Glens Falls, state that Allen Lowe was hired between 1936 and 1937, as part of a major upgrade of the sales department. He had been superintendent of "the mill at Grand Mere, Quebec, when it had set a world record for speed in newsprint production". He was one of four men who "quickly brought in enough orders to make 1937, the second (and first full) year of our arrival here, a successful year in sales." It is also mentioned that at one point Allen Lowe was department head of Advertising, and at some point he was he was head of the Estimating department.
Other mentions: "That fall, Allen Lowe succeeded in obtaining for Sandy Hill the contract from the New York State Department of Forestry's Paper Making Division, an order for a complete commercial laboratory paper machine with both fourdrinier and cylinder board machine wet ends.
It could not have been done for the money appropriated, had not Allen found an almost new and unused 48" trim board machine at the former Stillwater, N.Y. board mill. Sandy Hill was able to rebuild it like new, adding a new Sandy Hill fourdrinier wet end and a new press section of our design. "
In apparently 1957, Allen Lowe was made Assisting Vice President in charge of Sales Promotion.
"As First Vice President, Wesley had combined a practical knowledge of papermaking with adequate machinery design. He had encouraged our engineers to perfect teh previously patented Fancher Roller Shoe drive for Packer screens. Together with Allen Lowe, he had designed the Rotoformer for the inventor, who did not know enough to understand that the principal by which the Rotoformer worked was supposed to be wrong. This statement was made to the inventeor by both of our top competitor machinery builders! As a result of the successful work of Wes and Allen, the inventor gave us the sole right to manufacture and sell the Rotoformer. "
p 383 - "Our forte had become the smaller specialty paper machines, with our pioneering in vacuum forming - thanks to Wes Joslyn and Allen Lowe followed by Martin Keller and Ed Matteson-- Sandy Hill having built 86 Rotoformers and 22 Deltaformers up to the anniversary date."
It mentions that the new president of the Board, Frank Juckett, had owned other companies, and was an inventor, with a wide background in the paper industry. Juckett had grown up in the Lake George area, apparently, and worked in Springfield, Massachusetts, for a railroad company. They still lived there around 1914/1917, when he worked at Strathmore Paper Mills in the Springfield area. Strathmore owned or helped at paper mills in Philadelphia, New York City, Cleveland, Detroit,. Kansas City, various places in Massachusetts and Vermont". I don't know if during some of the time when Grandfather was in Quebec and in Ohio he worked for paper mills that Juckett was previously involved with.
Book by Walter J. Juckett - his autobiography. "In Retrospect" 1981. He died in 1988.
They went to Oak Park, Illinois, for two years, which my grandmother hated, and then to Lakewood, Ohio, which my grandmother apparently loved.
My grandfather's obituary says that he began his career in the paper industry when he worked for the Laurentide Company in Grand Mere, Quebec, in 1911. During 14 years with that company he worked in all departments in capacities up to supervisor. Mail from him and to him in that time that my mother saved gives his address as Grand Mere (not Three Rivers).
After leaving Laurentide, according to his obit, he worked for the Fritz Publishing Company, publishers of Paper Industry Magazine, in Chicago, for the Penton Publishing Company and the W. S. Tyler Company in Cleveland.
He came to Glens Falls in 1930 as a partner in the Harris Importing and Exporting Company. He went to the Sandy Hill Iron and Brass Works in 1936. "At Sandy Hill he has been one of the prime figures in the research and development of the Rotoformer, a new type of paper forming machine".
"With a background of many years' experience in the paper industry in teh operation as well as the design and installation of paper machinery, his advice and counsel were regularly sought from a wide area of the paper industry, both in the United States, and abroad. He was a regular contributor to technical papers and a collaborator on numerous textbooks dealing with the paper making process. He was a member of TAPPI, the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry."
"During WWI he was a member of the 301st Engineers and served as an officer with the 50th Pioneer Infantry with the American Expeditionary Forces. He was immediate past president of the 301st Engineers' Association.
"Mr. Lowe was an active member of the Church of the Messiah. He was also a member of Glens Falls Post, 233, American Legion, and of Senate Lodge, 456, P, and A.M. "
It sounds as though in his work, my grandfather had a remarkable talent for using practical creativity to solve any problem, a naturally confident attitude about his ability to solve a problem, and natural sales ability, as my cousin Joe. It sounds like he could talk anyone into anything. As nearly as I can learn, my grandfather was mentally as stable as a rock, though less cheerful and optimistic when I knew him than as a young man, but this was bipolar temperament.
My cousin Joe, who was visibly having some kind of attack of mania at the time, told me that his first cousin, Murray Williams, went into business with our grandfather just before the Depression, and made off with the money, and this caused the family to lose a nice house on Ridge St. From what I have found, I cannot assess the truth of that statement. It definitely is not completely true. My cousin was going through a phase of acting clinically manic. My mother says it's a combination of a neurological disorder and medication, and I'm suspicious if the medication would cause a not bipolar person to act manic, as a number of medications predictably aggravate bipolar disorder. The most infamous of them is the steroid hormones. Some things he told me were true pieces of family history long hidden that were critically important to make known to me. Other things he said have been disproven, and some things sounded outright jumbled. For instance, he insisted repeatedly that my grandfather's grandfather was run out of Ireland for being a Mason, when he was never run out of Ireland, and while he did get into serious trouble, for which even his descendants never acknowledged his own responsibility, being a Mason had nothing whatever to do with it. His son apparently left Ireland as a teenager to go to relatives in Montreal. I questioned some things Joe said when he said them. He was talking on and on, and he could not be contradicted in anything.
See my notes on Murray Williams; he was a prominent, quite respected, businessman and journalist in Montreal, and died there in 1930. Since there is a photo of my grandfather with Murray Williams, the two of them were clearly in touch. Murray Williams had gone from writing exceedingly popular advice columns in the Montreal papers on stock market investment, to working in the stock market. Conceivably he and my grandfather had invested in something together, or he had something to do with my grandfather's job that brought him to Glens Falls, in which my grandfather was a partner, and that did apparently fail at the beginning of the Depression. My aunt writes in her autobiographical essays that things were good for their first year in Glens Falls - when they lived in hte nice house, on Ridge Street, and then "the depression caught up with" them. My cousin, who was born in 1949, spent his early childhood down the street from his grandparents’ house and visited them constantly, and could possibly have misunderstood something, or else been told the story before my grandfather learned that Murray Williams had died at the time when he was looking for him.
It is hard to know how long it took my grandfather to learn Murray Williams had died, and very conceivable that my grandfather was not very assertive in his efforts to learn what had happened to him. He must have eventually learned this, because it is in my mother's family papers that I found copies of his numerous obituaries. My grandfather also allegedly had no idea what happened to his father after they were in touch in 1923, and actually his father died six months after his last letter and his widow moved. Nevertheless something in the same papers suggests that he knew what had happened to his father. My grandmother allegedly looked hard for where his mother’s father had come from, and his efforts, which are well documented in the family papers, are nothing short of idiotic, if he actually wanted to find the information, and in this case there is nothing to indicate that my grandfather ever for instance checked the church his father attended, or else he asked only for specific information about his parents’ marriage, his mother and two sisters and got it, the main Protestant cemetery in that city, the city directories, the bmd indexes, or the city tax records, and he didn’t know of half the man’s children, let alone that he’d been born in Montreal to Irish Presbyterian parents and had a brother who was a witness at his wedding, and two sisters. At times it is hard to believe my grandfather was bright enough to teach himself advanced calculus and engineering, and he could be such a marshmellow, that one could wonder if he had a backbone, and his elder daughter is the same way. According to my aunt he got teh idea someone didn't want him to know his family history, and I guess that feeling that his cousins didn’t give him the necessary permission or whatever he ceased to look into it. According to his several obituaries, Murray Williams was President of the church where my grandfather would have looked for records. That would apparently be who didn't want my grandfather to know his family history, since otherwise why didn't Murray Williams just tell him his family history, starting with the fact that John Cauthers had married in that church. I suppose that history would include the fact that John Cauthers died of alcoholism.
The family papers prove that my grandfather did do research on his mother’s father, but he did it rather illogically and it didn’t go very far. There was a letter from someone in Montreal stating that his grandfather had worked as an accountant for a certain firm for many years, and also a letter from someone in a small village called Hemmingford, Quebec, on the Canadian border, stating that his grandfather had had a summer home there at one point but there was no other sign of him. My mother told me repeatedly when I was a child that my grandfather had heard that his grandfather might have been from Hemmingford but couldn’t find any sign of him there. It apparently never occurred to him to look for the trail of his father in Montreal where he knew the man had lived, or maybe that was when he concluded that someone didn’t want him to look into it and dropped it.
This is what I found on the history of where they lived.
Crandall library found Allen and Helen Lowe in the city directories for Glens Falls for 1931 through 1939, and they moved to William Street in 1936. Before that they lived on Nunan Street.
My mother tells a brief story of moving in and out of the house on Ridge Street more than once, then renting and buying the house they ended up in on William Street.
I have that they lived in Lakewood and/or Cleveland between roughly 1927 and 1930.
Cleveland, Ohio Public Library found Allen A. Lowe, salesman, and wife Helen in city directories in 1928, 1929, and 1930, at 1604 Cohassett Ave.
When I stayed with my grandparents when my parents made trips out of town when I was around seven, I was impressed that my grandfather slept in his den with a bed in it downstairs and my grandmother in the master bedroom upstairs. I saw little of him during those stays; he left the house early and came home late. I am not sure how often he ate dinner with us in the formal dining room. He would come out of his room in the morning, pick up his hat, coat and briefcase from a stand in the corner of the livingroom, and walk out of the house, and my grandmother would ask him polite questions about his needs and welfare as though he were a guest. When my grandparents stayed at my house for holidays my grandfather was always quite jolly, but on those occasions when I stayed at his house he never cracked an expression.
When my grandparents would actually stay at our house for a few days at a time at Christmas and so forth, I found him cheerful and jolly toward my brother and me, and he and my brother, who was five or six when he died, got on quite well. He was the only family member who really encouraged my brother to act like a small boy. He seemed to genuinely like my brother, and gave him encouraging toys like a jack in the box. In photos with my grandfather is about the only time I can recall my brother smiling or have a photo of him smiling, as a small child.
I wonder if it was always something of a marriage of convenience even though he and my grandmother at one time greatly enjoyed each others' company, my cousin and my grandmother both told me that they had planned to spend retirement reading literature and poetry to each other, and my grandmother was griefstricken and bitter at “premature” death at age 70. They seem to have loved each other very much at times but it may not have started out that way. When my mother had just returned to Northampton, to her parents’ home, from her missionary work, my grandfather happened to visit, and discussed the topic of marriage with a former highschool teacher. He told the teacher there had been just one girl he had ever thought about marrying (who was three years older than he), and the teacher said she was at home and not yet married. He went to visit her, made a formal and very humble speech in which he addressed her as “Miss Lowe”, proposed marriage, and the way my grandmother told it, she immediately accepted. My cousin also suspected it was in good part a marriage of convenience. My cousin said that when she was at Smith College my grandmother would have known men like my grandfather but second generation and more adn wealthy, who became managers and engineers. The way he sees it, my grandfather put it like sort of, here is what I can give you, and my grandmother recognized my grandfather as the sort of promising young man she had learned at Smith College to want to marry. My grandfather was already employed as a manager in the paper industry. They both had bipolar temperaments, and she probably thought he was likely to succeed. They also shared troubled family backgrounds and mothers with serious mental illness.
But my cousin and I both got the idea that by our time, the marriage had become rather a matter of convenience, and while they may not have disliked each other, Grandfather and Grandmom virtually lived separate lives.
General Notes (Wife)
My grandmother was a quite exceptional personality, and intellectually gifted. She had a classic manic depressive temperament; she was energetic, passionate, and extremely strong willed, and sometimes a bit out of kilter.
My grandmother could be a very difficult woman, and much of her history proves that, but she could also be a very delightful person, and with the exception of her children, most people who knew her well enjoyed spending time with her. All three of her grandchildren who had a chance to get to know her well loved to visit her, and listen to her stories. Though a difficult parent, she had mellowed by the time we knew her. She loved to spend time with us. She had her own exacting ideas about teaching reading and at one time or another with various degrees of justification she decided that none of us had actually learned to read and set about teaching us over again, but her reading lessons were fun. She sat at a table with me while I read the first chapters of “The Secret Garden” out loud, and eventually gave me a copy of it for a Christmas present. She had picked “The Secret Garden” because the characters spoke in Yorkshire dialect, and it was not possible to guess at the words or fail to pay close attention, and get the words right. My grandmother often encouraged me at things, and told me later when I was complaining about my brother’s and sister’s passivity, that she had always noticed a certain spirit in me. She had noticed for instance, that I couldn’t easily be talked into thinking I couldn’t do things I thought I could do, like reading my Sunday school story out loud when I was just learning to read. My mother tried to stop me on the grounds that it was too difficult. My brother and sister were more likely to accept the world as their parents defined it.
When I was in my second year of college, I boarded with a family just down the street from my grandmother, though none of us ever told her where I was living, because my grandmother was very senile and way too dependent on anyone she thought might be at her beck and call. The woman of that house, a nice, highly intelligent woman whose husband was a dean at the college, got to know my grandmother. My English professor also got to know my grandmother, and she had a good friend, a former clergyman, who looked after her and managed her affairs after she and her daughters broke relations. All three of these people loved to visit her and listen to her tell stories. They found her lively, and very intelligent, despite her extreme senility. She couldn’t intelligently use her kitchen, if she left her house she had no idea where she was, and if anything went wrong she was lost, but she could intelligently discuss the issues of her day, and had interesting views, and she loved to tell stories about her time as an Episcopal missionary in North Carolina between 1915 and 1920.
My aunt wrote that as naturally dogmatic as my grandmother was, she could not be politically pinned down. She was liberal in many ways, conservative in others, usually progressive, and rarely bigoted. She pleasantly surprised me by agreeing that it is wrong to discriminate against homosexuals. But when I was a child she had a deep seated suspicion of Jews. “You never know where their money is going.” It seemed that she did not like the formation of the state of Israel. It is possible that her feelings were aimed at what she saw as troublemaking rather than at Jews per se.
Nevertheless my grandmother had a spoiled streak, and occasionally it showed in her politics. My sister has a similar streak. My grandmother often saw the world through the eyes of an upper middle class white Protestant woman of her time and didn’t realize it. She had good old middle class values, but it’s sort of like the way my sister didn’t merely have to save up and buy a good quality piano; it had to come from a recognized piano builder in Germany. She characterized her daughters’ lives as teenagers by their interests; my mother had her music, and my aunt had something equally Victorian.
My grandmother had a difficult childhood. Her friend the clergyman who looked after her, thought that this was responsible for many of her problems and particularly for her low level of stamina in college.
I have an idea that his entire generation rejected the notion that bipolar disorder is genetic, and a set of genes with incomplete penetrance rather than genes that affect everyone who carries them to the same degree and in the same way . Today we know what many of the genes that cause it are. Most bipolar families have some very remarkable, high-achieving people like my grandmother and my sister, and some people like my grandmother’s mother, and some in between people like my mother, my brother, and me; repeatedly sick but never psychotic, though it is not unlikely that with my brother and me the difference lay in modern medical care and a completely different state of knowledge about mental illness.
In my great grandmother’s time, a middle class woman with that sort of problems usually just quietly holed up in her house and got sicker. The sheer Victorian atmosphere sickened many women all by itself. It was a stultifying atmosphere. Women were confined to their homes and expected to be genteel. Many feelings were considered sinful and not to be talked of. The entire subject of mental illness was taboo, and if you thought you had that kind of a problem you didn’t admit it, and neither did your family, unless you were raving, attacking other people or harming yourself, and you needed to be locked up or kept in chains - as Abraham Lincoln, who had bipolar disorder, was at one point, by friends who kept him from killing himself and nursed him. Women couldn’t just bring their feelings and fears out into the fresh air and deal with them. It wasn’t a healthy situation for any woman. Women often went into “declines”, stopped eating, stopped getting out of bed, and quietly died. Hysterical anxiety disorders were also common. Once people were confined to psychiatric hospitals, where they got only the most barbaric attempts at treatment, they often never emerged or didn’t recover until years later. My great grandmother was eventually confined in the state hospital, and she died there.
My aunt writes that from the stories told about my grandmother’s mother, she must have had both manic depression and schizophrenia. My grandmother’s clergyman friend told me just as an example of how serious things were in my grandmother’s home, that her mother kept the doors and windows locked and the curtains shut, because she believed that someone dangerous was constantly outside trying to get in. One day my grandmother told her mother, look, there isn’t anyone out there, see, there are no footprints in the snow, and from that day forth she went out, and she went everywhere and rather ran wild. She and a group of young friends had all sorts of adventures. She may have never had enough structure. For instance, she was baptized after college, in a completely different church than her parents had attended, though her father sang in his church’s choir, and it was something the whole family was quite into. In fact, my grandmother was named after the daughter of her father’s choirmaster. My aunt wrote that my grandmother’s mother cleaned the house, cooked, and made her daughter clothing, but never went to her high school nor college graduation.
Photos of her mother depict a woman who looked very different at different points in time. At times she looked pleasant and highly intelligent. At others she looked like my mother at her worst. Her face seemed to change even its shape depending on her mental health.
Pictures depict her looking remarkably like my sister even as a baby, with an exceptional personality even as a baby. She was a grave child, and there is a photo of her around nine years old looking like a child who was habitually unhappy and sullen. Pictures of her in college and as a young woman show her as strikingly pretty, with strength of character, but a vague lack of energy consistent with her own statements of how she felt, and an impressibility or need for structure come across. However, one photo shows her as a markedly plain woman, who looks habitually not happy, and a bit sullen. That is the photo in which she looks so much like my sister (who has never managed to look plain and sullen even as a physically neglected child with strange teeth and greasy hair sticking out everywhere), that only the clothing gives away the fact that it wasn’t my sister. Evidently the way she photographed changed with her mood state. Photos of her in middle age come across as either extremely dignified, or as rather sly and manipulative looking. One eye was always lower than the other, and sort of in a perpetual not nice wink, and that was not simply how her eyes looked. In fact, her eyes didn’t naturally look that way at all. As an old woman, sly and manipulative were definitely two of her less pleasing traits, though with her daughters she was most often in simply demanding mode, and with other people she was intelligent enough to be nice. This could well be part of the legacy of a troubled childhood. Children who can’t trust their parents learn to manipulate and control people in order to get their needs met, and the picture their children have given of their childhood relationships with her suggest she may well have manipulated them far more than they were aware of it, leaving them both unable to pull away from her. It may also be something that came out at a certain long stage in her life when she felt unsure of herself, despite the fact that she never admitted feeling less than completely sure of herself to anyone.
She went to Smith College in Northampton, started out to study medicine but lacked the stamina it demanded, and stopped just short of a masters' in English. At that time, this was a remarkable accomplishment for a woman.
My grandmother went to New York and Appalachia as a social worker and missionary for the Episcopal Church. According to my aunt, she became interested in social work, went to New York City, lived and worked at College Settlement, worked with juvenile delinquents in Rockland County, went to North Carolina as an Episcopalian missionary to the mountain people for atleast two years, then worked in Ossining, New York and Ansonia, Connecticut, before she returned home and married in 1920. She said that a clergyman picked her for her first assignment because he knew her from Smith College to be someone who would do what had to be done and not ask how to do it, and my grandmother was certainly that person. She loved to tell about adventurous challenges she faced as an Episcopal missionary to a backwoods community in the mountains of North Carolina. There she proved herself very resourceful and mechanically inventive as well as a capable leader with natural diplomatic ability. She also seemed to have frequent conflicts with her higher ups in these missions, which she never forgot. This bothered my aunt, who isn't inclined to actually care about much and suggests that she often didn't understand her mother at all; and I have to admit that I too would have had issues with some of the snobbery and inequities in how people were treated that my grandmother used to describe. During her time with delinquents in a juvenile facility in Rockland, she observed that their biggest problem seemed to be that they couldn't read. She thought that this underlay their problems.
My mother's papers contained baptismal and confirmation certificates from 1912, informing us that Grandmom was both baptized and confirmed in July of 1912, at St. Faith's in the Hills, by Rev. Sniffen, missionary, Diocese of Western Massachusetts.
The Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts found this:
According to our most recent diocesan history book (page 36) [Joyce will send you a copy]: St. Faith's In The Hills, "the House of Heath", near the Vermont border, a summer training school for deaconesses operated by St. Faith's House in New York, supplied young women to help in this rural missionary work. The Girl's School at Heath, opened in his home by Archdeacon Sniffen, brought in girls of about fourteen to fifteen from illiterate, desolate, sometimes depraved hill farms for three months to teach them "Christian living" and the "housewifely arts - cooking, sewing, cleaning, canning, preserving, care of cow and chickens, besides the little niceties of home life"
This is consistent with Grandmom's report that the mission people she worked for were snobs. The notion that New England farmers were depraved, and their daughters in need of learning Christianity and household arts, is odd. One story Grandmom told of the people she worked for was that the staff had nice towels, the clientele had rough towels, and they couldn't ever touch the nicer towels teh staff used. My grandmother said she confronted them and there was a big blow out. Grandmom's temperament, which never let go of long ago conflicts, could leave one wondering if the other person was actually at fault, and Aunt Bunny's essays express suspicion about the nature of Grandmom's problems with the mission staff. This history suggests that the problems Grandmom reported were genuine.
Eventually my grandmother was assigned to a little community in the backwoods in the mountains of North Carolina. She was assigned there as a sort of deacon and community leader. She was on her own, and a priest came in once a month or so to hold a communion service. Otherwise my grandmother led Sunday morning prayer services. Weekdays she taught school in the same one room building. My grandmother thrived there, and enjoyed herself greatly. She won the respect of the community, and people were always coming to her with problems. My grandmother had a brilliant analytical mind and a practical inventiveness, and she put them to good use.
One time a child was brought to her with conjunctivitis. She had learned somewhere that conjunctivitis causes blindness if not treated, so she splashed the child’s eyes with witch hazel, which worked. My grandmother made much of others’ later insistence that that could not possibly have worked. Today we know the child probably had a self-limiting virus. But the point was that my grandmother diagnosed the problem and thought of a means to treat it.
Another time people came to her in the middle of the night, because a man was lying in his cabin at death’s door. My mother was taken over mountains and across bridges over gulleys, and through the trees so old you couldn’t stretch your arms around them. When she got to the man’s cabin, she could see that he had pneumonia, and he had a desperately high fever. She figured she had to get the fever down. The men of the community made moonshine, which was highly illegal, and she wasn’t supposed to know it, though one night one of the young men had harassed her a bit when he was drunk, and the next day the others brought him to her to apologize. My mother stood and looked at the men crowded in the cabin, all of them carrying rifles, and said something like not to make something of it, but I know what I know, and what I need to bring down this man’s fever is some good old fashioned moonshine. They went off, she never knew where, but she thought to the barn, and brought back some moonshine. She bathed the man, his fever broke, and he lived.
I think it was a good thing he didn’t also need antibiotic.
One hot summer, the people ran out of ice, and their food was spoiling. It occurred to my grandmother that they might cool the food using evaporation. She put the food in its cool wet pit in a cool damp place, and hung wet sheets over it. I don’t remember if she dipped the ends in water to keep them wet, or what. It worked well enough to keep the food from spoiling.
One time the men needed to deal with a bank for some reason, and they came to her to ask her to teach them to sign their names. My grandmother organized night school in the schoolhouse, and taught them all to sign their names.
I am not doing these stories of my grandmother’s justice. She told these stories repeatedly, dozens of times, but each time she told them they fascinated her listeners, all intelligent adults. Her clergyman friend gave her a tape recorder to record them, but my grandmother’s mind was wandering, and she filled the tapes with ramblings about working with her pupils.
She and her husband moved to Quebec, where he was a manager in a paper mill, and where my aunt was born. They next moved to Oak Park, Illinois, where Grandfather was trying "something else", and she hated it. Here Grandfather was baptized in an Episcopal church in 1926, and on that date, that church shows Grandmom transferring from St. John's in Northampton, which is hardly where she had last lived. She actually lived with her mother in Northampton for a short time in 1920 after returning from her missionary work. I'm told that is on the campus of Smith College; perhaps Grandmom had attended there while at Smith? Then my grandfather tried something else; apparently sales (from teh city directories), and they moved to Lakewood Ohio. "There Mother enjoyed the people and general atmosphere. She found friends and above all, the PTA. She really did do some amazing things in the three years she was in Lakewood. In Oak Park and Lakewood she took my aunt to various museums and children's concerts and occasionally to movies.
My grandmother is described by my aunt as a difficult parent. My aunt was quite a bit closer to her mother than my mother ever was, because when my mother was quite small her mother took up a full time career. Apparently my grandmother ran the house like a military base but had little time for my mother, and didn't give her anything like the kind of attention my aunt had gotten. She was authoritarian and rigid. My aunt said my mother took after her in this, and my aunt thought that my mother suffered from the lack of attention or closeness to her mother, leaving her a distant, unexpressive except in anger, rigid and extremely authoritarian parent. My father told me she didn’t hug nor like to be hugged because she’d never learned to hug.
The leader of the class for which my aunt wrote her autobiographical essays described my aunt as having been left struggling for a sense of identity, and I think that so was my mother. She copied by hand family genealogies that her mother had, exactly as I also did as a child. There must have been some reason for that activity; and she seems to have never thought about getting more information about the people than the names and the dates. It appeared more like a religious sort of activity with her; nevertheless, it was very important to her. Particularly as a young woman she appears to have had little sense of who she was and to have been immature for her age, though very responsible, and as an elderly woman she still often appeared to lack a healthy self-image and self-confidence. . For instance, recently, shouting over us to make sure noone said differently, my mother, who has always insisted that I am plain, informed me that I am as bad looking as she is. My mother has recently done little with her looks, but she has always had nice features. Apparently she never thought so. Though by the time I was a teenager my mother could small talk or gossip up a storm and showed a knack for flowery language in situations involving etiquette. My mother never said anything in polite company simple in a few words if a lot of flowery language would do, and even long after I’d grown up, if she thought I hadn’t said something to demonstrate good manners adequately, she’d jump in and say it over again for me.
I remember once when I was a young girl, my father and mother and I were at Howard Johnson's, which was a popular inexpensive chain of family restaurants similar to Denny’s today, for lunch, and my mother said stiffly to my father, "I think I'll have something from the gurill", looking uncertain and uncomforable, as if it were very important to her to say teh proper thing and she struggled to think of what that would be. “Something from the gurill” didn’t communicate what she wanted to eat. My plainspoken father said something like I'd like a hamburger. My mother eventually managed to pick a “gurilled cheese sandwich.” Seriously, I had no idea what a gurill was, but I knew I was supposed to find it impressive. I was left feeling like I myself had no idea how to order lunch in a Howard Johnson’s. Should I say, “I’ll have something from the gurill”? What’s a gurill? How do I even know what I’m going to end up eating? I actually personally liked my father’s clear and down to earth statement better. As for gurilled cheese sandwiches, we had them for lunch, made by my mother, when “Uncle Jirald” and “Aunt Jiraldine” came to visit - maybe their names had something to do with the term? But I was left unconvinced that my mother would have said she wanted something from the gurill if she’d wanted a simple gurilled cheese sandwich. Wasn’t one supposed to just ask for what one wanted? Noone was about to tell me what a gurill was so that I would know what to say and how to say it, and since I also pretty much didn’t understand the menu, I sat there in a quandary. I don’t think the issue really bothered my father as much as it bothered me. He wanted a hamburger, so he asked for a hamburger. My mother always said depreciatingly that I took after him. My father often snorted at my mother’s wordy chattiness. I was an extremely anxious child, and I hung up on the matter. In college I was still scared to go in Howard Johnson’s and order food. I soon got over it when I learned in about two actual visits to restaurants that I didn’t have to say anything about the grill. Eventually I learned that a long time ago there was a formal sort of language one used when eating at a restaurant, that got employed in dialogues in French lessons. It is actually not unlikely that my grandmother actually talked that way when the family ate out. It is exactly the sort of stiff and formal language that my grandmother used all the time, though with her extreme of natural dignity she never sounded unnatural when she spoke with excessive dignity and formality. My mother floundered like a fish out of water without firm rigid structures of authority around her, and the fact that noone else was talking that way is probably why she looked so awkward and uncomfortable.
My mother actually went through one of her worst mood disorder attacks ever when the Episcopal Church began ordaining women to the priesthood. Not, she simply disagreed. She could not accept either the church’s decision to allow the ordination of women, nor its failure to decree what its bishops had to do on the matter one way or the other. My mother never understood the concept of freedom of conscience despite the fact that most of her ancestors came to this country seeking it. She behaved as though the earth had disintegrated from under her. We all had to put up with extreme moodiness, generalized nervousness, and irrational violent rages, until finally, despite that fact that my father was the minister at the Episcopal church in our little village of 800 people, my mother joined the Roman Catholic Church, where she enjoyed the most archaic and petty of its small rules and rituals and authoritarian ways tremendously, and her mood picked up. You’d have thought she was an elderly nun to hear her happily bowing and scraping at “Father” or “Monsigneur”.
The point here is simply that I think that not only did my mother’s entire identity revolve around such matters as saying the right thing in the right words at the restaurant, and not only did she appear awkward and overly worried about what to say, but as far as she was concerned, the entire foundation of the world existed on getting small matters like that precisely right according to prescribed formula. My aunt suspects that her mother’s extreme authoritarianism filled in for my mother for a lack of warmth and affection, and provided the only sense of security that her mother was able to provide her with. One must also consider that my grandmother grew up in an extremely troubled home with a mother with very serious mental illness. My grandmother inherited the bipolar temperament, and was an extraordinarily dignified woman who was never wrong, with probably little idea of the impression that she made on my mother when she gave her often quite odd pronouncements about what was what. It is also possible that this authoritarianism was how my grandmother gave structure and meaning to her world.
My aunt wrote that she constantly felt awkward and unhappy, and photos of her from my mother’s birth until she married consistently show an awkward and unhappy or troubled girl and woman. My aunt was not naturally a physically attractive person, but she looked very attractive on the rare occasions when she was smiling and looked genuinely happy.
After the birth of her second child my grandmother took up tutoring children with educational problems. My aunt wrote, "In 1936 (when my mother was four), a neighbor asked Mother to help his son with his eighth-grade arithmetic. That boy was her first and only puil for a while, and then the word spread. At one time she was working from eight in the morning until eleven at night, six days a week, with an hour out each for lunch and dinner -- both proper home-cooked meals. The household marched to her beat at all times. Eventually she became convinced that many of the troubles her students were having had their root in the fact that the kids couldn't read. Her involvement with that battle extended beyond Glens Falls and lasted until she was in her eighties."
My grandmother undertook what my aunt describes as a lifelong mission to convert the schools to teaching reading by the phonetic method, because most of the kids who came to her were unable to learn by the word recognition/ intuitive learning paradigms. My grandmother realized that she was seeing kids who had little wrong with them but had often been labelled as learning disabled, because they were not able to learn to read by that method. She was convinced that she was right, and she cared passionately that kids should be able to learn to read. I am convinced that she was right as well, and so are alot of people. She published two studies of her own of this problem in such journals as the Atlantic, and a chapter in a book on the subject, though she lacked an appropriate degree. Someone on the Internet has recently resurrected my grandmother's old articles, along with those of other people, and put them on his web site. It was very good work; my grandmother analyzed her pupils' reading mistakes to show why they were having trouble. She continually got into it with local school authorities over what they were doing with pupils in her charge. Typically she tried to get them out of inappropriate tracks they had been assigned to, and the school officials would not bend.
The effect of all of this on her home life was that the household revolved around her schedule and my mother saw little of her and was required to spend long periods of time doing little and being absolutely quiet. When I was a child, I was required to spend two and a half hours every afternoon sitting still on my bed making no sound while my mother took her afternoon nap; it continued until I was in my late teens and my mother was working most afternoons.
My grandmother and her daughters broke completely and permanently in a power struggle only those three people could have managed, over the subject of her care. Noone wins a power struggle, and nobody won this one. The only possible logical outcome was a broken relationship, and that is what happened. My grandmother had become so senile that she could not properly care for herself, and she was legally blind. She placed extreme demands on my aunt, who lived nearby; calling her in the middle of the night to come over and find items she’d misplaced, and demanding that they hire her a maid and caretaker, which they couldn’t do. In her last years it was pitiful to watch her confined to her house and not really able to take proper care of herself and her hygiene, and I thought she must have felt lost; but she felt at home there, and adamantly wanted to stay there, in her own house, with her books. My aunt had never been able to say no to her mother, came close to a breakdown, and finally read her mother a long letter stating how she felt and broke with her. My mother was as strong willed and authoritarian as her mother, and knew exactly what her mother should do, and simply ordered her to go into a facility where my mother would have lived in an apartment but had people come into care for her. When my grandmother refused to do it, my mother permanently broke with her. Then my grandmother’s clergyman friend took over her care, arranged for meals on wheels and someone to come in part time to clean the house and that sort of thing, and this was enough for my grandmother to get by.
My grandmother had a difficult childhood with an apparently bipolar mother of a line that carried manic depression. This mother died insane in the state hospital, as did my grandfather's mother. We don't have many details of how she suffered under her mother, but stories that have come down are that her mother wouldn't allow her out of the house because she constantly thought someone dangerous was prowling outside trying to get in, but eventually my strong willed young grandmother said she didn't believe it and went out anyway; and she didn't go to her high school or college graduations. Her father was a manager, and belonged to a rapidly upwardly mobile family. His father entered the country as a textile mill worker, though a well connected one, and three of his sons became professionals. All I know of his diaries is a phrase that was expressed in passionate but correct terms. It sounds as if he was not really able to deal with his family situation.
Throughout her life, my grandmother was very strong willed, and energetic. However, in graduate school she had a long and inexplicable period when she had little energy and tired easily. As an adult she had times when a very small amount of stress, like that of going to visit her daughter’s family, regularly resulted in her health breaking down completely in flares of rheumatoid arthritis, which otherwise my grandmother didn’t have very often. She also had several phobias, and an irrational streak. For instance, if she had a fight with the grocery store manager over a spoiled chicken, she repeated the story about it in the same angry terms for the next thirty years. My aunt said that she never understood the concept of moving on. She occasionally did things that suggested she wasn’t quite right, like storing up a life supply of toilet paper.
It is important to realize that bipolar disorder is not always experienced as cycling mood. Bipolar disorder is a collection of metabolic diseases that affect neurological function in certain ways, and many people experience bipolar depression as cycling energy levels; and that depression can have other unexpected symptoms like irrational anxiety. She passed a tendency to depression and bipolar disorder to my mother and her children. My usually hypomanic sister also has had bouts of depression that she never recognized as such, and that you cannot tell her were depression, as a young woman and following the birth of her second child. She experienced a very low energy level, constant exhaustion, and extreme nervousness. I rarely get sad when I’m depressed; more often I get anxious, develop psychosomatic symptoms, and have a lot of trouble sleeping. Sometimes my energy level and ambition drop but I don’t think something is wrong. In formal psychiatric terms that is a mixed manic episode, and its old name is nervous depression. Like most people with bipolar disorder, prescription antidepressants predictably leave me having to be peeled off the ceiling.
My grandmother took conflicts with such people as her superiors when she was a social worker, Glens Falls city school officials, and grocery store personnel, personally, and often never forgave them, and told stories about it for many years. For instance, she told the same story repeatedly about the store manager who gave her a hard time about returning a spoiled chicken, for many years, in the most angry and vehement tones. I found her a delightful person to talk with, and I greatly enjoyed visiting her. But if you happened to get her on teh wrong side of a subject she would quickly act very like a charging mad bull - though not physically violent like my mother. She was quick to take affront and could be very defensive, and my brother recalls that she could get very rude very quickly
All of her grandchildren who knew her well found her a delightful grandparent. When I was in my second year of college and living nearby, she and I had delightful long conversations. She often encouraged me, both during my childhood, and when I was in school. She told me that she had noticed from the time when I was small that I had spirit.
She and her daughters broke completely and permanently over a power struggle about her care, as her health deteriorated, she went blind from cataracts and glaucoma, and her mind went. She and her daughters fought to control each other, and nobody seemed able to assert themselves in adult ways.
She died in her 80's of a stroke, after many years of small strokes that she refused to see a doctor about, screaming that she wasn't senile.
In the family papers is a program for a "Program of Illustrations of a Lecture on the Church Organ" by Mr. E. B. Story, on Tuesday evening, May 3, 1898. Apparently at Edwards Church, Northampton, which had a pipe organ bult by Mr. George S. Kutchings of Boston, in 1897. Attached to this is a note saying that Grandmom was named after Edwin Bruce Story - that is where her middle name came from.
Two obits of this Edwin Bruce Story also found.
The sudden death of Edwin Bruce Story, F, M, C, professor of music at Smith college, from a shock of apoplexy at his summer cottage.. brings great sadness to every heart in this city, where he had labored so long, professionally, and was beloved by all who knew him. His death coming so unexpectedly adds to the sorrow of every one, for when he left his home in this city only a few days ago ... he was full of life and activity, and looking forward with his accustomed eagerness and pleasure to another year of work at the college, and in other lines of labor in which he was deeply interested and the accomplishment of cherished plans, for he was always seeking to do something for the profit and pleasure of others. Nearly thirty years of Prof. Story's life was spent in this city, as teacher of music at Smith college, organist and director of the music at the Edwards church, and as a citizen who took a deep and abiding interest in all that was for the well being of the city. This was particularly true of what had any connection with his profession, and where the knowledge and experience of music could be of any value his services were given freely and gladly,. His sympathetic nature, his keen discernment, his delicate and refined taste, his gentleness of speech and manner, both in private and public, are all recalled... Prof. Story came to this city from Worcester in 1881 and began his professional work. In connection with his ever increase in labors at the college he became organist and musical director at the Edwards church, retiring in 1908, after twenty-five years' service, which was fittingly observed at that time by the church. For a large part of the time he was connected with the college he had charge of the music at "The Elms", a select school for young women in Springfield. On innumerable occasions he was called upon to plan and arrange for the music adn take charge of musical entertainments at important and interesting gatherings. At the time of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the settlement of Northampton his work was a feature of the occasion. Outside of his professional labors, perhaps there was no one thing to which he became more deeply interested and devoted so much time, energy adn contributed so liberally to as the organization of the Seth Pomeroy chapter of Sons of the American Revolution, nearly ten years ago, and to the promotion of its interest. " He leaves besides his widow, two daughters, Miss Helen B Story, a graduate of Smith college, adn Miss Marian Story, and a sister, Mrs. Hildreth, wife of Judge John Hildreth of Holyoke. My grandmother was named Helen Story Readio. Her note on the organ program reads, "Edwin Bruce Story - for whom I was named" - HRL (Her married name was Lowe).
No identifying information on the obits, as usual. However, a note elsewhere in my mother's papers says that he died in July, 1909.
The minister who attended Marion Raymond Readio's funeral was at First Baptist in Northampton.
The minister at First Churches (the Baptist and the other Congregational church in Northampton merged) says that the Congregational churches in the 1890's baptized infants but First Baptist did not. July, 1909.
My grandmother was a quite exceptional personality, and intellectually gifted. She had a classic manic depressive temperament; she was energetic, passionate, and extremely strong willed, and sometimes a bit out of kilter.
My grandmother could be a very difficult woman, and much of her history proves that, but she could also be a very delightful person, and with the exception of her children, most people who knew her well enjoyed spending time with her. All three of her grandchildren who had a chance to get to know her well loved to visit her, and listen to her stories. Though a difficult parent, she had mellowed by the time we knew her. She loved to spend time with us. She had her own exacting ideas about teaching reading and at one time or another with various degrees of justification she decided that none of us had actually learned to read and set about teaching us over again, but her reading lessons were fun. She sat at a table with me while I read the first chapters of “The Secret Garden” out loud, and eventually gave me a copy of it for a Christmas present. She had picked “The Secret Garden” because the characters spoke in Yorkshire dialect, and it was not possible to guess at the words or fail to pay close attention, and get the words right. My grandmother often encouraged me at things, and told me later when I was complaining about my brother’s and sister’s passivity, that she had always noticed a certain spirit in me. She had noticed for instance, that I couldn’t easily be talked into thinking I couldn’t do things I thought I could do, like reading my Sunday school story out loud when I was just learning to read. My mother tried to stop me on the grounds that it was too difficult. My brother and sister were more likely to accept the world as their parents defined it.
When I was in my second year of college, I boarded with a family just down the street from my grandmother, though none of us ever told her where I was living, because my grandmother was very senile and way too dependent on anyone she thought might be at her beck and call. The woman of that house, a nice, highly intelligent woman whose husband was a dean at the college, got to know my grandmother. My English professor also got to know my grandmother, and she had a good friend, a former clergyman, who looked after her and managed her affairs after she and her daughters broke relations. All three of these people loved to visit her and listen to her tell stories. They found her lively, and very intelligent, despite her extreme senility. She couldn’t intelligently use her kitchen, if she left her house she had no idea where she was, and if anything went wrong she was lost, but she could intelligently discuss the issues of her day, and had interesting views, and she loved to tell stories about her time as an Episcopal missionary in North Carolina between 1915 and 1920.
My aunt wrote that as naturally dogmatic as my grandmother was, she could not be politically pinned down. She was liberal in many ways, conservative in others, usually progressive, and rarely bigoted. She pleasantly surprised me by agreeing that it is wrong to discriminate against homosexuals. But when I was a child she had a deep seated suspicion of Jews. €œYou never know where their money is going.” It seemed that she did not like the formation of the state of Israel. It is possible that her feelings were aimed at what she saw as troublemaking rather than at Jews per se.
Nevertheless my grandmother had a spoiled streak, and occasionally it showed in her politics. My sister has a similar streak. My grandmother often saw the world through the eyes of an upper middle class white Protestant woman of her time and didn€™t realize it. She had good old middle class values, but it’s sort of like the way my sister didn’t merely have to save up and buy a good quality piano; it had to come from a recognized piano builder in Germany. She characterized her daughters’ lives as teenagers by their interests; my mother had her music, and my aunt had something equally Victorian.
My grandmother had a difficult childhood. Her friend the clergyman who looked after her, thought that this was responsible for many of her problems and particularly for her low level of stamina in college.
I have an idea that his entire generation rejected the notion that bipolar disorder is genetic, and a set of genes with incomplete penetrance rather than genes that affect everyone who carries them to the same degree and in the same way . Today we know what many of the genes that cause it are. Most bipolar families have some very remarkable, high-achieving people like my grandmother and my sister, and some people like my grandmother’s mother, and some in between people like my mother, my brother, and me; repeatedly sick but never psychotic, though it is not unlikely that with my brother and me the difference lay in modern medical care and a completely different state of knowledge about mental illness.
My aunt writes that from the stories told about my grandmother’s mother, she must have had both manic depression and schizophrenia. My grandmother’s clergyman friend told me just as an example of how serious things were in my grandmother’s home, that her mother kept the doors and windows locked and the curtains shut, because she believed that someone dangerous was constantly outside trying to get in. One day my grandmother told her mother, look, there isn’t anyone out there, see, there are no footprints in the snow, and from that day forth she went out, and she went everywhere and rather ran wild. She and a group of young friends had all sorts of adventures. She may have never had enough structure. For instance, she was baptized after college, in a completely different church than her parents had attended, though her father sang in his church’s choir, and it was something the whole family was quite into. In fact, my grandmother was named after the daughter of her father’s choirmaster. My aunt wrote that my grandmother’s mother cleaned the house, cooked, and made her daughter clothing, but never went to her high school nor college graduation.
Photos of her mother depict a woman who looked very different at different points in time. At times she looked pleasant and highly intelligent. At others she looked like my mother at her worst. Her face seemed to change even its shape depending on her mental health.
Pictures depict her looking remarkably like my sister even as a baby, with an exceptional personality even as a baby. She was a grave child, and there is a photo of her around nine years old looking like a child who was habitually unhappy and sullen. Pictures of her in college and as a young woman show her as strikingly pretty, with strength of character, but a vague lack of energy consistent with her own statements of how she felt, and an impressibility or need for structure come across. However, one photo shows her as a markedly plain woman, who looks habitually not happy, and a bit sullen. That is the photo in which she looks so much like my sister (who has never managed to look plain and sullen even as a physically neglected child with strange teeth and greasy hair sticking out everywhere), that only the clothing gives away the fact that it wasn’t my sister. Evidently the way she photographed changed with her mood state. Photos of her in middle age come across as either extremely dignified, or as rather sly and manipulative looking. One eye was always lower than the other, and sort of in a perpetual not nice wink, and that was not simply how her eyes looked. In fact, her eyes didn’t naturally look that way at all. As an old woman, sly and manipulative were definitely two of her less pleasing traits, though with her daughters she was most often in simply demanding mode, and with other people she was intelligent enough to be nice. This could well be part of the legacy of a troubled childhood. Children who can’t trust their parents learn to manipulate and control people in order to get their needs met, and the picture their children have given of their childhood relationships with her suggest she may well have manipulated them far more than they were aware of it, leaving them both unable to pull away from her. It may also be something that came out at a certain long stage in her life when she felt unsure of herself, despite the fact that she never admitted feeling less than completely sure of herself to anyone.
She went to Smith College in Northampton, started out to study medicine but lacked the stamina it demanded, and stopped just short of a masters' in English. At that time, this was a remarkable accomplishment for a woman.
My grandmother went to New York and Appalachia as a social worker and missionary for the Episcopal Church. According to my aunt, she became interested in social work, went to New York City, lived and worked at College Settlement, worked with juvenile delinquents in Rockland County, went to North Carolina as an Episcopalian missionary to the mountain people for atleast two years, then worked in Ossining, New York and Ansonia, Connecticut, before she returned home and married in 1920. She said that a clergyman picked her for her first assignment because he knew her from Smith College to be someone who would do what had to be done and not ask how to do it, and my grandmother was certainly that person. She loved to tell about adventurous challenges she faced as an Episcopal missionary to a backwoods community in the mountains of North Carolina. There she proved herself very resourceful and mechanically inventive as well as a capable leader with natural diplomatic ability. She also seemed to have frequent conflicts with her higher ups in these missions, which she never forgot. This bothered my aunt, who isn't inclined to actually care about much and suggests that she often didn't understand her mother at all; and I have to admit that I too would have had issues with some of the snobbery and inequities in how people were treated that my grandmother used to describe. During her time with delinquents in a juvenile facility in Rockland, she observed that their biggest problem seemed to be that they couldn't read. She thought that this underlay their problems.
My mother's papers contained baptismal and confirmation certificates from 1912, informing us that Grandmom was both baptized and confirmed in July of 1912, at St. Faith's in the Hills, by Rev. Sniffen, missionary, Diocese of Western Massachusetts.
The Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts found this:
According to our most recent diocesan history book (page 36) [Joyce will send you a copy]: St. Faith's In The Hills, "the House of Heath", near the Vermont border, a summer training school for deaconesses operated by St. Faith's House in New York, supplied young women to help in this rural missionary work. The Girl's School at Heath, opened in his home by Archdeacon Sniffen, brought in girls of about fourteen to fifteen from illiterate, desolate, sometimes depraved hill farms for three months to teach them "Christian living" and the "housewifely arts - cooking, sewing, cleaning, canning, preserving, care of cow and chickens, besides the little niceties of home life"
This is consistent with Grandmom's report that the mission people she worked for were snobs. The notion that New England farmers were depraved, and their daughters in need of learning Christianity and household arts, is odd. One story Grandmom told of the people she worked for was that the staff had nice towels, the clientele had rough towels, and they couldn't ever touch the nicer towels teh staff used. My grandmother said she confronted them and there was a big blow out. Grandmom's temperament, which never let go of long ago conflicts, could leave one wondering if the other person was actually at fault, and Aunt Bunny's essays express suspicion about the nature of Grandmom's problems with the mission staff. This history suggests that the problems Grandmom reported were genuine.
Eventually my grandmother was assigned to a little community in the backwoods in the mountains of North Carolina. She was assigned there as a sort of deacon and community leader. She was on her own, and a priest came in once a month or so to hold a communion service. Otherwise my grandmother led Sunday morning prayer services. Weekdays she taught school in the same one room building. My grandmother thrived there, and enjoyed herself greatly. She won the respect of the community, and people were always coming to her with problems. My grandmother had a brilliant analytical mind and a practical inventiveness, and she put them to good use.
One time a child was brought to her with conjunctivitis. She had learned somewhere that conjunctivitis causes blindness if not treated, so she splashed the child’s eyes with witch hazel, which worked. My grandmother made much of others’ later insistence that that could not possibly have worked. Today we know the child probably had a self-limiting virus. But the point was that my grandmother diagnosed the problem and thought of a means to treat it.
Another time people came to her in the middle of the night, because a man was lying in his cabin at death’s door. My mother was taken over mountains and across bridges over gulleys, and through the trees so old you couldn’t stretch your arms around them. When she got to the man’s cabin, she could see that he had pneumonia, and he had a desperately high fever. She figured she had to get the fever down. The men of the community made moonshine, which was highly illegal, and she wasn’t supposed to know it, though one night one of the young men had harassed her a bit when he was drunk, and the next day the others brought him to her to apologize. My mother stood and looked at the men crowded in the cabin, all of them carrying rifles, and said something like not to make something of it, but I know what I know, and what I need to bring down this man’s fever is some good old fashioned moonshine. They went off, she never knew where, but she thought to the barn, and brought back some moonshine. She bathed the man, his fever broke, and he lived.
I think it was a good thing he didn’t also need antibiotic.
One hot summer, the people ran out of ice, and their food was spoiling. It occurred to my grandmother that they might cool the food using evaporation. She put the food in its cool wet pit in a cool damp place, and hung wet sheets over it. I don’t remember if she dipped the ends in water to keep them wet, or what. It worked well enough to keep the food from spoiling.
One time the men needed to deal with a bank for some reason, and they came to her to ask her to teach them to sign their names. My grandmother organized night school in the schoolhouse, and taught them all to sign their names.
I am not doing these stories of my grandmother’s justice. She told these stories repeatedly, dozens of times, but each time she told them they fascinated her listeners, all intelligent adults. Her clergyman friend gave her a tape recorder to record them, but my grandmother’s mind was wandering, and she filled the tapes with ramblings about working with her pupils.
She and her husband moved to Quebec, where he was a manager in a paper mill, and where my aunt was born. They next moved to Oak Park, Illinois, where Grandfather was trying "something else", and she hated it. Here Grandfather was baptized in an Episcopal church in 1926, and on that date, that church shows Grandmom transferring from St. John's in Northampton, which is hardly where she had last lived. She actually lived with her mother in Northampton for a short time in 1920 after returning from her missionary work. I'm told that is on the campus of Smith College; perhaps Grandmom had attended there while at Smith? Then my grandfather tried something else; apparently sales (from teh city directories), and they moved to Lakewood Ohio. "There Mother enjoyed the people and general atmosphere. She found friends and above all, the PTA. She really did do some amazing things in the three years she was in Lakewood. In Oak Park and Lakewood she took my aunt to various museums and children's concerts and occasionally to movies.
My grandmother is described by my aunt as a difficult parent. My aunt was quite a bit closer to her mother than my mother ever was, because when my mother was quite small her mother took up a full time career. Apparently my grandmother ran the house like a military base but had little time for my mother, and didn't give her anything like the kind of attention my aunt had gotten. She was authoritarian and rigid. My aunt said my mother took after her in this, and my aunt thought that my mother suffered from the lack of attention or closeness to her mother, leaving her a distant, unexpressive except in anger, rigid and extremely authoritarian parent. My father told me she didn’t hug nor like to be hugged because she’d never learned to hug.
I remember once when I was a young girl, my father and mother and I were at Howard Johnson's, which was a popular inexpensive chain of family restaurants similar to Denny’s today, for lunch, and my mother said stiffly to my father, "I think I'll have something from the gurill", looking uncertain and uncomforable, as if it were very important to her to say teh proper thing and she struggled to think of what that would be. “Something from the gurill” didn’t communicate what she wanted to eat. My plainspoken father said something like I'd like a hamburger. My mother eventually managed to pick a “gurilled cheese sandwich.” Seriously, I had no idea what a gurill was, but I knew I was supposed to find it impressive. I was left feeling like I myself had no idea how to order lunch in a Howard Johnson’s. Should I say, “I’ll have something from the gurill”? What’s a gurill? How do I even know what I’m going to end up eating? I actually personally liked my father’s clear and down to earth statement better. As for gurilled cheese sandwiches, we had them for lunch, made by my mother, when “Uncle Jirald” and “Aunt Jiraldine” came to visit - maybe their names had something to do with the term? But I was left unconvinced that my mother would have said she wanted something from the gurill if she’d wanted a simple gurilled cheese sandwich. Wasn’t one supposed to just ask for what one wanted? Noone was about to tell me what a gurill was so that I would know what to say and how to say it, and since I also pretty much didn’t understand the menu, I sat there in a quandary. I don’t think the issue really bothered my father as much as it bothered me. He wanted a hamburger, so he asked for a hamburger. My mother always said depreciatingly that I took after him. My father often snorted at my mother’s wordy chattiness. I was an extremely anxious child, and I hung up on the matter. In college I was still scared to go in Howard Johnson’s and order food. I soon got over it when I learned in about two actual visits to restaurants that I didn’t have to say anything about the grill. Eventually I learned that a long time ago there was a formal sort of language one used when eating at a restaurant, that got employed in dialogues in French lessons. It is actually not unlikely that my grandmother actually talked that way when the family ate out. It is exactly the sort of stiff and formal language that my grandmother used all the time, though with her extreme of natural dignity she never sounded unnatural when she spoke with excessive dignity and formality. My mother floundered like a fish out of water without firm rigid structures of authority around her, and the fact that noone else was talking that way is probably why she looked so awkward and uncomfortable.
My mother actually went through one of her worst mood disorder attacks ever when the Episcopal Church began ordaining women to the priesthood. Not, she simply disagreed. She could not accept either the church’s decision to allow the ordination of women, nor its failure to decree what its bishops had to do on the matter one way or the other. My mother never understood the concept of freedom of conscience despite the fact that most of her ancestors came to this country seeking it. She behaved as though the earth had disintegrated from under her. We all had to put up with extreme moodiness, generalized nervousness, and irrational violent rages, until finally, despite that fact that my father was the minister at the Episcopal church in our little village of 800 people, my mother joined the Roman Catholic Church, where she enjoyed the most archaic and petty of its small rules and rituals and authoritarian ways tremendously, and her mood picked up. You’d have thought she was an elderly nun to hear her happily bowing and scraping at “Father” or “Monsigneur”.
The point here is simply that I think that not only did my mother’s entire identity revolve around such matters as saying the right thing in the right words at the restaurant, and not only did she appear awkward and overly worried about what to say, but as far as she was concerned, the entire foundation of the world existed on getting small matters like that precisely right according to prescribed formula. My aunt suspects that her mother’s extreme authoritarianism filled in for my mother for a lack of warmth and affection, and provided the only sense of security that her mother was able to provide her with. One must also consider that my grandmother grew up in an extremely troubled home with a mother with very serious mental illness. My grandmother inherited the bipolar temperament, and was an extraordinarily dignified woman who was never wrong, with probably little idea of the impression that she made on my mother when she gave her often quite odd pronouncements about what was what. It is also possible that this authoritarianism was how my grandmother gave structure and meaning to her world.
My aunt wrote that she constantly felt awkward and unhappy, and photos of her from my mother’s birth until she married consistently show an awkward and unhappy or troubled girl and woman. My aunt was not naturally a physically attractive person, but she looked very attractive on the rare occasions when she was smiling and looked genuinely happy.
After the birth of her second child my grandmother took up tutoring children with educational problems. My aunt wrote, "In 1936 (when my mother was four), a neighbor asked Mother to help his son with his eighth-grade arithmetic. That boy was her first and only puil for a while, and then the word spread. At one time she was working from eight in the morning until eleven at night, six days a week, with an hour out each for lunch and dinner -- both proper home-cooked meals. The household marched to her beat at all times. Eventually she became convinced that many of the troubles her students were having had their root in the fact that the kids couldn't read. Her involvement with that battle extended beyond Glens Falls and lasted until she was in her eighties."
My grandmother undertook what my aunt describes as a lifelong mission to convert the schools to teaching reading by the phonetic method, because most of the kids who came to her were unable to learn by the word recognition/ intuitive learning paradigms. My grandmother realized that she was seeing kids who had little wrong with them but had often been labelled as learning disabled, because they were not able to learn to read by that method. She was convinced that she was right, and she cared passionately that kids should be able to learn to read. I am convinced that she was right as well, and so are alot of people. She published two studies of her own of this problem in such journals as the Atlantic, and a chapter in a book on the subject, though she lacked an appropriate degree. Someone on the Internet has recently resurrected my grandmother's old articles, along with those of other people, and put them on his web site. It was very good work; my grandmother analyzed her pupils' reading mistakes to show why they were having trouble. She continually got into it with local school authorities over what they were doing with pupils in her charge. Typically she tried to get them out of inappropriate tracks they had been assigned to, and the school officials would not bend.
The effect of all of this on her home life was that the household revolved around her schedule and my mother saw little of her and was required to spend long periods of time doing little and being absolutely quiet. When I was a child, I was required to spend two and a half hours every afternoon sitting still on my bed making no sound while my mother took her afternoon nap; it continued until I was in my late teens and my mother was working most afternoons.
My grandmother and her daughters broke completely and permanently in a power struggle only those three people could have managed, over the subject of her care. Noone wins a power struggle, and nobody won this one. The only possible logical outcome was a broken relationship, and that is what happened. My grandmother had become so senile that she could not properly care for herself, and she was legally blind. She placed extreme demands on my aunt, who lived nearby; calling her in the middle of the night to come over and find items she’d misplaced, and demanding that they hire her a maid and caretaker, which they couldn’t do. In her last years it was pitiful to watch her confined to her house and not really able to take proper care of herself and her hygiene, and I thought she must have felt lost; but she felt at home there, and adamantly wanted to stay there, in her own house, with her books. My aunt had never been able to say no to her mother, came close to a breakdown, and finally read her mother a long letter stating how she felt and broke with her. My mother was as strong willed and authoritarian as her mother, and knew exactly what her mother should do, and simply ordered her to go into a facility where my mother would have lived in an apartment but had people come into care for her. When my grandmother refused to do it, my mother permanently broke with her. Then my grandmother’s clergyman friend took over her care, arranged for meals on wheels and someone to come in part time to clean the house and that sort of thing, and this was enough for my grandmother to get by.
My grandmother had a difficult childhood with an apparently bipolar mother of a line that carried manic depression. This mother died insane in the state hospital, as did my grandfather's mother. We don't have many details of how she suffered under her mother, but stories that have come down are that her mother wouldn't allow her out of the house because she constantly thought someone dangerous was prowling outside trying to get in, but eventually my strong willed young grandmother said she didn't believe it and went out anyway; and she didn't go to her high school or college graduations. Her father was a manager, and belonged to a rapidly upwardly mobile family. His father entered the country as a textile mill worker, though a well connected one, and three of his sons became professionals. All I know of his diaries is a phrase that was expressed in passionate but correct terms. It sounds as if he was not really able to deal with his family situation.
Throughout her life, my grandmother was very strong willed, and energetic. However, in graduate school she had a long and inexplicable period when she had little energy and tired easily. As an adult she had times when a very small amount of stress, like that of going to visit her daughter’s family, regularly resulted in her health breaking down completely in flares of rheumatoid arthritis, which otherwise my grandmother didn’t have very often. She also had several phobias, and an irrational streak. For instance, if she had a fight with the grocery store manager over a spoiled chicken, she repeated the story about it in the same angry terms for the next thirty years. My aunt said that she never understood the concept of moving on. She occasionally did things that suggested she wasn’t quite right, like storing up a life supply of toilet paper.
It is important to realize that bipolar disorder is not always experienced as cycling mood. Bipolar disorder is a collection of metabolic diseases that affect neurological function in certain ways, and many people experience bipolar depression as cycling energy levels; and that depression can have other unexpected symptoms like irrational anxiety. She passed a tendency to depression and bipolar disorder to my mother and her children. My usually hypomanic sister also has had bouts of depression that she never recognized as such, and that you cannot tell her were depression, as a young woman and following the birth of her second child. She experienced a very low energy level, constant exhaustion, and extreme nervousness. I rarely get sad when I’m depressed; more often I get anxious, develop psychosomatic symptoms, and have a lot of trouble sleeping. Sometimes my energy level and ambition drop but I don’t think something is wrong. In formal psychiatric terms that is a mixed manic episode, and its old name is nervous depression. Like most people with bipolar disorder, prescription antidepressants predictably leave me having to be peeled off the ceiling.
My grandmother took conflicts with such people as her superiors when she was a social worker, Glens Falls city school officials, and grocery store personnel, personally, and often never forgave them, and told stories about it for many years. For instance, she told the same story repeatedly about the store manager who gave her a hard time about returning a spoiled chicken, for many years, in the most angry and vehement tones. I found her a delightful person to talk with, and I greatly enjoyed visiting her. But if you happened to get her on teh wrong side of a subject she would quickly act very like a charging mad bull - though not physically violent like my mother. She was quick to take affront and could be very defensive, and my brother recalls that she could get very rude very quickly
All of her grandchildren who knew her well found her a delightful grandparent. When I was in my second year of college and living nearby, she and I had delightful long conversations. She often encouraged me, both during my childhood, and when I was in school. She told me that she had noticed from the time when I was small that I had spirit.
She and her daughters broke completely and permanently over a power struggle about her care, as her health deteriorated, she went blind from cataracts and glaucoma, and her mind went. She and her daughters fought to control each other, and nobody seemed able to assert themselves in adult ways.
She died in her 80's of a stroke, after many years of small strokes that she refused to see a doctor about, screaming that she wasn't senile.
In the family papers is a program for a "Program of Illustrations of a Lecture on the Church Organ" by Mr. E. B. Story, on Tuesday evening, May 3, 1898. Apparently at Edwards Church, Northampton, which had a pipe organ bult by Mr. George S. Kutchings of Boston, in 1897. Attached to this is a note saying that Grandmom was named after Edwin Bruce Story - that is where her middle name came from.
Two obits of this Edwin Bruce Story also found.
The sudden death of Edwin Bruce Story, F, M, C, professor of music at Smith college, from a shock of apoplexy at his summer cottage.. brings great sadness to every heart in this city, where he had labored so long, professionally, and was beloved by all who knew him. His death coming so unexpectedly adds to the sorrow of every one, for when he left his home in this city only a few days ago ... he was full of life and activity, and looking forward with his accustomed eagerness and pleasure to another year of work at the college, and in other lines of labor in which he was deeply interested and the accomplishment of cherished plans, for he was always seeking to do something for the profit and pleasure of others. Nearly thirty years of Prof. Story's life was spent in this city, as teacher of music at Smith college, organist and director of the music at the Edwards church, and as a citizen who took a deep and abiding interest in all that was for the well being of the city. This was particularly true of what had any connection with his profession, and where the knowledge and experience of music could be of any value his services were given freely and gladly,. His sympathetic nature, his keen discernment, his delicate and refined taste, his gentleness of speech and manner, both in private and public, are all recalled... Prof. Story came to this city from Worcester in 1881 and began his professional work. In connection with his ever increase in labors at the college he became organist and musical director at the Edwards church, retiring in 1908, after twenty-five years' service, which was fittingly observed at that time by the church. For a large part of the time he was connected with the college he had charge of the music at "The Elms", a select school for young women in Springfield. On innumerable occasions he was called upon to plan and arrange for the music adn take charge of musical entertainments at important and interesting gatherings. At the time of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the settlement of Northampton his work was a feature of the occasion. Outside of his professional labors, perhaps there was no one thing to which he became more deeply interested and devoted so much time, energy adn contributed so liberally to as the organization of the Seth Pomeroy chapter of Sons of the American Revolution, nearly ten years ago, and to the promotion of its interest. " He leaves besides his widow, two daughters, Miss Helen B Story, a graduate of Smith college, adn Miss Marian Story, and a sister, Mrs. Hildreth, wife of Judge John Hildreth of Holyoke. My grandmother was named Helen Story Readio. Her note on the organ program reads, "Edwin Bruce Story - for whom I was named" - HRL (Her married name was Lowe).
No identifying information on the obits, as usual. However, a note elsewhere in my mother's papers says that he died in July, 1909.
The minister who attended Marion Raymond Readio's funeral was at First Baptist in Northampton.
The minister at First Churches (the Baptist and the other Congregational church in Northampton merged) says that the Congregational churches in the 1890's baptized infants but First Baptist did not. July, 1909.