Behind Every Good Man

The is a great woman, or Two or Three

I had the good fortune to have some wonderful women in my life that helped to shape me and influence me in many wonderful ways.  I wouldn't be who I am if it weren't for these women.  They helped me to obtain the life skills that I needed to be able to live the life that I have had.  Two of them, my paternal grandmother and my mother have been gone for years, and the third one, my sister is still alive and well.

My mother, Rose (at age 19 in the photo above) had a great influence in my life, as most mothers do.  She was a strong, intelligent and beautiful woman, inside and out.  That's not to say she was perfect, she was human after all.  My mother was from Italy and had a fiery temper, which I inherited from her.  With two hot tempered people in the same house, there were some conflicts.  But we managed to work through them.  I also inherited some other qualities from my mother.  She said she was always a dreamer, and she was a romantic as well.  She believed the world could be a better place and all of her life she strived to help make that happen.  I too am much the same way.  My mother was also a feminist before that word was commonly used.  When the Women's liberation Movement was starting in the late 1960s-early 1970s, my mother was involved in it.   One of her best friends was the president of the local chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and my mother did activities with them.  One of the most important things my mother taught me, near the end of the era when women were thought to be best at home raising the children, doing the housework, and taking care of her husband, was that women are every bit as good and equal to men.  It was a lesson that I learned from things she told and more importantly by her actions.  My mother was a very empathetic and compassionate person, another thing I inherited from her.  She volunteered at the first Headstart program, in the 1960s in our city.  She became very good friends with one family and the children she knew from preschool at Headstart maintained contact with her until she passed away.  After my mother passed one of the girls, then a young woman wrote a beautiful letter to us and said if it weren't for my mother's influence, she would have never attended university and obtained a bachelor degree.  My mother was also involved with a group of mostly young Benedictine nuns form a nearby convent.  These young nuns established a Pax Center in our city, initially to protest the Vietnam War, and they also established a soup kitchen to help the people in town that were either homeless or living in poverty.  For more than 30 years my mother would go to the Emmaus Soup Kitchen and help to provide a hot meal for anybody that came in to the building.  She quickly established a reputation for her warmth, kindness and her marvelous Italian soup.

Equally important was my mother's circle of friends.  She belonged to a book club for many years, initially established to read and discuss the Great Books.  The classic literature, history, philosophy and fiction that shaped the thought of the modern world.  After they had finished the program, they continued to meet and read and discuss all kinds of other books.  As a child I would sit quietly when the group of ladies would meet at our house, and listen to their conversations.  These women were much like my mother, mostly housewives, a few of them worked outside of the home and all were strong intelligent women as well.  They were a fine group of women that reinforced my mother's statement that women were every bit as good as men.  They would discuss events of the day, politics and just about every other subject.  It was a great education for me as a young child and into my teens.  Near the end of her life, in the early 1980s, my mother took her first job outside of the house since before my sister was born in 1948.  She took a job at the local Florence Crittendon Home for Unwed Mothers.   It was a charitable foundation established to provide a home for young, unmarried women that had become pregnant and needed a secure environment and assistance.  some of the girls there were in their early teens.  My mother would work in the evenings and late nights, talking to the girls, listening to them and providing them what comfort she could during their stay there.  She would knit while she did this and she knitted a little bay outfit for every girl's newborn child.  This tradition quickly became a special event, and the girls eagerly awaited the time when they would deliver their baby and get a beautiful little outfit handmade, with love, by my mother.  

In February of 1986, my mother complained of a terrible headache.  After a day or 2 she went to the doctor and the doctor sent her to the hospital for further exam.  They did a CT scan and it revealed a brain tumor about the size of a golf ball.  They said she needed surgery as soon as possible to remove it and determine exactly what kind of cancer it was.  She chose to go to the world famous Cleveland Clinic about 1 1/2 hours away form Erie.  One of their foremost neurologists did the operation and removed the tumor.  After the surgery, the doctor met with my father, sister and me and explained that my mother had one of the worst kinds of brain cancer, a glioblastoma.  She said no matter the treatment, no patient she ever had with this type of tumor ever survived longer than 6 months.  Needless to say it was a shocking blow to all of us, my mother was 59 at the time.  After she recovered from the surgery my mother came home.  My father and I took care of her and my sister lived in Cleveland and had a young son and would come on weekends to help.  While the tumor was removed, it had left cells throughout her brain that kept growing and my mother's condition slowly worsened.  After about 5 months we took my mother to a nursing home, we were exhausted and emotionally drained form taking care of her 24/7 at the house.  A month later, August 24, 1986 my mother passed away less than an hour after my final visit with her.  It was a very stressful experience and devastating blow to lose my mother a couple of months after her 60th birthday.  I grieved for her for a few years afterward.  Although my mother wasn't an active Catholic,  The Benedictine nuns she knew so well gave a beautiful brief service at her graveside as we said goodbye to my mother.   I still miss her greatly, think of her often and I am grateful that I could be with her for the 1st 30 years of my life, she taught me so many things.

I could go on and on about all of the things I learned from my mother.  I admired her strength, when after she married my father at the end of WW II, at the age of 20, she got on a ship with a couple of hundred other Italian war brides and came to the United States.  She left her home behind, her parents, her 2 younger sisters, her aunts and uncles and all that was familiar to her to come to a new life in a foreign country.  This was in 1945, and the only contact she had with her family was to write letters that took a few weeks to get to Italy and a few more weeks to get  response.  I have lived outside of the US for 30 years total and 25 years continuously and I have had the internet a good part of that time to call my family in the US, read news and generally keep up with events in my home country.  I can only imagine how difficult it was for my mother with just exchanging letters, a few rare and expensive phone calls and the trip back every few years to see her family.  Fortunately for my mother, my father's mother and my mother became great friends and they truly enjoyed each other's company.  My mother also got along well with my father's siblings and their spouses, all of them Polish-Americans.

My father's mother, Agnes was another amazing female role model in my life.  My grandmother, born in the US in 1901, grew up on a farm between Pittsburgh, PA and Erie, PA, where she moved to as a teen.  She had several brothers and sisters and the family didn't have a lot of money.  My grandmother finished the 4th grade in school and that was the end of her formal education.  She needed to help on the farm.  Both of her parents were Polish immigrants looking for a better life in the US.  When my grandmother was a teenager, she moved to Erie with her older sister who had found a job in Erie.  My grandmother hoped to find a job as well in the city, she had enough of her life on a rural farm.  Her sister married a Polish immigrant and my grandmother eventually started to learn to be a beautician.  Shortly after her sister married, she gave birth to a girl.  Not long after the birth, my mother's sister died.  Now her widowed husband had a bay to care for so my grandmother's family told my grandmother to marry the widower to raise her niece.  Apparently this wasn't unusual back in those days. 

So now my grandmother was the wife of a man she barely knew and raising an infant.  My grandfather, Francis or Franciszek in Polish had immigrated to the US at the age of 16 in 1907. He had lived in the eastern part of Poland that belonged to Russia at the time.  My grandfather had no future in his homeland so like many young men, he immigrated to the US.  His father and grandfather followed shortly afterward. He had left school after the 3rd grade and had no appreciable skills except drinking and playing cards with his friends.  He did various things to earn money, he worked as a butcher, he sold vegetables and eventually he opened a barber shop.  But mostly he liked to spend time with his male friends drinking and playing cards as well as hunting occasionally.  After he married my grandmother, in addition to his 1st daughter, in quick succession my grandmother gave birth to 3 boys and a girl.  There was also one baby that was stillborn, and another girl that died at about age 2.  eventually another girl and finally another boy were also born.  My father was the 3rd oldest in the family.  My grandmother worked as a beautician and eventually opened her own salon in the front of their house in the Polish neighborhood in Erie.  My grandmother was busy raising 6 children, cooking, cleaning and working in her salon, married to a man that she was told to marry.  To give you an idea, I found the US census records online.  In the 1930 census, it listed the family members, my youngest uncle hadn't been born yet.  My grandfather's occupation was listed as 'barber' and in the block for how many hours he worked in the week prior to the census taker's visit it said 20 hours.  My grandmother's occupation was given as 'beautician'.  The hours worked were 60 hours.  What an incredibly strong woman she was!   

I got to spend a lot of time visiting my grandmother.  She still had her beauty salon when I was a child.  We would have family gatherings for the holidays at her house, with all of my aunts and uncles, and my 21 cousins.  There was quite an age span between my cousins due to the age span of my father's siblings.  My oldest cousin wasn't much younger than my youngest uncle.  My grandmother would cook heaps of traditional Polish food and she would open the connecting door to her salon to let us young ones play in the shop as long as we were careful.  We would spin in the chairs and sit under the large, old fashioned hair dryers.  I can still smell the shampoo and various hair products that my grandmother used, and I was always fascinated by the little tin of amber colored wax that she would use to shape her customers eyebrows and remove any unwanted facial hair.  I never new my grandfather, he died from liver disease as a result of his alcoholism few years before I was born.

My grandmother had every reason to be an angry and bitter old woman in her later life.  She had never had an easy life.  She was anything but.  She was always smiling and in a good mood and she loved all of her grandchildren.  Because she had stood on her feet for many hours a day, for many years, she had exposed ulcers on her lower legs that cause d pain and needed to be cleaned and dressed daily. She worked until she was 65, and I never heard her complain about anything.  She never had a lot of money yet when we would visit she would always slip us a quarter and later a dollar so we could buy a little treat.  She took each grandchild on a trip to someplace a few hours away for a little holiday.  She would always bake a banana cake with chocolate frosting for our birthday.  And after she retired she hand crocheted an afghan for every one of her 22 grandchildren and after that she took up quilting and made a beautiful hand stitched quilt for every granddaughter.  My grandmother always respected us kids, she never talked down to us or got angry with us.  She would tell us stories about her childhood and she didn't have a lot of education, but she was full of common, practical wisdom about life.  She would impart these values to us in a way that was never preaching or telling us what to do, but rather gentle , loving guidance, that I happily received.  When I was in my early 20s I would go visit her and I would give her a ride she could indulge in her favorite hobby, bingo.  In short, I couldn't have asked for a better grandmother.  When she was in her 70s, my grandmother was diagnosed with colon cancer.  She had surgery, but the cancer had spread.  She moved to her youngest daughter's house, and my ant took great care of her.  I would visit and although she was often obviously in pain, she never complained, she was still cheerful   and about a year and a half later she passed away in 1978 at age 77, at my aunts house where she went to live during her illness.  All of her children were there was well as many of her grandchildren and we all go to say our final goodbye to one of the kindest, most loving and tough women I have ever known.  After we had all said our goodbyes, she slipped peacefully away.  I earned so many things about life from my grandmother.  One of the most important things was that no matter what life gave you, try to make the best of it and find you happiness where you can, a lesson I have benefitted greatly from in my life.  All of her 6 children were hard working wonderful people that made the best of their lives raised good families.  My last aunt, who was very much like her mother passed away just a few years ago.  I was lucky to visit her less than a year before she passed and we spent several hours talking about life, sharing memories, and laughing and having a good time.

The 3rd woman that had and still has a big influence on my life is my sister Pat who is 7 years older than me.  Because of the age gap, we didn't have much of a relationship when I was a child.  She was the older sister, she babysat us often and we were generally a pain in the ass to her.  I have asked for and graciously received her forgiveness for that.  For example, when she had her 1st serious boyfriend in high school, he came one night to pick her up for a date.  Since she was upstairs still preparing, I took it upon myself to entertain the young man by telling him about every boyfriend my sister had since junior high.  I'm surprised my poor sister didn't kill my brother and I for the things we put her through.  But she didn't and we survived into adulthood.  

My sister is a tall, and elegant woman.  She was always very pretty and very intelligent.  In the time she grew up, it wasn't easy to have brains and beauty.  It was acceptable for a woman to have one or the other, but not both.  She was strong, did very well in school and went to university and got a BA in science.  She met her husband there, they got married in the summer of their junior year, they graduated and then joined the Peace Corps and spent 2 years in Kenya in Africa.  My sister taught at a girls school run by Dutch nuns and my brother in law, a civil engineer worked on water projects.  They returned to the US and my sister worked a few jobs and then went back to university and got a 2nd degree in accounting and spent the rest of her career as an accountant, mostly for non-profit organizations.  She took after our mother with a desire to help people.  After a few years in the US my brother in law's company sent them to Khartoum in Soudan, Africa for 2 years.  My brother in law went back to school after 15 years of civil engineering and got a master's degree in international business and worked for an international oil company with credit cards.  They had a son in 1983.  They had the opportunity to go to Brussels, Belgium to work in the company's office there so they spent 3 years in Belgium.  Then they returned to the US and both worked until they retired when they were 65 years old.

As an adult, my sister and I have become very close over the years.  She has always been there for me and supported me no matter what I was doing.  If she didn't like some of my life decisions, she kept quiet about it.  My sister is the only member of my family that I never had an argument with in my adult life.  Not because we never disagreed, but because I have so much respect for her and I never want to damage our relationship.  And she has done the same for me.  Like my mother and my grandmother, my sister has taught me many things about life and has shown that a beautiful woman can also be very intelligent and successful in a man's world and she is strong enough to overcome all of the obstacles that such a world presents to a woman.  She had to work hard and fight to prover herself over and over throughout her life and she did it well.  We talk on the phone often and we really enjoy discussing books, the arts, other mutual interests, and life.  I couldn't have asked for a better sister, I love her dearly.

So as you can see, these 3 very important women in my life have helped to shape my worldview and my view of women particularly.  I owe a huge debt of gratitude to these 3 women and I did my best to instill their values in my daughter.  She carries their genes and has proven to be worthy of carrying on their heritage  My daughter is also a strong, hard working young woman, very intelligent, tall and beautiful inside and out.  I have no doubt she has passed on these qualities to her daughter as well.  I prefer the company of women, and feel very comfortable around them.  I have great respect for women having grown up with these very special women and others.  I like women so much I have been married 3 times!  

My mother and father taken less than a year before my mother passed away.