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| My mother is second from the left. Left Sadie Dunn Nichol, Ruth Dunn Day, Babe (Frances Dunn Barron – James Brennan (with hat on), tennis champion |
In the mid-1960s, my mother, Ruth, saved a toddler’s life when our family was a Lake Rick-A-Bear Lake, in Kinnelon New Jersey. She was heading for the snack bar on the beach and coming along the path of trees that ran beside the lake just past the picnic tables she saw it in the water apparently having fallen off the bank. No one else was around or watching the baby. She waded into the water and grabbed the child. I came along shortly after and one of the beachgoers rushed up to me and said, “your mother saved that baby over there from drowning.” I didn’t say a thing while looking to the side. I couldn’t see the baby with the crowd of people huddled around, many of them talking loudly.I kept walking back to your picnic table more off the path and in a secluded area of the woods. My dad was grilling burgers and chicken wings the rest of the family sitting either at the table or in Adirondack chairs smiling. For once no one was saying a word. I said to my mother, “someone said you saved a baby?” Mom just continued to smile, she blue eyes shining and gave me a shrugged. That was her. I discovered something else about my mother when I was in high school. I took French my first year from Mrs. Chackmanoff. She was a Jewish and fron France teaching in a Catholic school. The first day she called my name and asked me to stand. She told the class that she was honored to be teaching me because it was my mother who taught her English. When I told my mother this after school she just said, with her smile, “ Yeah, she didn’t speak English. They lived upstairs from us when you were a baby. We babysat for each other. Her husband was a Russian Prince.”
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| Ruth-my mother at 21. |
We lived on Madison Avenue in Paterson and we had lived on this block once before eight doors up from where we were living in a block of terraced rowhomes. Mrs. Chackmanoff’s family had the apartment above ours. At the end of freshman year, Mrs. Chackmanoff called me up to her desk and told me she was passing me even though I failed French because she used to change my drapers and for all my mother did for her when her family first came to this country. She told me she had been in a concentration camp in World War II when the Germans held France. When the Russian arrived her future husband was among them and they liberated the camp saving thousands. She later married him and came to America. At first, our two families could only wave and smile at each other. One day my mother went to the small grocery store on Market Street and found Mrs. Chackmanoff standing in the last aisle crying and looking at the change in her hand. My mother saw she was trying to buy bread and jelly. She pointed out the coins for the two items and from then the English lessons began. Mom didn’t tell me any of that. She was like that. She didn’t talk about others as I remember it. I told my mother what Mrs. Chackmanoff said about finding her in the grocery stores and she did her usual shrug with a smile. I felt such admiration for her. My mother never spoke badly about anyone. And she didn’t talk badly about her own mother. There were signs I suppose along the way. Though what did we, her children, have to compare it with? We know only our own bubble, our small safe and comfortable albeit lower middle-class sphere created by our two parents. My friends home life seen just like mine with else kids as far as I could tell. We had fun times at our house. Great holiday with wonderful meals. Getting ready for Christmas’ would be weeks of examining Sears and Spiegel’s catalogs to write our lists for Santa and then drives to toy stores to view what we wanted. Our father would come back later and buy the gifts though at times saving money with a cheaper version. There were board or card games on Saturday night after my mom’s weekly great fried chicken dinner. Some Sundays, long car rides, four kids stuffed in the back seat elbow to elbow after the kids went to church and then for dinner, sandwiches and a bakery layer cake, the special treat of the week. This was followed by watching Bonanza and the Ed Sullivan Show. Thursdays were chili dogs, known in Paterson as Hot-Dogs-All-The-Way, and fries from any number of hotdog restaurants around the city. In the summer, day trips to the lake to swim and a week at the Jersey shore. After school some days I would come home to find my sister, Doris having tea with our mother, the prized tea set all laid out on the dining room table. They would be talking and laughing. I spent some afternoons watching the Million Dollar Movie of the day with our mother. She would go back and forth to the kitchen cooking supper. Then my mother worked around the house more times than not she would be happily humming her favorite tunes. This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 56c1b-john-sadie-dunnsite-1.jpg I suppose some signs something was wrong was that sometimes lunch would be on the table when we ran in from school and sometimes mom would still be in bed. Then we would make our own lunch from lunch meat and cheese in the refrigerator or peanut butter and jelly. Sometimes we would find her crying in the bedroom. Her parents. She did not like conflict. If any of her five children were fighting and telling them to stop didn’t work she would fling one of her penny loafers at them usually missing. One time the shoe hit her china cabinet breaking the glass door and her prized china inside. I remember it. That was me and my brother, Ike. She sat and cried as we ran from the house only to return when we knew the heat would be out. All the glass was cleaned up and nothing was said about it, ever! I first learned about my mother’s early life from my sister, Doris, who spent time with her godmother, one of my mother’s close sisters, and years after the same accounts from a couple of her sisters in the few conversations I had with them. The story goes that my mother was her mother’s ‘whipping boy.’ Her mother beat only her even though she had six other children. No one seems to know why. And those we talked to said they knew not to intervene. Years later my parents would help two other members of my mother’s family elope with ‘unacceptable’ men drawing the ire of the ‘old battle-ax’ that my father called his mother-in-law. I think this was an act of rebellion, long overdue, by my mom inspired my dad’s self-assertive nature. Other things my aunts told me about my mother was that she was always kind, quiet, pleasant, smart, religious and always nervous. She like roller skating. She went to Saint John’s Grammar school in Paterson and then business school and became a comptometer operator, the comptometer being the first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculators made in the United States back in 1887. She was so good at it she was in demand at banks.
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| 260px-Comptometer_model_ST _Super_Totalizer A comptometer |
During World War II my mother set up offices for Curtis-Wrights Industries who made plane for the military and where my father worked for all his life though the two did not date until meeting at a Holy Name parade one year. My father was a member of The Holy Name Society and my mother a parade goer. What I know about my parents’ wedding was that it was a judge of the piece ceremony. My mother wore a business suit. One of her closest sisters, Aunt (Frances) Babe and Uncle Marty, my father’s best friend, stood in for them. It was during the war and no other family members were present and there were no pictures taken.
My mother’s mother was forced on us each summer for two weeks. My father couldn’t stand her and so my parents tried any way they could to get out of it. Many telephone fights with her siblings went on before and after each visit. One year we all had the German measles and that included my father. Measles is a very contagious disease caused by a virus spread through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes.
It fell on the week the ‘battle-ax’ was due for our summer visit from her. We lounge around in the living room where the TV was with our pillows and blankets, our father sat in the armchair. My mother came in from the kitchen and said in a worried tone, “We should tell them so someone else can take our turn. Old people can die from it.”
“Let her come,” my father said. “Maybe she’ll die and put an end to our misery.”
My mother threw up her hands, made a clicking sound and left the room. I was horrified he would say that until I learn of the abuse my mother had to deal with from her.
 MOM (Ruth Day) and me. |
When I met my future husband, Buddy on a blind date when we were fifteen and sixteen, he came over after school before he would go to his part-time job at the supermarket. One time was while my grandmother was there and she wanted to sit on the porch. She was frail now and walked with a cane. Buddy help her to the porch carrying a chair and walking behind her in case she fell. When he left, my grandmother said to me, “He’s a nice boy. Too bad he’s Italian.” One of her daughters married an Italian and this had been a bone of contention. Later I told my father what she had said and he laughed. He never liked any of the boys I or my sisters brought home but this changed everything for me and Buddy! Buddy became like a son to my father.
I once heard my father and mother talking in a way I never heard them do before. My father used to take trips to Washington D.C. as the accountant on a team of negotiators for Curtis-Wrights Industries working on government contracts. My parents stood at the pantry door. Dad was saying, “Why Ruth? Why?” The pain in his voice. My mother had drank all the beer and to try and hid it, filled the bottles with water. I didn’t know for a long time what that conversation was about until my sister Doris told me all she knew of our mother’s alcoholism.
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| Ruth Day (left) and her sister, Alice – (see the washing machine behind them) |
My mother was abused, persecuted as a child with a sick mother.
I wonder if she felt the beatings were her own fault. Was it the guilt her mother heaped on her. Maybe mom did feel being mistreated was her own fault; she was bad so that was why she deserved the mistreatment. Did all this lead to feelings that she had no room to talk or criticize others? Did she think she didn’t deserve to feel good about herself and so never talked about the good she’d done?
When she was twenty-three, she had a mental break-down. Her father who liked to drink gave my mother beer to get through it. So that was how she learned to cope with life.
I believe my father tried to take care of her in the best way he knew with the information and lack of support available to them.
In the nineteen fifties and sixties alcoholics with treated badly to say it mildly. There was little support for those with the disease and their families. It would be a year or so after my mother’s death before alcoholism was declared a disease and the understanding we now give it.
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| Mom and Dad, Ira and Ruth Day, 1967 |
My mother was persecuted by people which included her own family and my father’s mother. She received anonymous phone calls a few times a week as long as I can remember. All we knew about these calls were that they shouted names at her and she would be upset after one. In those days there was no way to find out who the caller was. I suspected it was a hostile friend of my father’s mother who did it at that grandmother’s direction. She was another piece of work.
My father died sixteen months before my mother of heart disease. I was nineteen at the time. We were all lost without him. None more than my mother. She stopped eating and just drink beer. These months were even more horrible than the year and a half leading up to my father’s death. With her being out of it all the time people disappeared from her life quickly. Some showed up for the money she was willing to give away just to have them talk to her.
One sister wouldn’t take her phone calls. This was the same sister that when her husband was cheating on her, my mother would drag us all over to be with and comfort her. Later, when my mother was dying in the hospital she came. She screamed at me, “Why didn’t you tell us?”
I said, “Where were you when she needed you!”
Another sister wanted her to still watch their mother for the two weeks that year, and without my father to intervene, that sister said to her, “He had to die to get away from you.”
I was standing next to her in the kitchen on Lake Avenue the house my father bought for us before he became ill. My mother began sobbing and I took the phone telling her sister to never call us again.
Places she shopped at for years and took her credit wouldn’t now and some told her not to come there again. She doctor offered no help. No one did. She was not in an acceptable condition and did not have an acceptable disease.
To this day some have nothing kind to say about her. Even many years after her death there were still people making derogatory remarks with disdain like, ‘She came to my house with a six-pack and wanted to drink it!’
My mother was dying. So what was their excuse for abandoning her?
I still miss her. Ruth Catherine Day. ~Jan
