In Momorium
Posted by Cartographers Without Borders on January 28, 2008
That’s a studio photograph of my mom, Thelma, back in about 1952. Pretty lady, just like her sister, Susanna, who died a few months ago at the age of 97.
On Jan. 20, it was Mom’s turn. She passed peacefully on a Sunday afternoon, reducing the world’s quotient of gentlehearted redheads by a significant 1. She was 93, but only in body.
Mom was a daughter of the late George W. and Bessie E. Miles of Shippensburg, a small south-central Pennsylvania town where she grew up in a hard-scrabble lifestyle but had a lot of friends and became a noted scholastic athlete in field hockey and track. Much of that was to the confusion of her parents who didn’t “get” sports. Not surprising since her dad survived a brutal orphanage upbringing and her mother persevered after dropping out of school in the fourth-grade to go to work to help support her family.
Mom remained interested in sports to one degree or another, particularly football. I used to enjoy calling her long-distance on Sundays after New York Giants games and telling her what had transpired since, beset by macular degeneration, she couldn’t watch TV anymore. But the last real conversation I had with her, the day before she died, concerned dancing.
Mom had transferred her athletic skills to the dance floor at an early age and won a variety of contests in the pre-World War II era. However, that activity was slowed considerably when she met a shy young man at a dance, found out he could barely shuffle around a dance floor, and married him anyway. That was the other William Dowd, her first husband and my father, who died in battle in France as an Army infantryman in World War II.
Several years later, she met and married John J. Mayer, a cantankerous ex-Navy man from Brooklyn, NY, who, as her luck would have it, was even worse on the dance floor than her first husband. Despite that flaw, they were married for 60 years, during which popular dancing went through many phases until it reached today’s version which did not interest her. Luckily, she had taught me to dance when her enthusiasm remained high, and I’m a dance floor guy every chance I get.
In her later years, Mom was involved in calmer pursuits, although well into her 80s she was part of a jazzercise group. She also made up for being a hellion in her youth by attending various local churches and even serving as editor of several of their publications.
This Sunday, along with millions of others, I’ll be watching the Giants play in the Super Bowl. Win or lose, I’ll think of Mom and what I would have told her about the game when I called her, which I’ll never do again.
If I had my choice, I’d rather be dancing.
February 25, 2008 at 3:45 pm
No wonder your mom always asked me if I was still dancing — ballroom, that is.
I was surprised at how much she looked like Mom. I also didn’t know that Grandma Bessie only went through the fourth grade. She was a gem and some of the best laughs came from her. She and George could go through some go rounds and her quips always were sharp and on target.
What a nice tribute to your mother. She was always very nice to me and kept in touch until the latter couple of years.
February 28, 2008 at 3:16 pm
What a beautiful tribute to your mother. She was a kind, warm person, and I always enjoyed seeing her. Tami and I wished that she and John could have come to our wedding, but we understood why they weren’t able to attend.
I never knew that Aunt Bessie had a fourth-grade education. I’m sure it was the same for my great-grandmother. Life was much harder in those days.
With the passing of your mother and Sue Laster last August, my grandmother and Myrtle (I can’t remember her last name) from Sunbury, Pa., are the last remaining members of that generation of the Schwartz clan.