My Mother
While most people are aware of where we start our journey in life none of us know for sure where the journey will take us.
I read somewhere that we live as long as we live in people’s memories. I wonder if that includes anecdotes and stories about those who have passed away. If so I hope these brief recollections will keep my mother alive for my children, Maggie and Cary, and for future descendants of our family.
My mother was born in a coal mining camp in Wyoming in 1911. The little town of Deitz sat in the shadow of the Bighorn Mountains along Goose Creek, about a mile north of Sheridan, and not far from the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or as it is known by the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho people, The Battle of Greasy Grass.
Actually, Deitz was comprised of a series of eight mining camps and a tiny town where my grandfather was the depot agent for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. At the time of my mother’s birth the town of Deitz had a company store, two schools, a baseball field, a hotel, two saloons, a pool hall, a union hall, two churches and several homes. Today all of it is gone---demolished. The railroad tracks were taken up, and the surviving small houses were moved to Sheridan. The only trace of the settlements and mines are the remains of two cemeteries, neither of which are maintained. Today the entire area is part of The Padlock Ranch, at nearly half a million acres, one of the world’s largest cattle ranches.
Margaret Ann Woodbury was named after her aunt, who was named after her aunt, and her grandmother. The name Margaret reappears through generations, and so carries on in our family with cousins, distant cousins and our daughter, all of whom descended from Hugh and Margaret Quinn, Irish immigrants to America who arrived in New York on the steamship Anchoria from Glasgow, Scotland on April 24, 1882. Her father called her “Dolly”, a name used to address her by various family members for decades. I recall my grandmother and grandfather saying that, from the start, she was full of life, full of energy, and exceptionally kind. That’s how I remember her, too.
As a girl she was a tomboy, owning the distinction of beating anyone her age---boy or girl---in a hundred yard dash along a single railroad rail (without falling off), something I used to try as a kid but could never master. My grandfather’s work as a telegraph operator took him all over the West in the early part of the 20th Century and Mom lived in Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, and Utah in wild rural settings, in apartments above depots, houses in small towns, and on a Nebraska farm.
In Deitz my grandfather’s closest friend, a Japanese man named Timothy Kawamoto, who worked on the railroad as a foreman, gave my grandmother a number of traditional Japanese handicrafts to celebrate my mother’s birth. She kept them all her life and we have them now.
As a kid she picked apples and tended farmhouse vegetable gardens. At ten, when she wasn’t in school, she got to go to the depot and “Highball” the freight trains, always pulled by enormous steam locomotives, thundering along and shaking the ground. “Highballing” signaled an engineer to proceed without stopping and involved raising your arm as high as possible and waving to him as the train approached the station---two short toots from the steam whistle answered Mom’s wave if he had nothing to deliver and four short toots answered her next wave if there was nothing for him to pick up.
She got up to shenanigans with her friends. She had lots of cats and dogs---Simon, Fluffy, Buff, Tiger. She and my grandmother would sit on the screened porch in the afternoons at their farmhouse in Nebraska and find animal shapes in the clouds that drifted slowly by. When I was very young Mom would tell me bedtime stories about the Harvest moon in those days that rose over the western prairies like a giant pumpkin, orange and round and bright.
The farmhouse had a tin roof and once, while they sat watching a particularly wild thunderstorm unfold, lightening hit the windmill by the barn, leapt to the roof of the porch and Mom was suddenly surrounded by sparks. She said she could feel them tickling her ears.
My mother was captain of the cheerleaders at Kearney High School in Nebraska in 1928. She was an attractive and popular teenager, attending dances at a venue that was located exactly half way across the USA, and there saw Glen Miller, Harry James, Paul Whiteman and other big bands that were famous in the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. Her boyfriend owned an Auburn Speedster and they roared through rural Nebraska in that.
She married at 19 to Harold Deibler, a young Manhattan, Kansas banker, gave birth to my sister a year later and within days lost her husband, leaving her a single mother in 1930’s Kansas during the Depression, supporting herself and my sister with a job as a sales clerk at FW Woolworth in Manhattan. Then she met my father, a veterinary student at Kansas State University, on a blind date and together they ended up in Ohio after he graduated.
She was a terrific dancer and a fine “farmhouse” country cook, canning all manner of vegetables and pickles with my sister and grandmother every Fall. She enjoyed a good joke. I’ll never forget her chocolate cakes. She was an outstanding seamstress and she could crochet almost as well as her father, who everyone agreed was the best at that activity in our entire family. I owe her so much for whatever artistic talent I may have inherited. She adored her grandchildren and enjoyed fussing over them, giving them gifts and doing things with them.
She was a good mother, grandmother, mother-in-law, daughter, wife and friend to her friends---kind and supportive, and utterly dedicated to her family. My grandparents lived with us and were nursed by her when they became ill in the years before they died. She looked after my sister during her five-year battle with cancer. Each time Gerry was hospitalized at the Cleveland Clinic, the last time for three months, my mother left the house every morning and took the bus to Cleveland to sit with Gerry all day, then returned at night and repeated the journey the next day. She looked after my father after his heart surgery, and her friends and neighbors until they, too, were gone.
Although she suffered a number of hardships I never heard her complain about anything. In fact one time when I had a scare regarding her health and became a bit emotional as I sat with her, what she managed to say to me was “Are you all right?”
Among the many things I loved and respected her for was her non-judgmental stance regarding others no matter their social status or ethnicity. She loved every one of my friends as if each was a member of her family.
With respect for her Irish ancestry and working-class background, when she passed away we had a simple graveside service for her, no funeral home calling hours. We kept it simple as per her wishes. The minister from Mom’s church, Reverend Mary Willis, asked each of us to recall something special about her, then led us in a hymn with an Irish melody. As I looked around the small gathering I saw several of my childhood friends---those who she’d cared for so much over the years---an extended family of sons who came from all over to say goodbye to their “second mother”, as a few of them stated at the service.
She had finally let go, a few days before the 21st century was born, and was buried beside my father in Twinsburg, Ohio.
© Kent Jones 2016
While most people are aware of where we start our journey in life none of us know for sure where the journey will take us.
I read somewhere that we live as long as we live in people’s memories. I wonder if that includes anecdotes and stories about those who have passed away. If so I hope these brief recollections will keep my mother alive for my children, Maggie and Cary, and for future descendants of our family.
My mother was born in a coal mining camp in Wyoming in 1911. The little town of Deitz sat in the shadow of the Bighorn Mountains along Goose Creek, about a mile north of Sheridan, and not far from the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or as it is known by the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho people, The Battle of Greasy Grass.
Actually, Deitz was comprised of a series of eight mining camps and a tiny town where my grandfather was the depot agent for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. At the time of my mother’s birth the town of Deitz had a company store, two schools, a baseball field, a hotel, two saloons, a pool hall, a union hall, two churches and several homes. Today all of it is gone---demolished. The railroad tracks were taken up, and the surviving small houses were moved to Sheridan. The only trace of the settlements and mines are the remains of two cemeteries, neither of which are maintained. Today the entire area is part of The Padlock Ranch, at nearly half a million acres, one of the world’s largest cattle ranches.
Margaret Ann Woodbury was named after her aunt, who was named after her aunt, and her grandmother. The name Margaret reappears through generations, and so carries on in our family with cousins, distant cousins and our daughter, all of whom descended from Hugh and Margaret Quinn, Irish immigrants to America who arrived in New York on the steamship Anchoria from Glasgow, Scotland on April 24, 1882. Her father called her “Dolly”, a name used to address her by various family members for decades. I recall my grandmother and grandfather saying that, from the start, she was full of life, full of energy, and exceptionally kind. That’s how I remember her, too.
As a girl she was a tomboy, owning the distinction of beating anyone her age---boy or girl---in a hundred yard dash along a single railroad rail (without falling off), something I used to try as a kid but could never master. My grandfather’s work as a telegraph operator took him all over the West in the early part of the 20th Century and Mom lived in Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, and Utah in wild rural settings, in apartments above depots, houses in small towns, and on a Nebraska farm.
In Deitz my grandfather’s closest friend, a Japanese man named Timothy Kawamoto, who worked on the railroad as a foreman, gave my grandmother a number of traditional Japanese handicrafts to celebrate my mother’s birth. She kept them all her life and we have them now.
As a kid she picked apples and tended farmhouse vegetable gardens. At ten, when she wasn’t in school, she got to go to the depot and “Highball” the freight trains, always pulled by enormous steam locomotives, thundering along and shaking the ground. “Highballing” signaled an engineer to proceed without stopping and involved raising your arm as high as possible and waving to him as the train approached the station---two short toots from the steam whistle answered Mom’s wave if he had nothing to deliver and four short toots answered her next wave if there was nothing for him to pick up.
She got up to shenanigans with her friends. She had lots of cats and dogs---Simon, Fluffy, Buff, Tiger. She and my grandmother would sit on the screened porch in the afternoons at their farmhouse in Nebraska and find animal shapes in the clouds that drifted slowly by. When I was very young Mom would tell me bedtime stories about the Harvest moon in those days that rose over the western prairies like a giant pumpkin, orange and round and bright.
The farmhouse had a tin roof and once, while they sat watching a particularly wild thunderstorm unfold, lightening hit the windmill by the barn, leapt to the roof of the porch and Mom was suddenly surrounded by sparks. She said she could feel them tickling her ears.
My mother was captain of the cheerleaders at Kearney High School in Nebraska in 1928. She was an attractive and popular teenager, attending dances at a venue that was located exactly half way across the USA, and there saw Glen Miller, Harry James, Paul Whiteman and other big bands that were famous in the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. Her boyfriend owned an Auburn Speedster and they roared through rural Nebraska in that.
She married at 19 to Harold Deibler, a young Manhattan, Kansas banker, gave birth to my sister a year later and within days lost her husband, leaving her a single mother in 1930’s Kansas during the Depression, supporting herself and my sister with a job as a sales clerk at FW Woolworth in Manhattan. Then she met my father, a veterinary student at Kansas State University, on a blind date and together they ended up in Ohio after he graduated.
She was a terrific dancer and a fine “farmhouse” country cook, canning all manner of vegetables and pickles with my sister and grandmother every Fall. She enjoyed a good joke. I’ll never forget her chocolate cakes. She was an outstanding seamstress and she could crochet almost as well as her father, who everyone agreed was the best at that activity in our entire family. I owe her so much for whatever artistic talent I may have inherited. She adored her grandchildren and enjoyed fussing over them, giving them gifts and doing things with them.
She was a good mother, grandmother, mother-in-law, daughter, wife and friend to her friends---kind and supportive, and utterly dedicated to her family. My grandparents lived with us and were nursed by her when they became ill in the years before they died. She looked after my sister during her five-year battle with cancer. Each time Gerry was hospitalized at the Cleveland Clinic, the last time for three months, my mother left the house every morning and took the bus to Cleveland to sit with Gerry all day, then returned at night and repeated the journey the next day. She looked after my father after his heart surgery, and her friends and neighbors until they, too, were gone.
Although she suffered a number of hardships I never heard her complain about anything. In fact one time when I had a scare regarding her health and became a bit emotional as I sat with her, what she managed to say to me was “Are you all right?”
Among the many things I loved and respected her for was her non-judgmental stance regarding others no matter their social status or ethnicity. She loved every one of my friends as if each was a member of her family.
With respect for her Irish ancestry and working-class background, when she passed away we had a simple graveside service for her, no funeral home calling hours. We kept it simple as per her wishes. The minister from Mom’s church, Reverend Mary Willis, asked each of us to recall something special about her, then led us in a hymn with an Irish melody. As I looked around the small gathering I saw several of my childhood friends---those who she’d cared for so much over the years---an extended family of sons who came from all over to say goodbye to their “second mother”, as a few of them stated at the service.
She had finally let go, a few days before the 21st century was born, and was buried beside my father in Twinsburg, Ohio.
© Kent Jones 2016