Born a coal miner's daughter and a few years later a coal miner's orphan, Mother was progressive and loved things that were modern and fresh. Although barely educated beyond what is today a grade school level, she was not afraid of technology, but was undaunted in her struggles to master it. I smile as I write these words since I remember all too well how she could never adjust her digital watch or clocks for daylight savings time. If I didn't adjust them for her--well, she would just make a mental correction every time she looked at one of them. After Daddy died she hinted often that she would like to have a microwave oven. After she got one, she delighted in it and used it for almost everything. Daddy was her opposite in many ways. He objected to microwaves, flying with me, and anything that was unproven in his mind. Not Mother! She was a joy; she delighted in things new and was receptive to surprising things. For instance, she would listen to rock music with my sister's boys. She often begged me to put in a radio with a tape deck in her car; something I never did. Mother would have taken to the computer and struggled mightily to master it. I would have bought her one had she lived till the PC became available; I only wish that I still could. For those that knew Mother, the most remarkable and noticeable thing was that she was a talker. Mother always had something to say. She was not a critical or vindictive person so while she talked a lot (some of us seem to have inherited that gene) she was not unpleasant to listen to or to be around. Mother was extroverted and loved to be around people. She made friends easily and was a trusting, generous person almost to a fault. She would do anything for her friends or strangers. However, a few people made the mistake of seeing an open, kindly, and giving person and would sometimes use this to their advantage. Woe unto those that ever violated a trust or took advantage of her. She would drop these people in a heartbeat and have nothing to do with them from then on. Mother spent time in her early life in a Catholic girl’s school (orphanage) in Philadelphia. Her mother had five girls and no way to support them on the wages of a domestic in the 20s and 30s. As each girl was able to leave the school and help support the family, they did. I have a heart touching letter from my Mother's oldest sister to the youngest sister, who was still in the girls school, saying that she would have to stay at the school over Christmas because they did not have the $2 necessary for bus fare and that they did not have enough money for food and rent. A follow-up note said the $2 was enclosed and they all were looking forward to being together at Christmas. My mother came up with the money by working extra jobs. She is credited in the letter as being the one they could usually count on. I never knew this until many years after her passing when I discovered those letters still in the cherished possession of the only remaining and youngest sister. Later the family was found working in New York City in the late 1930s where all the sisters and their mother could find jobs. My Mother worked at Radio City as a waitress and came to know many of the radio stars of the day. She loved to listen to the radio and passed that interest on to me. She related to the stars of both the daytime and evening programs. She knew something about each of them having waited on many of these stars in her job. A favorite of hers was the lady who played Stella Dallas in the radio soap of the same name. Anne Elstner, Stella's real name, knitted several items for mother and some of which were used when my sister and I were small. [For those who are unfamiliar with the radio soaps on October 23,1937 - Radio's "Stella Dallas" made her debut on the NBC-Red network. Stella hung out on NBC until 1955 with Anne Elstner in the title role for the entire run. "Stella Dallas" was "A continuation on the air of the true-life story of mother love and sacrifice, in which Stella saw her own beloved daughter, Laurel, marry into wealth and society and, realizing the difference in their tastes and worlds, went out of Laurel's life." From The ArchivesTM of The History Channel] This was just one of many of the radio folks she knew well. How she loved to listen to all the programs of the time--but that is another story. Was Judith Anne, my sister, named after Anne Elstner? I suspect so. Mother was a wonderful cook and mastered both Southern cooking to please my father and still managed to keep up her skills and cook foods from her youth from time to time. We still cook some of these dishes today. Halluschka in Hungarian or cabbage and noodles come to mind as an example. She loved another Hungarian dish which she called "turtle eggs" which were basically a hamburger/rice mixture rolled into soften cabbage leaves and cooked in sauerkraut. Other favorites of hers included split pea soup and stuffed peppers. But man, could she fry chicken, squirrel, or rabbit with equal ease! She loved bread and butter with jelly or honey. She would cook a big meal for the family, then sit down, have toast, and jelly with a cup of coffee for herself. She made jelly, jams and preserves all the while we were growing up. This was not a hobby or an affectation, we needed to can and preserve in order to eat in the winter. Fig preserves from two fig bushes beside the house in Norcross were among her favorites, but she also made apple jelly, muscadine, pear, peach, wild plum, etc. She would eat what she preserved with toast or bread over the course of a winter season. We had a pressure cooker, a big one, that she bought with scant savings from the Jewel Tea man who used to make the rounds to our country home. She taught herself to can most everything. We ate well in these days before freezers. Vegetables of every description, home canned chicken and meats, stews, you name it. If she could get it into a Ball Mason jar, we had a few quarts. This was "slow food" prepared in the waning days of summer and early fall. We had a smokehouse full of pork from the hog killing at the first frost. She cured, smoked, and wrapped most all of this bounty. Nothing went to waste. She even boiled the trimmings down for lard and cracklins (a treat for me even today). Why my arteries harden at the thought of the super rich cracklin corn bread that would follow for the few weeks following this incredible back breaking effort. Pork fat does indeed rule. I remember throughout my youth listening to Mother trying to get out of bed in the morning. The agony in her major joints was something she had to overcome everyday she lived. By the time she died, all of the joints in her fingers and toes had to be replaced in order to have any function at all. She had many other related problems including degeneration of the ligaments. This ligament degeneration caused her to have a major operation in the early 1980s to have her neck vertebrae fused to prevent sudden death from any quick movement, which would have severed her spinal cord. Mother suffered with asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and later in life an irregular heart beat which eventually killed her. Although never a shy person, she got up and did what needed to be done. She suffered mightily and certainly every day while she was on this earth. But I never heard her complain. Not once. The transition from the big city, New York, to a rented, rural farm house, which we shared with another family (a duplex in today's language) in Georgia must have been a shock for Mother. She took it in stride. We didn't have electricity, running water, or indoor toilets, but we made do. We farmed, hunted, and raised chickens, rabbits and pigs. We cooked on a wood stove and lived in an unheated house except for a small stove in the "living room". We moved, I think, to save a marriage. My Mother wanted to get my Father out of New York and was determined to make this work. And work it did. Some of the pictures of her and her sisters who came to visit every now and then is almost laughable since they seemed so out of place in that environment with their big city clothes and big city manners. She was an expert seamstress and made a living at this for much of my youth. One of the early enterprises, of Mother's was to make fur collars, fur cuffs and fur muffs and ear muffs from the skins of rabbits we raised when we lived in Lawrenceville, Ga. There was a taxidermist who lived not too far up the road to whom we would carry the fresh pelts to be cured and then to be made into various decorative items by mother for sale locally. Mother first went to work in the "Pants Plant" in Lawrenceville, Ga in order to supplement our meager income. There were a few times in the mid forties that we had no money and little food in the house. The canning would come a little later. So going to work was not a luxury, it was a necessity. There was no welfare, assistance, or food stamps. You provided for yourself and your family. In those days, you saved for what you wanted. These values were passed on and set deep within me. Mother held various other jobs over the years including a job at Frye-Duluth in Duluth, Ga where she sewed automobile seat covers on a piecework rate. I remember once she turned the seat cover business into a small enterprise when she invented a drawstring pocketbook. She made these from the seat cover patterned plastic on the front and back and the seat cover early vinyl plastic on the sides. I can still smell that material in my mind's nose (?). She made and sold a great many of these bags in the local community and set up a small shop in the house to work making these items in her "spare time". Daddy invented a device to remove the web from the cording material used in the seat covers to make the drawstrings for the handbags. I can remember playing with carbon tetrachloride in 5 cent Coca-Cola bottles that was used to clean grease from the material. Today, one can only handle this carcinogen only with proper ventilation and equipment. Who knew? In the late forties, we moved from Lawrenceville, Ga to Norcross, Ga (Gwinnett County) to another rented house. Daddy installed a bathroom on what was part of the back porch and made an inside entrance at Mother's insistence. What luxury! Cold running water instead of a well with a rope and bucket or a spring at the end of the pasture! Hot water would come years later out of a pipe instead of a kettle. An indoor toilet, five rooms and no path! It was to Mother's great satisfaction that we pushed over the outhouse, filled the pit, and used the shell for a coal bin. We lived about ten miles from the Frye-Duluth plant. Mother rode to and from the plant from our very modest home on the corner of Britt and Bostic Street in Norcross on the Greyhound bus or with her supervisor, a Mrs. Andrews. She had a love-hate relationship with Mrs. Andrews, which eventually turned into a friendship. I remember when she met Mrs. Andrews many years later and spoke fondly of her for the rest of the day. This type of work was a strain on Mother as she would come home in the evening and fuss at my sister and I for not doing out chores (which we were always late in getting done--sometimes finishing moments before she came in the door}. My father worked at night in Atlanta driving a taxi for the Yellow Cab company, a job he held for many years. He worked at night because it paid a few dollars a week more than working in the day. He had one day a week off. Mother later got a job at Atlanta Linen Service in Atlanta still sewing and still working in a piece work shop where in order to get the minimum pay you had to make "rate" or minimum production. With all of her infirmities, she would and could work rings around anybody. About this time Mother learned to drive. What a hoot! This would have been about 1954 or so. Although she had driven from time to time out of necessity, our Model A Ford or later our 1946 Ford, she decided that it was time for her to get wheels. For many years, she walked, rode the Greyhound bus, or depended on others to get her where she needed to go. We didn't get a telephone until 1956 or so. Like anything else that Mother decided to do, she went at it with gusto. The fact that she didn't have access to a car, worked long hours, was in poor health, and that she didn't have the full support of my father, were just "little problems" to be overcome. She practiced whenever and wherever she could. At age 14, all boys think they can drive and I was often her instructor. Or at least she let me think that. She borrowed cars now and again and we had to figure out how to get them out of the ditch on some dirt road more than once. Such was the courage of her conviction about the whole thing, that when she went to the courthouse in Lawrenceville, the State Patrolman there that day, didn't even give her a driving test! He just gave her a license--after all he was only a police officer and he was up against my Mother. Good judgment on his part, I would say. In 1959, Mother was beginning to really bear the consequences of her lifelong, chronic, rheumatoid arthritis. She made up her mind that she was going to quit the sewing and was going to get another job working in an office where she wouldn't have to suffer so much. She took courses at night, studied, and worried and went to look for a job with the same energy she had for everything else. Mother was definitely a high-energy person. When she went for something, she wasn't easily deferred and she certainly couldn't be stopped! She landed a job in the mailroom at E. T. Barwick Carpet Mills in Chamblee, Ga that was much closer to home and much easier on her. She held this job until the company went bankrupt. The tragedy in this is that the corporate officers embezzled the savings and pension fund to which she had been regularly contributing. These men eventually went to jail but that did not bring any of her money back. When that company folded in the 1970s, Mother retired since she was not able to compete with younger, more able workers. About this time she taught me yet another lesson that has stood me well over the years. In the summer of 1959, I desperately needed a summer job. I had been accepted at college. We didn't have enough money to pay the tuition. After a day or two of looking, I came back discouraged and dejected. Mother asked me where I had been and what I had done. I told her. She then said that she would take half a day off the next day and we would find me a job. What kid wants his Mother to go with him to look for a job? You can imagine how I received this news. We drove into Atlanta into a rather run down semi-industrial section of town not too far from where she worked. As we were driving down a bleak looking street, she told me to stop the car. She then told me get out and to go into the first building and ask for a job. I, like all teenagers, said something to the effect, "MOTHER, it is bad enough that you have to come with me to look for a job. This place isn't going to have a job for me!" "Go", she replied. We repeated this process for about 30 minutes at each successive door--no matter how unlikely it seemed. Thirty-five minutes later, I had a job; it was about a quarter till nine that morning, when I dropped her off at her work. After the death of my father in the late 1970s, Mother's health began to improve when she took herself into a gold shot program for her arthritis. Daddy was always opposed to this treatment. He was scarred of the harmful and cumulative effects that the heavy metal, gold salts can have on the body and the need for constant blood work to monitor the levels of the gold. Nevertheless, Mother didn't hesitate for long after Daddy died and this treatment gave her the most relief she had in her adult life from the ravages of that horrible, painful, and disfiguring disease. Her asthma also improved with several inhaled drugs she took on a daily basis. Nevertheless, she was an angry lady who only began to find peace in the last years that she lived. The loss of my father coupled with the loneliness only someone who has lost a spouse of many years can know contributed to this anger. To better help her, I moved her from Georgia to Delaware to be closer to me. She immediately adapted to this change and within a matter of a few months had a growing circle of new friends. She was a resilient person, indeed. Mother was always a deeply religious person and was a devoted Catholic, a religion she had to give up when we moved to Georgia in 1945. There were no Catholic Churches that were in reach in what was then the rural South. She converted to Methodism, the religion of my father, and never looked back. She still kept her rosary beads, however. She was active in the church while my sister and I were growing up. I can remember going to church every Sunday in what today would be "custom tailored clothes" and wishing for once I had a store bought shirt or coat! Mother became even more active as my sister and I grew up and left home. She had a wide circle of friends and moved quickly to establish her place in a new church in Delaware after she moved. Mother died suddenly and unexpectedly in Delaware on a Sunday morning in 1985. She was 66. She woke up feeling as her friend, said "funny". She lay on the sofa for much of the morning. It was there that her heart began to beat irregularly and it was there that she died. My wife, my son, and I had gone down to a friend's place on the Chesapeake a few miles away. I drove back that morning and thought of going by and seeing if Mother wanted to join us. I decided, to my everlasting regret, not to since I did not want to disturb her Sunday unexpectedly. Her funeral in Delaware and again in Georgia where she is buried beside my Father was a testament to how many people she knew and had touched. In Delaware, a place she lived for only a few years, well over a hundred people turned out to say good-bye and the same was true for her funeral in Georgia. She left the world a better place for her having been here and to have touched so many people. She was a first class hero "with oak leaf cluster" in my eyes. Rest in peace, Mother. I know you are enjoying God's blessings, and happy Mother's day. Walter Freeman