My magnificent mother almost never cried.
She had been widowed in the depth of the great depression. Left with five-year-old twins and limited resources, she became, out of necessity, a successful businesswoman. Struggling to maintain the family and the home we came to love. She was no feminist but when my father died in January, 1931, she went to work running his large printing and publishing company, and never complained. “I had no choice,” she often said later.
We had moved into an apartment house on Euclid Heights Blvd. in Cleveland Heights. It was located in a pleasant residential stretch of buildings where perhaps 50 families lived in relative comfort in a single block between Lancashire and Hampshire. Many, as we did, had moved from private homes as incomes diminished. There were lots of children, and for the most part we hung together, gathering nightly on the tree lawns, or playing ball in the “empty lot” around the corner.
The feeling was somehow upbeat. No obvious stress or tensions about war or bad times. We were too young to sense the danger ahead. And thankfully we had never been exposed to the recklessness and excesses of the 20’s into which we were born. We were, for the most part, quite satisfied with what little we had.
Family life was high on the agenda. Our family often gathered on Friday nights, with aunts, uncles, cousins at our home to listen to the Jack Benny show on the radio. Our only real link to the war was an occasional air raid drill. Many of us became plane spotters. It was exciting but not ominous. Almost like a game, the chief warden was the heavyset son of the family that owned our building. He considered himself a big deal and barked orders about what we each should be doing, which we mostly ignored, or joked about...
We had air raid drills in school that very much resembled fire drills. (I have a special memory of one of those drills. We had to line up in a darkened hallway until the all clear was sounded.)
One of my male classmates moved very close to me and attempted a sexual advance which I spontaneously rejected, although I still remember feeling somewhat aroused by the adventure in the darkness of Heights High School. (Years later this young man became a well known television producer for Leonard Bernstein in New York and won an Emmy for his work.)
The real war was in movies like the March of Time at the newsreel theater on Euclid Ave. downtown, or frightening headlines in the newspaper which I couldn’t ignore since I delivered The Press six day a week to 45 customers.
Otherwise we played together, walked or rode our bikes to school together, grew up together. But history was not on our side. It was painfully reckless with our lives.
And my mother, of course, saw it coming.
It was September of 1939 that I first saw my mother really cry. There was news of Germany invading Poland, and she was in tears. She sensed, as one who had lived through the First World War, the enormity and pervasiveness of world events that would surely affect all our lives in one way or another.
Nearly five years later in February 1944, at the Pennsylvania Railroad station on E. 55th St., I saw her cry again. A group of us had volunteered to be inducted into the Army right after mid-term high school graduation. We viewed it as an adventure. A chance to do our part, whatever that was. Consumed by insensitive teen-aged excitement, I tried to ignore her tears. Frankly I was a little embarrassed by my mother’s tears.
But she knew, much better than I, that the home she had struggled so hard to preserve through very hard times was inexorably disappearing. She faced the stark reality that after losing a husband at a very young age, she could now lose her only son.
Thankfully the boy she had raised came back two years later a battle-hardened man, very much better prepared to create, in the years ahead, a home of his own. Mother eventually married a widowed high school classmate and lived a warm and fulfilling life with her husband, into their late eighties.
And for the most part, none of us in our small family ever really looked back. Perhaps it was just too painful.
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