they would turn in their graves

Alta Gladys (Clay) McEowen and son Hubert Dwight McEowen I’m a day late this week because we had a graduation open house yesterday for our daughter, who earned her master’s degree this month.   In her memoir my great-grandma Gladys wrote, “I wanted to be a nurse, but father couldn’t stand having me away from home and I didn’t have the high school education.” A few sentences earlier, she had written, “I quit school and went to work in the grocery store when I was sixteen…” Gladys was sixteen in 1912. The grocery store to which she refers was more of a general store AND included the town post office, and she “was sworn in as assistant postmistress”. She earned a whole $5 a week (plus two meals a day) and the work she did was hectic and backbreaking. As a teenager, along with the usual business of sorting and handing out the mail and waiting on customers, she found a trove of old junk in the storeroom, products the store owners didn’t even know they owned. Gladys, it seems completely ...

  Great-grandmother Alta Gladys (Clay) McEowen When Gladys wrote about her life as she remembered it between 1896 and 1953, she said, “I hope it may in some way help someone to press on and not give up as I am now 57 years of age and still striving to make something of my life.” Well, she was spot on, and I am grateful for her words. Nearly every line of her memoir has something to say to me specifically.   Gladys was fifty-seven and could still vividly remember being very young and having a bad dream while staying with her grandparents: “There were so many tigers in the room they could hardly move about…” At fifty-two I, too, can still remember bad dreams I had when I was very young, and thinking of them still inspires the same horrifying thoughts I had about them then. A few nightmares I had over and over as a child and even into my teen years. There was the one in which my mom was talking over the fence to the neighbor who was clearly a witch, and I kept trying to get her a...

Alta Gladys Clay, at far right, with her parents and brothers, ca. 1902 My mom’s paternal grandma, my great-grandmother Alta Gladys, was born in 1896, the middle child and only daughter of Ohio farmers. I never knew her; she died only twenty days before I was born. My mother has always spoken fondly of her, and from things she wrote herself, I believe she was a treasured daughter in a time and place when girls were not valued as highly as boys, who were thought more able to handle farm work and legally able to inherit a family’s land and improvements. Gladys was married in 1917, when she was twenty. Her husband, my great-grandfather Vergil, wrote on his draft registration card that same year, “not in sympathy with present war, can be of more service at home”. He was a schoolteacher at the time. In later years he was a bookkeeper in a grocery store, the manager of a motor sales company, a bookkeeper for auto sales, and a timekeeper for first the Studebaker Corporation Aviation Division ...

My daughter graduated from the University of Michigan yesterday with her master’s degree in Biological Chemistry. I believe she is the first person in her direct line of descent to obtain an advanced college degree. I graduated from the University of Michigan in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, certified to teach secondary grades 7-12 in mathematics and French. During my five years of teaching, I attended Grand Valley State University and obtained 21 credits toward my master’s degree in education, but after my first child was born, I never went back to finish the degree – but I never intended to and was only taking classes to keep my certificate current. My mom graduated from high school in 1970 and never went to college. My dad holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from General Motors Institute, now Kettering University. Three of my four grandparents graduated from high school (my grandma Nedra was forced to quit high school during the depression to support ...