My mother, Dorothy Jean Firestone Emery

Dorothy Jean Firestone Emery

Born October 4, 1923, West Bridgewater, PA

Died, May 8, 1965 (a day before Mother’s Day), Rochester, PA

My mother was born to John Raymond Firestone and Emma Hannah Weyand Firestone. She lived her entire life in Beaver County, PA. She died too young, at 41 years from cancer, in the Rochester General Hospital, just a couple of miles from where she was born. As far as I know she never flew in an airplane and she never got a drivers license. She worked at the soda fountain a 5 and 10 cent store on the main street of Rochester after she graduated from high school. I think that’s where she met my father. I’m the middle child and only son of my mother. My older sister is Joyce and my younger sister is Kathy.

I was just 14 when my mother died. Mom had surgery on Halloween Day of 1964. She had been having “stomach problems” so the doctor decided to do a hysterectomy. According to what dad told us later, when they cut her open they found that she was riddled with cancer so they just closed her up and sent her home. They gave her six weeks to live but she lived over six months. I don’t think dad or the doctors told mom she had cancer or that she was dying. She must have known though. Dad never told me how sick she was. It was only after she died that I learned about the cancer. She seemed to recover some strength in the two months after her surgery. She was still weak at Christmas 1964, but we went to my grandparents (Firestone) for our typical Christmas Day celebrations. Almost immediately after the New Year she started getting weaker. Dad took her to the hospital in early February 1965 because she was feeling so sick. He told us that he let her off near the emergency room door and went to park the car. When he came back she was on her knees and couldn’t get up. They admitted her to the hospital that day and she never left. My birthday was just a month before she died. She was very weak and confused the last few months of her life. Dad took a birthday card to the hospital for her to sign for me. She signed it “Dorothy Emery.” It was probably the last thing she ever wrote. I still have the card.

It’s surprising how few really strong memories I have of my mother. Of course, I can “see” her in my mind’s eye but actual events aren’t very clear to me. I remember her as rather shy. My dad’s brothers, Al and Bill (and sometimes Harold) liked to tease mom. She would always blush and try to ignore them. I think either Al or Bill had dated mom for awhile before she married dad. I may be wrong about that though. Mom didn’t smoke, drink, or use bad language. She did love tea and drank it throughout the day. I clearly remember that mom would never talk badly about another person, even if other people in a room were. The one exception I remember was when we heard the news that some Soviet leader had died. Mom said something like, “The world will be a better place now.” I always thought she said this when Khrushchev died but when I looked him up I found that he died in 1971, so it couldn’t have been at his death. Stalin died in 1953, so I’m sure I was too young to remember that. Hm-m-m?

We always went camping for a week or two every summer when I was young. I don’t know if mom really enjoyed it or not. She would spend most of her time cooking and cleaning up. Dad would go fishing. The kids would run and play. Sometimes mom would go with us to the beach for awhile but mostly she’d just work the whole time were at the campsite.

We had an old-style wringer washing machine in the basement of our house. Before I was old enough to start school I would follow mom around the house as she did her housework. One time I went to the basement with her. She had to leave for a minute and told me not to mess with the washing machine and to be especially careful of the wringer on the top. The wringer was a mechanism of two rollers that you would feed the clothes through to help wring the water out of them so they’d dry faster. The rollers were made of a hard rubber substance. There was a very strong spring that pushed the rollers together to squeeze the water out of the clothes. You would start feeding clothes in between the moving rollers and they would grab the clothing, pull it through, and squeeze the water out. Well don’t you know, as soon as mom left I put my fingers up to the rollers and the silly machine grabbed my hand and started running me through the wringer. I started screaming and mom came to my rescue. No broken bones, but sore fingers and humiliation when she told dad about it that night. On another occasion (I was a toddler so I only know this because mom and dad told me about it) I started down the stairs into the basement and fell. I bounced down the stairs but mom caught me just before I hit the cement floor. Again, I had no broken bones.

Another time when I was a little guy I was in the dining room with mom while she was ironing. We had an old wooden china cabinet. It had glass doors on the top, two silverware drawers below that, and two storage places with doors on the bottom. We used the left hand drawer as a silverware drawer but the right hand one was a catch-all drawer. Any small thing that didn’t have another specific place in the house went into this drawer. I remember there were nails, nuts, bolts, fishing bobbers, small tools, and many other things. On this day I opened the drawer and was investigating its contents. I found a little paper packed, about the size of a pack of paper matches. The front flap had a little slot so it could be completely closed. I was curious so I opened the flap. Inside was a very thin rubber device. I took it out and stretched it out. I’d never seen anything like it before. It looked like a big balloon but the opening was bigger than any balloon I’d ever seen. I put my thumb in the open end and turned around and showed my mother. I asked her, “Mom, is this something to put on your thumb to keep it dry if you get it cut?” She stuttered for a moment, told me “yes,” and asked me to put it back where I found it. I looked in the drawer for it at other times but I never saw it again.

We didn’t have a clothes dryer when I was young. We had either cloth or wire clotheslines strung between posts in our back yard. I remember going out with mom many times to watch her hang the clothes to dry. When I got old enough I would hand clothes or clothespins to her. I remember very clearly that she would run a wet cloth down the length of the clothesline every time before she hung the clothes. That was necessary in Western Pennsylvania in the 50s and 60s because of the air pollution caused by all the steel mills in the Beaver River and Ohio River valleys. I was probably about 10 years old before I understood how dirty things got because of all the pollution. I remember as a young child thinking that snow always turned black on top over night naturally.

Dad was always a bit of a tease. I very clearly remember my mother saying “Oh, Howard!” many, many times.

I’ll post this now but I’ll add memories as they come to me.

Comments?

Nikki’s Oral History Report on her Grandfather, Howard Emery

This is an oral history report my niece, Nikki, did for an English class in 1994.

She interviewed my Dad, her Granddad, Howard Emery, and wrote the report.

Oral History Report

by

Nicole Hare

1/3/94

(Nikki received a grade of 90)

Childhood Questions

What jobs did you have when you were young? What did you have to do?

Describe your family, your home and your neighborhood.

What were your parents like?

Was your dad anything like you are? (jokester)

How big was your family?

What were they like?

What things did you and your peers do and play?

Did you do any rotten things?

Did you and your peers do mean things to people?

Howard Benson Emery

Sixty-nine year old (born August 15, 1924)

Maternal grandfather of Nicole R. Hare

Howard had many different jobs when he was young. At one point he sold Cloverine Salve, delivered magazines door-to-door and had a paper route of daily and Sunday papers which made over one hundred papers. First he started out walking with papers in a big bag, then he got a wagon and then he graduated to a bicycle with saddlebags. Howard had this paper route the whole time through grade school until he went to high school.

In high school Howard got a job at a men’s dry goods store where he worked after school from 4 p.m. – 9 p.m. and all day Saturday from 9 a.m. – 9 p.m. He made $18.00 all week and back then that was considered a lot of money. Howard would give his mother $10.00 for board and would have $8.00 to spend all week. He was rich!

Because of a big family, Howard lived in a two-story house. It was a white house made of wood. The house had quite a large basement. Connected to the house was a verandah porch. The basement went under it and the rest of the house. In the basement under the verandah was the laundry room.

The neighborhood was called Allendale. In Allendale a country road of dirt runs through. There were only eleven houses. Most of the families were of four or five.

In the summer time at home he and his five brothers and sisters and his mother and father would work a big garden. They raised everything they ate. Howard’s dad would butcher three pigs every fall. They had their own chickens but they didn’t have their own cow so they had to buy milk and butter. The family grew corn, beans, tomatoes and cucumbers. His mother would can some food for the winter.

In the summer when the berries grew ripe, the family would go into the woods and pick blackberries. Howard’s mother would make blackberry jelly and jam. She would can a hundred quarts of blackberries and make pies so the family could eat blackberries in the winter.

Howard and one of his brothers once worked for a farmer all day long digging and made 50 cents for a day’s work.

While still in high school, Howard was drafted into the Army during World War II and served in the Pacific. He received many medals such as Good Conduct, Sharpshooter, the Bronze Star and The Asiatic Combat Ribbon with Arrowhead representing the beachhead on the island of Cebu in the Philippines.

After returning home, he worked in a men’s haberdashery for nine years.

Howard’s parents were nice parents, but strict. They were fair in punishments and were also church going people.

Howard’s dad, like Howard, was a jokester. If Howard would bring a girl home for Sunday dinner, his father would push his chair back and look at the girl and say, “Young lady, don’t you go home and say what you did last time you were here.” And she would say, “What’s that”? He’d say “Don’t go home and say we didn’t feed you.” Of course, she wouldn’t know what to say since this was her first visit.

Howard had quite a big family. There were six children, two girls and four boys. The girls are named Belva and Pat. The boys are Harold, Allen, Jr., Howard and William.

Howard’s brothers and sisters would fight a lot with each other, but also would stick up for one another against other people.

Howard, his brothers and sisters and peers played many different games together. Some were baseball and street hockey using tin cans. They didn’t have hockey clubs so they would have to go to the woods and cut down a tree. They had to find a branch that was shaped like a hockey stick and shave it down into a hockey stick.

With the girls he and his peers would play Rover, Rover Won’t You Come Over and Hide and Seek. Howard would try to hide with a pretty girl.

The boys would play cowboys and indians. Once they took some barbed wire and tied one of the boys pretending to be an indian to a tree. Everyone then forgot about him being tied up and went home for dinner. Later on they remembered he was still tied up to the tree and went back to free him. He was mad as a hornet, swore at them and then stalked off home. The boys were scolded by their parents and never again tied anyone to a tree.

This is a glimpse of what life was like in the 1930’s and 1940’s for my grandfather growing up in the country.