I remember my beloved mother as a self-sacrificing, conflicted, gentle, tough trooper who was a slave to her husband and six children, who comforted us in our childhood illnesses and injuries, made wrong-headed decisions, loved too well and died impoverished much too young at the hands of a clumsy surgeon at age 62 in 1957. My mother was a beautiful woman. The only true security I ever experienced in my 87 years was as a child wrapped in her arms.

            Married at 21, she brought six children into the world of the small college town of Northfield, Minnesota in rapid succession—Elaine, Jeanne, Mary, me, Fritz and later Nadia. She told us she had six abortions—that Dad gave her the money and put her alone on a train to Minneapolis. Better than a coat hanger I guess.

            Much to her dismay, we lived packed into a brand new, small, three-bedroom, one-bath house next door to my grandfather—his wedding gift. Grandmother insisted her son attend every Sunday evening supper next door, leaving my poor mother at the mercy of her kids.

            My father was a dreamer. His father put him into business at the Crystal fountain and candy store on Division Street. The business bellied up.

            To help out financially, Mom entered a contest sponsored by Bernarr McFadden, the physical fitness guru and won $100 for her entry, “With the Birth of Each of my Babies I Was Born Again.” The centerpiece of the above triptych is taken from Physical Culture magazine and displays her attractive figure.

            “Here am I, twenty-seven years of age and a ‘perfect thirty-six’ after six years of married life, during the course of which I have acquired four children. The fourth is a boy (me), nineteen months old.

           “My ‘special exercises’ can be described with one word, housekeeping, heavy, not light. At least it is heavy for a one hundred sixteen pounder. Cooking, sewing, cleaning, scrubbing, and last, but most important for the woman who wishes to keep her figure, the family wash.

            “My doctor tells me that I am as perfect physically as I was before marriage. So I am convinced that maternity should not spoil woman’s figure and neither should it alienate her husband’s love.”                         

            The photo on the right is my poor, worn out mother at age 48, four years after Dad dropped dead from a massive coronary, which forced her out of the house and into the business world. I had worked in his insurance agency since I was fourteen and helped support the family when I found his blue body in bed on my little sister Nadia’s birthday, November 9, 1938. I was a general insurance agent at seventeen and taught my mother the business while walking four years to college. She was a quick learner and highly successful, then, tragically, at the importuning of sister Jeanne, sold the business to the local bank and moved to San Francisco.                                                                                                     

           Back in Northfield after a few years in California, she was forbidden by the terms of sale to get back into the insurance business, so she clerked at several local stores, sold Watkins products door-to-door and eked out a meager living. Whenever she got a few extra dollars she immediately sent it to my sister Mary in Texas. Mary’s husband was an Army sergeant without enough pay to support a growing family.

My brother Fritz, back from World War II and heavy combat duty in Europe, built an apartment for her in the basement of the house, which was now occupied by my little sister Nadia, her assistant postmaster husband and their five children.

            My mother was dealt a lousy hand.

            My dad would rather play chess than tend to business, but he did get elected municipal court judge and pocketed “court costs” from traffic fines that poured into the town’s treasury from a speed trap. He once had the largest appliance business in Rice County and employed seven salesmen at the height of the 20s boom in refrigerators and console radios. That business failed in the early 1930s during the Great Depression.

            As the daughter of an underpaid Episcopalian minister, Andrew David Stowe, my mother never set foot inside the local All Saints Episcopal Church. To her, the principal activity of the congregation was agitating to get rid of the pastor—not to worship. To supplement his income, grandfather Stowe published Stowe’s Clerical Directory of the American Church—the who’s who of the Episcopal Church. When he died in 1926, Mother’s older sister Grace Stowe Fish took over the publication chore. Amazing Aunt Grace came to Mother’s rescue by helping her with the chore of raising six children.

            During the worst days of the depression we ate a lot of corn meal mush, rented the small den to a roomer. Mom and Dad earned a few dollars casting “sophisticated” horoscopes. We kids rented mystery books to college professors for two cents a day. Grandmother Blodgett bought books by the carton, devoured them and kept our front hall rental business well stocked.

            Looking back to childhood, I feel nothing but love, pity and guilt about my mother, because  I was unable to help her financially.

But I also recall magical times when Momma gathered us around the piano to sing. She kept us spellbound with her marvelous, inventive stories filled with villains and heroes. She was a master storyteller. The evenings ending as she played a sprightly song that sent us marching up the winding staircase to bed.

She was miscast. Her considerable musical and theatrical talents were wasted scrubbing the kitchen linoleum floor until her hands bled. I recall her black and blue right arm caught in the washing machine wringer. I was not able to be with her when she bled to death following a second operation for uterine cancer in 1957, but faithful brother Fritz was there and heard her calling out to her beloved Buzz as she lay dying.

            I am drawn to her small, marble grave marker every time I visit Northfield. The power mowers knocked a chip off one corner, and the weeds always need to be tended. Her grave site is fifty yards away from the large, imposing Blodgett headstone where Grandfather and Grandmother were buried in Oak Lawn Cemetery with its towering pine trees which my future wife and I climbed and clung to each other in the warm springtime of our life together 65 years ago.

            At 87, I remember my mother, more with sorrow and tears than with joy and laughter.