my mom Archives - Page 11 of 16 - Ramblin' with Roger

Hyperplastic polyps, and other things

It has rained every day for the past couple weeks in Albany, NY.

This is a picture of my mother’s class (kindergarten or first grade, from the 1933 date). Can you find her? My, they all look so sullen. I mean, I know it’s the Depression and all, but dang.

In that TMI category, there were a couple of polyps removed from my colon in late June. They were hyperplastic, a term I had never heard/seen before. This means that not only are they BENIGN, but they also do NOT turn into cancer. Compare this with polyps that are adenoma type, also BENIGN, but need monitoring. Not to mention outcomes that could have been worse. So I won’t bore you with my colonoscopy tales for another decade.

If it wasn’t for people such as Doug Englebart, I wouldn’t be communicating with you. The tools he helped develop in computing are used today on the Internet. I started watching the lengthy video here from 1968(!). At about 19 minutes in, he’s essentially describing the hyperlink; at 30 minutes, the computer mouse; later, Google.

I knew Google RSS feed reader was going away. Now I get an e-mail from Bloglovin every day – found it easier for me than some of the others that were suggested, such as Feedly.

There was so much to write about the Supreme Court cases in June. Yet the only thing I could muster was a piece in my other blog that the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is only partially dead, i.e., Section 3, while Section 2 survives. Those widespread news reports saying otherwise were wrong.

I actually started writing a piece on how crazy Justice Antonin Scalia was in the month of June, but I just lost my mojo for it. Mark Evanier put it well: “I don’t understand a lot of the logic behind [the] rulings on Gay Marriage. Scalia’s dissent in the overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act reads to me like the rebuttal to his support the day before in the castration of the Voting Rights Act;” that’s about right. SCOTUS voted 9-0 on the gene patent case, correctly, to my mind, but Scalia’s “reasoning” was bizarre. Yet I actually agreed with the rebuttal of the Supreme Court’s support for DNA testing of arrestees.

Arthur, rightly, was complaining a few weeks ago about the immigration reform bill Marco Rubio (R-FL) co-sponsored but threatened to kill it if gave gay couples immigration rights. So I found it quite entertaining that, as a result of part of the Defense of Marriage Act being struck down, a US citizen who is married to a non-American of the same gender will be able to sponsor his or her spouse for immigration in exactly the same way that legally married opposite-gender couples can. And the first couple approved by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services is from…Florida. Was that REALLY a coincidence?

When I feel discouraged about the body politic, I realize I need to find and read this book: The American Heroes of Social Justice.

Need to wish a belated happy 25th anniversary to Denise Nesbitt, the progenitor of ABC Wednesday, and her husband Jon.

At some point, it has rained every day for the past couple of weeks in Albany, NY. It doesn’t bother me as much as it does others, based on the whining in social media, though it HAS been difficult to mow the wet grass. Now some local towns around here suffered sudden, severe flooding; THOSE people can complain. Still, I prefer it to the arid 100F+ (38C+) temperatures out in the western US.
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I’m reading The 10 nerdiest jokes of all time, and this one made me literally LOL, with the intro, “Is there ever a wrong moment to make an existential funny?”

“Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress, ‘I’d like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream.’ The waitress replies, ‘I’m sorry, Monsieur, but we’re out of cream. How about with no milk?'”

Vegetable washing, poultry killing, EJ shoes, Glida Corp, and my mom

Endicott Johnson was one of the fairer employers of the period, as the title of Professor Zahavi’s 1988 book Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoemakers and Tanners of Endicott Johnson, 1890-1950, would suggest.

This is a photo of my mom, Gertrude Williams (later Green), that I have never seen before this week, behind the counter, in front of the scales to the left. My sister Marcia found it and put it on her Facebook page.

Apparently, my mom told my sisters that she worked at something called the Glida Corporation from the time she was 16 for four or five years, and this, apparently, is from there.

There is an obscured chart to the right about Endicott- Johnson, the shoe company that was huge in the Binghamton, NY area, and its sales for the 12 months ending November something, of $142,029,121.32.

So I wrote to Professor Gerald Zahavi, who is a UAlbany professor mentioned in the Wikipedia bibliography. He has written a history of the Endicott-Johnson Corporation, which is publicly available. Specifically, he compiled an appendix, which notes that the sales in 1947 match the numbers on the board. This would mean my mom would have just turned 20 in November 1947, and the picture was taken shortly thereafter, certainly in cold weather, based on the apparel.

Professor Zahavi also notes that there were E-J food markets in the area. Was this one of them, run by Glida, and subsidized by E-J? And if not, why would Glida be selling food, and noting E-J’s earnings? At this point, I have no idea.

What I found about the Glida Corporation is at a funky site called Fulton history. Glida made canvas products, such as parachutes, during WWII, and was a peacetime manufacturer of “light fabric bags and baby clothing;” it went bankrupt in the early 1950s, after making some questionably ethical decisions, if I’m reading things correctly.

On the other hand, Endicott Johnson was one of the fairer employers of the period, as the title of the professor’s 1988 book Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoemakers and Tanners of Endicott Johnson, 1890-1950, would suggest. The Wikipedia notes: “When asked why no attempt had been made to organize E-J workers, [labor organizer Samuel] Gompers said that E-J already gave workers more than unions had achieved elsewhere.”

And who took the picture? At least a couple of people in the photo (the boy to the left, the woman to the right) are aware of the photographer.

Anyone with info about the Glida Corportation or the EJ food markets, please share!

My mom’s first year as a mother

“I don’t know why you kids fight. You’re so lucky! I never had a brother or sister. If *I* had had a sibling, we would have gotten along.”

My sister Marcia sent me via Facebook a whole slew of photos at the end of March. I’d seen most of them at one point, but it had been years. They’re great to see.

This is a picture of my mom, with her eldest child, who is yours truly. It appears that she is filled with unbridled joy, which is lovely, of course. The thing is that I didn’t think of her in that way. I considered her a bit of a worrier.

Partly, I think this was a function of her working outside the home at a time when that was not the norm. Perhaps it was the thought of leaving her son, and, eventually, her two daughters with her somewhat crazy mother.

It was also, though, that she, as an only child, did not understand the fact that siblings have disagreements. Many times, she dragged out this particular speech: “I don’t know why you kids fight. You’re so lucky! I never had a brother or sister. If I had had a sibling, we would have gotten along.” I think she actually believed this. Of course, because she WAS an only, she had ZERO credibility with this logic. (My father was an only as well, but I never heard him say this.)

Still, I thought she was a pretty good mom, though I’m not convinced SHE thought so. She probably fretted, like many parents do (including me) about whether she had any idea about what she was doing.
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Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms, including my wife and my mother-in-law.

It would have been mom and dad’s 63rd anniversary

In the late 1960s, my mother took to wearing a red wig, which made her look even more fair-skinned.

Did I mention that I was always appreciative of the fact that my parents were wed in 1950? It was always easy to remember how long they had been married; the math was easy. I was a five-day-early third anniversary present to them, my mother used to say.

I wish I could find this particular photo of my parents on their wedding day. Actually, there are a couple of them. One is of them cutting the cake, which is nice. The other, though, was one taken in the living room of my maternal grandmother. There’s the smiling, happy couple, plus Mom’s mother Gert, her aunt Deana, her uncle Ed, and her Uncle Ernie, all looking sullen. Also in the photo, Ernie’s wife Charlotte, looking like myopic people sometimes looked in photos, and their kids, Raymond, ten years to the day younger than my mother, and Frances, looking mildly bored as tweens (a term that didn’t exist then) were wont to do.

Fran was interviewed in 2005, as I noted here in 2010. Fran believed that my grandma’s family’s resistance to my father was because of his skin color. They were rather light-skinned black people, especially Deana and my mom, who probably could have passed for white.

Fran said: “My family on my father’s side was very much impacted by the racial notion of the time, so they liked it that my father married my mother because she was white. That was, you know, really acceptable. When my cousin Gertie — Trudy [my mom], they call her now — started to date the man who eventually became her husband, Les Green [my father], he was deemed too dark for the family. And I think my father and my Uncle Ed had to intervene and say, Listen, I’m not going to be able to ever speak to you again unless you stop this nonsense.”

The Yates clan eventually lived with the marriage, especially after the children came, but there was always hostility between my father and his mother-in-law, with my mother as the uncomfortable DMZ. I thought that it was the fact that he lived in a house that she owned, and that was an affront to his manhood, and that could have been part of it. But I’ve since realized it was also the lack of her acceptance of him. My sisters and I remember this to this day, although it happened at least 45 years ago: We’re eating dinner, and somebody asks my grandma if she wanted any peas; she replied, “I’ll have a couple.” My father, seated nearest to her, and the peas, proceeded to put TWO peas on her plate. (And people call ME a literalist.)

In the late 1960s, my mother took to wearing a red wig, which made her look even more fair-skinned. My favorite story from that period: My father was on a business trip to San Francisco, and my mother went along. While the guys were doing business, the wives were at lunch chatting about the issues of the day. Eventually, something about race came up. One woman said, “What do you think, Trudy?” My mother replied, “Being a black woman…” Apparently, the next sound heard was a bunch of jaws dropping.

Even after my mother came up to Albany to see my daughter, and visited my church, at least one member thought my mother was white, even though he had abandoned the wig decades earlier. This was, of course, after my father had died.

My parents were married 50 years, and 2 days shy of 5 months.

Photo of my parents and me – great shot of the back of my head – at my 1992 graduation from library school at UAlbany; taken by either Zoe Nousiainen or Jennifer Boettcher.

F is for Family

I was 51 when I had my daughter, only a year younger than my father was when he had his first GRANDCHILD. So who IS this old man with this little kid?

Rose wrote, in response to my post P is for (Helicopter) Parenting, that it was the first time I had written about family. This surprised me, initially, because I’ve gone on about my daughter every month on the 26th of the month, without fail. In fact, it was one of the two purported reasons I STARTED this blog back in 2005, the other being to tell the JEOPARDY! story.

I’ve written about my wife at least twice a year, on our anniversary and her birthday. My late parents I’ve discussed on the anniversaries of their births and deaths, and my sisters on their respective birthdays.

It’s true, though, that I’ve seldom written about them for ABC Wednesday. Here, then, a summary.

My parents both grew up in Binghamton, New York, a small city near the Pennsylvania border. They were both only children, so I have no direct aunts, uncles, or first cousins. Anyone I have called cousins are either my parents’ cousins, or their children. So we have a very small tribe.

My parents met cute, with my father delivering flowers to 13 Maple Street when they were intended for 13 Maple Avenue in Binghamton. Though Trudy initially thought Les was a bit full of himself – probably accurately, from what I’ve been told by others – they ended up getting married on March 12, 1950.

My mother had a miscarriage in April 1951. I always thought that was why my father was a little…distant…when I was born five days shy of their third anniversary. I was named for no one; my father just liked that my initials, ROG spelled out a shortened version of my name.

I found it interesting that when my sister came along in July of 1954, my father named HER for him, Leslie. (This caused me all sorts of complications. People knew my family had a child named Leslie and assumed that it was MY name, and some guys in church called me Little Les, which WAS NOT MY NAME, and to which I refused to respond.) It was also confusing when we’d get phone calls; my father was Les, and my sister became Leslie Ellen.

My sister Marcia was born in May 1958. We all went to school at Daniel Dickinson, staying at my maternal grandma’s house at lunch.

My parents and Marcia moved to Charlotte, NC in 1974. Leslie and I kidnapped my grandmother and brought her to Charlotte by train in January of the next year. She used coal for heat in Binghamton, and going up and down those rickety cellar steps in her mid-70s was not an option. She died in Charlotte on Super Bowl Sunday, 1983, but is buried in Binghamton, less than two blocks from her former home.

My father died of prostate cancer on August 10, 2000, less than 18 months after he arranged the flowers for my marriage to Carol Powell. I’ve long been sad that he never got to meet my daughter Lydia, who was born about three and a half years later.

Once I figured out how to put pictures into Blogger – I READ THE MANUAL and still couldn’t figure it out – I used to put pictures of the Daughter all the time. At some point in the past two years, though, my wife expressed concern about my daughter’s pictures appearing in this blog. It’s for that reason, not my own, that I’ve limited the number of her photographic appearances here.

Frankly, I don’t agree. I thought by having her picture out here it would make her well enough recognizable that she would be LESS likely to…well, whatever scenario the Wife was envisioning.

At the same time, I also thought it was better for ME – some public photographic proof, or at least indication, that she was my daughter, in case the cops ever stopped us. MY paranoia is a function of the fact that I was 51 when I had her, only a year younger than my father was when he had his first GRANDCHILD. So who IS this old man with this little kid?

I remember the utility worker who first asked if she were my granddaughter. I used to be miffed, but now accept the reality.

My mom died, reasonably suddenly, in February 2011. I got an outpouring of caring, from Jaquandor, Arthur, plus many in the ABC Wednesday community. Oddly, it wasn’t a post about my mother’s passing, but a post about going down to visit my mom after her stroke that triggered the comments, which, even as I write this, make me teary-eyed, not just with missing my mom, but of all the support I received at the time.

So there you be: my family. Well, except for my two nieces, Rebecca, Leslie’s daughter, and Alexandria, Marcia’s daughter. Oh, my mom’s three granddaughters are each separated by about a dozen years – Becky, Alex, and Lydia, in that order. Glad Lydia got to meet my mom, and vice versa.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12