A work in progress

I am trying to create family stories that I can self publish and give to my children, nieces, and nephews and have been working on this all summer.  Below is a draft of part of work.  It is part of the story of my grandmother.  I wrestle with what to include and what to leave out.  So here is a bit of it.

Isabella Whitney, our grandmother on the farm, was born in 1895.  She became a teacher when you didn’t need a college education to do that.  One day she and another teacher were having trouble with a class.  They were in the school theater and took one boy aside and asked him to do some acting with them.  They were going to make noises, and he had to scream like he was being whipped.  At the end he needed to rejoin the group with a contrite look on his face.  They smacked their hands, and he screamed in pain before rejoining the group, and the rest of the day went well.  This was a time when women could not be married and be a teacher.  She was not married, but some of her colleagues were.  They had to live far away from where they taught to hide their marriages.  But they did it because they needed the work and money or because they loved working with kids.

She bought a car in the 1920’s, a dodge.  A woman buying her own car.  She said that she remembered test driving it on Kingshighway where there was a hill that could be used to test the brakes. She was in favor of women getting the right to vote.  She had to wait until she was 25 to do that.  She said that she voted in every election that she could once she was given that right. And all her votes were for democrats.  She particularly disliked Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat.

Isabella went to Normal School (later named Southeast Missouri State University) in Cape Girardeau to learn about being a teacher.  There she met Albert Wallach, her future husband.  She would sneak out at night to meet him.  One time they were spotted sitting on some big rocks near what is now the student union, and she had to run.  She was wearing a red sweater, and they started looking for a girl who had a red sweater.  She had to hide that sweater to avoid getting caught.  She snuck out by propping open the window in the basement of her dormitory, Lemming Hall.  There were some steps that led to a closed door and she would sit on those steps outside in her bare feet and peek her head back in through the window when it was noticed that she was missing. She would act like she had been there all along.  She and Albert enjoyed time together in Cape Girardeau, but when the school term was over they did not continue to see each other.  She said that she was a city girl, and he lived in the country.  At the time, that was not for her.  The two of them met again at the end of World War I.  She was sitting in the city and saw him get off a bus in his uniform.  She made contact, their friendship was reignited, and then they were married. 

Isabella always made Christmas cookies. They were “the cookies” and they would arrive in a tin with a piece of apple on the top to keep the cookies fresh and moist.  It didn’t matter how far the cookies had to travel, they arrived with the apple.  Sometimes the apple slice would be moldy, but that didn’t hurt the flavor.  After the cookies were eaten, you had to return her tin.  If you didn’t, you would not get cookies the next year. 

Isabella was the youngest of 7 children.  Her father was a St. Louis police officer and he would walk the beat, carrying a stick that he would hit on the pavement – the beat.  He died when she was two, of pneumonia.  He got it after a shift in the cold rain.  Her mother Bridget supported the family by opening a small store.  They lived upstairs and the store was downstairs.  Her closest sister was Helen, and we got to know her well.  When we would visit the farm in the summer, there was always a Whitney reunion.  The grownups would drink beer and whiskey sours.  Aunt Helen and Grandma Isabella would have a couple of beers and then they would get silly.  One year, they came down in their swimming suits ready to go for a swim, maybe in the pond and pranced around being silly.  They knew how to have fun.  They liked to travel together, organizing trips that their husbands would take them on.  They were sisters and friends. 

There is always one sibling in the family who moves away and in Isabella’s family it was her sister Mary Agnes.  Mary Agnes moved to California with her husband George. This would have happened in the early 1900's.   He was not Catholic.  Helen and Isabella, who were both very devout Catholics, went to visit their sister after children were born so that they could secretly get their nieces and nephews baptized in the Catholic Church.

Throughout her life, Isabella was a very independent woman.  She was the organizer of her family and a bit of a controller.  She sometimes boycotted weddings that were not held “in the church” and expected everyone else to follow her lead.   Isabella was not very happy that her son married a non-Catholic woman.  From time to time, they had a difficult relationship.

One trait that this family nurtured was stubbornness. “You can’t tell a Wallach what to do.” We were all allowed to do our own thing. Her son did his own thing and married someone out of the faith.  She did her thing and made sure we knew how to be Catholic.  When we visited we said our nightly prayers before bed, stayed after mass to light candles, and learned how to say the rosary.