My late grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Rosenberg, who died at 98, was a calm and generally unflappable school teacher born in 1888 near Minsk, Russia. Her parents emigrated to the USA for better opportunities here when she was six months old. Born Mary Marholin, she self-adopted a middle name because, as she told me, so many of her Irish immigrant schoolmates had Elisabeth as a middle name.
She visited me in a dream last night while I was considering what we should do to survive four years of an angry, despotic president elected by the slimmest of margins.
Empathy, patience, and perseverance, she said, reminding me that she had lived through many twists and turns in history, surviving 18 different presidents, some of them brilliant, some of them ordinary and disreputable; and two world wars.
Benjamin Harrison (1889-93), Grover Cleveland (1893-97), William McKinley (1897-1901), Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09), William Howard Taft (1909-13), Woodrow Wilson (1913-21), Warren Harding (1921-23), Calvin Coolidge (1923-29) Herbert Hoover (1929-33), Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45), Harry S. Truman (1945-53), Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61), John F. Kennedy (1961-63), Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69), Richard Nixon (1969-74), Gerald Ford (1974-77), James Carter (1977-81), Ronald Reagan (1981-89). While elections are always in even years, the term starts in January, of the following year.
A voracious reader and good student, she went to teachers' college and taught for 55 years, 35 of them in the same grade at the same school. She then worked as a substitute for more than a decade until declining eyesight and age made it impossible. Her optimism rarely faltered in front of her grandchildren. She lost a daughter to the 1918 flu epidemic but had two more daughters, timing her pregnancies so that the births would be in May or June as the school year was ending.
Like many immigrants to the USA, she worked hard and kept her focus. Teaching meant an income during the Depression. She was fortunate that her son and son-in-law - my dad - both served in and survived World War Two.
With humor, a letter penned in her splendid Spencerian handwriting, took note of inflation, well aware that her salary as a teacher had increased along with her wise investments in electric utility stocks.
"I shopped for steak for your grandfather's dinner, but it cost $1.32 a pound, so I told the butcher I did not have a safe in which to store it and declined."
Reading a Daniele Steele romance novel in her mid-80s, she said if she had known what the story said was possible, her life might have been different. Her sense of humor never dimmed. However, the fact that she had outlived so many family members and friends, and is now nearly blind, made her grumpy in her final years.
In her eulogy, I reminded mourners in 1987 that she taught us what working women could accomplish in an America then still locked in patriarchy.
Empathy for others, patience in organizing, and perseverance in opposition to bad policies will still work in this century…..A grandmother’s advice.
By: Kenneth Tiven