The Grandmothers I Never Knew

Have you ever been asked, “If you could meet someone from the past, who would it be?”

Most people pick someone famous.

This question is so easy for me. I would meet Julia and Edith, my grandmothers. They both died in their mid-40’s from cancer, when my parents were teenagers, long before I was born.

What I know of their lives is just incredible. They came from two completely different worlds, but they both persevered, and were determined and creative in finding opportunities to make their children’s lives better than their own.

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My mother’s mother, Julia, left Czechoslovakia at age 17 with her sister, Susanna, and mentally impaired brother, Paulo, who they thought would have a better life in America. I can’t begin to imagine being on a boat crossing the Atlantic.

She settled in Philadelphia and met my grandfather. He fell in love with her dialect, it was the same as the village from where his mother had come.

They worked hard and saved up to buy a brownstone building, on a street in a quaint neighborhood of Philadelphia.

As I grew up, my mother never exactly disparaged her own mother, but she did not share any fond memories of her with us. She felt her mother highly favored her two brothers, and her mother made her work morning to night cleaning the brownstone building they were able to purchase. She spoke of her rather factually, and I think she appreciated her mother’s work ethic and real estate sense.

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My father’s mother, Edith, grew up in a farm community in Iowa. She earned her college degree, and with that distinction, she automatically became the local schoolteacher.

She and my grandfather were a successful team running their farm in a little town called Zion, located in the southwest corner of Iowa. My grandmother also raised chickens and used the money to buy savings bonds for her 4 children to go college. It was most common then to tell girls they did not need a college education because they would get married and stay at home.

But she was insistent that all of her children would go to college and get a degree.

Side note: my aunt told me that when her mother was teaching, there were so many kids named John and Mary. She was determined she would give her children unusual names.

So she did!

Landis, Coyla, Arden, Kathryn, and Arla Marie (who died as a baby).

She was also benevolent in her community, making sure that every local child had a warm coat for the severe Iowa winters.

When she went into the hospital after discovering she had breast cancer, she wrote a letter every single day to my grandfather, reminding him that their children were to go to college.

She died in her mid-forties. All four of her children did go to college, and they all got advanced degrees.

My father absolutely adored his mother. Whenever he spoke of her, his voice would crack with emotion.

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I have always been in awe of these 2 women. They were both determined and worked hard, and passed that work ethic onto their children.

I would love to have known both of them.

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