Today's Post Dedicated To My Mother On Her Birthday!

Aunt Edna & Uncle Eddie Chrzaszcz, Aunt Francis & Uncle Frank Harding, Hazel & Michael Dran

Today would have been my mother's 87th birthday. Yesterday would have been her sister, my Aunt Edna's 88th birthday. My mother died in 2002. And my aunt died on December 1st of this year, in a trailer fire with her son and my cousin, Michael. 

My parents got married on August 28, 1942 in Orlando, FL where my father was stationed in the US Army. He loved that time of his life. Now, at 91 years old, he talks about that time with such good memories. My mother had gone down to FL to marry him. They got married and she worked at the Vogue Theater as a cashier. In those days, she said the movie stars  came to the theater because of the war. They were boasting the morale of the servicemen who went to see their pictures. So she met a lot of the older stars when they came into the theater.

At Lake Eola, October 1942

Many of their photographs from Orlando were taken on this little bridge at Lake Eola. They spent a lot of their time fishing as that is something they both enjoyed and did often. Even as they were older until my mother could not do it anymore due to her health problems. She had become very sick with Cushing's Syndrome in 1978 and at that time, they removed her adrenal glands. It was do that or she'd die. Now I don't think they do that, but don't know for sure.She had been a very active woman, loving to fish and to swim the most. 

My mother & father in 1942.

My mother received an allotment check from the Army while my father was stationed there. He got really sick with ulcers and was in the hospital for a few months. He was so sick they told him not to get out of bed to salute the officers when they came through. Everyone else had to because most of them were trying to get out of the Army and weren't really sick. He didn't want to get out. But he ended up being discharged and sent home. 

Our first house on State Road in Binghamton.

My mother spent one of her allotment checks she received from the Army to buy a coat to wear on the train coming back to New York. Since she had worked the whole time she was in Florida, she had saved every one of those allotment checks. So they weren't home very long before they bought their first house. This is where we lived when both of us kids, Mickey in 1950, and me in 1952, were born. 

Mickey & me - he still dresses that way!

My parents were very thrifty and frugal. They were married for seven and a half years before they had children. They bought houses to fix up and then sell while they lived here. One house they bought for one dollar was an old school house. My father fixed it up and made it into a regular house, and put the blackboard into our house, I always remembered that blackboard! They fished all the time. Back then you could eat the fish you caught in the Susquehanna River. It was safe! Not like now. My father was a good hunter and hunted a lot. Plus, they foraged for berries and things in the woods and land around them. My mother knew a lot that she learned from my grandmother, who could find, grow or make food out of anything! 

katlupe

So that is just a little bit about my family. My family has changed since I had my child. My mother completely changed when he was born. I have to admit, I wish she had stayed the way she was. Being a grandmother seemed to bring something out of her that I had never seen before. I like to think of her the way she was when it was just the "four of us." 

Happy Birthday in heaven to Mom and Aunt Edna! I love you and miss you...........

Copyright © 2010  Kathleen G. Lupole

All Photographs Copyright © 2010  Kathleen G. Lupole