When she was 13 her mom, Greta, passed away from tuberculosis. I'm not sure how long she had it, but she did spend time in sanitariums. So between that, and her father traveling a lot with the Clyde line, they had nurses to take care of the kids. One of the nurses is the one who gave her brothers nicknames which stuck for life. Louis became Jack and John became Billy. Billy had St. Vitus's Dance (likely from rheumatic fever) as a kid and was very sickly. To beef him up, his brother got him into rowing, and they raced with clubs on the Hudson. Billy excelled at the single sculls. Billy was a lefty and the nuns used to smack his hand with a ruler to get him to use his right had. Greta was less than 5 feet tall, but went to the school and gave them a piece of her mind.
My mom stayed with relatives frequently, especially down in Charleston. Since Louis worked for the Clyde line, he could get her passage on one of their ships. She said once one of the sailors got his eye pecked out by a seagull. She sometimes took her friend Ruth Worsnop (later Ruth Fink) who lived on Shaler Ave too. One Sunday they decided to go to church. So they walk into a church and didn't even notice, not only that it wasn't a Catholic church, but that they were the only two whites in the church. She did talk about playing with the family's servants who lived behind the house in Charleston. Back home, Billy had a Henry J automobile and sometimes he would charge my mom and Ruth 25 cents for a ride around the block. He would use that to put gas in his car, so he could get around after he gave them a quick ride. At some point he was in a wreck between two trucks and the Henry J was so sturdy that he was able to walk away.
After Greta passed, my mom said she spent time living with the Worsnops, but her sister in law said it was more her choice than anything she had forced on her. She certainly did not get along with Marguerite Honer (who owned part or all of their house), her aunt, and claimed that Marguerite stole a lot of Greta's things when Greta passed. I always found Marguerite to be cold.
My mom went to Grover Cleveland High School but didn't finish. Not sure if she went to work or got married first. She married Bill Bayer in 1938 and they lived next to his parents. Bill taught my mom to drive a stick. She worked for a reinsurance company as a clerk, but had met Mary O'Flaherty in high school and thereby introduced to Bill. Bill was a FDNY fireman. Somehow he got bbn into financial difficulty and was faced with bankruptcy, so instead he hung himself at home. Bankruptcy was a big social stigma and would be a blow to any future opportunities. His sister Mary (O'Flaherty) w as pregnant with her son John at the time and was the one who found him. Possibly due to the shock to her system, but more likely due to genetic, John had behavioral and addiction problems his whole life.
My father was assigned to Engine 304 in Queens Village, about a mile from Mary and John Vincent O'Flaherry's house.
After they got married, they had a honeymoon in the Poconos. My parents bought a house at 89-33 238th Street in Bellerose, Queens, which was close to his firehouse. When I was 5, we moved to 121 Morris Dr, East Meadow, out in Nassau County. We had a 54 blue Chevrolet BelAir. Later replaced it with a black 1963 Chevy BelAir, and that with a green '72 Buick LeSabre.
Mom was a huge fan of the Yankees. That was the only sport either of my parents followed. My father had no interest. Down in our basement, my father built a bar and my Mom had bobble heads of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris on it's back shelf. She also had their pictures on the wall as well as a big black and white glossy of the 1949 Yankees. She would take us to Yankee Stadium as soon as we could sit still in a seat. She always told of a guy sitting in front of us complaining because my feet were touching his seat. My legs were too short to bend over the end of my seat. She had LPs of Babe Ruth's and Lou Gehrig's farewell speeches. When the Yanks were in the World Series, she would even sit in the bleachers if she could get a ticket. We all always kept the box score during the game in our programs, even if we threw them out after.
She also took us to Broadway plays - always musicals, My Fair Lady with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, Carousel, and others. She also liked to go to the movies at Radio City Music Hall, with the Rockettes show included. We also took trips into the city to go to the Natural History Museum, Empire State Building, Fraunces Tavern, Hayden Planetarium, and take the Circle Line tour and sometimes eat lunch in fancy places like the Top of the Sixes.
At Christmas she baked dozens of mostly butter cookies that she gave away in metal tins as gifts. For dinners she never ruined a meal and served mostly roasts, steaks, chops, fish, seldom chicken, all fairly hearty meals since my Dad worked hard. She was an avid reader and belonged to three different book clubs that shipped books every month. We had bookshelves throughout the basement from floor to ceiling. She encouraged us to develop hobbies, some which took...most didn't, but got us in the habit of trying different things to find our interests. Even when we lost interest, she kept up our stamp and coin collections. We played cards and board games fairly often - especially Rummy Royal, which is actually both a card and board game. She taught us poker, rummy, blackjack, solitaire and shuffling the deck.
She loved her rose bushes and had at least 10 or 12 of them in the back, front and side yards. Drove her crazy when I planted a gourd in the middle of the back yard and the tendrils wrapped themselves around anything within 10 feet. She encouraged my sister and I to pick a favorite tree on our property. I had a hawthorne and Margaret had a pine tree. Later I got seeds in 4th grade and planted a mimosa in the middle of the front yard. We also tried our hands at growing tomatoes, green beans, and carrots. The tomatoes came out great, but the carrots were tiny.
In the summer we would go up to the O'Flaherty's bungalow in Smallwood, NY in the Catskills. We would swim in White Lake. The bungalow only had an outhouse. All the kids slept on beds on one side of the house, wall to wall beds. The adults slept on the other side in another room in similar fashion. My father hated it. There was a farm in the back and the cow pasture backed up to the property. The pasture was pretty swampy and covered in cow pies, so we didn't spend too much time back there. Across the street were dense woods with blackberry and raspberry bushes and crabapple trees. We ate a lot of berries. Next door, Mary O'Flaherty's mother had a much nicer bungalow, but most of the time she stayed their with her boyfriend, leaving Pappy Bayer at home. The bungalow we stayed in had a screened in porch and we would play 45 RPM rock and roll records on a record player out there.
Later our vacations centered around history - battlefields, forts, restored villages like Mystic Seaport and Williamsburg, museums. We got in the habit of reading the cards at every display instead of just breezing through the museums.
My parents threw a lot of parties and sometimes every Saturday night they would be at a party at a different house of their friends and brothers. They called it the Bottle Club, because everyone brought their own bottle and the host provided snacks. In there morning there wasn't much left in those bottles. The smoke level in our basement from the cigarettes was about 3 feet off the floor and the room smelled like ashes, stale beer and liquor. Both my parents smoked. My father smoked Camels until around 1966, then switched to cigars - Muriel Coronellas and probably went through 10 a day. My mother smoked Winston cigarettes. I tried them once...most foul tasting cigarette ever, even worse than Marlboro.
About when I finished college, my parents were looking forward to doing some travelling around 1974. My Mom went down to Florida to visit with Uncle Robbie and Aunt Jean. They took her to the Yankee's spring training. Later I found out that they noticed that she was having trouble following directions; they would point out something on the left and she would look right. A year later, my parents took a trip to California and often times, my father would lose sight of her and find her sitting in the car. About a year and a half after that, after I moved out, gotten married, started travelling with work, and going for my MBA, and I hadn't been able to visit; I took time off and went over in the middle of the day and noticed things were off. Her conversation was limited, her sweater was shrunken and I knew something was wrong. I took her over to Nassau County Medical Center to get her assessed. That started a whole round of tests, which never were conclusive. We are pretty sure now that it was early onset Alzheimers.
She was a big fan of Englebert Humperdink and played his LPs over and over, which got more obsessive as her mental state degraded.. She was also always the one who paid the bills. Once I pointed out her mental state to my father, he found that she had been paying credit notices and that his cable TV was paid up for two years in advance. She started hallucinating that Englebert came to visit her and was down the street. Even once she lost the ability to put together sentences, she was able to sing along with old songs. My father kept her home throughout her decline when she finally passed in August of 1978.
