Mom’s 100th

Today, September 4, 2019, would have been our mother’s 100th birthday. Marjorie Ann Kay Whalen had a short life–she died just weeks before turning 50–but a full one. She was a wife, mother of six, a part-time bookkeeper, and a registered nurse who later taught nursing.

It is difficult for a child to really know a parent until he or she becomes full grown as well. Our family didn’t have that chance. Our eldest, Charlie, was only 22 when Mom died, and he spent the last couple of years of her life away in the Army. Each of us knows a few anecdotes, of course. Here are a few little things I know about the person Margie Whalen was.

She had a little scar on her forehead. That was from meeting the business end of a snow shovel when she was about eight years old. At twelve, Mom was run over by a car while walking home from a baseball game. That’s why she was always nervous and constantly reminding us to, “Watch the cars!” as we walked home through our own school parking lot after watching Patrick catch a high school game.

Mom was a little rebellious as a teen. When short hair came into vogue and she wanted to get a bob,  her parents said no. She came home with the style anyway. She was heavy as a kid, too, but when advised by her mom to choose a more slimming dress for some dance, she refused. She wore the dress she’d picked out, yellow, with ruffle after ruffle. Gram said her older sister, our Aunt Mary, had the opposite problem. She was stick thin. Mary wore a narrow, white dress that only accentuated her skinny figure. Gram said if the girls had only switched dresses they both would have looked fine, but she could not get them to do it.

Even though Mom had a serious illness when she was 16, she stayed active in sports. We have photos of her on the 1934 and 1935 high school basketball teams. She may have been the shortest player, at only five feet tall, but she was voted 1935 team captain just the same.

Mom was smart in school. She skipped grades and graduated early, in the same class as Aunt Mary. In later years Mom would say that was a mistake though, she could not go on to nursing school until she was 18, so her future was stalled for a year and without much to do. She kept books during the wait for a yacht club and a marina.

Mom persevered in her promises. When she was a teen, she took “the Pledge.” That was a promise, made during a ceremony in the church, to abstain from alcohol until she was 21 years old. She kept the promise. When she told me about it, she said it was hard, as the other kids would try to tease her into taking a drink, but, she said she’d made a pledge and she was going to keep it. And she succeeded. She didn’t drink any alcohol until her 21st birthday.

Mom’s Catholic heritage informed other parts of her life too. When I asked her about a relative’s racist remarks, she said, “She should know better! No Catholic should have prejudice against anybody! Doesn’t she remember what it was like for Catholics not so long ago?”

Mom was patriotic, adventurous, and persistent. When World War II started, she tried to enlist in the WAVES. While preparing for the entrance physical, she tried every stretching technique she could think of to increase her height, including hanging off a bar for as long as possible. Nothing worked. She was turned down because she was too short.

A very interesting part of her life–and one I am presently researching*–was her work with German POWs who were held at Fort Niagara from 1944 to 1946. I suspect Mom worked in the medical office as she had already graduated from nursing school. In discussing that time, Mom taught me a life lesson. I, a naive young girl, had asked how could she work with “the enemy.” She told me, “Oh, those men were not enemies anymore, they were prisoners of war. We were trained to treat them with dignity and respect, and we did. After all, they were soldiers a long way from home, just like our guys were. We treated them like we would want ours to be treated.”

* Subsequent to this original post, we found Mom’s War Department Civilian Personnel employment record. She was indeed employed at Ft. Niagara just before war’s end. Click or tap here to see the entire record. 

I wish I’d had mor time with my mother. I wish I knew more about who she really was. I wish I could have known her as adults know each other. I wish I could have seen her looking back, laughing at this or that of our growing up years. I wish I could have helped her as she grew old. Oh sure, I’m grateful for the time we did have–but I wish…