My great-grandmother was a formidable woman. She bore a dozen children, eight of whom made it to adulthood. Not long after the last child, she was widowed and her older children took on the chores of running the family farm. One by one, they left to start their own families. A few years later, she advised them that she was selling the farm and would spend the rest of her life living with them. And so she did, spending a few months with each of the five who were married.
As the years passed, she gravitated more and more to my grandfather, her oldest son. Whether that was because some of the others lacked the resources to keep her or whether their spouses objected or whether great-grandmother’s dominant personality sparked friction, or all of the above, family history is blurred. But I was told by my mother that her grandmother held strong and vocal opinions on every topic and treated her offspring in their 40s the same as she must have treated them in their childhood. My grandmother, her daughter-in-law, somehow coped with her husband’s mother, and also his brothers and sisters who descended on the oldest brother whenever they encountered hard times.
Great-grandmother was a very religious person, insisting that she be taken to church twice on Sunday and any other time the doors were open. In one sense, it was her only activity, her only occasions to get out of the house, and her source of information about the activities and misdeeds of the neighbors. These were the years before radio became the prevailing source of information and entertainment. So the church social was the center of information and entertainment. She found others who agreed with her assessment that the next generation was well on the road to perdition. By now, these were the early 1920s. Women’s hemlines rose from their ankles to their mid-thighs. Some of them smoked, drank strong beverages, drove recklessly, danced wildly and almost certainly behaved impiously in other ways. Because great-grandmother and her set did not go to dances and parties, all of this may have been hearsay, but they believed it implicitly and denounced the concepts and their execution. She was particularly concerned about her grandson, who played a saxophone in a dance band.
About 1925 or so, great-grandmother developed a heart murmur. The family physician, Dr. Rudd, made the diagnosis and told her that she needed medication to control the problem. Then, he asked my grandfather for a private word.
Digitalis was just becoming available. But it was very expensive and Dr. Rudd knew that the family could not afford it. The more affordable and reliable alternative was a couple of ounces of bourbon whiskey a day, said the doctor.
“Mother is dead set against any kind of whiskey,” said her son. “She would never agree to this. She never had a drink in her life.”
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