Mildred

Mildred holding daughter Elle

Mildred was the surviving oldest daughter of two German immigrants. Whatever took her parents early in her adulthood left her to parent her four younger siblings (one sister and three brothers) alone. Mildred’s extended family was a mix of refined well to do and working class steel workers. Somehow she got sorted into the working class part of the family. She worked as a seamstress in a factory sewing the zippers into men’s pants. She sewed at this same job until she retired in her fifties. What a task it must have been working and caring for her siblings in the midst of the depression.

Mildred married a man and had one daughter, Elle. Mildred added Elle to her siblings as she tackled the task of providing. Mildred’s stormy marriage was short lived and her young husband disappeared one day never to be heard of again. As Elle grew she recalled seeing only one faint photo of her real father. Mildred destroyed all reminders of him and erased him from their lives. All Elle had from her father was her last name- Reedy.  Many years later through extensive investigation, Elle found out that he was of Scottish descent.

Elle as a Baby

Mildred later remarried a man named George which became a popular family name. She had a brother, nephew and cousins all named George so her husband somehow acquired the nickname of Dutch.  Dutch joined the men of the family every day in the steel mills. They lived in a small, narrow city row house built around 1880 for which they paid cash- no mortgage. The 900 sq ft house had two rooms on the main floor- a long living room and a large kitchen with a big table in the center of the room. The refrigerator was small with a freezer smaller than a shoe box that could hold ice cream and regularly became encased in ice so defrosting was a routine procedure.

The second floor had three bedrooms and you had to walk through the middle bedroom to get to the master room that overlooked the front street. The middle room where I often slept as a child had a window on the roof like a skylight that created plenty of sounds for monster stirrings especially when it rained. The only option when one had to use the bathroom at night was to go two steep flights down to the cellar where the “bathroom” was located or use a bucket.  

The only time I ventured down the steep cellar stairs was in daylight when the monsters slept. Often I tumbled down the stairs because they were narrow and steep for little legs. When I’d fall down the stairs my grandmother Mildred would say “See that is God punishing you.” She was superstitious and believed it was bad luck to have a black cat cross your path or to walk underneath an open ladder. Mildred never permitted a wire coat hanger to be hung on a door knob because it would mean that someone in the family would die!

The cellar steps landed on a dirt floor that extended to the front of the house. Rarely did I venture in that direction because all sorts of scary creatures such as zombies and vampires might visit there. En route to the partitioned area housing a toilet and claw foot bathtub were shelves and Mildred’s wringer washing machine which rattled noisily when operating. The washer looked something like the one I am posting. I recall Mildred carefully feeding each item through the wringer which removed enough of the water to hang them for drying on the clotheslines in the cellar in the winter and the back yard in the summer.  The sopping clothes and sheets came from the other side of the wringer like damp cardboard.

One hallmark of Mildred’s home was the white marble front steps. Neighbors were often seen scrubbing their steps with wooden scrub brushes and buckets to keep them clean and shiny. How many houses are built today with marble front steps?  This is a narrow house on the same tiny one lane street where I spent most weekends and holidays as a child. Our house had no railing to detract from the beautiful marble steps.