Making Community: Our Grandmothers and Mothers Before Us

As I have noted before, there are several blogs I read on a regular basis. The blogger at My Money and My Life recently posted one called "I want to be a domestic goddess." In it, she wrote about wondering how to fill her day when she is home and ended by saying

I wanted to take part of this summer to learn some new domestic skills, grandmother skills as I like to think of them, but I don't know what to learn or where to look. So, dear reader, I pose this question to you. What domestic skills are essential, and what are nice to have? Gourmet cooking? Decorating? Crafting? Ironing? (Please don't say ironing, please don't say ironing, lol)

I commented back, writing in part about how I filled my days: I volunteer. A lot. I suspect a lot of our grandmothers, even the "small town" ones, did a lot more "community work" than we realize, because that was the fabric of the community, on a neighborhood or town level.

As I wrote those words two hours ago, I had an "aha!" moment. Not about me: I know how I fill my days. My aha! moment was about the notion of "community work" and what it meant in Delaware 40, 50, 80 years ago. Two women came immediately to mind: Warren's mother, Ellen, and my own grandmother Skatzes. Both of them did "community work" in their own ways in their own decades and although they lived very different lives, in some ways they lived very similar lives.

Ellen moved to Delaware with her husband, Arthur, in 1950. He was a newly minted optometrist, courtesy of the GI Bill, and she was a thoughtful, college-educated woman eager to put down roots and enrich her community. Like many women of her era, her initial years were spent working (at the local college as a secretary), then quitting to have children (three eventually) and establishing a home, a small starter home first and then the one Warren and I live in yet today. From the outset, she was active in her church, the First Church of Christ Scientist. As her children grew and she had more time, she served on the board of the Delaware Children's Home and on the city Shade Tree and Strategic Planning commissions, as well as being an active member in the Irving Club and the Delaware Music Club.

Ellen participated fully in Delaware life all of her life. That is her on the far left of the photo below, posing with her friends for their roles in the 1958 Sesquicentennial Pageant. When she died in 2004, her obituary noted that she was "extraordinarily generous and interested in other people and always had time for those who needed help, or to comfort the discouraged." (That was my dear, late mother-in-law to a tee, and I cannot count how many times since marrying Warren I have heard that from those whose lives she touched.)


From her board to her club memberships, Ellen's activities epitomized what I would call "ladies community work" for a college-educated woman of her era. Although she never worked for pay outside the home after the first of her three children were born, she always took an active and heartfelt role in bettering her community and the world around her.

Now, step back another twenty or thirty years to the 1930s. You are still in Delaware, but now place yourself on the other side of the Olentangy River, which splits our town into its east and west sides.

The east side of the river was and still is the blue collar, lower income side of town. It was the original industrial side of town (and still contains two pre-Civil War era industrial buildings); it drew and housed the railroad workers back when Delaware contained the major engine shops for the Big Four railroad, as well as the local stockyard workers, as the stockyards were by the railroad. (It is important for me to note that there was and is still a pronounced division - psychological, economic, cultural - between the two sides of town, and while I live on the west side of town, I grew up on the east side and still retain many emotional and psychological connections to it and its history and people.)

My grandmother Skatzes was a young bride back in the early teens, and started what became a large family soon afterwards. Her ninth and tenth children, my aunt Ginger and my mother, were born much later than their siblings, with Ginger coming in 1929 just days before the stock market crashed and my mother bringing up the rear in 1935. My grandmother, whose family had moved to Delaware when she was an infant, had grown up in a railroad family; from everything I can tell, her husband was a self-employed carpenter and handyman throughout his work years. With many children and erratic income, their household epitomized life on the east side.

When the Great Depression hit Delaware, it hit the east side of town hard. Work was scarce, resources were scarce, food was scarce. It was not coincidental that a Works Progress Administration (WPA) sewing project and the county relief storeroom were both located on the east side of town in the small commercial district just a few blocks from where my grandmother and her family lived.

As a child, I grew up hearing my grandmother's stories of her life. Her Depression stories fascinated me the most. The East Side did not have the ladies clubs or the aid societies that the west side of town had. But women like my grandmother nonetheless did the type of community work necessary to hold together the neighborhoods through this bleakest time. My grandmother had an open door policy, in defiance of my grandfather (who was not a kind or generous man), throughout the Depression and the war years that followed. If you came to their home, you had food to eat and often a place to sleep. It might just be homemade noodles stretched to feed "just one more" and a blanket on the floor, but you would be fed and sheltered. For my uncles, at least one of whom went into the CCC during the Depression and all of whom were in the service during World War II, this meant they could show up with a friend who had no place to go and know that their friend would be seated at the table.

As my grandmother would say in telling me these stories, "we all helped each other through these times. You did what you could because we all needed to stick together." In her own way, in her own era, my grandmother served her community every bit as much as Ellen a generation later.

My grandmother Skatzes made a deep and lasting impression on me. Although she has been dead for over three decades, she still influences me. The community work I do that means the most to me - the monthly legal clinic - takes me back to my grandmother. The issues that concern me the most - community, hunger, poverty, place building - tie me back to Grandma Skatzes.

I just completed an all-day workshop on a program called Bridges Out of Poverty, from which I came home back exhausted physically and energized in every other way. Early in the day, Phil DeVol, the presenter, defined poverty as "the extent to which an individual does without resources" (resources being financial, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, physical, support systems, relationship/role models, and knowledge of hidden rules of society/class).

It was an intense day and one I am still absorbing. But the overview I got on Friday fits in with my thoughts about community work and the work of women like Ellen and my grandmother.

Ellen Wilson Hyer and Clare Skatzes grew up and lived in very different economic circumstances, in very different worlds, in different worlds in the same town. They never met, but they would have been very comfortable had they because they were shared common core values. Both lived to make the lives of those around them - their families, their neighbors, the greater community - richer and more secure in any way they could. Both were rich in intangible resources and both made sure they invested and reinvested their resources and themselves in their respective worlds. Both of them made sure the fabric of the community was stitched together as securely as they could make it.

How do I fill my days? In many different ways, but in part, I hope, like Ellen and Grandma before me.