My Mother's name was Norma Morgan Everhart. Growing up she was called "Doody" by her two sisters, short for "Doodle-Bug," though I have my own conclusions as to how this may have come about. More on that later. Much later.
Doody was how everyone in her family knew her, and of course as Mother by all of us in our family. Never Mom, or mommy, or mama—just Mother. I honestly don't recall her ever telling me this, but I know it like I know that my left foot is too big, that you just didn't call her anything but Mother. Except that my "Dad" (yeah, I know, it must mean some deep seated thing we will never fully grasp) would frequently call her "Norma!" This of course when she had crossed some line as she so often and gleefully did. They loved each other fiercely, but he was the good one, and she was the naughty one. And she could be very naughty.
Mother grew up as one of three girls in the Morgan family, and she always wanted us to understand just how proper and strict her mother was, and how shed had come from money and lived her days as if she still had plenty, though there was never any evidence of it by the time we came along. Her father, Franklin Townsend Morgan, had at one time been the President of Morgan Steel in Pennsylvania, but lost it all in the Great Depression. Somehow, the Great Depression to me was that our family had been rich and Herbert Hoover screwed us all out of our inheritance.
In my Mother's family, her Mother must have been the good one, and my Grandfather Townsend must have been the naughty one. I never met my Grandmother, but I spent many a happy hour with "Grandpop" Townsend, and I can assure you, he could be very naughty. So maybe opposites do attract.
Townsend and the family lived in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania while my Mother was growing up, and to hear her tell about it, she had an idyllic childhood. They actually had full-time "domestic help," which meant a woman who cooked, cleaned and beat the children named XXX. Apparently XXX knew quite well that my Mother was different than her sisters Mary and Bits (for "Little Bits"). Bitsy was the cute and outgoing daughter, and Mary the intellectual and well behaved one. That left my Mother to be the tomboy and naughty one, which she excelled at.
My favorite story of XXX was when someone would come to the door, all the girls would run with their English bulldog to see who it was. XXX would have to grab the dog, and introduce the girls to whoever was at the door. She would say, "This is Mary, and this is Bitsy, and that's Doody. She ain't so nice!"
Now Townsend was also an artist, who gained quite a bit of prominence in the print making world at the time. He painted watercolors and oils, but his real mastery was as an etcher. Etching, which by today's standards is almost a lost art, is a very rigorous and demanding art form involving beeswax, metal plates, diamond tipped tools, acid baths, printing presses and a sense of both mechanical and artistic knowledge to translate very demanding mechanical tools into the most aesthetic and beautiful works of art.
This extreme artistic ability was easily passed to my Mother. Mary became a poet, and Bitsy did a little painting, but my Mother had the "touch" and did many beautiful watercolors and woodblocks throughout her life. In later posts I will include images of them.
After Morgan Steel went belly up in the 1930’s, along with my ability to languish on the Riviera for the winter, while waiting for the weather to improve in the Virgin Islands where I would no doubt have had my summer home, Townsend was contracted by the Roosevelt administration as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to move to Key West and foster the arts in Key West, which at the time had become nearly bankrupt after World War I. The WPA wanted to bring tourism to Key West to help support the naval presence there.
So having good connections into the Federal Government, Townsend secured a spot in the new project in the Keys. He began moving the family down in the summer of 1935. At first, it was just Townsend and my Mother, while the rest of the family stayed behind to wrap up their affairs. As it turned out, Townsend and my Mother moved down just in time for the Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. 400 people died in this monster hurricane, which is still rated as the strongest storm ever to hit the continental United States as measured in barometric pressure.
In the next post, I will tell some of my Mothers stories of the Keys.
