Granny's Memories (Part 2)

Ethel and Her Sisters

My grandmother, Ethel, was the youngest of nine children.  With an older brother and seven older sisters, she never lacked for attention.  She admitted that she was indulged by her sisters, who would bring home toys for her and sew and crochet clothes for her dolls.  Her favorite toy was a wicker doll buggy.  

Ethel with her Wicker Doll Buggy

In the summers, the family traveled to visit her father’s relatives on their Door County farm.  There, she got to do things that she couldn’t do in the city like riding a horse and picking berries in the woods. 

Door County

Ethel with Mother

She spoke of her childhood as a happy time.  There were lots of children to play with in the neighborhood.  She took piano lessons and went to school in Englewood, and to Sunday mass at the local Catholic Church. 

School Picture

First Communion

But children grew up quickly in those days.  As soon as they finished school, Ethel and her sisters and brother went to work.  The sisters held a variety of jobs:  milliner, dressmaker, Dictaphone operator, forelady in a factory,and a stenographer in a florist’s shop.  Peter, the family’s only son, was a salesman in a department store and then later a draftsman. 

While in school, Ethel had studied typing and Pittman shorthand, and by 1930, she was eighteen years old and already working as a typist for Commercial Clearing House, a company that printed law reports. 

 In a letter, she reminisced about an exciting adventure she had getting home from work one day:

“I remember one really big snowstorm we had when I was at work in an office in downtown Chicago.  It had been snowing all day, and we worked until 5 o’clock when I boarded a streetcar for home.  It was about a 45-minute ride to our house but about half way home, the streetcar stopped and couldn’t go any further.  The ice and snow was in the tracks and the streetcars were lined up for blocks.  This was a bad part of the city to be left stranded in because there was nothing but factories around. 

Everyone in the streetcar just sat and waited, thinking we would get going, but it got so cold they started to get off and walk, so that’s what I did, not knowing how far I’d get in that blowing snow and freezing cold, but I was lucky.  We hadn’t walked very far when a truck came long and the driver asked another girl and I if we wanted a ride, and we gladly accepted.  My mother always told me not to accept rides from strangers, but this was an emergency, and I wanted to get home that night.  He didn’t take us very far, but left us off at a drug store where we could at least phone our parents. 

By this time, it was about 10 p.m., and my mother was worried sick.  When she heard my voice, she said, “Thank God, you’re all right!”  My brother was married and lived next door with his family, and he had a car with chains on the tires, so my mother said, “Wait right there, and Pete will come and get you.”  When he pulled up to that drug store, I was never as happy to see anyone as I was to see him.  It was about 11 p.m. when we get home that night, and home never looked so good.  What should have been a 45 minute ride, turned out to be a six-hour ordeal.” 

While working in the typing pool at Commercial Clearing House, which she always called CCH, she was introduced to a young linotype operator, (a linotype machine set type for the printing process).  His name was Chet, and from the first, she thought he was incredibly handsome.  They began dating, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Ethel & Chester