Today would have been her 86th birthday. My
mother left me with two enduring learning points.
- Good music is cheap and cheap music is expensive.
- It does not matter how much money you have as long as you are educated.
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| 5th Grade Buhrer School Miss McGovern, 1941 |
There were many others. She was given to maxims, glittering
generalities, and statements of opinion as fact. From my point of view, she had
about 12 or 13 good years, and then slid downhill for about 25, though she
enjoyed a couple of counter-trend peaks. After she died, we cleaned out her
apartment and two salient facts gave me pause:
- She had no mirrors (except for the one that is standard in the bathroom). When we were kids, we used to make Transylvania jokes about being Hungarian; maybe it was not so funny.
- We found a candle that had been burned at both ends.
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| c. 1964 |
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| Cleveland Dental Manufacturing is now a residential loft space |
When Mr. Smith retired she worked a year or so more for
the new president, but after the sale to Cavitron, she found another job. She
then went to work for Dr. Robert Morgan Stecher who had offices at Cleveland
Metropolitan General Hospital from its days as City Hospital. He was not a
practicing physician, but an academic researcher whose passions included early
horses and the genetics of arthritis. He was independently wealthy. His father,
Fred W. Stecher, was a pharmacist who invented Pompeian Massage Cream and built his home in Lakewood on a natural gas well that brought lease income.
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| No longer interested in politics. City Hall Chambers 1998. |
Working for Dr. Stecher broadened her horizons. She took us
to the Cleveland Health Museum, bought me memberships in the Natural Science
Museum, and split season tickets to Severance Hall with neighborhood doctors.
(Our home was two blocks from City Hospital. Some of the rentals, ours and
others, went to interns and residents. I benefited from a lot of
extra-curricular education and exposure to the research labs at the hospital.) She wrote Dr. Stecher’s international
correspondence and prepared his journal manuscripts. Their office was next to
the hospital library; and I bought some discards for a dime each.
After Dr. Stecher retired, she worked as an office temporary
until she met her second disastrous husband. That marriage lasted no longer
than the first, but the comparison is between the harsh voyage of the Mayflower and the gaiety of the Titanic.
When it became clear that neither Paul nor I was going to
graduate from college, she took over management of our sister’s education and
got Kelly through Baldwin-Wallace with a major in English and a minor in
Biology, including a field trip to the Galapagos Islands. Mom did not live to
see Paul and me go back to graduate with honors.
However, she did participate from the audience in the
Cleveland punk music scene hanging out with Paul’s band, and billing herself as
“Irene Styrene.”
Her last job was as a full time administrative assistant at
Cleveland City Hall. By then, she had lost her passion for politics. Forty
years earlier, she had sent me to school with a Nixon-Lodge pin and the next
time around, it was AuH2O in 64, which is how I ended up in Young Americans for
Freedom in 1965, and ultimately wrote a blog.
ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
