Ruth Catherine Dunn DAY 1916-1971

In the mid-1960s, my mother, Ruth, saved a toddler’s life when our family was a Lake Rick-A-Bear Lake, in Kinnelon New Jersey. She was heading for the snack bar on the beach and coming along the path of trees that ran beside the lake just past the picnic tables she saw it in the water apparently having fallen off the bank. No one else was around or watching the baby. She waded into the water and grabbed the child. I came along shortly after and one of the beachgoers rushed up to me and said, “your mother saved that baby over there from drowning.” I didn’t say a thing while looking to the side. I couldn’t see the baby with the crowd of people huddled around, many of them talking loudly.I kept walking back to your picnic table more off the path and in a secluded area of the woods. My dad was grilling burgers and chicken wings the rest of the family sitting either at the table or in Adirondack chairs smiling. For once no one was saying a word. I said to my mother, “someone said you saved a baby?” Mom just continued to smile, she blue eyes shining and gave me a shrugged. That was her. I discovered something else about my mother when I was in high school. I took French my first year from Mrs. Chackmanoff. She was a French Jew teaching in a Catholic school. The first day she called my name and asked me to stand. She told the class that she was honored to be teaching me because it was my mother who taught her English. When I told my mother this after school she just said, with her smile, “ Yeah, she didn’t speak English. This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is ruth-36-garet-mountain-overlook-patersonsite-1.jpgThey lived upstairs from us when you were a baby. We babysat for each other. Her husband was a Russian Prince.” My mother at 21. > We lived on Madison Avenue in Paterson and we had lived on this block once before eight doors up from where we were living in a block of terraced rowhomes. Mrs. Chackmanoff’s family had the apartment above ours. At the end of freshman year, Mrs. Chackmanoff called me up to her desk and told me she was passing me even though I failed French because she used to change my drapers and for all my mother did for her when her family first came to this country. She told me she had been in a concentration camp in World War II when the Germans held France. When the Russian arrived her future husband was among them and they liberated the camp saving thousands. She later married him and came to America. At first, our two families could only wave and smile at each other. One day my mother went to the small grocery store on Market Street and found Mrs. Chackmanoff standing in the last aisle crying and looking at the change in her hand. My mother saw she was trying to buy bread and jelly. She pointed out the coins for the two items and from then the English lessons began. Mom didn’t tell me any of that. She was like that. She didn’t talk about others as I remember it. I told my mother what Mrs. Chackmanoff said about finding her in the grocery stores and she did her usual shrug with a smile. I felt such admiration for her. My mother never spoke badly about anyone. And she didn’t talk badly about her own mother. There were signs I suppose along the way. Though what did we, her children, have to compare it with? We know only our own bubble, our small safe and comfortable albeit lower middle-class sphere created by our two parents. My friends home life seen just like mine with else kids as far as I could tell. We had fun times at our house. Great holiday with wonderful meals. Getting ready for Christmas’ would be weeks of examining Sears and Spiegel’s catalogs to write our lists for Santa and then drives to toy stores to view what we wanted. Our father would come back later and buy the gifts though at times saving money with a cheaper version. There were board or card games on Saturday night after my mom’s weekly great fried chicken dinner. Some Sundays, long car rides, four kids stuffed in the back seat elbow to elbow after the kids went to church and then for dinner, sandwiches and a bakery layer cake, the special treat of the week. This was followed by watching Bonanza and the Ed Sullivan Show. Thursdays were chili dogs, known in Paterson as Hot-Dogs-All-The-Way, and fries from any number of hotdog restaurants around the city. In the summer, day trips to the lake to swim and a week at the Jersey shore. After school some days I would come home to find my sister, Doris having tea with our mother, the prized tea set all laid out on the dining room table. They would be talking and laughing. I spent some afternoons watching the Million Dollar Movie of the day with our mother. She would go back and forth to the kitchen cooking supper. Then my mother worked around the house more times than not she would be happily humming her favorite tunes. This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 56c1b-john-sadie-dunnsite-1.jpg I suppose some signs something was wrong was that sometimes lunch would be on the table when we ran in from school and sometimes mom would still be in bed. Then we would make our own lunch from lunch meat and cheese in the refrigerator or peanut butter and jelly. Sometimes we would find her crying in the bedroom. Her parents. She did not like conflict. If any of her five children were fighting and telling them to stop didn’t work she would fling one of her penny loafers at them usually missing. One time the shoe hit her china cabinet breaking the glass door and her prized china inside. I remember it. That was me and my brother, Ike. She sat and cried as we ran from the house only to return when we knew the heat would be out. All the glass was cleaned up and nothing was said about it, ever! I first learned about my mother’s early life from my sister, Doris, who spent time with her godmother, one of my mother’s close sisters, and years after the same accounts from a couple of her sisters in the few conversations I had with them. The story goes that my mother was her mother’s ‘whipping boy.’ Her mother beat only her even though she had six other children. No one seems to know why. And those we talked to said they knew not to intervene. Years later my parents would help two other members of my mother’s family elope with ‘unacceptable’ men drawing the ire of the ‘old battle-ax’ that my father called his mother-in-law. I think this was an act of rebellion, long overdue, by my mom inspired my dad’s self-assertive nature. Other things my aunts told me about my mother was that she was always kind, quiet, pleasant, smart, religious and always nervous. She like roller skating. She went to Saint John’s Grammar school in Paterson and then business school and became a comptometer operator, the comptometer being the first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculators made in the United States back in 1887. She was so good at it she was in demand at banks.260px-Comptometer_model_ST_Super_Totalizer A comptometer> World War II my mother set up offices for Curtis-Wrights Industries who made plane for the military and where my father worked for all his life though the two did not date until meeting at a Holy Name parade one year. My father was a member of The Holy Name Society and my mother a parade goer. What I know about my parents’ wedding was that it was a judge of the piece ceremony. My mother wore a business suit. One of her closest sisters, Aunt (Frances) Babe and Uncle Marty, my father’s best friend, stood in for them. It was during the war and no other family members were present and there were no pictures taken.