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Call Her Peggy

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By JANIS D. FROELICH

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 4, 2008

So far this year, I've flown to Greenville, S.C., three times to visit my mother, who lives with my brother, Pete, and his wife, Sherri. They take stellar care of her, and I pitch in when I'm there. She gets around by walker and wheelchair.

Her care is a routine: fixing her meals, grinding up her pills, helping her shower, sharing a John Wayne movie, serving up the prunes and Ensure at 8 p.m., and tucking her in at night - all labors of love.

On my last visit, I had to chuckle when I saw the envelope in the mailbox. It was addressed to my mother in the name of Mabel Clara.

How she hates that name! Since the age of almost 3, her handle has been Peggy. This is a favorite family story, how little Mabel became Peggy. My mother tells it over and over, complete with fanciful embellishments - which at age 87 she's entitled to.

Esther's Undivided Attention

In 1923, when her Aunt Esther mercifully gave her a new first name, my mother was 21/2. The story, one of her earliest memories, goes like this:

"Mabel Clara," whispered Aunt Esther as she stroked my mother's sweaty locks on a humid May day. "That's no name for a child. I'm calling you Peggy from now on."

Peggy was a modern name, and Esther liked it. And she also liked Peggy - the only girl in a family of five children.

The newly christened Peggy had just been spanked by her Uncle Paul, Esther's husband. Peggy had playfully put straw in a milk pail. Esther never could have spanked Peggy. But in those hardscrabble times on their Ohio farm, even a toddler had to be punished when it came to messing with the family's food supply.

Little Peggy stopped her whimpering. She was at the farm because her mother, Eva, was recovering from the birth of yet another baby. Her father, the wild, whiskey-loving Lynn, was Paul's brother.

Peggy adored the attention she was getting from Esther, a plump woman in her late 20s who favored polka-dot housedresses. Esther felt completely sorry for the girl with brown curls and soft olive-green eyes.

Earlier that May day, Peggy's neglect by her parents had been discussed - again - by Esther and Paul as they drank their coffee. It was a well-chewed subject.

"I don't know why Eva has to keep having them kids," Esther said. Paul had simply snorted in disgust.

Eva had given birth to five children in seven years of married life. Beginning in 1917, at age 17, Eva had Ralph, Art, Peggy, Robert and now Glenn. It was tough to meet all their individual needs.

Esther and Paul's farm was 10 miles away from Hudson, Ohio, where the maternal side of my mother's extended family lived mostly in Victorian houses in a wooded valley behind the small town's main street. They were the Graber family, with such old-fashioned names as Bertha, the matriarch and my mother's grandmother. Bertha Graber, known for her crabbiness, had been a widow since age 43, and, as my mother likes to say, "She was born old."

The family's stately residences were the size of small mansions, attesting to the family's lineage and birthright.

From the outside, it looked like they were rich. Their lawns and gardens were carefully tended; red roses climbed white trellises; and looming buckeye trees were ringed by flowers and shrubs.

It was an illusion. This clan was the offspring of men who made fortunes from the steel mills in nearby Cleveland, back as early as the 1850s, but the new generation didn't accumulate new earnings. Not much of the great wealth was left. Long gone were the servants who made the beds, served dinner and wore white gloves to open grand walnut and stained-glass front doors.

And Baby Makes 5

Paul Hubbard couldn't stand the lot of his brother Lynn's in-laws. "Snooty, every one of them," he said of the Grabers.

On the day Peggy went to stay at Paul and Esther's farm that spring, Eva just had Glenn, giving her five children 6 and younger.

There were no children at the farm. Esther had not been able to have babies.

Esther had seen how listless Eva looked. So two days after Glenn's birth, Esther came calling on the new mom and fussy baby. It was apparent Eva hadn't slept since screaming throughout the birth - letting the neighbors know that another child was being born at the Hubbard household.

"You can't watch all of them," Esther had said to her sister-in-law.

They were sitting on the wrap-around porch of Eva's home. It was the first time Eva had left the upstairs bedroom where the baby had been born.

In Eva's mind, Esther and Paul's life on the farm was a dirt-poor existence. She would take her shabby chic, city life any day. Despite her throbbing headache from lack of sleep, she put on a maternal show in response to Esther's suggestion to take her daughter.

"Mabel Clara will miss her mama. You know that," Eva said. "She'll scream her little head off if you try to carry her out of here."

"She'll like it at the farm," Esther insisted.

Esther went into the house to fetch the girl and came back cuddling and kissing Mabel Clara. Esther took Mabel Clara's hand to wave bye-bye and carried the child to Paul's green pickup truck, where he waited in mud-caked boots.

Out of earshot, Eva declared, "She is the worst dresser," as she watched the large lady in the starched polka-dot frock with black buttons from neckline to waist carry her daughter away.

Good Times And Bad

After that rural spring, everyone started calling Mabel Clara by her new name. She was Peggy, who always had a happy attitude despite the lack of girly things in her life. She especially loved the familial warmth when occasionally she would be sent back to Esther and Paul's farm for a spell. The farm chores she did there molded her into a strong girl - a characteristic she would need in spades.

She was pretty, petite and athletic. By 1933, she was a sassy 13-year-old who had gone from somersaults at home to excel in track events at school. But it was also the year she walked up the steps and her legs wouldn't work.

Peggy had been fatigued for nearly a week before her cash-poor family called the doctor. The diagnosis was crushing. She had polio.

No one else in the family had been stricken with the disease, although polio was a nationwide epidemic. The Hudson kinfolk were placed under quarantine. No one could visit. The milkman wasn't allowed to leave bottles at the door. The children had to stay home from school.

Polio struck Peggy's throat, right leg and left arm, but she didn't need to be placed in an iron lung. The doctor suggested overhead pulleys to help her strengthen her upper body and legs. It was tough rehab, lasting for several years, coupled with fighting high fevers.

Again, there was scant care for Peggy. Finally, in 1934, Eva, despite a troubled marriage, gave birth to another baby. This time, it was Peggy's father, as distant as ever, who dropped her off at Esther's, where her rehab continued.

How It All Turned Out

Today, my mother suffers from post-polio syndrome and congestive heart failure. Her Great Depression-era girlhood still lingers in some ways. She uses one tea bag for two cups.

Her mother had six boys and three girls. There probably would have been more children had not Lynn Hubbard deserted the family around 1935. He disappeared and went out West someplace. It was a most scandalous divorce in tiny Hudson because he left Eva for another woman. No one knows what happened to Esther and Paul, other than that they eventually had children who were toddlers when my mother was cared for by the couple during her bout with polio. Eva remarried when the last of her children were raised during the 1950s. She died in 1982 at age 82; Bertha died shortly after celebrating her 100th birthday on July 4, 1977.

All was not dysfunctional. Mother's life took a wonderful turn when she met the son of a Romanian immigrant. She craved stability and found it in my father, who like clockwork sat down for supper every night at 5:30 p.m. after washing up from his factory job.

What a contrast to her roller coaster high school years. She had to support herself after her father flew the coop. So she worked for a wealthy Hudson family as a live-in maid, polishing silver tea sets. It was here she learned domestic skills sadly lacking in her foremothers, Bertha and Eva. She proudly graduated at age 17 from Hudson High School. She became a career gal by working the switchboard at Ohio Edison, a job she would return to briefly during World War II when my father was off in the Army Air Corps in France.

She married my father, Pete Perv, in 1942, after meeting on a blind date. She was 21; he was 20. She burnt the hot cocoa the morning after their wedding so, yes, there was passion.

By 1945, my father returned from Europe, and my parents, with my brother Pete, my sister Helen and me lived in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a building owned by my Romanian grandfather.

My mother longed for her own home, but this didn't happen until 1957, when I was about to enter sixth grade. My grandfather helped with the down payment.

My parents moved from Ohio and lived in St. Petersburg from 1980 to 1986, then in Sebring until 2002.

My father died in 2004. My mother closed his eyes after his last breath.

ABOUT THIS STORY

Tribune reporter and baby boomer Janis D. Froelich, 61, marvels at the strength - and the remarkable good humor - of her Greatest Generation mother.

"When we were kids and she told us the name-change story, we, of course, would tease, "Mabel, Mabel, set the table," Froelich says. She'd shoot back, "You should have heard the schoolchildren when my last name was Hubbard. It was 'Old Mother Hubbard went to her cupboard ...'"

Froelich can be reached at (813) 835-2104 or jfroelich @tampatrib.com.

Janis D. Froelich can be reached at (813) 835-2104 or jfroelich @tampatrib.com.

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