My mother wasn’t exactly the sentimental type. So when it came time to go through her papers, I knew I would find plenty of receipts and cancelled checks, but little in the way of ephemera or memorabilia.
Yet on the last trip I made to my childhood home, I finally scored something more emotional than old tax returns.
I had just about given up looking for anything significant when I found it in the back of her bedroom closet: a perfectly intact scrapbook she kept from 1935 to 1937, when she was a junior and senior in high school. It was the first I’d ever seen of it and the earliest meaningful record of my mother’s life. Click on any image for a larger version.
My mom didn’t talk a lot about her high-school years. Like so many of that generation, she preferred to focus on the war years. Those were, I’m sure, more memorable. I didn’t serve in any wars, so I could never relate to that period. But I did go to high school and it’s almost scary to think my mother did, too.
Looking through the scrapbook made me feel sorry for my mom. She was sent away for high school to St. Mary’s Academy, a Catholic all-girls boarding school, where she worked in the cafeteria to pay her tuition. Here is a picture of Sister Laurentia, who, we discover from the caption, had a special relationship with God. That is followed by several of the holy cards my mother also kept in her scrapbook.
The influence of religion is everywhere in my mother’s scrapbook and her early life, which included two older brothers and two younger ones. She was the classic middle child and only girl in an Irish Catholic family.
My grandmother was a bit of a religious fanatic and I imagine my mother was under a lot of pressure to join a convent. Her younger brother later became a priest.
But once you strip away the religious layer, the rest of my mother’s scrapbook seems typical. She had tickets for a number of football games at nearby Loyola University the then all-male Catholic institution where several of her brothers attended.
The Chesterfield ad is from the back cover of one of the football programs back when it was okay to market cigarettes to children.
My mother was popular at Valentine’s Day, it appears, though sadly the only Valentine from a boy bears her brother’s signature.
My favorites are the hand-made variety, of which there were quite a few. Even the few cents it cost to buy a Valentine was precious in those Depression-era days.
Go to page 2 to see the St. Mary’s school yell, a Parlor Call Card, and nun-drawn calligraphy.
This article was last modified on March 8, 2021
This article was first published on July 2, 2010
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