My Proud Stubborn Mother

My mom Helen at about 23 years old (front right) at her mother Lucille's 3rd wedding to Doc Boyer - Late 1940's I'm guessing.  Her cousin Betty is 2 seats down.  Betty's mom Muriel is front left.

I was thinking about my mother today, Helen Chester Harms.  I remember her as being a beautiful and gracious woman.  Her father passed away when she was only five or six - early in the Great Depression.  There is a photograph of her wearing a rabbit fur coat for her first day of school - her hair in lovely blonde curls (which darkened as she grew older).   I can’t imagine what the mothers of her impoverished classmates must have thought. The depression did not touch my mother and her mother Lucille Thien Chester Boyer because Helen’s father Henry (twenty two years senior to Lucille) had been very wealthy. It took my grandmother thirty years and two other husbands to run through his fortune.  My mother told me how they lived in luxury hotels when she was young and everybody got a kick out of her because she loved to eat spinach.  Hearing this beginning, you would probably think my mother was a snob, but she really wasn’t. My grandmother Lucille was definitely a snob but not my mother.  (Grandmother Lucille told me that she could tell everything about a person by their table manners.)

People naturally flocked to my mother.  She once half complained to me with a smile that it seemed that everyone in a grocery store always wanted to stop to talk to her.  In high school she fell in love with the tall handsome football star and president of his class, Rob Lowe.  They married when she was 18.  World War II was in progress, and he was in the coast guard stationed on the great lakes.  They had my older sister Katherine within a year of marriage and divorced soon after.  My mom said women were constantly swooning over Rob, and he did not resist their attention.  Mother also told me that they basically married so they could have sex and that waiting to have sex after marriage was a big mistake.  In those days “nice” girls didn’t have sex before marriage but “nice” boys did: one of the hypocritical and unfair double standards of that generation.

As a young divorcee and single mom, Helen moved from her home in Wisconsin to California where she had a pretty awesome time dating an assortment of fabulous men. She told me how one of the owners of the famous rose company, Jackson & Perkins (I can’t remember which one) was desperately in love with her and wanted to marry her.  About 10 years ago, I saw a yellow begonia in the Jackson & Perkins catalogue called “Helen Harms,” and I must admit I did wonder.  Yellow was my mother’s favorite color.  She told me of some of the movie stars she met.  She danced with Robert Stack (who was incredibly handsome but unfortunately for my mom in love with another woman); she shared a piece of pie with Canadian actor Walter Pidgeon, and Errol Flynn had propositioned her. (She was entering a restaurant he was leaving, and he was hopelessly drunk.) Helen’s uncle, Emil Thien, was an elite plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills and had many famous clients including all of Howard Hugh’s stars, so he had Hollywood connections.  Her cousin and best friend Betty Tholen was Emil’s daughter, and they palled around together.  Betty ended up marrying a sweet man and business person from old California money.  (His family had donated the land for the University of Southern California.)

At a family wedding in Wisconsin, my mother became reacquainted with my father Wm Scott Harms whom she had not seen for many years.  He was her second cousin, 12 years older than her, divorced with no children.  They fell passionately in love. However, when my father heard that she was going to vote for Republican Dwight D Eisenhower for president instead of the famous liberal and my father’s hero Adlai Stevenson II, he almost called off the wedding.  My mother became a proper liberal thereafter.

The incidence that I was thinking about today happened many years after my father had passed away (1968) of lung cancer. My mother had been dating Frank for a number of years.  He was a decent enough man - I liked him. He was a successful engineer turned salesman in the air conditioning business, but his drinking problem certainly made my mother’s drinking problem much worse.  Once about 6 months into their dating, Frank plowed into a parked car after they had been drinking at a party together.  My mother was injured and hospitalized - almost killed.  Frank’s lawyer couldn’t believe that my mother didn’t sue.

They had been together for about seven years when Frank was diagnosed with liver cancer.  He was dead within the month.  On his deathbed he whispered to my mother “the safe,” and she knew exactly what he meant.  Frank had a big pile of gold coins in that safe, and he wanted her to get it.  But my mother had a sort of stubborn pride.  She just could not bring herself to take the gold even though she knew that Frank had never rewritten his will, and it would all go to his ex-wife.  She had the combination and opened the safe for the police a few days later. They counted out the number of Krugerrands together.  “The policeman looked at me like I was nuts,” she confided to me.  Then he took the gold to the station.  

My mother was not rich.  She had sold our family home for too little money, and lived on a comfortable but fixed income.  The gold would certainly have come in handy, but she would not take it even though she knew that Frank had wanted her to have it.  I was in my early 20’s at the time and could not understand my mom’s decision.  Now I think my mother was old school and believed that you didn’t take money from a man unless he was your husband, father, or brother.  Not even from a long time lover.  If Frank had put all that gold in a strong box, wrapped it in a ribbon, and given it to her, I am pretty sure she still would not of taken it.  He could only of gotten the gold to her through his will.

You have to understand something too.  Frank despised his ex-wife.  Frank was somewhat of a playboy bachelor most of his life- living an unmarried salesman life: drinking and partying. One girl he partied with had told him that he had gotten her pregnant, so he manned up and married her.  A couple months after the wedding he was asking, “Where’s the baby?”  No bump. “I miscarried,” she told him. Right.  The divorce was ugly. She made out like a weasel in the hen house who not only ate all the eggs but bit off the heads of a number of hens too just for the fun of it.  That woman had embittered Frank against all women until he met my mother.  My mom knew that the gold, the cadillac, the house, the vacation cabin where she and Frank spent a lot of time, and whatever bank account and investments he had would all go to the ex-wife. And it did.

Frank loved my mom.  He had asked her to marry him multiple times, but she had always refused.  She was probably the classiest woman he had ever dated, but he never “got” her.  Some men think all women have a price, but what the woman is really looking for is a man who takes authority and responsibility.  One of the things that my mom complained to me about Frank was that he refused to advise or guide her on any financial matters. For example, she once looked at a cadillac that was on sale from a friend but was unsure about whether to buy it.  Frank refused to give her advice on the matter, but when she decided not to get it,  Frank bought it saying that it was a great deal.  That just infuriated my mother - although she never told him.  If he had encouraged her to buy it, she probably would of - but he refrained. Responsibility and authority rest upon a man like golden epaulettes on the uniform of a officer.  My father naturally wore those epaulettes; Frank didn’t.

After Frank’s death, my mother moved to the Florida West Coast to be nearer to my older sister and to spend the last years of her life in a warmer climate.  She reconnected with some of her old Wisconsin high school friends and was happy that she made the move.  But she was not impressed with the men in her age group in Florida.  “They are all unbearably conceited,” she told me.  There are many more women over sixty in Florida than men.

Alcoholism and cigarette smoking killed my mom at sixty seven.  Her mother had lived to ninety six, but Lucille drank alcohol and smoked very moderately.  I love and miss my mother.  I wish she could have been around longer for my children growing up.  I will always remember her as a great lady.