By 30 October 1944, Mrs. Mary M. Dawson at 5901 Lawndale Street in Philadelphia was informed that an award of the accrued amount of her husband’s disability payment was approved and that it would soon be sent to her, as unmarried widow of James A. Dawson, Pvt. Med. Dept. 

The next thing we know from family records is that on 28 August 1945 the Veterans Administration sends her notice of transferral of her case file to her new address at 234 N. E. Third Street in Miami, Florida.

This photo was most likely taken in the train down to Florida in late winter 1944-1945. 

Why did Mary at age 56 and Marian at age 21 go to Florida in 1945? For that matter, why did Paul Emile go to Florida in 1946 at age 35, finally staying in 1947? Why did our father leave a thriving business? Why did our mother leave her hard-won Department of Justice position in Philadelphia where, it should be noted, she would have eventually had a comfortable and secure income? Did they know people in Miami, or did a job offer attract them?

We don’t have anything that gives us a direct answer. To different degrees, both of them had been unsettled by wartime and the Great Depression of the 1930s, and disappointed by their job searches for the careers in music they had first set their caps on. As our mother said when her parents re-located to St. Petersburg earlier, perhaps they all had just “got sand in their shoes” and were drawn by the bright, sunny climate after the dark days up north.

There are quite a few photos of our grandmother Dawson down in South Florida amongst her friends.

In contrast, there are none of her as a mother in St Petersburg, nor in Philadelphia or Willow Grove—except for one family photo in 1925—nor later as a grandmother with her grandchildren.That could indicate that Miami proved to be a place where she could be herself and was happy to be among friends downtown—the kind of friends who wanted to gather together with her and take her picture. 

The photo above shows our grandmother Dawson in Miami, possibly in winter of 1945 shortly after arrival in Miami. She looks much younger here than she does three years later in our mother’s 1948 wedding photos. It is possible that the woman to the right is Lillian, and the younger woman to the left is Anne. We have other photos of both of them but no last names. Some of the other first names that are listed in our grandmother’s papers include: Bessie, Ethel, Tommy, Harold K, Lillian and Ed. Additional names that we cannot match-up with photos are: William Nugent—died January 5, 1959—and Harry Joseph Parent—died February 19, 1957. Some of the young women in her apartment house thank her for being a “second mother” to them on the back of the photos they give her.

[Slide show of Mary Dawson friends.]

If the two-member Dawson family had thought that career prospects would be better for Marian in Miami, the years 1945-1947 proved that their timing was off. Our mother certainly tried, beginning with radio-related jobs, then secretarial, then unemployment, and then jobs in retail—all the while doing more and more work in music that likely did not pay a dime. 

In the 1945-1946 academic year Marian earned high marks for her semester of work at the University of Miami.

But jobs at Pan American Airways, Professional Insurance Company, and National Silver were all short term for relatively small amounts—$35.00 per week for a 40-hour week at National Silver, for instance. Her unemployment benefit was $15.00 per week in between jobs.

Predictably for our parents’ luck, a pretty sizable recession of -12.7% hit the US economy in 1945 as World War II ended and veterans returned to the country. (Compare this with the -26.7% of the Great Depression and the -5.1% of the Great Recession.) But Miami had benefited enough from the World War II economy that it bounced back faster. So many veterans wanted to return to the same location of their military bases in South Florida that they flooded the University of Miami on the GI Bill—resulting in a housing and employment boom. During the winter months of the war years Miami had accommodated 152,000 persons additional to its 1940 population of 173,000. By 1950 it had a population of 249,276 and has continued to grow  faster than much of the rest of the United States.

In the two years before she met our father in late 1947, Marian was welcomed by the music community and she made many friends, most of whom she would know for many years. She was a principal member of the American Guild of Variety Artists and she also belonged to the Miami Music Teachers Association. She was featured in many music revues and appeared in Rigoletto, Madame Butterfly and The Gondoliers with the Miami Opera Guild. She also modeled for a number of agencies in Miami. The photographers she met in both the music and modeling work account for the high quality of many of her photos taken at this time and later at her wedding.

[Slide show of modeling and opera photos.]