It is difficult to imagine how James Anthony and Mary Margaret got by financially. They seem relatively well off until the last few years when James is in veterans hospitals most of the time, but there does not seem to be any evident source of steady income.

By the time of his induction in World War I, at age 30, our mother’s father was the only son left of Jas. Dawson & Sons unless there were uncles we know nothing about. It will be interesting to check Philadelphia city directories to discover how long the company endured in the 20th century but it does not seem possible that our grandfather Dawson could have worked as a tin roofer in any substantial way. After only three months in an Army stateside medical unit, he was granted a small pension of $45/month for an injury he suffered in the line of duty that he drew during his lifetime and that was later continued for his widow as well. We do not know his specific injury, but he was a medical private and late 1918 was the time of the influenza pandemic. We have an envelope from the War Department addressed to him in 1920 at the Howard House, 146 S. Tennessee Avenue, Atlantic City, New Jersey, but we do not know why he was there. Today that address is a parking lot.

Our mother says he built their Willow Grove house in the three years of 1926-1929, after first building a garage apartment on the property. Reportedly, the main Dutch colonial-style house was beautifully finished and furnished.

She says that he also did both new construction and home renovations and she went with him on his jobs. He liked to work without a crew.

In late 1929, after the Wall Street Crash, he inherited a net amount of $1,000 from his mother—approximately $15,000 in today’s dollars. However, there must have been some considerable  medical expenses for both Annie Dawson and, previously, for Marian Dawson when she had polio and meningitis. After Marian recovered they sent her to a private Catholic boarding school in Philadelphia.

The Depression years, in particular, do not seem to have an impact on their household—at least, in the early part of that decade. In 1930 they take a three-month vacation to Canada and New England after buying a new Buick and they begin in 1931, on doctor’s orders, to spend almost every winter for ten years in St. Petersburg, Florida, returning to Willow Grove only in the summers. James does not seem to have worked in St. Petersburg. Perhaps he had successfully cashed-out investments in the stock market before it crashed, or there was rental or other property that kept them going. He does have a Social Security card dated 14 July 1937 but it seems unlikely that either he or his wife could have received benefits from that fairly new fund.

Whatever the reason, their means were considerably reduced in the World War II years beginning in 1942, despite the sale of their St. Petersburg home, much of their furniture, and the Buick their father had taken such pride in driving. After his death in 1944 and the settlement of his will and compensation, Mary and Marian took the train down to Miami, Florida sometime in early 1945 and settled into an apartment at 234 N. E. Third Street.

Our grandmother Dawson lived another 19 years after her husband died and a few of her oldest grandchildren remember her—she was the only grandparent any of us actually ever met. I hope she enjoyed good times earlier with her own immediate Dawson-White family, and later with Miami friends because Gaga—as we children called her—certainly did not have an easy life as an orphan. She probably felt reasonably secure when her daughter still lived with her and could help with costs, after her husband’s death and before her daughter’s marriage. It is not surprising that, in terms of both her own and her daughter’s interest, she was less than thrilled at the choice of Paul Emile Pepin for a husband. However hardworking, his prospects for steady and remunerative work were not nearly as good as some of our mother’s other prospects.

In the 1950s, in particular, Gaga enjoyed many good friends nearby in the downtown location of her small but comfortable apartment at 437 N. E. 29th Street. (I remember how much we children delighted in the Murphy bed contraption.) She could walk to almost everything, especially church and a neighborhood bar, and take the bus to visit us when she chose, which  was understandably not often—it did not take long before there were quite a few of us.

One can understand her perspective. Our mother had been a belle, an only child, a natural musical talent with an extraordinary contralto voice despite her slight frame, the total focus of James and Mary—especially so when she became ill with polio and meningitis when very young. She recovered but was kept from other children for a long period, playing only with dolls, a pet dog and a pet cat. She did not experience any of the typical childhood diseases—measles, chicken pox—until her children got them, when she became much sicker than we did. It must have seemed to our grandmother Dawson that our family’s many children and limited  financial means were not exactly the future she had envisioned for her only child.

As grandmother Dawson grew older, her small monthly disabled veteran’s compensation as a surviving widow became increasingly inadequate. There are still copies in the family papers of the eloquent letters Ma wrote seeking Old Age and public welfare assistance for her mother beginning as early as 1956, but the applications were not successful. (We believe she lived for most of this time at 437 N.E. 29th Street—the address is on her wallet calendar in 1959—perhaps dating back to her move from our parents’ first home at 835 N.E. 88th Street—we do not know.)

By 1960 she no longer had enough income for her to live on her own and our family could not begin to help with her costs.

She left her many downtown friends to move in with our family at 2231 S.W. 57th Court—a separate, small apartment in the house likely was part of the reason that we had moved from the smaller Matilda Street house in Coconut Grove to the larger old home and property at 2231.

While our grandmother lived with us, she could not have been happy with the fact that she had almost nothing left to live on. I suspect she had been a good, complaisant wife and mother while in the well-to-do Dawson family, but by the time we knew her towards the end of her life she was a combative Irish woman who left on the bus to visit her friends in downtown Miami as often as she could. Gaga did not do child care and she fought with our father tooth and nail—a secret pleasure for any of us who had the chance to listen in on the fight, by the end of which he was muttering in French. On her worst days she spoke nothing but Gaelic, replete with some of its worst curse words which, of course, several of us still know quite well.

She died, aged 74, at our home following surgery for cancer of the anus with our mother caring for her, calmly and quietly, until the end came on 27 January 1963. When it was all over, my mother did not cry—she was probably worn out and experienced too much through all the suffering and morphine shots of Gaga’s final days—but our tensile-tough father cried uncontrollably. It was the only time I saw him cry openly. I can still visualize where her bed was in that apartment. Years later, I moved into the space when I started full-time work and college.

There is still a bill of $703 in our family’s papers from Jackson Memorial Hospital for her hospital stay from December 16, 1962 to January 9, 1963 for treatment of cancer of the anus—I have no idea whether it was ever paid. Although he was the music director at several churches and schools, our father’s salary did not amount to much. Unfortunately, I do not remember the numbers, but at one point—when I was also working in my early twenties at a couple of the churches in Miami—I remember being appalled by the figures I saw on an old loan application he had made. I suspect that there were a number of occasions when our father’s workplace and reduced circumstances likely led to some of the extraordinary bills being paid for by the churches or parish members.

Our father did have health insurance for the family but that did not help in the case of our grandmother, who I suspect would have sought care earlier if she had had health insurance. Our grandmother’s death came two years before Medicare and Medicaid were signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 as an amendment to the Social Security Act of 1935.

Most of us have forgotten how destitute many elderly people must have been towards the end of their lives in the 1950s and 1960s after living through ten years of depression in the 1930s and seven years of war in the 1940s.

There was no money to cover either Gaga’s grave or her burial or a marker. The cemetery donated the grave space and St. Vincent de Paul Society paid for the burial. It is specified in the cemetery’s letter that no memorial or marker would be allowed until the St. Vincent de Paul Society was compensated. I know there was a funeral but I don’t know who paid the undertaker, if there was one. As late as March of 1963, our mother was still attempting to confirm whether there were any accrued VA payments payable to cover final costs—I gather not.

Our parents were finally able to pay the St Vincent de Paul Society in 1980, two years before our father died in 1982. Later, our mother and her second husband paid for the marker on her mother’s grave. Our sister Cecilia handled the arrangements requested by our mother for her mother’s marker and our mother’s interment and marker. In 2011, Marian Frances Dawson Pepin McDonald was buried near her mother.

[Slideshow of Grandmother Dawson’s downtown friends]