My Mother's #MeToo

When the school called my mother because I was wearing pants instead of a dress, my mother stood up for me.

When the school counselor (also the pastor's wife in our small town) called my mother because I signed up to take wood shop in 7th grade, my mother stood up for me.

When I got my driver's license, my mother told me how the day she got her own car, she discovered what freedom really was.

I heard about her successes: the undergraduate degree that wasn't an MRS, the graduate degree and academic honors in a time when women didn't do that sort of thing.

I heard about the time the bank wanted her husband's signature to open an account in her name. The bank manager heard about that too.

She endured what we now call micro-aggressions--those subtle and not-so-subtle reminders that a woman wasn't welcome in a traditionally male realm.

She knew it was happening, and she didn't remain silent, even in a time when feminism wasn't a word in everyday use. Even something as innocuous as her sorority scrapbook, full of theater programs, matchbooks from clubs and restaurants, and wedding announcements from her sorority sisters, there is a piece of paper pasted in with her note.

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I had to park in the lot behind the KA house one day -- this is what I found under the windshield wiper when I came back:

Little Miss Chi O,

There are certain prerequisites you must meet before obtaining a semester pass to park in this lot. Certain measurements, little acts of ---, etc. Never having seen you in our house president's room, I realize only too well that you have not qualified for a pass to park here. Therefore, if you are interested in a semester pass to park in this lot, drop around anytime - someone will give you your test.

The Masked Marvel
KA

Grammie, or a DAC Parliamentarian

On this day in 1941, my Grammie, Ruth Neely Thompson Walsh became a widow. They had been married 17 years, and her son (my father) was only 13. With what would have been termed moxie at the time, she picked herself up, and soldiered on, running the Biltmore Hotel in San Francisco on her own. Her integrity got her written up in the newspaper more than once, but that's a story for another day. After she retired, she plunged headlong into a rich social life of playing bridge, having coffee with friends, and researching genealogy, which led her to hold many offices in groups like the DAR and DAC.

In March 1960, she pens the following letter to her son and daughter-in-law, who have just had their first child. She writes chatty letters, but this one, posted from room 640 of the Statler Hilton in Los Angeles provides a window into her unflagging energy and focus. At the time she wrote this, she was 75 years old.

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Saturday P.M.

Dear Madge & Bert,

I meant to send a card before this but haven't been able to find time. We started with a Board meeting before we got unpacked Wed and Thurs and Friday were full days with luncheons-dinner Thurs and a 7:30 breakfast on Friday. I am going to tumble in as soon as I mail this and try to catch up on sleep as I haven't had enough any night since I arrived.

Our flight was pleasant but then we had to circle over the airport for almost a half hour on account of fog and smog.

Next week won't be so strenuous as I have no responsibility and can skip meetings if I wish. The State Board put Marjorie up for a National Office for D.A.C. She did a good job of presiding on the whole. I had to sit up by her as parliamentarian and I wished she had left out a few things she said but on the whole it was all right.

Much love to you both and to my grandson.

Ruth - Mom

Ruth Thompson Walsh ca. 1955

Recipe: Crab stuffed sole

It was a staple on my grandmother Jessie Cutting Richardson's elegant table: crab stuffed sole, moist and delicious. Jessie was talented in the kitchen, preferring simple dishes with fresh ingredients. Her daughter Madge, however, was an intellectual, and like her father, needed a recipe to follow--slavishly.

In my childhood, I can remember the moist dish when eating at Grandmother's, but at home, it was dry and rubbery. I finally figured out why in 1986. My parents were moving from Portland, Oregon back down to Redding, California for their retirement, leaving us, their adult children, behind. Moving day was predictably hectic, and the plan was that after the van pulled away, they would come stay the night in my apartment. I would provide a well-earned shower, dinner and a bed. My mother handed me $20 and a copy of the recipe for crab-stuffed sole and said, "why don't you make this?"

The recipe in Madge's book

 A careful reader of the recipe will note that the method doesn't say what to do with the wine, so I added it before putting it in the oven so the fish would poach. At dinner, my mother was near tears as she noted that it was as delicious as when her recently-deceased mother had made it--and what did I do differently? We went through the steps, and when I said I added the wine, she exclaimed, "You added it? I always just drank it!"

While cleaning out her home last year, I found my grandmother's recipe box. Turns out those years of baked fish can be traced to a copying error. Use this version.

The recipe in Jessie's card file

Merry Christmas 1947

Christmas card from Bert T Walsh, 1947

The SS Matsonia rounding Diamond Head

On Armistice Day

by Madge R. Walsh, Nov. 11, 2008

My father, my brother, and my husband all were veterans of the US Navy.

Ensign Russell D Richardson

My father volunteered in World War I, and was sent to Mare Island Naval Station on San Francisco Bay, where the USS Gridley (a four-stack destroyer) was being built. As a “landsman,” he was to be trained as an electrician, but the class was full so there was a long wait until the next class. Half a dozen of these “landsmen” got bored with nothing to do, so they hired tutors and studied to get their commissions as officers – and did. (It was a relief not to have to sleep in a hammock anymore!). My father was assigned to the Gridley as an ensign; during the builder’s trial runs, it got pretty rough – green water over the bow at 35 knots – but my father didn’t get seasick, and never did (I wish I could say the same for myself, but I can’t.). The day the Gridley sailed out of San Francisco Bay was the day the Armistice was signed.

One of the highlights of that first voyage was the passage through the Panama Canal, recently built; another was that the Gridley was one of the ships stationed at intervals across the Atlantic to report on the flight of the four Navy seaplanes across the Atlantic, and if necessary, rescue any that didn’t make it. The Gridley did have to rescue the pilot of one plane; another destroyer tried to tow it, but the seaplane was not built for that kind of treatment, and sank.

David C Richardson

After the war, my parents married and had my brother, who served in World War II. He was in college, Naval ROTC, and managed to graduate (University of California). He was immediately sent to New York for midshipman school at Columbia. The Navy then sent him off to the South Pacific. He had a small sailboat on San Francisco Bay, and the Navy put him on a small ship, a wooden APc originally designed for mine sweeping, etc. They had the not unpleasant duty of exploring the remote islands & atolls to check up on the presence of any Japanese (didn’t find any); but then were part of the Philippine invasion. At Luzon, his little ship was attacked by a kamikaze, but another US ship shot it down, so they were not damaged. From there, they faced the imminence of invading Japan; but were “saved” from that by the atomic bomb, and the subsequent Japanese surrender. People decry the use of atomic weapons, but at least in this case, my family is grateful that the invasion did not take place, and my brother was not killed.

After his tour of duty was done, my brother was assigned as captain of an oceangoing tug launched in Portland, Oregon; he was to take it to Honolulu. It had a small crew, only 2 officers – my brother and a navigator. The poor navigator was seasick all the way to San Francisco, so my brother did the navigation. As they approach the pilot boat at the entrance to San Francisco Bay, the fog lifted – my brother said if he kept on going, it would’ve run right into it. Since he’d sailed the San Francisco Bay and knew it well, he was darned if he take on a pilot, and took the tug into the bay himself. After delivering the tug at Pearl Harbor, he was released from the Navy. He continued to sail in small (and larger) boats, even in the Midwest, whenever he could find a lake to sail on.

Bert T. Walsh

My husband was also in the Navy, during the Korean “conflict.” He served on an LCd; once he showed me a photo of the hold – the “dock” – loaded with wounded men on stretchers, being evacuated. Before that, growing up in San Francisco, he had been a Sea Scout, and made lifelong friends – I still have a photo of their sailboat, the “Corsair,” and its “pirate” flag is brought out at every reunion. He attended the Maritime Academy at Vallejo, now part of the University of California system. He sailed on oil tankers and also for Matson, to Honolulu. I recall the time after we were married and had our son, we were walking along San Francisco’s Embarcadero, and he told our little boy how to get on a board a liner as a stowaway! But he had taken advantage of the G.I. bill, went to college and eventually became a licensed mechanical engineer. For a man who really didn’t enjoy traveling, his work took us to quite a few places, in the US and Canada. After we “retired” to Northern California, he even had a small sailboat on Whiskeytown Lake. Our son has missed our latest embroilment (now too old). I’m hoping my grandsons – and their contemporaries – never again have to face such situations.

Once Upon a Time: Honolulu

by Marjory Cutting Hulting

     On December 13, 1899, on my seventh birthday, we sailed from San Francisco for Honolulu. It was a foggy, bleak day when we left Marmee’s house and went to the wharf, the last part of the trip over large noisy cobblestones. Our trunks and our cat Billie, a huge part Persian, in a crate, were taken to the ship, R.P. Rithet, by a neighbor, Esther Hayes the expressman.

     By the time we reached the dock, I was thoroughly frightened at the strangeness of it all and the confusion, smells, fussing relations and my mother’s determined good-natured impatience. Billie had escaped from his slatted box, made by my young uncle Howard; so with this excuse, I cried. Everyone asked what was the matter, and knowing grown-ups always must have a reason, Billie’s loss was the simplest. I can look back and realize that Billie was not the main reason, but merely my excuse. Loving relations were my grandfather and grandmother Cutting, my Aunt Evelyn, Papa’s Auntie Grace [Beck] and Howard, then about 18. We love them all dearly and, on their part we were going to a very faraway place.

     Papa had gone to Honolulu some months before as a salesman for Waterhouse & Lester, a carriage supply firm in San Francisco where he was a bookkeeper, and a firm in Honolulu called Honolulu Carriage Co. had offered him the position as manager. He came home, made the necessary arrangements and returned to Honolulu, leaving my mother to sell the furniture (except the piano), put the house up for rent and take four children by sailing vessel to make a new home.

Our captain was Capt. MacPhail, a young, slight Scotsman with a decided accent. The first mate was Dr. Mr. (afterward Capt.) George Weston Gove, and a close friend of the family for many years thereafter. The second mate was another Scott named Mr. Burns, the delight of us children because he sang sea shanty type songs for us and had ridiculous things to say about the passengers, especially one old man who used to go to a barrel of seawater every morning and put it on his eyes saying, “nothing is so good for the eyes is good saltwater.” The mate took him off perfectly. We had Christmas at sea, and a passenger, Capt. Frieze, dressed a Santa Claus, came down through the cabin skylight with presents for everyone.

The Cutting's 1902 voyage aboard the R.P. Rithet

Clippings: A Promising Athlete

From the San Francisco Chronicle, 1896

A PROMISING ATHLETE
Walsh, a High School Boy of San Francisco, Who Walks With Style and Speed.

            There is a High School boy in San Francisco whose performances as a walker indicate that in him are the possibilities of the future coast champion. His name is A. M. Walsh and he lives at 1631 Ellis street. He is 18 years of age, 5 feet 7 ½ inches in height and of slight build, for he weighs, in meager track dress, but 114 pounds.

            In March, 1895, he practiced for the first time to heel-and-toe movement that is the essential part of fair walking, and in a trial on the Olympic Club grounds covered a mile in about ten minutes. Previous to that he had accustomed himself to rapid walking in going to and returning from the High School, a distance of 10 blocks from his home. That was his first training, so he was not conscious of it at the time.

A.M. Walsh, a Coming Walker (From a photograph by "The Elite.")

A.M. Walsh, in the original photograph

Young Walsh now walks a mile in 7 minutes 30 seconds. What that means may be imagined when it is asserted that a very great majority of men, take them as they pass on the street and untrained, cannot run a mile to a fire in that time. For one who is practically in his first year as a walker this is remarkable speed. Generally three years are necessary to develop a walker, and in the larger universities today there are few men whose performances surpassed the work of this beginner. The intercollegiate record for the Pacific Coast is 7 minutes 25 2-5 seconds and was made over three years ago by Harry Timm, a very tall, wiry, long-limbed athlete, who was graduated from Stanford University in 1893.

The best previous collegiate record had been held by George Foulkes of the University of California. During the last three years the record has not been threatened. L. T. Merwin of the University of California gave some good exhibitions in the East a year ago, but his time here has not been worthy of note is the performance of an experienced member of a great athletic team. Merwin is, however, a very fair walker, although his style is not the best, and his height and strength give him an advantage over a smaller man. Foulkes was a sick-set football-player, a “plodder” in his style of walking and probably incapable of very great speed because of his muscular build. Timm’s style is more like that of Walsh, an easy, loose-jointed rapid movement. But Timm’s fault was a left knee that would not always straighten completely back before the heel was raised.

And a failure to “lock” the knee to have a total of one foot and the heel of the other on the ground simultaneously subjects a walker to a caution from a watchful judge. Three cautions disqualify a man from further competition in the race, or one caution on the final 100 yards will disqualify him.

Walsh has never yet been cautioned for an unfair step and he has won six medals. His steady improvement in speed is shown in the records of events he has entered: September 14, 1895, 9 minutes 6 seconds; April 11, 1896, 8 minutes 3 3-5 seconds, breaking the school record of 9 minutes 4 seconds; May 2, 1896 Coast championship, when he finished 9 yards behind Merwin whose time was 8 minutes 10 seconds; June 13, 1896, 7 minutes 49 2-5 seconds; July 4, 1896, 7 minutes 40 seconds, at Stockton, where he was beaten by Henry Timm; July 16, 1896, 7 minutes 39 seconds.

Walsh’s stride from toe to toe is 52 inches and from toe to heel is 42 inches, though the inside seam of his trousers measures only a fraction over 33 inches. As yet he has not acquired the low, gliding side-swing movement of the foot, so well exemplified in the easy style of Horace Coffin, the champion walker of the coast. That is another possibility.