As the Phoenix Does

The phoenix, in Greek mythology, is a bird that is regenerated or reborn. Associated with the sun, a phoenix obtains new life by rising from the ashes of the one before. Just as the phoenix rises up from ashes, Lucretia Donahue arose from her couch after a year of grieving the loss of her husband. She had decided to return to teaching. She had children to raise and to support. She could have chosen to marry again, but she never did. She would manage her life independently. Now, she needed to renew her teaching certificate. Now, it would take two years instead of the one she completed at the end of high school. She enrolled at the Albion Normal School, a place of continuing education which specifically trained people for the teaching profession and prepared those who would go on to other schools. It seemed lucky for her that when she was a teen, society had begun to see the value in training girls to have some means of supporting themselves, and teaching was one of the main options. She already had the experience and the confidence to step back into it.

By the time my mother was eight-years-old, my grandmother had obtained her new teaching certificate. She returned to the profession and taught fifth and sixth graders. She loved it! She especially liked the boys and was amused by their rowdiness. She was health conscious and would have her students get up from their desks and do "calisthenics to get their blood moving." Even when she was an old woman in her 80s and 90s, her past students, now adults in their 50s to 60s, would fondly address her. I remember wheeling my grandmother down the street one Fourth of July when a man came up to her, took her hand and said, "Hello, Mrs Donahue!" He told her she was the greatest teacher and she had made a good impact on him. He thanked her. It was clear she had been an important influence.

My mother, however, did not have such a good experience. She had my grandmother as her teacher. So as to not seem to be favoring her daughter, my grandmother was more strict and was harder on my mother. My mother hated being in her class. They had a prickly relationship in general. My mother felt deeply criticized by her mother. I didn't see it as I was growing up and couldn't understand my mother's tension. It wasn't until I was home later in life and the three of us went to a celebration in a downtown park that it became evident. My mother was pushing my grandmother in a wheel chair, which felt humiliating to my grandmother. I witnessed her sniping and barking at my mother with a harsh, critical tone for no good reason apparent to me. Then I felt empathy for my mother. I finally saw it and it was painful to see. It didn't make any sense. My mother needed her mother to be her support and in many ways she didn't get that. My mother clearly admired my grandmother's strength. But that strength that allowed her to persevere after her husband's death, for some reason, became harshness directed at her daughter. I wonder if it was some unconscious, twisted jealousy that didn't want to share that special man they both loved and who had loved each of them.

My Mother's Dad

I know bits and pieces of what my mother could recall from age five and of what had been told to her. Evidently, Joseph Donahue was an upstanding man around town, a gentleman. He was doing well as a miner. My mother remembered sitting in his lap and him doting on her. Also, when her mother wasn't allowing her to do something, maybe because it was a hassle or she thought a girl shouldn't do it, her Dad would say, "Oh, let her do it. It is ok." He was her champion.

While playing outdoors with her friend who was a little younger than she, my mother convinced the little girl to grab onto an electric fence. Neither one of them really knew what it would do. The girl's hands became stuck, she was being electrocuted and couldn't let go! My mother's dad came running, threw dirt on the girl's hands, and pulled her off. That girl, Theresa, would spend the rest of my mother's life good-naturedly reminding her that she had tried to kill her!

My mother would get a wickedly satisfied look on her face when she told of witnessing an incident when her dad punished her older brother, Jim. She said that Jim had always been a trouble-maker even as a kid. As a teenager, he would "start the fights and his brother, Paul, would finish them." As an adult, my Uncle Jim became an embarrassment to her. He was a belligerent drunk. So looking back on this punishment, she believed he fully deserved it. Also, because of losing her father when she was so young, I don't think she could allow herself to think her dad ever did anything wrong. So Jim had done something; she couldn't recall what it was. Her dad began whipping him with a razor strap, the long strap men ran their shaving razors down. He was hitting him so hard and going on so long, that her mother began yelling, "Joe! Joe, stop! You're going to kill him!" Somehow, my mother believed Jim deserved this and she would look satisfied that her Dad had given it to him. With a different perspective, (I didn't have an emotional need to idolize my grandfather) I thought this was a horrible way to treat a child. He would have been age 10 or younger, and what could he possibly have done to deserve such an intense whipping. The sad thing would be that their dad would die when Jim was age 10 and my mother was age five. We remember events with high emotion, so I imagine this whipping was a memory of his father that my uncle would have carried with him. With only ten years of experiences with his dad, how many memories would compete with this one, enough to overshadow it?

So Joseph Donahue worked in a silver mine. The Triumph mine was the main one to work. The men would climb down very long, high ladders to get down into the mine. One day, Joe slipped on a wet ladder step and fell to the bottom, hitting his head on a rock. At home, he laid on the couch with a terrible headache. He was moved to the second floor of a building on Hailey's main street which served as the hospital. There was no smoking allowed, but Lucretia Donahue ran out and bought a pack of cigarettes. The man was dying; he could at least have the smoke he was craving. Joe died three days after falling from the ladder. He left two sons, ages 10 and 9, and a daughter, age 5. My mother said that her mother laid on the couch for much of the following year, very depressed and grieving.

Women's Work and Marriage

I don’t know very much about several years of my grandmother’s life. She may have left home around the year 1913. I know she traveled with her Aunt Rea who was only a year older than she. The two young women were best friends. She traveled by train, and out west, she saw little scrubby bushes she could not believe were sage brush. She had read about it in Louis Lamoure novels described as growing higher than a man on horseback. Those little scrubby things did not live up to her expectations. She and Rea stayed at a bed and breakfast and dined with two handsome and charming young men who turned out to be Catholic Jesuits. She lamented that all of the good looking men were priests! She said she worked at the May Company as a phone switchboard operator. It must have been fun because she seemed delighted with that time and fond of the Company. At some point, she must have begun teaching. Now that I think of it, it is strange that she didn’t talk of the 15 years before she met my grandfather. She must have lived her life according to the standard rules for teachers of the time:

You will not marry during the term of your contract.

You are not to keep company with men.

You must be home between the hours of 8 pm and 6 am unless at a school function.

You may not ride in carriages or automobiles with any man except your father or brother.

You may not dress in bright colors.

You may under no circumstances dye your hair.

You must wear at least two petticoats.

Your dresses may not be any shorter than 2 inches above the ankles.

It was typical of the time that women who became teachers would end their teaching careers when they married. She met Joseph Donahue, a miner from Mackay, Idaho, at a St Patrick’s Day celebration. They made a good match. She was mostly Irish with red hair and bright blue eyes. He was full Irish, his father and uncles coming into America from Canada where their father had come to from County Meath, Ireland. They married on June 28^th, 1928. She reluctantly gave up teaching. She had her first son in March of 1929 and her second son a year later. Their births were so close that for a few weeks each year, they were the same age.

 

Joe continued mining, silver mining, and she lived in the mountains with him. She talked of packrats stealing her hose or stockings, audaciously running across the cabin floor. They started out in Mackay but somehow ended up in Hailey, Idaho near the famous Sun Valley Ski Resort. She gave birth to my mother on the kitchen table in a little house they were staying in in Hailey. The story is that Joe came into a big payout from a mine he was working, and before he came home from the mountains, she had used the money to buy a house, a log house, in Hailey. This was very bold for a woman. She was not a meek, quiet woman. She had opinions; she would argue. Joe and Lucretia were a fiery Irish couple!