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.