Mraz Family Memory

Written in late 1980's to "have on hand" for memory purposes when Helen Mraz was extremely ill. Then it got lost or mislaid, until found very recently while cleaning and re-organizing an office. Helen Mraz died in October, 1996, at age 98. [Click here to access this document.]

Helen Fetter Mraz was, to her young family, a shy and quiet homebody, a woman dedicated to her work as a wife and mother. She was immensely proud and devoted to her husband, Edward Mraz of Canton, Ohio, and her four sons, Jim, David, Paul, and Bernard. Helen Fetter of Columbus, Ohio was the second daughter in her family, a younger sister of a beautiful and beloved and gentle older sister. To remember the one, you must remember the other. The older sister, Gertrude, and the younger sister, Helen, had almost totally blended lives in their early and teenage years, as they worked together and stayed close, even though a brother and five other sisters followed them in the family.

Both women were serious women, in that they never wanted to stop learning. They were committed to education, to a turn-of-the-century-American faith that a full, bountiful life would come from dedication and hard work.

Helen never saw her own beauty, which beauty was estimable, because she felt, for instance, her "squinty green eyes" were not the same as Gertrude's stunning blue ones. But Gertrude, the loving and nurturing person, never placed herself above Helen in any way. Indeed, the total joy Gertrude took in every success of Helen's, and the joy and security that Helen felt in her closeness to Gertrude, produced a beautiful relationship for all of the Mraz children and their Burns cousins who came from the happy union of Gertrude and her beloved James Burns.

When Helen Fetter married Ed Mraz, she moved 150 miles away from the close family cocoon of her childhood. In 1922 this was a great distance. Now she was on her own, a devoted partner in a new life. Her beautiful and healthy babies and her lovely home were her joy. Her tall, handsome, jovial, intelligent husband was her sun and moon. Together they toughed out the Great Depression, even managing to welcome heartily the birth of a daughter - me - at the height of it.

My father's 50% Depression paycut in his management position at the stamping and enameling plant only challenged them to be more creative and caring with the half they still did receive. Indeed, I remember one Christmas as a child in which the $10 that would have gone to provide Christmas presents to our family went instead to a young widow one street over.

And as a young child. I went along with my father to deliver, quietly, the baskets of food he and my mother would prepare for some of the less fortunate families. Many times I would sit outside and watch while some tramp person would come to our back door and be fed.

Helen, our mother, canned food, sewed, played the piano with us, worked rapturously while listening to us practice our piano, read to us, hung laundry outside, cooked, baked, struggled home from the bus stop with bulging shopping bags and boxes, scrubbed us, ironed 30 white shirts a week on her gas mangle at one sitting so that each male would have a clean shirt every day for school or work. To think of her during my childhood years is to see a whirlwind of tasks. She saw it all as her way to raise her children, to launch them with the best she could give. We had the best food, the cleanest house, and every encouragement to study and learn.

And she had fun, too. She and Dad had their card-playing club. We visited people, all went to church together, went hunting and fishing, took family drives, and trips to Columbus. The childrens' school progress and achievement and musical skills were a cause of great pride. Hobbies of the boys, such as model airplanes built with little gas engines, and such as fly rod casting and target shooting, and creating finely crafted woodworking projects, were sources also of immense pleasure and pride.

For Helen, it all came to a crash in 1947, when her beloved Ed went to his office one morning and suffered a massive heart attack. She never saw him alive again. He was only 53. Two children, Bernard and myself, still lived at home. Jim, the eldest son, was so far away and deeply involved in World War II that he could not be home for the funeral.

The story of dedication and love that was Helen's life to this point became one of courage, creativity, grit and survival. Though there has never been the slightest doubt in my mind that from that point, Mother never was more than one thought away from seeing Dad again, she carried on, magnificently and intelligently.

Now truly on her own, she summoned every strength and power she had. She returned to office work, she branched out into clothing sales work. She sent me to college, a four-year private university. She became a financial whiz. She welcomed grandchildren from the marriages of Jim, Paul and Bernard. She eventually sold the family home in Canton and came to live with me in Milwaukee and then in Washington, D.C. She and I chummed together, spending many Sundays on little adventures and excursions around Washington.

She provided a beautiful wedding for me and my husband, Ned, in Washington, D.C. When I moved to Massachusetts, after a few years she, too, came to Boston, there to enjoy a life as a Boston lady who worked as a salesclerk at Best and Co., a proud and proper store. She walked her grandson at the Public Garden.

Eventually she retired and came to Whitman, the treasured and beloved grandmother to our three children, with whom she spent long hours while my husband and I campaigned and served in political offices.

She went back to Columbus, Ohio for a while to see her roots again, and then back to Whitman, Massachusetts for a few short years. Amazing in health and outgoing, popular and beloved in senior citizen social circles, Mom wanted a place of her own, not. wishing to be tied down to a busy household where someone else's agenda carried the day.

Amazingly, at 88 years of age, Helen moved to an apartment found for her in Newark, Delaware by Paul and Sally Mraz of Elkton, Maryland, just minutes away from their home. Mom loved her apartment and loved being around the big, loving Paul-Sally Mraz family of grandchildren and great grandchildren. From the shy and quiet homebody of our childhood, Mom had grown to an outgoing, gregarious, life- of- the- party. Still unaware of her great beauty, she was nevertheless celebrated by all who knew her. Her charm, social presence, style and intelligence were remarked about over and over again to me, years after she left Whitman. No one who ever met her, it seemed, forgot her. The two most often repeated remarks to me have been, "Your mother is so beautiful" and "Your mother, you know, is a very remarkable woman. I have never met another quite like her." I have heard this over and over, from her fellow club members and church associates. It is a joy and a pride to realize that these things were not just my own opinion.

And as for my brothers, I have observed that they honored Mother by imitation, each choosing for his beloved wife a woman who echoes some facet of mother's persona: Ruth, the wife of Jim, has the same caring attitude and complete devotion to her husband and home; Jane, the wife of David, has the sense of tactful reserve so admired also in Mother; Sally, the wife of Paul, has the intelligence and grit of Mother, and the organizational savvy, and Yuriko, the wife of Bernard, is as shy and retiring as Mother was in her early years in a new area, but possesses the same loyalty and devotion to children. Mother was so proud of all of her sons, including my Ned, her son-in-law whom she loved as a son. Myself, her birth daughter, she made her confidant, her sounding board, her special friend. She honored me by revealing herself to me, a circumstance that her generation did not encourage women to "bother" men with. Thus, I probably do know a different Helen than maybe my brothers do, but if that is true, they should all realize that she adores them and her pride in them is fierce.

She had every son scrupulously analyzed, to catalog exactly and in what delightful measure he is the reflection of his father. One's voice, one's wit, one's smile, bearing.. .whatever. Her happiest pronouncement after a visit or a phone call would be something said, done or looked to be ". .Just like Ed." Even I was told many, many times the highest accolade: "You have hands just exactly like your father!"

So, it was a love story, and we were all in it.

Mary Alice Mraz Kirby