Charity Isabel Wattles Kirby

First Published July 2009

CHARITY ISABEL WATTLES KIRBY
April 24, 1912-July 12, 2009

The most beautiful woman in the world, both inside and out. A wonderful wife to William R. Kirby and a mother without peer to Kathleen, Susan and Rebecca Kirby.

I will write about Mom in the days and weeks to come, but for now here are some photographs of her that I find especially appealing. If you have photos you'd like posted, send them to susan.kirby@gmail.com.

The photo on the left was at one of her birthday parties in Florissant. She loved the parties that celebrated her life, because she got to see all the ladies she loved. She had an unending reservoir of love and an unsurpassed capacity to hug.

The next photograph is of Mom with her older sister Hattie, in about 1976. The family resemblance is remarkable. Mom was the 12th of 13 children. There is a genealogy Web site about the descendants of John Jacob Kepp. It gives all the children of John Wesley Wattles and Maria Isabelle Harmon, Mom's father and mother. Aunt Hattie apparently provided some of the information.

Continue reading this post on the Charity Isabel Wattles Kirby page.

Memories From My Mother

Originally published 2012

My Mom, Charity Isabel Wattles Kirby, would have been 100 this year. She lived through some of the most stressful yet some of the most interesting times in our country’s history. In 1981, a young friend asked to interview her about the Great Depression. Mom, born in 1912, would have been 17 on Black Tuesday, when the stock market crashed. My mother, who had spent much of her life behind a typewriter typing court documents for my father in his law practice, decided to type up her memories, and made sure her daughters got copies. What follows is that history, which is the best inheritance I could ever have received from her. It provides such a window into the era, and on the joy that my Mom felt in everything she did.

The opening page pictured to the right shows the Executive IBM type she used so much of her time working for Dad. Although she deals mainly with the Great Depression years, seeing this type takes me through so many years after that, when I’d see her late at night typing away in the bedroom.

The picture to the below shows Mom and an older sister, Hattie, in the back yard of our house in Florissant, Missouri, in 1976. (I deleted the address Mom had added, because the house has been sold.)

Isabel Kirby and Hattie Wattles

My mother used to dream about “skimming,” being able to float above the ground and look down on the earth.  Sometimes she had a jetpack on her back, she used to tell me, and  sometimes  just “skimmed” around. I  love the part about the Fourth of July  when she had the thrill of flying for the first time.

I’ve done a little bit of editing, but for the most part this is Isabel Kirby, in her own voice. I’ve just added a few explanations in brackets and dropped in a few illustrations, although Mom's writing lets me see everything without them!

* * * 

Isabel Kirby
Florissant, Missouri
April 18, 1981

When my friend Cassandra contacted me with reference to an interview concerning the Great Depression and I agreed to the interview, how little I realized the “Pandora’s Box” of memories that would be flooding over me. I chose to write concerning these years rather than to record them since some sort of chronological order necessarily seems to need to be followed in answering some of these questions.

In order to analyze any “opinion” as to any given circumstance, a background of the person giving this opinion is of the utmost importance, and the opinion of the Wall Street broker hurling himself from the tallest building in New York on October 29, 1929, the bank president refusing to open the doors of his bank to a screaming and threatening mob, and a 16 year old girl growing up in rural Illinois would necessarily be far apart.

Continue reading Mom's memories on the Charity Isabel Wattles Kirby page.

Why Every Rat Is Guido

Originally published May 2012

Back in the 1980s, there was a lot of construction going on in the neighborhood of my second-floor Upper West Side hovel. Gigantic creepy rodents with long tails, disturbed by all the racket and disruption, were spotted entering our apartment building as if they owned the place, or at least paid rent there.

Richard, my boyfriend at the time, would report sightings of the rats in the laundry room and even in the lobby, slipping through the cracks in the mailbox wall. That, of course, did not make me a happy camper, but I had not yet had a close encounter with a rodent and wanted to keep it that way. I succeeded — until the radiator pipes under my floorboards sprang a leak, and workers were sent to make repairs. When they finished patching the pipes, they departed, leaving a gigantic hole in the floor around the radiator in the living room.

Late that night, as Rich and I prepared to sleep, there was a loud, loud, LOUD rustling sound from the kitchen — a sound from something definitely larger than a mouse. I admit to screaming hysterically and turning every light on in the apartment. Rich went into the living room with whatever weapon he was able to grab at the time (his drum sticks? a yardstick? not a baseball bat, since we didn’t have baseball paraphernalia at that time) and made a lot of noise, but fortunately the critter escaped (I say fortunately because I don’t think I could have handled an actual sighting – the sound was horrible enough).

Continue reading this post on the Why Every Rat Is Guido page.