Good Old Days Magazine

A Return Home on Mother’s Day

The two 70-year-old “youngsters” in the back seat of our car were driving my husband, Mike, crazy. “Go this way” ... “No, this way is faster!” my mother and her sister, Agnes, urged him. Years ago now, we were all en route from Havertown, Pa., to West Philadelphia on a trip down memory lane—a special gift to Mom for Mother’s Day.

She always spoke of her old house, number 3709, located on auntil 1957. Their home had gorgeous Battenburg lace curtain panels hanging from the 11-foot ceilings to the floor in the parlor. My grandmother’s homemade pies and breads, which she made daily during the Depression years, sustained her eight growing children, visitors and friends, while her husband worked as an insurance inspector. We children were intrigued by Mom’s stories of the Indian Head pennies that her brothers buried in a mayonnaise jar beneath the backyard’s U.T.S. Club hut. (U.T.S. stood for “Under The Shed”— no girls allowed.)

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