Grandmom's Adventure 75th Birthday

In 1993 Karen and I went to Wilmington to celebrate Mother's 75th birthday.
It snowed. Quite unusual.

On Sunday, Karen produced this charming account of the weekend, done in the style of a young grandchild.  (She was 19 and in art school at the time.)

I just found the booklet again today.
The cover is wrapping paper.

The top picture references a picture Sarah drew years before for a Thanksgiving place card, illustrating Grandmom (Grace) after driving to Minnesota for a visit.

I don't remember either issue here, but apparently we were not stars in the kitchen!

"once in a while"...  chuckling.

The Olive Garden was chosen because it was open.  The roads were not plowed, Newlin drove, and the ride was 'exciting.'  That is Lois in the front seat, freaking out.

An academic orientation

It is Mother's birthday.  She would have been 95 today.


Before any of us were particularly aware of Tower Hill School or its motto,
we intuitively knew what Multa Bene Facta meant.  Mother.

And one of the things she was best at was school.

Both The Morning News and The Evening Journal carried articles about the Claymont High School Graduation in 1935. Complete copies of these newspapers exist in The Stuff.
Here are scans of a separate, crumbling set of clippings that have since been recycled, found in a different box.

"At the right is shown Miss Kwick, who won all the honor prizes"

Growing up, while we knew that Mother had been a good student, we were not told of this coup.

Late in her life she did tell me that during the graduation ceremony,  Mr. Stahl, the principal, when calling her name for yet another prize, added an aside to the audience something like, "Lest you think that Grace spends all of her time studying, you should know that she has a very nice boyfriend, too."

Her high level of involvement in everything persisted at college.

With her picture in the yearbook from her Junior year:

                 Class Editor Blue and Gold 1; Business

                 Manager Blue and Gold 3; Class Treas-

                 urer 2, 3; Math Club 1, 2, 3; French

                 Club 1, 2, 3; German Club 2, 3; Science

                 Club 1; Freshman Formal Committee 1;

                 Stunt Night Committee 2; Sophomore

                 Tea Dance Committee 2; Soph-Senior

                  Luncheon Committee 2; Business Man-

                  ager Junior Prom 3.

                 One girl who does well what would

                 enough work for three ordinary girls.

(Stunt night Committee??)

There are other documents that illustrate academic excellence and much careful, if not very interesting work in elementary school -- and a lot of notes and related correspondence about her Masters degree.  Both are out of scope for this post.

Suffice it to say for now that we had an amazing academic role model, and that it was always understood that school work was of utmost importance.

Kwick comedians

Sometimes when we only know people when they are old, we forget that they were once much younger and less dignified....

Nils/Grandpop, Grace, Gerda/Grandmom (or maybe Alice?), Raymond.  Late 1920s.

Sisters with beaded bags

I have very strong memories of hanging around Grandmom's house while Mother and Grandmom and Alice and, I think, even Swea sometimes, were crocheting these bags. They each had one like this, and there were also a couple of plainer variations. 
I was at least occasionally allowed to string the wooden beads on the gold cording. Think about it.  All the beads have to be on the thread before you start crocheting.  So please notice that the bead colors repeat in strict order.

Yes. It is a Rock.

This is a very special stone.

It was part of the Stone House on Naaman's Road where Grace was born in 1918.

When her kids were growing up, the house was known as “Corson's”, presumably the name of the people who lived there at the time. It was a nice looking stone farmhouse then.

The house was torn down when Naaman's Road was widened, but before it was completely gone, Grace rescued this stone so that her birthplace was not entirely obliterated.

Nils and Gerda Kwick and family moved there from Chester sometime between 1910 and 1918.

Late in her life Grace wrote:

"The stories about the time in the old house on Naaman's Road are many and varied. My father, who I think was by that time working on the Delaware River, probably on a dredge … bought this old dilapidated house with a lot of land and then told my mother. When he took her to see it she said she wouldn't move into that house, but it was a done deal so they moved into it. Stories go that the window sills were piled with manure to keep the wind out. Anyway, Pop had a crew from the boat come out and clean it up before they actually moved in."

Here is picture from before much was done with the house.

By the very early 1920's, the Kwicks had moved across the road to a new house that Nils built.