Jean (Griest) Leiby

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Biography

Raised in Steelton, PA

My mother was the second of three children born to her father and mother. She had an older brother, Ed, and a younger brother, Jack. When she was three years old, sometime between Thanksgiving and her birthday (December 11) her mother died suddenly of a vaginal hemorrhage. Being so young, she really didn't understand what had happened, but she remembered being overwhelmed by the number of presents she got for Christmas, which she realized later was because her mother had just died. I don't know if this happened before or after her mother died, but her father hired a young black girl (14) to cook and clean and take care of the children. Her name was Ethel and she was the mother figure to my mother. Her father remarried to my step-grandmother Irma when my mother was six, and when she was seven, she got a step-sister, my Aunt Marcia. Every summer they went to a little town at the shore in Cape May County, New Jersey, called Stone Harbor, where her parents bought a summer house.

My mother attended public schools in Steelton and then went to Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA, where she received her A.B. After college her parents sent her to Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School. After secretarial school, she received several job offers, including one as the secretary for a well-known novelist (I don't know who this person was), but she thought it would be too social, so she went to work as the secretary for the railroad in Allentown. Then she became the secretary to the Dean of Men at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. The story is that my father, who was studying there, was not the best student, and spent some time in the office, where he met my mother in the spring of 1948, and as they say, the rest is history. They got engaged at the end of July 1948, just after my father brought my mother home to visit his father, who then died within the week.

We actually have the love letters my mother and father wrote to each other in the fall of 1948, when my father was off at Harvard working on his Masters. My mother was still secretary to the Dean of Men at Muhlenberg. Her parents strongly opposed the marriage (no money, no social status, a left-wing husband) so she had no help from them. At Thanksgiving, on November 26, 1948, they got married at Harvard, with Jim Reppert as best man and Tom and Eleanor Fina as witnesses. I believe Eleanor was also the attendant. My mom wore a navy blue suit and her raccoon coat, which her parents had given her a few years earlier. My mother came back to Allentown and stayed there working until my Dad came home at Christmas, and then they had a very short honeymoon in the Poconos before they moved to Cambridge.

My mother did not know how to cook and so she bought a Betty Crocker cookbook (in tatters by the time I was a teenager) and read all the nutrition information and planned meals and cooked according to the information in Betty Crocker. As a result her meals were very nutritious, even when they had no money. My mother kept a notebook with everything she bought it and the prices (stamps, 3 cents, etc.) Unfortunately, my brother got rid of it. The prices and things she bought were very revealing of the times. My parents had very little money and every week they would put all the money they had left over in a jar. Sometimes there was nothing, sometimes just a few pennies, sometimes a nickel or a dime, or even a quarter. Every Christmas Eve my father would go out about 10 pm and try to find a Christmas tree we could afford. It was always a small, somewhat sparse or lopsided tree.

I believe they first shared an apartment with someone else, then moved to Somerville. They played classical music at night and a mouse (they named him Frederick) would come out and sit on the stairs to listen. They would give him a little cheese. My mother worked as a secretary at a children's private school until she became pregnant and started to show (November 1949?) They did not have a telephone, so when my mother went into labor on March 16, 1950 about 4am, they waited until 7am to ask the landlady if they could use her phone to call the hospital (Mount Auburn Hospital.) My dad took my mother to the hospital in his father's gray Nash. I was born shortly after 9am. The story is that my mother was left alone with a nurse call button. When she reached down she could feel my head crowning and panicked, finally finding the nurse call button. When the nurse came in and saw what was happening, she ran out screaming for the doctor. Then they gave my mother a painkiller (a little late, she said) and I (Ellen) was born. I weighed six pounds, three ounces. As was common at the time, my mother spent two weeks in the hospital. When my parents brought me home, I was asleep and they just put me on the couch and looked at me, because they didn't know what to do. My mother nursed me for several months.

While my father was in graduate school, he worked as a pianist in bars and as a teaching assistant. My mother typed papers for students and took care of me. Eventually they moved to Shaler Lane. My brother was born at Mount Auburn while we lived there. My parents didn't have a car and went everywhere by bicycle, with me on the back of my father's bike (to nursery school) and my brother on the back of my mother's bike. I remember my mother going grocery shopping by pushing a very big, traditional baby carriage with my brother in it and me walking along side up a long, steep hill to the grocery store. It was easier on the way down. My mother was a great mother. She made playdough from scratch and read to me every day.

In September 1955, we moved to University Heights (New Brunswick, New Jersey) when my father became an assistant professor of American History at Rutgers. Our housing had three bedrooms(!), but no bathtub in the bathroom, so my mother bathed us in a small blue enamel bathtub on the kitchen floor. My parents bought a sandbox for us and we went and got sand for us. My father was driving a dark green 1950 Plymouth at the time, but my mother still did not know how to drive. Behind our house there was a large green yard and a row of trees lining a creek. That fall my mother planted red tulip bulbs on the side of the house, and it was a great disappointment to us all when someone picked the flowers. That winter there were snow drifts up to the windows. The next year we moved to Prentiss Lane, a two bedroom home at another location in University Heights. By this time my brother and I were old enough to spend the days outdoors playing with all the other children. My mother attempted to send my brother to nursery school that year, after she learned how to drive, but my brother hated it, so he stayed home until he was ready for kindergarten. This marked a new development for us. Prior to New Jersey, if I asked for something at the store, my mother always said no, we couldn't afford it. But in New Jersey, once we went to the grocery store, and my brother asked for Cocoa Puffs, and my mother bought them. More impressive, we all hated them, and my mother didn't make us eat them, but put the box up on the shelf and it stayed there until we moved two years later.

When my father's mother broke her arm falling down the cellar steps, but parents bought a house in Highland Park, New Jersey, so my grandmother (Nana) could come live with us. She lived in what was known as the recreation room (a very large room taking up most of the first floor of the house (it was kind of a split level.) My mother then became very involved in school activities (the PTA) and the League of Women Voters. I thought she was the perfect mother, but apparently she had some mental issues and had some electro-shock treatments, of which I was completely unaware until my father mentioned it when I was an adult. During this time, every summer we went to Stone Harbor, NJ, where my maternal grandparents lived in retirement, and where my mother had gone every summer as a child.

In the spring of 1961 (March,) the dean of the School of Social Work at the University of California at Berkeley, Milton Chernin, called and asked my father if he could talk to him about a job teaching the history of social welfare in the School of Social Work. Well, of course he said yes, and so he came to New Jersey (on the way home from New York City, I believe) and interviewed my dad, and offered him the job. This was a huge change. My parents had to sell the house, pack up, rent a house in Berkeley sight unseen, and drive across the country. My mother, Mrs. Organization, was very successful at this, and that summer, at the end of August, we drove across the country in our 1954 Chevy, possibly bought for the occasion to replace our 1950 Plymouth. It was a fun trip, in nine days, with care taken to stop in the afternoon to stay at motels with swimming pools so the children could work off their excess energy. My grandmother took the Greyhound across the country and, when she arrived in Berkeley, moved into her own apartment.

Sources

• daughter; Record of Family of Bartholomaus Ramberger (Emigrant Ancestor) and Descendants, Compiled by Flora A. Curtin, 1965.

Memories of what my mother told me.

Letters by my parents to each other, August-December 1948.

Personal memories.