From Grandpa's tapes:
Josie was a religious fanatic. She was one of those old time bigoted Catholics. James’ folks didn’t bring them up that way but the generation before them were as bigoted as the Protestants were to them. If you weren’t a Catholic you were going to go to hell for sure. In later years when she was staying down at Marguerite Wulf’s mother’s house, Nell Donahue, she showed how fanatic she was. On Good Friday Josie would go to the church at 6:30 in the morning and she wouldn’t leave until evening. This Good Friday, along toward noon, some lady came over and told Nell that Josie had wet her pants and it had run down the floor almost to the alter rails. Nell picked up a pair of clean panties and went over to the church and started to scold Josie about going on in such a way. Josie said “Well, that’s the kind of a Catholic you are and I’ve been here all day with Jesus.” So she didn’t make much head way in telling her to have a little cleanliness about herself.
Another time she was staying at Nell Donahue’s when Marguerite was going with Howard and, of course, he was a Lutheran. Josie wanted to go for a ride. She had broken her hip some time before and it had never mended properly. When the ride was over she was so stiff that she couldn’t get out of the car without help. It took quite a bit of help so Nell went in the house to get Howard who was visiting. Nell asked him to help Josie, but when Josie saw him coming near the car she said “Go away. I’ll not have any help from a Protestant pup!” Nell said, “Good! Then you can sit in there and rot.” Josie sat and rotted for about two hours in the hot sun and finally she let the Protestant pup help her out of the car.
Josie also didn’t believe in taking a bath. She said if you changed your underthings that was all that was necessary. Marguerite tells about when she and her mother picked up Josie bodily and put her in the tub to clean her up. Josie stiffened out straight as a board. They had to crack her in the stomach to get her to bend and get into the water. They scrubbed her up no matter what she believed.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Why would she have been living at Nell Donahue's house?
I think that was her job, how she made money. She helped others, like assisted living.
I ran accross a mini-book written by Arleen (one of the other twins). In it she said that Josie lived with Mrs. Donahue because she couldn't take care of herself any longer. Apparently it was, like Mary said, an assisted living type home.
I will either include a link to Arleen's 65 page book or simply just write the address in a future comment... It is very interesting. She had a MUCH different view of Josie than anyone else did! SHe talked about how Josie's children didn't like her and that Josie said it was because she had needed to "get off dope". Maybe Arleen's version of Josie was the drug free one but seems like she would have used the stronger drugs after breaking her hip when she had constant pain.
Herre is the address for Arlene's "book"... It's really interesting but I found it hard to follow at times... You'll have to cut and paste it into your address bar to go there.
http://www.nd.edu/~hgberry/Arleen%20memoir%20of%20Josie%20Dunn-web.pdf
Post a Comment