John Rossi: Mother’s Day memories

For the first 26 years of my life, I had two mothers. 

Let me explain. 

My real mother, Muriel White Rossi, gave birth to me in 1936. She and my father were struggling at the time in the midst of the Depression. A few months after I was born two things happened that changed my life. My father developed a ruptured appendix and was hospitalized for a month and was unable to work for another couple of months. At the same time my mother discovered that she was pregnant with my brother Angelo and went to live with my father’s Italian family in South Philly. I was sent to live with her two aunts and my grandfather in Olney, an upscale neighborhood in those days. 

The move was supposed to be temporary. After my father recovered my mother was pregnant again, this time with my brother Ray. There was no room for me and I stayed with aunts. What was supposed to be temporary gradually became permanent.

It was not that I didn’t see my mother. She came to visit usually for dinner every week. When I got older and my mother and father’s situation improved and they got their own home in Port Richmond I would visit them and my brothers every week or so. 

My mother was a remarkable woman. She lost her left arm in a car accident when she was eight and compensated by being even more independent as a child and an adult. She cooked, made beds and cleaned house and could even tie shoes with one hand, a trick I could never figure out. She had five children and I can never remember her complaining even when my father died at age 43, leaving her with my four siblings, ages five to 20. She was a good mother to my brothers and sisters and her ten grandchildren, taught them to be independent like her and never complain about your fate. She said that as her first, I was her favorite but I never believed it watching her around my brothers and sisters. 

My second mother was one of Muriel’s Aunts, Mary Rose White. She and her married sister, Elizabeth raised me but for some reason I called Mary Rose, “Mom.” This created some serious talk behind the scene that I was really Mary Rose’s secret child. The situation could be confusing. Once I remember a salesman came to the house trying to sell her a children’s encyclopedia only to be told she had no children whereupon I appeared, calling her Mom. 

That took some explaining.

Mary Rose was a delightful woman, never married although she had plenty of beaus. She was poorly educated, slightly hard of hearing which led to confusion at times: she would say she liked Frank Sinostra’s singing or Liberaski’s piano playing for example. The TV was always on loud. 

In her eyes, I could do no wrong. I was her boy. Once when a neighborhood drunk, a 6’6” giant of man clipped me driving his car, all 5’4”, 130 pounds of her charged after him. He bolted into the house and locked his door. When the priest at Incarnation of Our Lord Parish made a disparaging remark about my poor report card, she told him off. In all honesty, I wasn’t much of a student then.

She didn’t work while I was growing up wanting to spend her time with me but when I was in high school, she got a job at the local Farmers Market. On Saturdays I would go and pick up our weekly order. One time while waiting I watched her wait on a bedraggled woman and her little girl. I saw her total up the bill — she wrote it on the side of the paper bag — and noted that the figure was wrong in the woman’s favor. When I mentioned it to her, she said the woman was poor and needed the food. Wasn’t she being unfair to her boss, I asked? Yes, she admitted but he was rich and could afford a little charity.

My last memory of Aunt Mary Rose came around the time of the 1960 election. Even though she was a lifelong Republican and the Judge of Elections in our district (13th district of the 42nd ward), she admired John F. Kennedy. But she didn’t believe he would win. She told me she remembered the Al Smith election and said the country would never elect a Catholic.

She took sick shortly before the election and in her honor, I was elected to replace her as Judge. She was due to come home from the hospital on the Friday following the election but for some reason I decided to visit her and tease her about Kennedy winning. She found it hard to believe but was happy. 

She came home the next day and was sitting in the kitchen having tea with Muriel and dropped dead from a heart attack. Somehow it seemed fitting that my two mothers would be together

John P. Rossi is Professor Emeritus of History at La Salle University