The wedding ceremony was conducted by the Rev. Herbert F. Loomis, pastor
of the First Baptist church. Jeanette was the bridesmaid and James Mazeene the best
man. "Following the ceremony, a wedding
supper was served from the Washington Lunch
Room. The house was beautifully decorated....
Mr. and Mrs. Rohrer left on the Duquesne
Limited on an extended tour of the East", read
the news item.
From about 1923 to 1925 (the L. D.
Rohrer Company had gone out of business in
1920), George worked as a bookkeeper for the
Cumberland Macaroni Company.
In about 1926, George and family came
to live at the big L. D. Rohrer home on
Baltimore Avenue, where I was also living with
my parents. For the next three years the two
young Rohrer boys - both only children - would
grow and play together (as described in the next chapter), beginning a close,
brotherlike relationship. In 1929, Pershing moved with his parents to Pittsburgh,
where his father went to work.
In 1931, Florence announced in the Evening Times that she had returned to
Cumberland with Pershing, that he had taken part in the Armistice Day parade on his
thirteenth birthday and that he had enrolled at LaSalle Institute (a private Catholic
junior and senior high school) The article identified him as "John Pershing," which
form (or "J. Pershing") he used through high school.
Sometime later, George and Florence Rohrer divorced. In 1939 George was
employed in the fabric dying department of the Celanese Corporation located in
suburban Cumberland and shared an apartment on Glen Street with his mother and
sister. Florence, then a waitress, and Pershing, until about 1938, when he left
Cumberland, had an apartment on Bedford Street.
George remarried and lived on Columbia Street. He died in Baltimore on
February 19, 1953, and was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Cumberland. Mildred,
his wife, died a number of years later.
Florence Rohrer, in her latter years in Cumberland, worked at Rand's Drug
Store. She was a communicant at St. Patrick's Church there. In 1971 she moved to an
apartment in Ravenna where Pershing and his family lived. She died there in 1973
and was buried in Hillcrest Cemetery, Cumberland.
17
Florence (McDonough) Rohrer, wife of
George, circa 1925
