sort of things I was anxious to do anyway. He did take me to Elkins on his train when
I mentioned one time that I had never been on a train. I think he simply did not have
it in him to “interfere" or to get close. But I did not consciously miss having a father
or wish that my grandfather were more like a father. That was just the way it was.
However, Pop was a role model in this one significant respect: His enduring
dedication to his job and to his duty as provider.
For all their bickering, it was clear that Theodore was devoted to Mary, his
wife. After all, it was she who made a life for him, and in the long run it was a good
life. She preceded him in death and although it was not a completely unexpected
death, he was terribly lost. His daughter Dorothy and her husband Carl Dicken and
their little girl, Kathryn Ann, moved in with him and the pleasure of having a child in
his midst again eventually supplanted his mourning.
In February 1950, Pop fell out of bed, fracturing a bone, and was hospitalized.
Six days later he contracted bronchial pneumonia and three days after that, on March
8, he died. His body was brought to his home of over 40 years to lie in state. After a
funeral Mass at Saints Peter and Paul’s church, he was buried in the church cemetery.
Mary
Mary Barbara Geatz was born February 14, 1873, the fourth child of John
and Anna Catherine Barnard Geatz (originally Goetz). When Mary was two, her
mother died; when five, her father married Catherine Eilert. This “Kate" had come
to America only a few years earlier and was still struggling with English. She was
a good mother, my grandmother told me, and in time a well-loved “Grandma"
to the Wallace children.
In her early childhood, both at home and in some measure at Saints Peter and
Paul’s school, Mary spoke German, but English soon became her primary language.
By the time she was my Grandma, she had forgotten most of her German, except for
a few words and the numbers and alphabet which I asked her to teach me. From time
to time she came out with an epithet that sounded like Scheit Pocke, which she
refused to translate. Grandma had no trace of a German accent. She did use a number
of incorrect English expressions which might have been derived from German
grammatical forms; for example, “That’s hisn (his), this is hern (hers) and that there
is yourn (yours)." Another peculiarity was her use of the past participle instead of the
simple past tense, as in “I taken my medicine already."
Not long after Mary’s new mother came, she and her older sister Katie
acquired two new brothers and a sister, whom they undoubtedly helped take care of,
and they shared the household duties as well. With seven children, a husband and a
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