A centenary tribute

Today marks the one-hundredth birthday of my maternal grandmother. Frances Marie Hyder -- Marie to one and all -- was born in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, to Nelson and Lucy Jane Bentley Hyder, the third of ten children. Around 1914, when she was ten years old, the family moved to a farm outside Adrian, Michigan, and here she grew to adulthood. She married my grandfather, Eino Korpinen, around 1928, and together they had two daughters, the younger of whom is my mother.

I remember her to be a loving woman, as I suppose most grandmothers are. Yet what I associate most with her is a cheerful disposition and an optimistic outlook on life. She was always singing around the house, something my mother picked up. That she would be such a "cockeyed optimist," to quote Oscar Hammerstein, was somewhat surprising given that her life was a difficult one from virtually beginning to end. Her upbringing was not especially happy, from what she told me. Her marriage was unsuccessful. Shortly after my mother's birth, she was a single mother attempting to feed and raise two daughters in the midst of the Great Depression.



Marie with her mother, c. 1922

By the time I came along, she was in her 50s. We would visit her at least twice a year, often around Easter and then again in the middle of the summer, when we would sometimes spend weeks at her house in a small town south of Ann Arbor, Michigan. If my father was unable come along, we would take the New York Central from Chicago to Ann Arbor, where she would pick us up. On other occasions my father would drive us there via the recently-built Indiana Toll Road. While there we would often visit other relatives and friends with whom my mother grew up.

Decades later I found myself wondering what it was like for my grandmother, who lived alone and worked at an IGA grocery store in town, to have a family of eight (after 1963) descend upon her and expect to be billeted in what was essentially a two-bedroom house. I can no longer recall the sleeping arrangements, but I do recall a small back room off the kitchen where there was a bed. I believe this is where Grandma slept during our visits.

She was also a perennial visitor to our home at the American Thanksgiving holiday each November, along with my aunt, uncle and cousins.

I know little of my grandmother's personal faith. I wish I had had the presence of mind to ask her about this, but as she died when I was 20 years old, I undoubtedly felt myself to be too young before that point to broach the issue. In any event, it was not something she talked about. Although she was raised in a church-going family, she was no longer attending church by the mid-1950s. Yet she did own more than one Bible, two of which I inherited from her. In one she had underlined verses, so she was obviously conversant with the Scriptures on some level.

After she retired in 1969, Grandma was plagued by a number of maladies, including cancer and Parkinson's Disease. She eventually died in hospital from the effects of a stroke not too far from our family home near Chicago. Shortly afterwards, I had a dream about her that was as vivid as reality. Grandma was young again, younger than I had ever known her to be. She looked like the young girl of 18 or 20 in the old sepia-tone photographs we have of her. She was running happily through a beautiful meadow dotted with wild flowers. I can ascribe the dream to nothing more than the hope of a young man that he would once again see someone he had loved dearly for the first two decades of his life. Her final resting place is in the Oakwood Cemetery in Adrian, near the graves of her parents and grandparents.