“Remoted” Workday 163 / Day 239 (Tuesday)

While I might not remember chunks of my life, I do remember random bits, especially stories Mummu told me (or more likely, fragments of stories).

Mummu was the youngest of ten children in her family, born over a 20-year timeframe. Three of her siblings died in childhood, and of the seven who lived to adulthood, Mummu was the only to graduate high school. Some of her siblings left after the eighth grade to go to work, some left school even earlier. 

Senior Yearbook - 1934

When Mummu graduated from high school in 1934 at age 17, the writeup in The Boulder, the Fitchburg High School yearbook, described her as quiet. Her father wanted to give her a car to celebrate the accomplishment. Her mother, Wilhelmina, forbade it, and Mummu was gifted with a radio instead. Some fifty years later, Mummu still talked about the radio she got for graduation when her father really wanted to give her a car and she still seemed mad at her mother over it. If there is anything my family can cling to it’s an old injury. And a grudge. 

In developing a spreadsheet of information to track the various addresses of the family over the years through U.S. Census records and information from City Directories, I noticed interesting tidbits and an intriguing question in the 1930 Census questions. In the 1930 Census, the interesting tidbit was that the family is shown as now owning their home on Kimball Street, valued at $4,000. Home value or rent amount was also a new census question for 1930. Other family members occupied the home next door as renters, which is the case through many years of the family.

The intriguing new question asked if the household had a “Radio Set,” which had me wondering about Mummu’s graduation radio. I never asked her anything about the specific radio she received as a gift, and now I wish I knew more about it.

According to the National Archives, “The 1930 census included for the first time a question regarding a consumer item. Respondents were asked whether they owned a "Radio set," a luxury that had become increasingly common in the 1920s.”  Now I can’t help wondering if Wilhelmina’s insistence on the radio as a graduation gift wasn’t influenced by the census question a few years earlier. Plus, it’s a lot safer than a motor car. Unfortunately, the Radio question was not part of the 1940 census so the presence of the luxury item in the household was not recorded for posterity.

When Mummu said “radio” all the times she told the story, I imagined a tiny portable transistor radio like the one she used to listen to sports when I was kid, but maybe it was something grander like one of the wood tabletop or freestanding cabinet radios. But still not as grand and impressive a gift as a car. File this under “things we will never know.”