JM: You said that your grandmother always gave you the impression that she had come from pretty good stock. How did she give you that impression?

MS: She dressed very well. She always wore high heels and looked like a million dollars. She could sew out of this world. She made her own clothes, so she always looked pretty spectacular. And she dated until she was way up in her sixties.

JM: Did you have a special relationship with her?

MS: Well, she lived with us for nine years. We were very close. In fact, at her funeral, all her grandchildren were there and all of us claimed to be her favorite. We stood around in a circle outside the church and everybody felt the same way. She was really good to all her grandchildren, not money-wise, just very caring.

JM: Was she a religious person?

MS: Yes, she was Episcopalian. She claimed she was from the High Episcopal Church, of course. In fact, my mother was scared to death I was gonna turn Episcopalian, because of my grandmother. We were Methodist. Once in a while I would go to church with Grandma, and she would tell me that High Episcopalians cross themselves and kneel all the time, but Methodists don’t, and I thought that was so glamorous. Grandma would paint my fingernails before we’d go to church. She always painted her fingernails. And she took a lot of time with me. I became sick one time when I was a little bit older - I think I was fifteen - and the doctor came to the house and said I needed to be hospitalized. In those days, you only went to the hospital if you were dying. And Grandma was there eating dinner and said, ‘Don’t you worry about it. You send Marion to the hospital and I’ll take care of the bill.’ And she did.

JM: In the last few years of her life, was she still sewing?

MS: Yes. She worked as an alteration lady at her daughter Louise’s dry cleaning store. And that was up ‘til about the last two years before she died.

JM: What about her daughter Bessie?

MS: She was married to Herbert Liskey, but she died very young.

JM: Yeah, in fact. I found her obituary. She died in 1944.

MS: Bessie Liskey died of a bad doctor. She went in for a female operation. She and her best girlfriend went in for the same operation. It was in Harrisonburg, and they decided that her girlfriend would go first, and he operated on her first and then he operated on Bessie. He didn’t sew her up properly and she bled to death internally.

JM: Yeah, the obituary says, ‘Mrs. Bessie Liskey, wife of Herbert Liskey, a popular matron and native of Harrisonburg, died at Rockingham Memorial Hospital on Wednesday at 3:30. She had entered the hospital a few hours earlier presumably for a minor operation. News of her death spread rapidly within the city and community and was a shock to her family and her many friends. Mrs. Liskey had held an office position with the Virginia Ship Corporation for many years.’

MS: You know, my father supported my grandmother when she lived with us. In fact, when Mother and Dad got married in Baltimore, his younger brother Joe came to live with them. And pretty soon his mother came to live with them. And then Camilla came, and Billy, who was the cousin; they all came to live with Daddy.

JM: He had a house full of people.

MS: And Daddy supported them all. He always had somebody living with him that he was helping to support. Then Camilla went to New York. She wanted to be a dancer. She was married, and she and her husband had two children. Grandma went to New York once for Thanksgiving and found out that her son-in-law had left Camilla and the two children. They didn’t have enough to eat and hadn’t eaten for a few days. So Grandma bundled them up and brought them back to Mr. Rainier. And they lived with Daddy.

JM: It sounds to me like your father and your grandmother were a lot alike, in the way they took care of people. Did Camilla get married a second time?

MS: Yes, seven years later. She got a divorce in Maryland under desertion. At the time you had to have been deserted for seven years before you could get a divorce. And then she married Leonard. He was divorced from his first wife because she claimed he was impotent. So he married Camilla, and right away she got pregnant with Christine. They went to the Episcopal Church in Mt. Rainier, and the congregation was so thrilled, because they loved Leonard and they were thrilled that Camilla was pregnant. She was furious because they all made a big fuss about her being pregnant and she didn’t want anybody to notice. In my family, there are all these wild stories.

JM: In the Lewis Hine picture, your grandmother is about 30 years old, but she looks like she could be 60. She’s looks like she thinks tomorrow is not going to be any better than today.

MS: Yes, but Grandma, and her daughters, Bessie, Camilla and Louise, were all beautiful women, gorgeous, striking. Christine, Camilla’s daughter, was educated at the Cathedral School with the ambassadors.

JM: How did she wind up getting in that school?

MS: Grandma moved mountains. She really knew how to get things done, and she got her in there on a scholarship. And then Christine studied in the summer in Europe. I know she spent one summer in Paris so that she could study French. I think the big thing about Grandma was that she instilled high moral standards in our family for generations forward.

JM: What do you mean?

MS: My father had very high standards. He believed in looking after his family. And he said he always stressed to me to be honest. I think all that came from Grandma.