My grandmother passed away last week - Tuesday, September 20, 2011. I had the extreme honor of giving her eulogy....
Everyone here knows Dorothy McDowell in a different capacity – as a friend, neighbor, as Aunt Dorothy, mom… To my children she is Grandma Mac, but to me she has always been nothing but Grandma. My mom tells me that when I tried to distinguish whom I was talking about I described her as “Grandma with the white hair”. Grandma really did know how to rock her silver locks, didn’t she? And now that I’ve become a grandmother myself I figured it’s okay if I let my own silver start to show through.
Letting our true colors show is only one of many lessons we can take away from this strong, vibrant, little person. Grandma wasn’t a particularly loud person and she didn’t make herself the center of attention, yet she was always a strong presence.
All of the people in this room can only account for so many years of Grandma’s life. Everybody here has only known her as Dorothy McDowell, but before she had that name, there are another 24 years, before any of us met her, her formative years, that most defined her.
When Tom Brockaw described “The Greatest Generation” he was talking about my grandmother.
Dorothy Dickson was born in 1916 in Richmond, Missouri, a little town in the farm fields north of Kansas City. When she was born there were still people around who could give firsthand accounts of the Civil War. She would have seen parades with 80 and 90 year old veterans marching next to recently returning WWI vets. In her childhood farmers talked about the devastation of the dust bowl of the 1920’s and she came of age during the Great Depression.
Grandma’s family were not wealthy people. They may have owned land, but they also worked it. These were not merchants and bankers, judges and congressmen, but farmers and laborers. Her father and grandfather and great-grandfather were coal miners. Her father even worked for a few years at the Kansas City Zoo. Workers – a long legacy of workers.
Grandma received an education and even graduated high school, something not necessarily guaranteed for a person of her generation. After high school she got a job. It was grandma who bought the family’s first car. When her parents and younger sister moved to Los Angeles, it was Grandma who drove her grandfather across the plains and mountains and desert to join the rest of the family.
It was after her arrival in Los Angeles that Grandma became the person most of us remember. Grandma was introduced to a widower a few years her senior. They went on a blind date and months later on Christmas Day 1940, Willard and Dorothy drove to Las Vegas and got married. They enjoyed over 50 years of wedded bliss until my grandfather’s death in 1994.
It is impossible to think of Dorothy without Willard. They were the funniest couple to see – her barely over five foot and him towering at 6’4”. You’ll see the McDowell genes well represented in this room with my cousin and my brothers… even my own sons aren’t lacking in height.
Grandpa was a gentle man, but it seemed the person who was most able to provoke him was Grandma. I remember riding in the backseat of their 70-something Maverick and listening to them bicker over the directions to get to the grocery store. And they would bicker over what to eat at dinner and what to watch on TV and just about anything else under the sun. My husband accuses me of being feisty, but once he met my mother and grandmother he started to understand that I came by it honestly.
Grandma continued to work after she married. I grew up surrounded not by stay at home moms, but with working women. Women who contributed to the family’s income and dealt with the modern problems of juggling a 40 hour week with home and children and a social calendar. She had a strong work ethic that was much more than someone who didn’t know how to sit still. And she did not know how to sit still - even when she was sitting she was busy. You can look back at her childhood to her parents and grandparents to see where it generated. She was a coal miner’s daughter, a farmer’s granddaughter. She came from rural Missouri during a time of extreme poverty and loss. Work was not available to everyone so it was something to be valued and cherished.
Grandpa, like his father and his father-in-law, was a mason. He and Grandma joined Eastern Star. They were active with the lodge and were instrumental in building a new masonic temple in San Fernando, California. They supported the masonic youth groups. Their son, my Uncle Don, was a Past Master Councilor of his DeMolay Chapter. My mother is a majority member of Job’s Daughters.
Job’s Daughters, DeMolay, Eastern Star, lodge, Shriners - initiations, installations, receptions, fund raisers – all made for a very busy calendar and Grandma kept up with it all. Is it any wonder those of us related to her are always on the go? It’s in our blood!
Not only did Grandma attend all of these functions but she usually was the one behind the scenes orchestrating them. It was nothing for Grandma to put on a dinner reception for 200 people. She knew how to command a committee, design the decorations, and corral people through a buffet line. Long before the title “event planner” ever existed Grandma was doing just that and could do it in her sleep with both hands tied behind her back!
As Grandma’s memory failed these past few years, something she would resurrect in her less lucid moments was that she was preparing for a large dinner event and she would complain that the same few people were the ones who always did all of the work.
We will all carry different memories of Dorothy McDowell. Mine center mostly on an active couple who had a beautiful house in Sylmar California with a perfectly manicured yard maintained by my grandfather. I can still vividly remember Grandma laying a piece of lettuce on her back porch, ringing a little brass bell and then patiently waiting for a snapping turtle named Petey to lumber out of his hiding place in the decorative grasses or from behind a cactus to slowly saunter across the lawn and come get his daily treat.
My brothers will probably remember riding bikes with Grandpa to collect stray golf balls. Grandma would wash the golf balls, store them in egg cartons and stash them away in the garage until they could be sold back to the golf course. After one of the big earthquakes they opened the garage only to have hundreds of golf balls spill out onto the driveway and roll down the street!
There are a million more memories of Grandma – so many of them intertwined with the people in this very room.
I never properly thanked her for showing up after my youngest son was born. I was still recovering from a cesearan and had this very tiny baby to tend to. She whisked in and made sure my older children were fed, that the laundry got done and my dishes washed. All of us know those are simple enough tasks, but for me at that time they were daunting and would not have been completed. She did what she knew best – rolled up her sleeves and went to work.
She was an industrious worker, a devoted wife and a caring mother and grandmother. Grandma was a vibrant spirit. She may have been small but she was mighty. She spoke her mind and never diced her words. She came from a time and a place that was very traditional and in many ways quite conservative, yet she was in every way a modern woman.
While you can physically see the legacy of my grandfather in this room, it is my grandmother’s legacy that will be heard. You will hear it as the women here gather, as we cackle and laugh, as we reprimand our children and suddenly start directing everyone around us. It is in our voices and in our movements. We carry with us Dorothy McDowell’s spirit of getting things done.
We can only hope to live such full and meaningful lives. Even at 94 it feels like she left us too soon. We know as she knew that she had lived life to the fullest. She had seen it all and done it all and now it’s time for her to guide us from the spiritual realm… which we all know will be done quietly from behind the scenes.
It is amazing to have seen her in action and to know she will continue to watch over us.
