Young Dolores

The girl with the determined stare in the middle of the front row is my mother. She is attending a Catholic boarding school in Windsor, Ontario, just across the bridge from Detroit where her mother and aunt share an apartment, living frugally to make ends meet and pay for the school.

This is not where Dolores or her mother wants her to be. Every Sunday her mother and aunt take a bus from Detroit to the school to spend the day with her, arriving early and staying late. They love her dearly but the Great Depression has begun and they both need to work to get by.

The father is out of the picture, having moved to Nevada where he can legally work his trade. He was an affable man who loved his daughter but circumstances intervened.

For years during Prohibition, he dealt cards at a Detroit speakeasy to make a living. The money was good but the connection with organized crime made the job less than ideal. Occasional arrests from police raids, the night hours, and habits brought home from work eventually made the marriage untenable and the couple divorced.

That was when Klara (left above) moved in with mother Elsie (second from right) to pool expenses and help raise Dolores. Klara worked at Hudson’s. Elsie at a bank. Sundays were their only days off.

Dolores worked hard at school, skipping two grades. The summer she turned 12, her wish to leave boarding school was granted and she returned home and attended local school. Below, you can see her walking outside her church on the streets of Detroit. She reveled in the freedom of being home, frequently walking to the bank or Hudson’s to lunch with her mom or aunt.

The University of Detroit admitted her to their freshman class when she was 16. She thrived there while living at home. War intervened a year later when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. As she would later relate, the men disappeared from campus overnight to enlist. The women left to take jobs.

Mom went to work for the Federal Reserve. One of her duties was to deliver checks to General Motors and Ford to support the war effort. She also volunteered regularly at the USO in downtown Detroit. You can see her below (second from right) delivering gifts to GIs.*

She would meet my father at the USO while assisting a photographer take pictures of the service men that could be sent home to loved ones. The rest of her story is for a later time.

The images are from family sources. Dolores would have turned 101 this week.

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* “GI” is an abbreviation of galvanized iron, a nickname attached to American servicemen during World War I. Hudson’s was the Macy’s of Detroit.

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