The Mudshow Diaries: A trailer with a view.

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

July 7, Mechanicville, New York (76 miles, Industrial park.)

Unknown said...: Val! I am finally catching up on your blog in the midst of a very busy wedding season (thankfully!)

My grandmother, Philomena Gulianelli (nickname: Ginger), was born and raised in Mechanicville, New York. She is now 85. We still have family there.

We went there with her in 2006. We drove around, Steve in the driver's seat, Grandma in the front passenger seat, and me - in the back - writing furiously as she reminisced about standing on the street corners singing with her friends, her dad and uncles working at the paper factory, and she and her family living above the tavern her family owned (there's a highway there now). The tavern closed during the depression. Her father died when she was 11, and she took care of her mother as a teenager until she died when my grandma was 17. Grandma didn't go to high school because she was the youngest and it was her job to take care of Mother.

She then moved to New York City with a friend, and at 21-years-old, met a soldier from Springfield, IL., Edward Hermon, who was on leave. They married 3 months later.

They had been married 55 years when he died in Indiana in the year 2000, 5 days before Steve proposed to me - in Springfield, IL.; Wednesday, September 09, 2009

The Mudshow Diaries