Anita Patricia Freihube Eckert 1909-1965

On November 18, my mom would have been 104 years old.  She died nearly fifty years ago.

I'm sorry I do not have a picture of her to share.

But maybe a few memories will be good enough.

She was one of ten sisters who grew up in Nashotah, WI.  She attended the little two room school house there and graduated from 8th grade.  I have no doubt she'd could have handled the upper grades and college if there had been any real opportunity for further schooling.   Like her older sisters, she worked as a housekeeper out among the mansions on Lake Chenequa.

She met dad out at Moose Lake Beach, two miles north of Nashotah.  Dad said what told him it was love was the time the car had a flat tire and she helped fix it.

There are a lot of things I remember about her.  She was always helping someone, like giving hairdos to our aging relatives.  In 1940, she ordered two blankets from a Sears-Roebuck catalog.  Laundering one a few months later, she hung it out to dry.  When she went to bring it in, it was gone.  Her response?  "Someone else needed it more than we did."

She wasn't as generous toward the one pet we had.  A kitty showed up at our door and was becoming a part of the family.  But it made the mistake of jumping up on the table and eating a piece of baloney we had out for lunch.  It ended up as a barn cat down the road and was never replaced.

She was an at-home mom until Judy and I were both in grade school.  That meant she did a lot of cooking and baking.  And teaching us how to fill the kerosene tank of the stove, dusting the furniture, doing dishes, and ironing our own clothes.  She made the best pork roasts, holiday turkeys, and Christmas cookies.

In typical teenage fashion, we each drifted out from under our parents influence with school, jobs, and friends.  But we did not drift that far from our parents' roof.  We had a home there until we each married, even if we did not happen to be in the house for periods of time because of school (in my case) or Coast Guard (in Jack's case).

Once Ann and I married and went off to school in Texas, Mom sent us ten dollars a month as support.  Just so you gain some perspective on how significant an amount that was, gas cost 28 cents a gallon and Ann's tuition was $98 a semester.

We always were welcome at home during those days.  We seldom got there.  And just when we were getting settled after graduating from college and seminary, Mom's high blood pressure caught up with her and she died of a heart attack.

She never met our kids.  We were in the process of adopting David when she died and he came into our lives just months later.  So they never got to meet her either.  My only hope is that I followed her example and they got a sense of who she was by who I have been.