For My Grandchildren: Anne Goss

Dear T, O, E, L, L, C, A:  This is about your great-grandmother, Anne Goss. She was born Hannah Sarah Krull in 1912 in New Jersey, but I've forgotten which city, although I know that as a young person she lived in Bayonne, Hackensack and Paterson. Her parents, David and Katherine Meltzer Krull, were recent immigrants from eastern Europe. She was the oldest of five siblings: Anne, Jacob (Jack), Hyman, Freda, and Max (Mendy). Her father installed metal ceilings, her mother was what was then called a "practical" (i.e. unlicensed) nurse. The family was not wealthy. The five children shared two beds, boys in one, girls in the other, sleeping crosswise. Anne had a bout of polio at sixteen months which left her with a permanent limp and weakness in the left side of her body. Because of the effects of the illness, she endured an unusually difficult childhood -- marked by a series of surgeries on her leg which may or may not have helped. But she was quick-witted and talented, learning to play violin and viola and graduating as high school valedictorian. About the Jewish religion, important to her parents, she told me, "I gave up that stuff when I was thirteen." She was intent on a college education which her parents opposed because the few dollars that she made as a dental assistant were crucial to the family economy. She won a full scholarship to Barnard College but it's sad to report that when she arrived on the first day of classes she discovered that she had to pay for room and board, which her family could not afford. She returned home but was admitted to Montclair State Teacher's College where she majored in chemistry. In a world with more advantages he would have gone on to medical school and become a distinguished physician, but such a career was not in the cards. At Montclair she played string quartets and met your great grandfather, Daniel Goss. There wasn't enough money to allow them to marry and no one lived together before marriage in those days. Anne once told me that the greatest mistake of her life was that she didn't go to bed with Dan until after they married, which didn't happen until he was 26 and she was 24. I think those premarital depression years must  have been hard and unsatisfying. And even after they married, still not so good because Dan and Anne couldn't afford a place of their own but shared an apartment with his parents (actually shared a bedroom, with a curtain between the parents'  bed and theirs). Dan's parents disapproved of Anne: "Why would you want to marry a cripple?" Eventually Dan was hired as a teacher of mathematics at Paterson High School and then in 1946 moved to Utica College in Utica, New York. Although Ann had been told that the polio made it impossible for her to carry a child, she gave birth to three daughters (Althea -- your grandmother --in 1939; Phyllis in 1942, and Paula in 1951). She taught mathematics until she retired at the then-mandatory age of 65 but continued with her tutoring business through her seventies. Meanwhile, she had mastered the domestic arts: cooking, baking, sewing (she made all her daughters'  clothes through their childhoods) and knitting. She was a hard-working woman, often to be found knitting, reading a book, and watching TV at the same time. Dan died in 1966 and so she spent many more years as widow than as a wife. Her life was filled with pain (two dozen major surgeries) but she never complained. She was independent, frugal, and adventurous. She was also strict, cool, not at all affectionate, and humorless. Not exactly humorless -- she never laughed, that I can remember, but sometimes she would respond to a joke by saying, "That's funny."  She played bridge to win and not for fun and she liked a rough game of Scrabble with her grandsons. She was easy to respect but difficult to love.

She moved to Boulder at age 87 and lived to be 97, though much impaired. At her 90th birthday party, in 2002,  she was still functioning well but "looping."  If she had died at 90 she would not have missed much. She was demented and bedridden for the last few years of her life. The last coherent statement she made to me, in her last month, was "I'm not afraid of this dying business."  

A good memory: Anne spent most of her early life wearing a heavy metal brace on her bad leg. But when she was in her early 90s, she acquired a brace made of a light space-age material. I took her walking in the mountains. First time. She was thrilled.

Here's another: she liked to help grade Althea's math exams and she liked to talk calculus with her grandsons. I remember saying to them, "You have to understand something. This is unusual. Your standard run-of-the-mill grandmother does not understand calculus."

Comments

[spike]

Thanks for this! Your loyal fans always appreciate family history. xo