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This
is what I learned by listening to Aunt Mary Foy Mullin and her
three daughters, Josephine Mullin White, Margaret “Peg”
Kabriski, and Mary Frances Mullin Gillen.
Their story is a remarkable history of an Irish immigrant
family.
Mary Foy Mullin was born in Garryedmond, County Mayo, Eire about
1884. She met
and married Michael Mullin, a shopkeeper in Claremorris.
Michael operated a store, and the couple lived in an
apartment over the store. Their
first daughter, Josephine, was born in Claremorris on August 31,
1903.
The parish priest visited the couple and warned Michael that he
had become a target for some presumed political activity, and
urged Michael to leave the country.
Michael was a mild-mannered man who tried to remain non
political, but he was targeted, perhaps because of his refusal to
take sides. So
he emigrated to New York City, where he joined the post office.
Mary Mullin loved Ireland and did not want to leave.
But about two years after Michael emigrated, the parish
priest visited Mary again and told her her place was with her
husband. So
Mary dutifully left Ireland and came to America, leaving
Josephine in the care of the Foys in Garryedmond.
When in New York City, the couple’s two other children were
born: Peg on 12
August 1910 and Mary on 30 April 1912.
They lived on the East Side in the 70’s or 80’s.
As others in the Foy family came to America, their first
stop was at the Mullins until they could find digs.
This included Uncle Paddy Foy and my father, Peter Foy.
Later the Mullin family moved to Woodlawn in the Bronx.
For some reason the girls took a shine to my father.
He had arrived in the US in 1914 at age 19.
He joined the army in 1917 where he became a caisson
driver, employing the skills he had learned in Ireland racing
horses for his Uncle Pete.
When he was discharged in 1919, the girls eagerly waited
his arrival on the elevated train at White Plains Road and 233rd
Street. Since he had never seen the Woodlawn house, the girls used
chalk to draw arrows on the sidewalk pointing out the dozen or so
blocks to their house on 236th Street west of Bronx River Park.
Josephine attended a teacher training school, a two-year
institution that was all that was required to become a teacher in
the public school system at that time.
Always petite and attractive, she had many young men
interested in her. I learned that when one of them visited and asked what he
could do to help, Jo gave him duties such as washing the kitchen
floor. When it
came time for her prom, her mother screened out all the
candidates; eventually her uncle, Peter Foy, was pressed into
service. All the
other girls wondered where she had found such a good-looking
beau. On his side
Peter insisted that Jo never tell her friends they were related.
Peter Foy began courting Virginia “Blossom” McKeon.
This was a long distance romance, as Blossom lived in
Elmhurst on Long Island, and the closest route was the 59th
street bridge or else the Whitestone ferry.
The Triborough and Whitestone and Throggs Neck bridges
were built long after. One
day Peg and Mary hid in the trunk of Peter’s car and discovered
they were locked in! Pete
drove to Elmhurst before he heard the knocking from the trunk.
Peter and Blossom were furious, but Grandma McKeon
welcomed the girls and gave them some cookies and tea.
The person who related this story omitted the reception
Peg and Mary received when they got home.
Josephine met and married James White, a very popular classmate,
probably against the wishes of her parents.
The marriage lasted about two years, ending in divorce.
A Mr. & Mrs. James White are listed among the wedding
guests at the marriage of Peter Foy and Blossom McKeon in
September 1925. Divorce
was unusual among lower middle class families, especially for
Roman Catholics. Jo
mentioned to me that often when family gatherings were organized,
her mother would advise Jo that as a divorcee she was not
welcome.
Michael Mullin died in 1927. Mary, Peg and May lived in the Bronx. I remember visiting with them on Sunday mornings for tea
when they lived on Carpenter Avenue in Wakefield section
in the early 1930s. Often
the Mullins invited recent immigrant members of their extended
family – the Morley cousins come to mind – to stay with them
until they could find other living arrangements.
My mother and father did the same.
But sometime in the 1930s the family moved back to
Manhattan where Jo had apartments on east 75th street,
east 85th street, and west 97th street.
I remember in particular her apartment on east 75th
street, which had a large back yard with lush greenery.
I believe the Mullins lived there when Mary married George
Gillen at St. Jean Baptiste Church on 76th and
Lexington in 1937. Joseph Foy took movies which may still exist, although
they were underexposed. Cletus Hartman has made copies and
would make them available to interested parties.
Peg Mullin was a brilliant student, graduating from Hunter
College at age 19 with a degree in mathematics and a teaching
certificate. However,
the city would not let her teach, citing a rule that a teacher
must be 21 years old. Peg found a loophole. She
attended Columbia for a year to obtain a masters degree in pure
mathematics. The age
limitation did not apply to persons with a master’s degree, so
Peg began teaching in the public schools at age 20!
Mary (we called her “Mae” before her marriage to George, but
changed to Mary because George did not like “Mae”) was also
an excellent student. After
graduating from college, she obtained a scholarship to Bryn Mawr
where she took all the courses for her doctorate, but did not
complete her degree, marrying George Gillen instead!
Mary was the greatest reader I ever knew.
When she would visit relatives’ houses, she would
disappear, usually into an upstairs room with any new books in
the house. She would
then reappear, having read one or two books, while the rest of us
talked to each other.
When the Gillens lived in Irvington, NY, Mary became the
reader for the Irvington library, reading every book purchased
and recommending whether it ought to be placed in the library or
discarded.
 Around
1938 Aunt Mary moved with her two older daughters into 11
Washington Square North, the former Wanamaker mansion. The Square became the home of the affluent
escaping from the crowded conditions of lower Manhattan in the
1850s, but had become seedy after the rich moved uptown to Park
and Fifth Avenues. A developer kept the facades of the attached mansions, lopped
off the back parts and added apartments at the back. The principal room in the Mullin/White apartment was
the enormous living room. During
renovation the ceiling was dropped eight feet to give the
shortened room better perspective.
Two large windows looked out onto the square.
The original mansion had the kitchen in the basement, with
food sent up via a dumbwaiter.
The second floor had the master bedroom, which remained in
their apartment. The children’s rooms on the third floor and the female
servants’ quarters on the top floor were converted to
apartments, as was the basement.
So the Mullin/White apartment had a small kitchen tucked
in a tiny alcove at the bottom of the main stairs.
The living room remained a center for gatherings for sixty
years; all who visited remember it vividly.
My older brother and I (ages 11 and 9) would often take the
subway to visit the Mullins.
The fare was five cents, and we had the stops memorized. Life was a little simpler in the 1930s in New York City.
Each trip included a history lesson.
Jo or Peg would take us walking, and point out Eleanor
Roosevelt’s apartment on the west side of the square,
the Judson Memorial Church on the south side, the story of
the Irishman who was unjustly hanged in the square and who was
said to haunt the space, the building of the infamous Triangular
Shirtwaist fire, Cooper Union where Abraham Lincoln gave a famous
speech in 1860… The
schoolteachers in them always came through.
What lasted with me was less the actual sites as the
curiosity about the history, geography, culture and languages of
places I passed through. This
stayed with me all my life, especially as my careers in education
and industry took me to foreign cities and countries; I always
tried to prep myself on the people and their history before
arriving for meetings.
In summer of 1941, my mother was dying of cancer at Calvary
Hospital in the Bronx, a hospice for terminally ill patients.
When Aunt Cecelia learned of this, she swooped in, took my
mother home and arranged for my brother and myself to spend a
summer in Chatham, New York with Aunt Mary and Peg Mullin.
My father lent his car to Peg, and we took a five hour
ride to a small old farmhouse owned by the Gillens.
There was no running water or indoor plumbing.
Here again Peg led the adventures in learning:
Pittsfield, the Berkshires, Tanglewood Music Festival, the
Pittsfield Library, the Shaker community.
My
father would write to us, but Peg would censor the letters,
reading some parts but omitting the parts referring to my dying
mother. What Peg did
not realize is that I was able to read the back of the letter as
she read the front. I
resented withholding the info from us.
When my mother died August 6, 1941, I skimmed the envelope
Aunt Mary had given to me to place in the mailbox and learned
that mom had died. But
Peg drove us all to Irvington before she told Peter and myself
that mother was dead. I
resented this treatment for several years, although now I
understand she was trying to cope with two young boys the best
way she could.
In 1950, I had graduated from Marist College and was teaching at
St. Ann’s Academy on Lexington Avenue and 76th
street in Manhattan. My
father was in New York Hospital for tests, which he assured me
were good. Peg telephoned me on evening and indicated that she suspected
something worse. I
walked down to the hospital one night, dressed in my clergy suit
– I was a Marist Brother at the time – and inquired of a
resident about Mr. Peter Foy.
The resident must have thought I was a priest.
He looked at the chart and said, “Oh, this guy’s a
goner! Three or four
months at the most.” It was a tremendous shock for a 20 year
old. It was the
first time I heard the “C” word – cancer in reference to
our family. This
word seemed to have been banished from the family vocabulary.
When my brother arrived from Florida, he said “Oh,
mother died from cancer also”
“How did you find out”
“I had to furnish mom’s death certificate when I
entered the marines in 1945” We had always been told it was arthritis.
In any event, my attitude towards Peg turned completely around,
and we became close friends.
She was almost old enough to be my mother, but treated me
like a friend. Often
when I would take Saturday courses at St. John’s University, I
would stop by the house in Washington Square for lunch, and we
would talk about many things.
Aunt Mary would preside over lunch that took place at a
table between the two large windows in the living room.
As I came to the end of my masters degree program at St John’s,
I told Peg my heart was set on attending Columbia, which had an
enormous reputation for mathematics.
She suggested I look at New York University, because NYU
had taken a chance and hired several mathematicians who fled
Europe during the Hitler regime, including Richard Courant,
reputed to be the greatest mathematician of his time.
My application at Columbia had been treated disdainfully
at Columbia by a subaltern in the admissions office.
When I inquired at the admissions office of NYU, the young
lady made a telephone call and sent me to a room on the fifth
floor of another building.
There I met a man in shirtsleeves, who reviewed my
transcripts, told me he liked my background, and welcomed me to
the university. I
left his tiny room walking on air.
Daniel Kirk, a friend, had accompanied me and inquired who
the man was. “He’s
Fritz John, the world authority in partial differential
equations!” Needless
to say, I attended New York University for my doctorate.
Aunt Mary died in 1956. Previously
she had several heart attacks.
When the ambulance arrived at the front door, the men
would be told to take her to St. Vincent’s Hospital, a few
blocks away. She
would raise her head and say: “Take me to New York Hospital,
they have better doctors!”
Finally, her daughters learned and told the men to take
her to New York Hospital. She
raised her head and said: “No, take me to St. Vincent’s
Hospital!” She
died soon after arriving at St. Vincent’s and receiving the
last rites.
Her daughters arranged to hold the wake in the living room.
Their many friends came and marveled how much like a
church it seemed. The
girls wanted to explain to their many Jewish and non-Catholic
Christian friends that not every Irish wake was modeled on
James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake or involved huge amounts of
liquor. In every
facet of their lives, they remained teachers.
In the early 1950s Josephine taught at Long Island City High
School. She
specialized on “XGs” experimental
groups, a euphemism for student with IQ’s between 70 and 85.
She taught each group for two periods, which included
history and English. Once
she invited me to visit, and introduced me to her class. Each one very politely introduced himself or herself, shook
my hand, and resumed their work.
Josephine was convinced that there was great goodness and
potential in these children, and the system ought not to give up
on them, even if they would never achieve the standard results in
traditional academic subjects.
They were to be treated as human beings and taught many of
the little ways people interact with each other.
By 1956, Jo had applied for and accepted a Fulbright Grant to
teach teachers how to teach English.
She lived in Pakistan for two years.
As she was packing up her belongings and teaching
materials, she heard a knock on the front door.
It was Matt Kabriski, whom she had never met.
He told her that his wife had attended Jo’s evening
classes for two years and these sessions were a high point in her
life. His wife had
died recently, and he wanted to personally thank her for bringing
so much joy to his wife in her final days.
Jo organized a group which visited various unusual spots
in the city, such as the kitchen of the Waldorf, the lower
regions of Grand Central, a courtroom, the Princeton Choir
group. When Matt
asked if he could do anything, Jo pointed to all the materials
she had spread out, telling him she had to get everything packed
and shipped before tomorrow when she flew to Pakistan.
Matt brought in some troops, packaged and shipped
everything quickly.
Matt also met Peg, and after Jo left for Pakistan, a
romance developed which ended in their marriage in 1957.
Peg studied for her doctorate at New York University, but
switched her field to education.
She chose an interesting topic for her thesis.
Many people were studying why students dropped out of
school. She
wanted to find the reasons why students came to school and
continued in school. At
first her mentors were skeptical, but she prevailed and her 700
page thesis became a landmark, because it pointed out how to give
students incentives to learn rather than preventing them from
failing.
In retrospect, the Mullin girls were amazing.
While the rest of the family became college oriented only
after World War II, thanks to the GI Bill,
Aunt Mary managed to instill in her girls the love of and
need for education. Jo
had a masters degree, Mary an ABT – “all but thesis”, and
Peg a doctorate.
In the late 1940s, Jo took a break from teaching to work for the
United Nations at Lake Success.
In the summer of 1948, she rented a house in Oyster Bay,
Long Island. My dad
and I stayed there a few days.
I think Peg and Aunt Mary stayed the full summer, and
visitors came and went on a regular basis.
Jo
always seemed to come up with innovative and sometimes
iconoclastic ideas. In the mid 1950s, when the cold war was
at its coldest, she decided to study what the Russian people
thought of Americans, as depicted in cartoons and photos in
Russian newspapers and magazines. She enlisted Joseph Foy,
who was a photography maven, to photograph the cartoons and
photos, and developed a series of lectures using the slides of
the cartoons and photos. Today this seems a rather mundane
idea, but in the 1950s is was quite radical. Jo
believed that people are people, no matter what their race,
religion, nationality or culture.
When Jo returned from Pakistan she may have resumed
teaching for a few years, but I may be mistaken.
Her active mind may have led her to other ventures.
For some time she became a guide on cruise ships with
round the world tours.
Jo welcomed just about everybody to 11 Washington Square.
She was always open to new people and new ideas.
Once she spent the summer in London, and arranged for the
cast of “Beyond the Fringe” an improvisational play on
Broadway, to use the living room on Sundays to review their
material. The room
had a Steinway piano, and Dudley Moore, one of the four
Englishmen in the play, loved to play.
The piano has a history of its own.
One day the sisters arrived home from their schools to
find the piano in the living room.
Aunt Mary had fallen on the sidewalk and broken her leg,
and received a $2000 settlement.
Rather than spend it on something useful or frivolous, she
took the Fifth Avenue bus up to 57th street to the
Steinway & Sons store, walked in and demanded to speak with
Mr. Steinway. The
clerk told her that no one spoke to Mr. Steinway.
She indicated that she had not come all that way not to
speak with him, and would wait until he met her.
The older gent came out.
She gave him the $2,000, told him to sell her the best
piano that amount would buy, and deliver it to 11 Washington
Square. But she
wanted him to personally check it out and tune it.
Mr. Steinway must have been impressed with her spunk.
He do so, and for several years the piano was tuned by
himself or his son!
Jo came to know the late Dudley Moore, and met several
times with his parents in England.
One time she was in London and received a desperate phone
call from Peg. “You
better get back here. The
place is a mess. It’s
overrun with people.”
It seems Dudley could not say no to people.
Several of his friends had camped in the apartment and
were running loud parties. Jo
returned to New York and told Dudley to get rid of all the
people. She had
invited him to use the piano, not open a vacation lodge for his
friends and hangers-on. He
told her he did not have the heart to throw them out and asked
her to do so. Which she did. She
then discovered Dudley’s finances were in a mess. When he appeared on Broadway, many in the cast would go
out after the show for a merry evening, but only Dudley was left
to pick up the tab. Josephine
took over his finances, placed him on an allowance, and continued
this work for several years. Jo became friendly with
Dudley's parents, and often brought items to them from Dudley.
After
Matt Kabriski met the Mullin girls, he and Peg struck up a
romantic friendship, and in 1957 they were married. Peg was
always a devout Catholic, and her marriage to an American of
Russian Jewish heritage was something unusual in the Foy
family. But Matt was the epitome of what Christ taught in
the gospels: he showed a concern for everybody, and was
willing to help out in any way he could. Behind his back,
we often said that Matt was more Catholic than any of the rest of
us!
 Matt
had purchased an old, rambling house at 147-38 Ash Avenue in
Flushing, New York with an idea of preparing it for boarders
during the second Worlds Fair held in Flushing Meadows in the
early sixties. He never followed through on this idea, but
the house did serve as the family home for his former wife and
his two children, Richard and Matt Jr. Richard became a
medical doctor and now practices in California, while Matt earned
a doctorate in engineering and worked for many years as a
research scientist with the air force in Dayton, Ohio. Matt
Jr is now retired, but continues his research with a private
firm.
The
house became the site of many grand Thanksgiving parties.
The couple would invite all relatives and friends within visiting
distance. In the early 1970s Mary and I traveled from
Poughkeepsie to be there, as it gave us the occasion to meet many
friends and relatives. There would be fifty or sixty people, many
of whom we did not know. Some came early, others came only
for coffee. The conversations were spirited,
and were carried on in the large living room, the dining room,
the circular alcove off the dining room reserved for deserts, the
kitchen, anywhere...
All
the Mullin girls were great conversationalists. My wife
Mary used to marvel at them. Whenever Peg or Josephine (or
both of them) visited, their first stop after the initial
greeting was the bathroom, where they would 'freshen up'.
Both girls were meticulous in making sure that not a hair be out
of place. Mary, on the other hand, could care less.
Her interest was in people, and housekeeping or fashion took
negligible priority in her life. My wife loved to see
the three girls together. Each of them would talk
simultaneously, and Mary often wondered how if all three talked
at once, did anyone listen?
After
Peg earned her doctorate, she taught part time for New York
University. I remember that one semester she taught in
White Plains. To enable her to reach the classroom, NYU
underwrote her garage space near Washington Square. The
rental for the auto was more than the monthly rental for 11
Washington Square, which was rent controlled! Peg's
full time occupation became Director of Admissions for Bronx
Community College, which opened in the early 1960s. Later
she transferred to the admissions office of the Graduate School
of City University, located on 42nd street in Manhattan.
 In
the early 1980s, the commuter railroads to New York City
experienced a strike. The subways were running, but
suburban people had to scramble to reach the city. Jo
offered me digs at 11 Washington Square. I would get down
on Sunday evening or Monday morning and stay until Friday, while
Mary and our two children would remain in Chappaqua. Even
though Jo was over 80, she planned a schedule which wore me
out. Every evening she had something different
planned: dinner at the Salmagundi Club on Fifth Avenue
where the food was excellent but cheap (Jo was not a club member,
but knew the club welcomed visitors to the dining room), a visit
to a museum, a movie, a trip to an acting group at
NYU. I would sit with her during two or three acts.
As soon as the play ended, the actors and actresses would make a
beeline to Jo, right past their teachers, and ask her opinion of
their performance. Jo would praise each one, but also point
out little ways they could improve their performance. I
remain amazed at her ability to relate to young adults...
Jo
confided to me that before she died, her mother took her aside
and told Jo that she was responsible to look after Johnny
Prendergast, a first or second cousin. John was a
greenhorn who stayed with the Mullins when he first came from
Ireland. My father found a position for him in the Andrew
Davey food stores. In a few months, my father told Aunt Mary that
John was very talented and should obtain a college
education. John studied accounting in the evening division
of City College. When he received his degree, he took a
position with McKesson Robbins, the pharmaceutical firm.
Around 1937, McKesson Robbins was the subject of a famous
accounting scandal. It seems it claimed large inventories
of non-existent materials. During the ensuing
investigation, John handled himself brilliantly. As a
result, McKesson made him a roving internal auditor. John
had the authority to visit any office of McKesson anywhere in the
world and conduct on-the-spot audits. He did this until his
retirement around 1980.
Peg
told me a said story about the Prendergast family that lived on a
farm in lower Garryedmond near the Foys. It seems his
father was riding a horse, fell off, struck his head on a rock
and died. The police arrested his mother and charged her
with murder. She was finally acquitted, but one can only
guess as the consternation and stress which gripped the family
during these months.
John
never married, and his slightly effeminate ways would lead a
modern reader to wonder if he were gay at a time when open
gayness was a no-no. Jo, John and I had lunch when I first
worked in New York City, around 1980, and I looked forward to
meeting him more often. In 1981, John was vacationing
at Cape May, New Jersey, when he died of a heart attack.
The only name in his wallet was Josephine's. She took
care of his funeral, purchased a burial plot at Gate of Heaven
Cemetery close to the burial site of Thomas and Jane
O'Grady.. John had drawn up a will, and made two of
his friends at McKesson co-executors. By the time John
died, the two friends had become enemies and wouldn't speak to
each other. Jo worked with the lawyer to secure funding for
the funeral. In one part of his will, John had left the
furnishings of his East Side apartment to his relatives in
Ireland. When Jo inspected the apartment, he saw that his
furnishings consisted of worthless second-hand items not worth,
not antiques Lamps, for example, would have to be rewired
if shipped to Ireland. When the lawyer for the estate told
her he was going to ship all the furniture to Ireland, she
insisted he personally visit the apartment. She met him and
brought him inside; once he saw the furniture, he had it sent to
the Salvation Army.
Likewise,
Aunt Mary informed Peg that she was in charge of Aunt Margaret
Foy, the oldest unmarried sister who was living in Montclair, New
Jersey. Margaret worked as a licensed practical nurse, and
as long as she was independent, Eileen and Eddie Zysk or
Bob and Marian O'Grady looked after her, as they lived
nearby. Eventually Aunt Margaret was unable to live
independently. Peg and Matt fixed up an apartment on the
top floor of their house at Ash Avenue and installed an
elevator. My two children loved to visit Ash Avenue, going
up and down on the elevator and roaming the many rooms -- it was
the closest thing they knew to a haunted house! The
apartment proved too big for Margaret, so Peg and Matt moved her
to a smaller apartment nearby. Peg and/or Matt fixed her
meals and visited her each day. Eventually even that
arrangement was not enough. Margaret returned to Ireland to
the Pope John XXIII nursing home, where she died. She is
buried in the new Claremorris cemetery, as the cemetery where her
parents are buried is now closed.
Sadly,
both Jo and Peg suffered from Alzheimer's during their last
years. Jo broke her hip and spent many weeks at St.
Vincent's Hospital recuperating. We all thought it would be
the end of her, but she regained her health. She also had
memory problems. The New York University Hospital group
used her as a model for experimental techniques in improving
memory in older persons, and she 'starred' in a training
movie. Of course, her famous movie role was as the
Mother Superior in the "Rosary Murders", with Donald
Sutherland. She loved how the rest of the cast looked after
her. making chalk marks on the floor to show her where to stand
and move, and helping her remember her lines.
We
celebrated Jo's birthdays around each end of August with
afternoon parties at 11 Washington Square. The parties
brought out an amazing variety of persons. My Mary was able
to attend several of these, and my daughter Bridget and her
friend (and now fiance) Jason Pomerantz attended the last two
parties. I wanted Bridget to be there. When Bridget
was a little girl, Jo wanted to bring Bridget to tea at the Plaza
Hotel; it never happened, but it exemplified the elegance
and élan which marked the Mullin girls all their lives.
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