Annabelle Smith was born in Mount Ayr, Iowa, on December 21, 1925. Professionally, she went by Ann, and among family, Annie. She didn’t like the name Annabelle, and she lived almost long enough to see it become fashionable again. She also didn’t like having a birthday so close to Christmas.
Mom’s childhood was shaped by the Great Depression. Her father had run his father’s dairy farm. When the economy collapsed, the banks took everything back save her grandparents’ homestead, an experience she wrote about here.
According to my folks, everyone in the Depression was poor, it was all a matter of degree. Mom always had shoes and clean clothes (hand-me-downs), and food on the table other than beans.
In school, Mom excelled in typing and stenography. My Dad, Bob Maley, moved to Mount Ayr from nearby Lamoni in high school. According to legend, they met at a pick-up football game among the boys and girls in their class. She mistook the new kid for another classmate and tackled him from behind. Kismet.
Upon graduation in 1943, Dad joined the Navy. They married on June 4, 1944, two days before D-Day. After the war, two babies came along and Dad pursued his plan to become a watchmaker/jeweler. Then Korea intervened; Dad was called back to the Navy, serving in seaplanes in San Diego, and ultimately Japan.
After that war, Mom hired on as a secretary with Boeing in Wichita, where she worked typing (and re-typing) the procurement contract for the B-52. I came on the scene in 1956, and Mom stayed at home until I went to kindergarten.
Here’s the thing about my Mom: She was the yang to my Dad’s yin. He was the creative, right-brained proto-hippie who cared more about tending his compost than balancing his checkbook. Mom paid the bills, kept the kids fed and clothed, and in later years, saw to it that the IRA’s were fully funded. Thank God for that.
I was close to my Mom growing up. Saturday mornings were for chores, not cartoons. I helped with dusting and vacuuming. She taught me to make a bed properly, with hospital corners and the finished side of the top sheet facing down, not up. Thanks, Mom, for that part of my OCD.
In their later years, I got to see an aspect of Mom’s personality that I never really saw as a kid. She craved competition. She was a killer Scrabble player. We used to play frequently after they moved to Lafayette. And it was through Scrabble that I saw the first signs of Mom’s mind slipping away. Fewer 7-letter “bingos”, more words like DOG and CAT. Oh, and she was aware of it. “I’m getting kind of tater-headed,” she’d say.
Mom’s last years were a steady decline, with sitters and ultimately a nursing home. Through it all, she never succumbed to anger. She always knew and loved my Dad. He was extremely devoted and insisted on visiting her every day that was possible. She passed in 2017, after nearly 73 years of marriage. Dad would die later that same year.
She always loved her kids, too. All five of us: my sister, brother, and me, but she also grieved for the two sons she lost at birth.
Thanks for everything, Mom. Happy birthday, even if it is right before Christmas.
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