Author Archives: By Mary Jo Clark as told to Jack Clark

In 1919, when I was five years old, I got whooping cough and almost died. I remember my mother sleeping with me every night. We lived in–well, we called it an English basement. Now they’d call it a garden apartment. And my mother used to go to the window in the pitch dark and lift […]

Aunt Maggie came to live with us in 1924. Now, she was a very intelligent woman, but she couldn’t read or write. My father would read the newspaper to her, all the special articles. The next day you’d hear her telling somebody about some important thing that happened yesterday. “It was in the Daily News, […]

In 1924 we moved around the corner to Sacramento Boulevard, to a bigger, nicer apartment, right on the corner of Lexington. We had bay windows out on Sacramento. You could see both ways. It was great fun watching the fire wagons. Horses pulled them. The middle window didn’t open. The side windows did. So in […]

I’ve always felt that I was much loved. People loved me. My mother loved me. My father loved me. And when he sat me on his knee and blew smoke in my ear I knew that he loved me. Didn’t I tell you that one? Well, today it would be considered child abuse. But when […]

Our living room on Flournoy Street had a great big window out front. Today you’d call it a picture window. On the day before Halloween 1921 my father got out there and washed this big window. When he woke up the next morning the neighborhood kids had written on it, “So you like to wash […]

My grandfather, Philip Ryan, died in November 1924, when I was ten. He was 89. I remember going to visit him when he was sick. He was wrapped in a blanket sitting in his chair. He was waked at home. They had these red candles on either side of the casket, and we kids–there were […]

Cousin Nancy was telling us ghost stories once, and my father heard and said, “Don’t believe a word of this. There’s always something material behind it. Now I’ll tell you a ghost story.” And he told us how his mother died when he was young, and he quit school after third grade and stayed home […]

The three Ryan boys came from Tipperary, Ireland, to New Orleans. Thomas, Patrick, and Philip. I don’t know the year. Philip and Patrick were both stonecutters. That’s all we know about the family in Ireland. They were down in New Orleans for a while, and then they heard about all these jobs in Illinois, helping […]

When you worked at Sears you worked. Maybe that’s why a lot of people are such good workers, because they always had to work so hard. Anyway, in 1940 I ended up in the collection department sitting next to Chuck Hanna. We dictated letters. We did all the no-payment accounts, where people would buy something […]