Grandma Hemmer

Today would be my Grandma Hemmer's birthday. She lived a difficult yet interesting and rewarding life. Yesterday my mom sent out the following reflections as an email to her children and grandchildren. I thought it was interesting enough to post here. Even if you didn't know my grandmother, it's a very interesting record of life in central Illinois in the early 1900s.
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Tomorrow is Grandma Hemmer's birthday and she would be 108 years since she was born in 1901. She was exactly five months older than her husband Max, born January 2 in 1902. I recall her talking about her first automobile ride when visitors to their neighbor owned a car. Her father, Christian Martin, died in his late forties and I think they had a car before that. I think when a horse and buggy approached, the car had to stop lest the horses get frightened.
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She married Max Hemmer in February of 1928 and moved into a new home that he built for her (the house Chuck and Marian had in Princeville). She had an electric stove and folks thought she couldn't keep house without the traditional wood/coal burning cook stove of the day. She also had an electric refrigerator, not the usual icebox. Uncle Jack said that Max was highly successful during his short time in business. I remember her electric stove beside the cookstove in Grandma Martin's kitchen.

Her husband lost his life in 1930, the time of the Great Depression. No government funds for a widow were available so she moved in with her mother and single sisters. I was told that the day after the funeral she moved her things, some upstairs to a storeroom and some to Grandma Martin's, to prepare the house for renters, who incidentally didn't pay her the rent they owed. Perhaps they couldn't then, but they could have later on. That was her source of income.
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Incidentally, my father didn't have a will so according to then Illinois law the house had to be sold (apparently our father had it paid for) and Mother was to get half and the children the other half. So the house was sold at auction in the courthouse and nobody showed up except Chris Hoerr, Sr., who bought the house for a dollar and promptly sold it back to Mother. Vater Hoerr (as he was called) came to outbid any other potential buyers to save the house for mother.
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Grandma Martin said that as long as she had food, we would have food and not one of us ever lacked for the things we needed. I think the aunts pretty much bought or made our clothes. Grandma's oldest sister (Anna, who died of a stroke in 1937 at age 39) was an accomplished seamstress and kept me in finery. Cousin Alice teased that she had everything going her way until I came along. At age eight, I well remember the details of Anna's death and funeral. She always had gifts for everyone at Christmas and her last year she gave me a much desired Dydee doll, one that actually wet her pants. How modern could we get?
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Knowing a father is a total vacuum to me, but truly the Lord provided well for us in other ways. You remember what a hard worker Grandma was--typical of the women of that day. She worked in the canning factory as foreman of the women--what a job that was. Then she cooked in a huge rest home/ maternity house for perhaps ten years. Stan Klopfenstein's journalist daughter Sonja wrote an article about that home in the Peoria newspaper. The pictures of that now private residence were familiar to me. And then for many years she cooked in the grade school cafeteria in Edelstein. One of the students wrote a paper when he got into high school about her wonderful donuts.
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What memories do you have to share? Guess I'll stop for now. Love, Mother