Mom would be pleased that her poems – even those from long ago – are causing her children to research and reminisce.

This poem was written in August of 1977 following the death of someone named Madeline.

A friend? A relative?

I checked first about a certain writer friend, but she spelled her name Madeleine and lived for three more decades.

A search on our massive family tree on ancestry.com brought me – at last – to Madeline.

Madeline Sturmer.

Madeline Sturmer Regan. Mom’s aunt.

in memoriam

madeline
in maine the fog comes thick this morning
sandpipers run from the waves
my husband goes back into sincerity
dark suit shoes demeanor
setting sail for unknown islands
leaving me widow walking
listening for fire engines that don’t come

is there a bookmark in the gift I sent
a final mahler on your stereo
I was waiting for others to die madeline
not you
you were going to call me

tomorrow
the one child left to me will run along the beach
smiling at sandpipers
the two of us will make gifts to take home
each at his picture along the quiet street
where earlier I go to pray the mass
for you
and for my husband coming home

~ joan vayo August 11, 1977

(The reference to Dad in this poem was, I believe, mention that he’d left the Maine vacation for a day or two to travel to a job interview that ultimately meant they would make one final move for General Electric. Home to Connecticut. Thankfully, 13-year-old Bill was with Mom; the rest of us were in the Midwest, heading back to college.)

Madeline’s parents emigrated from Germany during the 1890s.

They married in 1902. They had two daughters: Madeline was born in 1904 and Evelyn two years later.

Madeline wed Grandma Cassidy’s red-haired brother Tommy in early 1923 and they went on to have four children. They lived in New Haven, Connecticut, in the duplex on State Street where Madeline and Evelyn grew up. It still exists.

According to my Aunt Bunny, Tommy contracted tuberculosis and had to live at a sanatorium for a while. Sadly, Tommy passed away in 1946 and Madeline had to make it on her own.

She’d gone to work as a comptometer operator. (A comptometer is an electromechanical calculating machine. So much more than an adding machine.) She was a bookkeeper at Whitney Art Supplies in New Haven.

Her sister, Evelyn, eventually came to live with her. More about Evelyn in a bit.

My middle brother, Dave, remembers Madeline as the relative who helped his childhood stamp collection burst out to international territory.

Here’s Dave’s story:

I started collecting stamps when I was about eight, and continued until my early teens. Dad told me he had collected when he was a boy, but what motivated me wasn’t so much family tradition as a fascination with other parts of the world, which I have to this day. I enjoyed the techniques and tools of philately: carefully soaking the stamps off the envelopes and laying them on paper towels to dry, affixing them in the album with little lightly-gummed glassine hinges – never glue!!! – only touching stamps with tweezers if you were really hard-core (I wasn’t).  

I dutifully collected US stamps, but the wider world beckoned. 

Other than the occasional post card from a traveling friend or relative, our house rarely received any mail from abroad. Happily, though, once the word got out, a number of relatives came through for me. Uncle Paul was stationed in Spain for some time; his wife, Genia, received mail from relatives in her native Turkey; and Vatican City stamps trickled in from time to time when a Catholic friend or relation was abroad.  

Most helpful of all was my great aunt Madeline Regan, who regularly sent me troves of foreign stamps, most of which were on mail her sister Evelyn Sturmer, with whom she lived, had received. For some reason Evelyn had a strong Venezuelan connection, so that page of my stamp album soon burgeoned with color; she was the source of many European stamps as well. I only met Madeline once, when Mom took me to visit her – she struck me as perhaps the most cosmopolitan of any relative I’d met – but never did meet Evelyn. 

Waiting for chance and thoughtful relatives to supply you is one way to build a collection, but you can also pay to play. A lot of my allowance went to two companies: H. E. Harris, a venerable firm that Dad also had done business with, and the Mystic Stamp Company, who introduced me to the magic of approvals. Once a month I’d receive twenty or so little glassine envelopes, each containing one or more stamps – of all shapes (round! triangular!) and colors, from all sorts of far-off places.

I was floored, and grateful, that they trusted a ten-year-old to pay for what he wanted and send back the rest.

Approvals allowed me to indulge my philatelic fascination with New Zealand, the country – for reasons I don’t fully understand, maybe just its remoteness – whose stamps I most liked to collect.

When Becky was growing up, I tried to light the fire in her, but while she enjoyed the time with her Dad it didn’t lead to her own independent passion for the hobby. I’ve now become the custodian of Dad’s, my own, and Becky’s collections.  More than anything, I’d love it if one of Becky and Nick’s sons started collecting someday – there’s a lot of good stuff for that grandson in my closet – but given the dominance of electronic communication in the world they were born into, the odds are low. Then again, Gordon’s passion for furniture and home décor that predates his lifetime by a couple of decades gives me reason to hope. 

A year or so ago, I asked Dad about Evelyn. He remembered she was a nurse who had made quite a name for herself internationally.

There are a dozen or more news clips announcing her speaking engagements and awards. From these, I’ve pieced together that Evelyn was a 1929 graduate of the Hartford Hospital School of Nursing. Her undergraduate degree was from Albertus Magnus in New Haven and her Masters was from Yale.

Evelyn traveled the world, helping to build nursing programs with the World Health Organization and Good Neighbors project.

She spent three years at the American Hospital in Beirut and spent much of the 1940s heading up a nursing school in Caracas, Venezuela. In the 1950s, she returned to New Haven and was affiliated with the Yale-New Haven medical staff as a nurse and teacher for the rest of her career.

This 1961 news photo was impossible to resist! Although this shows Evelyn receiving a prestigious award, my first thought was she looks like she could be one of the Ricardos’ neighbors from I Love Lucy, which premiered on television that same year.

The award Evelyn received was “awarded annually to a man or woman who overcomes the handicap of tuberculosis and lives a life of outstanding productiveness and service in the public welfare.”

If I learn more about Madeline and Evelyn in the coming years, I’ll be sure to come back and update this story.

Meanwhile, Aunt Bunny’s recollection of their home on State Street gives the mind’s eye something colorful to think about: “Their house was so interesting – I always though they should have a turnstile at their door and charge admission. They had a chandelier in their pantry! Most of the décor was Evelyn’s doing. Madeline would quietly say, ‘the television and chair are mine’; she was a good egg!”

“in memoriam” ©1977 Joan C. Vayo. All rights reserved.

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