Adelaide and Herbert Crosman in 1949, University of Maryland

August, 2004

Anchorage, Alaska

Dear Family and Friends,

It grieves me to report that my mother, Adelaide Rispoli Ross Crosman, died on July 21^st 2004, at the age of 101. Her remains went to the Harvard Medical School, as was her wish. In a year or two her ashes will be buried in the Pine Hill Cemetery in Tewksbury, MA, in a plot reserved for her next to my fatherπs.

In the last several years she would ask me to remind her how old she was. ≥Is that all?≤ she would ask, disappointed that the number wasnπt larger. I think she was going for the record.

She was born in Somerville, Massachusetts on January 2^nd, 1903, and grew up in nearby West Roxbury, the second of four children: Allan, Adelaide, Lillian, and Norman. ≥The house, located on the corner of North Avenue and Nut Street, still stands,≤ she wrote in a recent memoir, ≥but has been given the more gentrified address of Northdale Drive and Paragon Road.≤ She had vivid memories of growing up in that house with her parents, Charles and Mary Stewart (Minnie) Ross, and their growing family. One memory was of the beautiful vine her mother innocently cultivated in the back yard, which turned out to be poison ivy. The whole family developed bad rashes, except for Minnie, who turned out to be immune. Another – guiltier - memory was of allowing her baby brother to fall out of one of the high bay windows in the living room. By good luck little Norman landed unhurt in a soft flower-bed.

Adelaide was a year or two younger than Allan, so she learned early to try harder. At school she was spurred to excellence both by her educated father and by an innate competitive drive. As a teenager she played organ in the Methodist church, and had a crush on the pastor, resulting in a life-long attraction to bald men. She was always a top student, and naturally gravitated toward teaching as a career. Women of her generation generally aimed at marriage and motherhood; Adelaide wanted a career first. Fortunately, the aftermath of World War I made professional work more available to women – at least to unmarried women – and she took advantage of new opportunities. After a few years teaching in the public schools she entered a program in public health education offered at MIT, where she spent a year. She earned a Masterπs Degree in Public Health from Boston University.

Thereafter she worked as a public health educator, first in the schools, and then for the American Tuberculosis Association. She was good at the work, and progressively got better-paid, more responsible jobs. She eventually came to feel however that the TB Association was an underachieving, self-serving, self-perpetuating bureaucracy, and one that failed to appreciate or promote their deserving women employees. It was hardly unique in that respect. In mid-life she decided that personal satisfaction in her work was more important than prestige or status. She experimented with writing and painting as alternatives, but soon returned to classroom teaching.

According to an interview I conducted with her shortly after his death in 1980 she was twenty-nine when she met Herbert Crosman. ≥I belonged,≤ she told me, ≥to the studentsπ club at the Baptist church at the corner of Clarendon St. in Boston. I can see Herbert now, the handsomest thing that ever walked through that door. I noticed him right away, and I thought åAha, thatπs for me!π But in the following weeks he did not return.

≥A group of us got together to plan a dancing-party at a little country-club, but my regular partners couldnπt come. I was desperate. There was Herbert, who I thought was pretty nice, and a friend relayed the message. Herb came flying down from Maine, where heπd gone to visit his sister, and the party was the real beginning of our friendship.

≥I had a little car, a Ford, I was successful. Iπd passed up a couple of chances to get married, but I was going to get married, and I was very certain that I was not going to marry someone I didnπt want to marry. At first Herbert didnπt appear to be the right man. He was poor. He wore a gray sweater with the biggest hole you ever saw in the back of it. I dropped the sweater out of the car, finally.

≥I wasnπt serious about him, until my mother said åYou wouldnπt marry a lame man, would you?π It was a mean remark, to judge anyone on the basis of his lameness, but I recognized that his limp bothered me as well.≤

Despite Herbertπs poverty and stiff hip, the two fell in love. In addition to his good looks, he had an intellect that interested and impressed her. He had potential that could be realized if he could afford to go to college, and she had the means to send him. In order to keep her job, they were ≥secretly married≤ in 1933, or so they used to tell me. Finally, when I was forty, she told me the real story: ≥Robbie, youπre old enough now to know that your father and I were not secretly married. We just lived together. I couldnπt marry and keep my job. It was the depression, and married women lost their jobs, since it was assumed they had a breadwinner in the family already, which I didnπt. Lying was difficult,≤ she added after a moment. ≥I developed hives around my neck and a false appendicitis all in the first year.≤

Eventually they married (Cambridge, 1937), Herbert graduated from college and took a Masterπs degree in education; then they moved to Chicago. Adelaide had a good job at the local TB Association, and he enrolled in graduate school. I was born there in 1940. She had planned to stay home with her baby, but domestic indolence did not agree with her. After six months she was back at work.

Herbert, who had gotten used to contemplating life from the summits of Harvard, disliked the University of Chicago, and in 1944 we moved back to Brookline, MA. In 1945 we spent a year in Mexico City, while he researched his doctoral dissertation. The year was an exciting one, but ended badly when Adelaide got a middle-ear infection. Mexican doctors doled out precious penicillin in doses too small to be effective, and she grew deathly ill. Eventually she flew back to Boston, where doctors saved her life, but not the hearing in one ear. Thereafter she was perpetually telling me to speak to her good ear, which I never learned to do until reminded.

Back in the U.S.A. Adelaide found work in the TB Association in Washington D.C., near the University of Maryland, where Herbert had a teaching job. She could have done better if she had been able to look for a job nationwide, but she subordinated her career to her husbandπs, as was the norm in that day. Her work there was not very satisfying, however. She quit when we all went to Europe for a year in 1951-52. After our return she read the ≥help wanted≤ ads, which at that time specified age-limits. A poem she wrote at that time expressed her anger at being discriminated against. ≥Help Wanted – Women under 35,≤ it was called. Next she taught hygiene for a year at the University of Maryland, which left her cynical about university athletic departments. In a year or two she went back to public school teaching, which she found deeply fulfilling.

She was a master-teacher. She liked to integrate the whole yearπs curriculum around a particular theme, like South America, and had the students work in small groups on collaborative projects that required learning geography, math, language-skills, history, art, etc. in a way that was directed toward the goals of the group project. Students were engaged and eager to learn. She loved many of them, and they shared the feeling. Her method was hard for the teacher, and she usually brought work home for the evenings and weekends. Fortunately she was an efficient worker, and managed to have a personal life as well.

I benefited from her teaching expertise. When I was in tears over some school ≥project≤ that required abilities that I did not believe I possessed – like artistic flair or manual dexterity – she would help me find a suitable project and get me started on it. Later, she taught me how to do well on multiple-choice standard exams, so that College Boards and the like held no terrors for me. She edited and typed many of my high-school essays and term papers. She was a confident and supportive presence in my life all through my school years, and insisted on regular correspondence when I went off to college. She always believed me capable of great things, but left it to me to choose which ones.

She and Herbert spent two more years teaching in Europe – mainly in France and Spain – while I began college. Then they returned to College Park, where they lived until Herbert retired in 1964. Adelaide continued teaching until she was seventy, when she quit in order to care for her husband, who was in failing health. They moved back to Cambridge, the site of their first years together, living in an apartment at 345 Harvard Street. It had big picture windows with a splendid view of the rooftops and the crowns of great trees westward across the university campus. Sunsets were particularly thrilling from that vantage point.

Their grandson Christopher lived with his parents fifty miles away, in Providence, and visits were frequent back and forth. She attended the Cambridge Art Institute in those years, where she produced a remarkable series of large abstract paintings, most of them in colorful acrylics, as well as many sketches, watercolors, small canvases, and other beautiful works of art. She began painting in 1945, and studied with the Abstract Expressionist master Morris Lewis in the 1950πs, but her seventies were her most accomplished years as a visual artist.

Herbert hung on until 1980 and then succumbed to multiple ailments. Adelaide grieved long and hard at the loss of her beloved friend and spouse, but she kept on with her busy life on Harvard Street. After a botched cataract operation caused her to lose much of the vision in her left eye, she turned from painting to writing as a means of self-expression, attending a series of writing workshops taught by Molly Strange Kennedy, a columnist for the Boston Globe. There she wrote a number of marvelous autobiographical pieces. One of them, ≥The Old Lady and the Taxi Driver,≤ is funny and profound. It was published in the Cambridge Forum in 1988, and she read the piece on Public Radio as well. It was written when she was eighty-five.

She continued to live alone on Harvard Street until 1996, attracting many of the other tenants, mostly much younger people. These found her to be a caring friend, as well as a lively and interesting mind. Finally, though, providing for herself proved too difficult, even with the help of friends and neighbors, and she resolved to move into assisted living.

In packing her dishes she fell from a step-ladder in her kitchen, breaking a hip. She lay on the floor unable to get up, pounding and screaming for help – to no avail. Any jaded tenant who heard her must have ascribed the noise to the regular din of the densely packed city. She had visions of being discovered days or weeks later, having long ago expired.

But Adelaide was made of strong stuff. She dragged a place mat down from the kitchen table, rolled it up, and used it as a stick to knock the telephone receiver down from the wall. Then she dialed 911. When she emerged from the hospital with a new hip, she let me and others pack her up for her move to Cadbury Commons.

Cadbury, a shiny new residence about a mile away from her old apartment, made much of Adelaide. They mounted an art show, attended by her friends and relatives as well as by the population of the residence and the interested public. Afterward about a dozen of her best canvases were left on permanent display in the public areas of the building, and are there to this day – you can go by to see them at 66 Sherman Street. She formed friendships and joined activities there, especially a writing group, although limited eyesight and hearing made it harder to participate.

Finally her capacities had diminished to the point where she needed round-the-clock care. She took up her final residence in Natick at Whitney Place. She had her ninety-ninth and one-hundredth birthday parties there, attended by family, including her son, grandson Chris and his fiancÈe Roxana, nieces and nephews, grand-nieces, as well as friends and well-wishers. In the last few years she had trouble storing new memories, and she was apt to repeat herself somewhat, but she was still the same person she had always been, and was still interested in news from friends, as well as what was going on in the world. She was especially angry at and scornful of President Dubya, though she could not always remember his name. As I say, she was disappointed to learn that she was not even older than she was.

She declined slowly, slept a lot, but continued to enjoy occasional visits from friends and family. Since I had to come all the way from Alaska, I would arrange to stay nearby, and would visit daily for a week. We would sing, read, and telephone old friends. I asked her during my last visit, in June, if she still enjoyed life. ≥Oh, yes,≤ she replied. Finally, on July 21^st, she had a brief seizure of two or three minutes and expired peacefully in her bed.

Although she had naturally low blood pressure, her long life was due in no small part to her healthy lifestyle. She quit smoking in the å50s, and ate a balanced diet, as her health education had taught. She was careful to control her weight. She lived alone until the age of ninety-three, and was still mentally alert at Cadbury. She was a dear and loving mother right until the end, and it was a pleasure to give back to her a little of the comfort and care she had given me as a child. In memory and in dreams she is still present, usually teaching me something I need to learn.

Unlike plays, which usually end on a high note, or at least on one of deep significance, the last acts of long lives are usually anticlimactic. We the living are forced to supply the dramatic shape retrospectively. Besides being a great teacher and a loving companion, Adelaide was heroic when heroism was required. She was the take-charge person in our family, the one with the energy and the practical intelligence to see what needed to be done and to do it.

Once, in Mexico, the three of us were travelling by bus over the mountains to Mexico City. It was evening, the bus was crowded, and the driver had been at the wheel for too many hours. While the rest of us dozed, Adelaide observed with disquiet that the driver was fighting sleep. His chin would drop to his chest, the bus would start to wander across the twisting highway, then he would wake and haul the bus back from the edge. Finally, however, he nodded off and did not awake. We drifted once again toward a sheer fall off the mountain ledge.

Adelaide knew what she had to do. She stood, hurried up the aisle, and turned the wheels back to the right, as the startled driver awoke and applied the breaks. Shaken, he thereafter was able to stay awake until we reached the city. The only recognition she got was the cheers of the other passengers, but it was enough to have saved her family and perhaps fifty strangers that evening. It was characteristic of Adelaide to be aware, to think things through, and to take appropriate action as needed. What else do we expect of a hero?

She is survived by a son, a grandson Christopher, a granddaughter-in-law Roxana (Boglio), and a twenty-one-month-old great-grandson Luke Alexander Crosman. We are all still grieving her death, but I know that someday we will be consoled by reflecting on the useful, productive, and above all loving life she led. In our hearts, and in the hearts of many others, she is still alive. Who could wish for a better legacy?

Robert Crosman

FROM CHRIS CROSMAN:

To me, Adelaide Crosman was always known simply as Grandma. And the memories I have of her, the most vivid ones, are of personal, intimate moments that we shared. These moments are still as fresh to me today as they ever were.

My earliest recollections, from when my Grandpa was still alive, are of opening presents at Christmastime, while the smoke from Grandpaπs yuletide cigar wafted through the air. Grandma would pass out the gifts, and I would munch on a multitude of nuts from the ever-present nut bowl. I didnπt really like the nuts all that much, but there were so many fascinating different types, and cracking them open was such an interesting challenge that I ate them anyway. Eventually, at some point after Grandpa died, the nut bowl fell into disuse. Maybe Grandma didnπt like the nuts that much either.

When I was a child, Grandma and I spent quite a bit of time together. My parents would put me on the Bonanza Bus from Providence to Boston, and Grandma would pick me up on the other end. Weπd drive back to her apartment on Harvard Street in her little Datsun B210, a flash of bright orange amid the other, more sedately-colored vehicles. Often, weπd stop at the market on the way back to pick up a roll of Pillsbury cookie dough, or some Jiffy Pop popcorn.

Ah, yes, the Jiffy Pop. A little frying-pan shaped, aluminum-foil covered package of fun. Grandma had an electric stove, so it took a real artist to get the Jiffy Pop just right. One needed to be careful that all of the kernels popped without getting too hot and burning to a crisp. Luckily, Grandma had it down to a science, and weπd munch on popcorn while watching Wheel of Fortune, our favorite show. Grandma usually had the puzzle figured out early on, and we would groan in disgust as the hapless contestants kept guessing the wrong letters, or, worse yet, landed on the dreaded ≥Bankrupt≤ section of the Wheel.

Later, Grandma would fix us dinner – perhaps her famous lasagna and a salad—and weπd eat lying on the bed, using TV trays, while we watched the local news or 60 Minutes. After dinner, it was time to bake the Pillsbury chocolate chip cookies, and eat them with a tall glass of milk. Interesting how so many of my recollections of Grandma center around food.

One of my favorite memories of Grandma was the time, shortly after my Grandpa died, when we went down to the animal shelter to pick out a cat to keep her company. The shelter had a big cage full of furry little kittens, frolicking and tussling with one another in a bed of straw. One of the kittens was quite gregarious, leaving her brothers and sisters to greet us at the side of the cage. ≥This one, Grandma, sheπs the friendliest of the litter,≤ I said, and Grandma agreed.

I can still remember the first night that kitten was at Grandmaπs apartment. Bambi, as Grandma named her, kept waking me up by pouncing on my feet as I slept. Then, purring frantically, she would snuggle up to my head. Unfortunately, the friendly little kitten turned into an unfriendly cat, who spent the next twelve years or so hiding under the bed and hissing at me if I got too close. Looking back, Grandma and I would always joke about our trip to the shelter, and how we got the sweetest little kitten who somehow grew to be a surly cat.

Grandma was one of the most generous people I knew. She was careful with money, but didnπt seem to care too much about hoarding it or about buying things for herself. Because of her and Grandpa, I was able to attend a wonderful private school after getting beaten up constantly at public school in the first grade. Later on, when it looked like Iπd be the only one in my class to miss a school trip to Montreal, Grandma came through and paid the fee for me. Iπm grateful that she was so generous to me on these occasions, as well as many others.

As I grew older, I was able to spend less and less time with Grandma. When I did visit her, she was the same as ever, although her vision and hearing were going. This made our trips to the store in her Datsun increasingly terrifying, but otherwise didnπt affect our routine. Eventually, though, I moved away, first to D.C. and then to Los Angeles. We kept in touch on the phone, but it just wasnπt the same.

The last time I saw Grandma was over three years ago. By then, she was in a nursing home, although quite a pleasant one. It was hard to see her looking so very old, even shorter of sight and harder of hearing than ever. And yet, she was still the same Grandma. She was delighted to see us and to meet my fiancÈe, Roxana, whom she regaled with some of the same fascinating anecdotes that she had told me years earlier. To me, during that visit, it seemed as though Grandma might possibly live forever.

Of course, nobody lives forever, no matter how much we wish otherwise. When I finally got the news that Grandma was gone, it was a shock, despite her age. However, I am comforted by the fact that she lived a very long and fulfilling life, and that she had experienced more than most other people ever do. My final words to Grandma are the same she used to say to me, in Spanish, when I went to bed at night. ≥Que tengas sueÒos de mil colores,≤ she would say – may you have dreams of a thousand colors.

August, 2004

Los Angeles, CA