Theodore
Tampa and he got the typhoid fever and it bothered his health for years
afterwards.
He took a job as a motorman on an open-platform street car in Baltimore, but
the cold weather almost killed him. After that he went into various businesses.
Not having had the benefit of a college education, he took up what now seems
to be a very unusual occupation for a man. He was a shirt ironer. This was in
the day when men wore high collars, separate collars, and, of course, the shirts
and collars were heavily starched and had to be ironed. He traveled up and
down the East Coast. Anybody who was a good shirt ironer could get a job
anywhere. He was working in laundries, and this is something that went out of
style, I guess, in the first decade of the century. For a while, he operated his
own laundry; he and one of his brothers operated a laundry in Washington.
He was living in Kingston, New York, when he and my mother courted. My
mother was a Baltimorean-all of my family history is based in Baltimore
except my father traveled around a lot. My mother was born in east Baltimore
and lived there until she married. My father courted her from Kingston by
postcard, and I still have somewhere in my archives upstairs the postcards that
they wrote back and forth from Baltimore to Kingston, New York, where he
was employed as a shirt ironer in the laundry.
They courted that way for a year or two. They had met while my mother was
visiting a cousin who lived in Kingston. Eventually, he came down to
Baltimore and married my mother, whose name was Emma Margaret Scheldt,
also of German extraction. But the Scheldt side of the family came from north
Germany.
Was that S-c-h-e-l-d-t?
and you could say
A: Yes, the same as the river which the Dutch call the
"S-c-h" could be pronounced in the same way, like "school." But it wasn't.
My grandmother was born in this country, but her parents were from Germany,
from Schleswig-Holstein, and they actually spoke a different kind of German.
The German was so different in the north and the south, but understandable.
Anyway, my mother and father were married on June 12, 1907, and lived in
Kingston, New York, for a few years. My father was a pioneer in
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