Your grandparents and great-grandparents were intelligent people, loving, gutsy and hardworking, and it’s good to know the stock that you came from. A couple of the pictures in here are some that I just recently received – a couple from my sister, Kathleen, and a couple from my sister, Eleanor; so, I’ve included their remarks with them.

Kathleen’s observations were interesting point out things about our grandfather’s neatness, carriage and differences from all the others in the picture. I believe that he was Secretary of his insurance company and hoped to be appointed the Insurance Commissioner of Illinois, interestingly enough by the Governor Elect by the name of Judge Edward F. Dunne – with an E! hundreds of letters were written to recommend him. However, I don’t know if he was ever appointed. All of the grandchildren called him “John” and we called our grandmother “Munner.” I think it was probably because our mother called her “mother” and the first grandchildren just tried to say the same thing and it came out differently. “Munner” and “john” – those names have such a nice ring to them for me and I have extremely fond memories of both of them. My parents would send me to their house often for weekends and I loved the special attention. My grandfather left Illinois, I’m guessing, around 1923, to come to Detroit, “where there was more opportunity.” Unfortunately, just a few years later, the Depression hit our country and he never did very well after that, just taking whatever part-time jobs he could find = a real blow that must have been for a very proud man who had been an officer in a large insurance firm. In fact, shortly after my mother and father married, they had been living in one of the apartments of a four-family flat that they owned, and they lost that and everything in the Depression, as so many did. I still remember my dad walking down to the next corner to ride the streetcar all the way to downtown Detroit where his law office was, in the Ford building. We’d often run down to meet him at the streetcar stop when he came home at night because he often brought home suckers for all of us. My mother wouldn’t let us have suckers with straight sticks because she thought we’d fall and jam them down our throat, so he always had to buy the kind with the loops. They didn’t even have a car in those days, had four children by then and another on the way. Finally, around 1937, the County of Wayne in Detroit asked my dad to head up a new agency, the Wayne County Department of Social Welfare, so he gave up his law practice and was Director of that department until he retired the end of 1965, just a few months before he died. Surprisingly, the department was disbanded the following year and was divided up into the city of Detroit and the State of Michigan – no more separate Wayne County.

My mother had attended Clark College in Dubuque, Iowa before her family moved to Michigan (in days where relatively few women went to college) and then to the Conservatory of Music in Detroit. She was an excellent musician and played the violin, the piano and the organ. I understand that before she was married, she often used to play organ in movie theaters to accompany the action on the screen as it was the time of the “silent” movies then. As a music student, she was privileged to be one of the first ushers in the brand-new Music Hall on Woodward Avenue in Detroit. When they were refurbishing it in 1990, Harry and I donated $100 for one of the new seats, so we had her name on a plaque on seat M-13. It’s still one of the finest music houses in the state because the acoustics are so exceptional.

Coincidentally, I went to my first two years in high school just around the corner on Parsons – Girls Catholic Central. My bachelor Uncle Fred Dunne lived with his sister, my Aunt Duff (Helen Dunne LeFevre) and her four children right next door. Her husband had died I believe from pneumonia when their children were very young, and my uncle helped her out by rooming with her. Uncle Fred used to drive Duff’s daughters, Eileen and Isabel, and me all the way to downtown Detroit to get to the high school every day. Then a new girl’s high school, Immaculata, was built in our part of town and I transferred there for my last two years. It was on the campus of Marygrove college and has since closed. I’m really jumping around here, but one thought leads in so many directions.

I’ll talk about the little I know of my dad’s mother, “Ma.” A lot of it may not be right on the mark, but close from little things I’ve heard. As far as I know, she came to Canada from the oppression in Ireland when she was only about 18 all by herself, met and married William Dunne who had also come from Ireland. My mother was frightened of her because she was such a strong lady and my mother was very timid. But I guess she had to be, as when my dad was only 11, his dad died. There she is with 5 children and no husband. She takes all five and goes to Detroit where she thought she could earn enough to raise them. Little by little, she started to acquire rental property, was even able to send my dad to a boarding high school in Windsor, Assumption High School, and on to Assumption College. He was quite an athlete and played on the football team. After college, he played pro baseball for the Kellogg company. Finally, his mother told him he had to quit this “playing around” and get back to school. That’s when he went to law school. That was about the time my mother’s family moved to Detroit and lived on the same block (John Rand Medbury), so my grandmother told my dad that there was a fine young lady across the way that he should marry! So, he did!! Anyway, she had to be one tough lady, because both of her daughters lost their husbands and she helped them raise their children. My one aunt, May Dunne Maher, was pregnant with her first son when her husband died; and my other aunt, Helen Dune LeFevre, had four small children when her husband died. So, here’s three widows with all these children and not many opportunities for women in those days. But, one of the things I heard that they did was that they made beautiful hats for the society ladies of Detroit and were quite successful at it. I still can’t imagine how they not only survived but worked enough to start investing in property.

I’m going to close now. Just writing these things down brings back many fond memories about my parents and grandparents. A couple of you have suggested that I write these things down, so here’s a start. I’m still going to hunt down some more pictures that you’ll enjoy, so every so often I’ll get some more out to you. And, maybe a few more stories.