They Named A Hurricane After Her

Nana Ruled with the Force of a Storm

Hurricane Nana slammed into Belize with 75 miles-per-hour winds on September 3, 2020. What? My Grandmother is a hurricane?

Sadly, the announcer mispronounced her name: She wasn’t “Nana” like banana as he said. She was “Nana” like mama.

So famous did Hurricane Nana become that a Facebook page exists in her honor. There’s even a picture of her with her glasses (and a mask). You can check out Nana’s Facebook page here. Nana, who was partially blind, had many pairs of glasses: 2 pairs of distance glasses, several pairs of reading glasses, a magnifying glass, sun glasses (which she called “dark glasses”), and extra-dark sun glasses.

It fits all too well. Indeed, Nana was often a tropical storm if not a hurricane. Not in speed or physical force but certainly in terms of the force and power she had over her family, including those who married into the family.

A difficult and opinionated woman, she disliked more people more than she liked. Nana had no use for Jews, Episcopalians, Catholics, anyone not born in the US, anyone whose skin color wasn’t white, Democrats, people who were divorced, those who had too much education, those who had too much money, those who didn’t have enough money, married women who worked. She was violently opposed to my Mother’s decision to return to teaching school after I was born. However, it had a positive outcome for Nana as it meant I spent even more time with her which she liked.

She disliked people not in her family. I spent much of my childhood with her and don’t remember anyone outside the family being in her house with the exception of a best friend from her childhood days in Red Cloud, Nebraska.

Her dislikes included everything from her husband to my Father’s family to Eleanor Roosevelt’s column “If You Ask Me” that appeared in McCall’s magazine which she read with her magnifying glass. She opposed women going to college despite my Mother having graduated from the University of Denver with a degree in French and admitted to Mortar Board, an honor society for women. When I was a senior in high school, she tried to talk me out of going to college, suggesting I should go to “finishing school.” (Schools that teach social graces and upper-class cultural rites — not that she in anyway exhibited these qualities.)

Nana rarely smiled, never laughed, and didn’t get jokes. Didn’t appreciate presents. Often lying on the couch with severe migraine headaches, I and my cousins would tiptoe quietly around her.

I’ll never know the details of my adoption. I know that my birth-father left to train as a paratrooper at Fort Benning in 1942 before my birth-mother knew she was pregnant. I know she wrote to him and that when home on leave, he paid the maternity costs. One of the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne, he would die in Normandy on D-Day.

I know that my birth-mother and birth-grandmother left me at the Colorado State Home for Dependent Children before leaving Colorado to work at the nuclear plant in Hanford, Washington. That my birth-grandmother signed the papers. Despite what I was told, I know I was not “chosen” as the cutest baby among cute babies up for adoption. Somebody knew somebody who arranged the adoption. Intuitively I know that Nana was part of this.

In the Beginning

Vera Wilson Mizer, the grandmother I called “Nana,” was an orphan: her father drowned in 1899 and her mother died a year later. I was also an orphan. She had talked my parents into my adoption. They’d been childless and happy for nine years. My Mother wasn’t crazy about the idea, but Nana prevailed. My father, an insurance adjustor at the time, travelled to Wyoming and New Mexico. My Mother went with him. Now she’d have to stay home. Nana excelled at convincing family members to do things they would never have chosen.

After the adoption papers were signed, I was taken to Nana’s house and put in the crib in a little room off the master bedroom. Dr. Brown, the pediatrician, came to the house. He was sure I had tuberculosis. I’m not sure how one made that diagnosis without an x-ray? Perhaps I had pneumonia? Whatever the diagnosis, I was a sick baby and stayed in the crib at Nana’s in the baby room for many months.

I was the last of the babies to spend time in the baby room. The crib was replaced by an old treadle sewing machine in what became the sewing room. My Mother made all my clothes in the sewing room at Nana’s and clothes for herself and Nana until I was in 2nd grade when she returned to teaching school.

When not sewing, Mother and Nana would stand at an old cook stove in the basement canning fruit. I would sit on the bottom step of the stairs watching, looking at picture books until I could read, playing with my beloved paper dolls, or coloring. It all went well until I tried unsuccessfully to tie my shoes. Out of frustration, I said “darn.” My Mother washed my mouth out with soap instead of showing me how to tie my shoes.

Even in kindergarten I walked to school. Nana lived half way between my house and school. I was to stop at Nana’s to check in on the way to school. After school until I was old enough to stay alone, I stayed at Nana’s until my Mother, who was at one of her club meetings, came to get me. Eventually, my Mother, bored with women’s clubs, returned to teaching school. And as before, I stayed at Nana’s after school.

We’d sit at the kitchen table where I could eat as many pieces of raisin bread toast as I wanted and was never scolded if one burned and had to be thrown away. Her old toaster didn’t pop up when toast was done. It continued toasting until one opened the little door on the side to stop the toasting and release the contents. Burnt toast was common if one wasn’t paying attention.

Often we ate bowls of cottage cheese and canned peaches together while listening to soap operas on the radio. Or played solitaire at the round table in the dining room. We each had our own deck, our own game. No double Solitaire. If my parents went to bridge club, waltz night, or dinner parties. I would stay all night at Nana’s. My parents went out a lot. I never had a babysitter. I stayed at Nana’s.

Stories of Nana’s eccentricities were well known and commented on by the family but never criticized in front of me. Perhaps the oddest was her habit of cooking a dinner, placing it in a plaid canvas zippered bag, and taking it to my uncle, her oldest son, who was a doctor. Since she didn’t drive, this involved catching a city bus to downtown Denver. When I stayed all night with her, I accompanied her on these jaunts. It was my job to carry the canvas dinner bag and hold on tight to two bus tokens.

The office in the since demolished Metropolitan Building on 16th St. had open gridding in the cars allowing riders to see the elevator shaft which I found terrifying. The elevator was run in the evening by a Black elevator operator. He would always greet my Grandmother, “Good evening, Mrs. Mizer.” She refused to respond to this man whom she called a “darkie.” My Mother, hardly a paragon of racial equality, would remind me that my Grandmother’s Father came from Virginia as if this was an excuse to be rude and racist.

After we arrived on the 3rd floor at my uncle’s office, Nana would put the dinner in the “oven.” I never saw it but assume it was a medical “oven” for sterilizing instruments. And then we would wait . . . and wait until he had finished seeing patients. Luckily I was addicted to reading and always had a book. Then more waiting as we sat in his office while he ate his dinner and returned phone calls. He and Nana would chat. I would continue reading. Eventually, we’d ride the elevator down to the parking garage.

These were the days when doctors made house calls which meant Nana and I would sit in the dark car (cold if in the winter) while he saw patient after patient. Obviously I couldn’t read in the dark. Nana chastised me when I complained about being bored.

When he stopped at St. Luke’s Hospital to see more patients, we’d follow him in and sit in the waiting room where hanging on the wall was a large, stern portrait of John Franklin Spalding (the first Episcopal bishop of Colorado) wearing a clerical collar and cassock. I had been brought up in the Congregational Church where ministers do not wear clerical garb. I was both intrigued and intimidated.

Eventually we’d get back to Nana’s and I’d run upstairs to bed. My Mother would pick me up in the morning or I’d walk home as I got older. That my parents thought this arrangement preferable to getting a baby sitter remains a mystery. But maybe not . . . Nana always thought I should be with her and she “ruled.”

Nana never went to church although everyone in the family did. And didn’t like parties, baby showers, weddings, or any event that might include a person not in the family. An unfriendly person and suspicious of those she didn’t know, she was also embarrassed by her heavy glasses and often a patch over one eye.

Despite her disapproval of my going to graduate school, she came with my parents to the airport when I flew (for the first time) to Columbus, Ohio and graduate work at Ohio State. The three of them stood on the tarmac (many years before airport security) to see me off. It was the first and only time I’d seen my Grandmother cry.

I went home in June when my Father passed away suddenly and spent the summer in Denver with my Mother and Nana. Without finishing my Master’s Thesis, I got married the next year. Nana refused to come to the wedding until I threatened to elope. A few years later, she refused to attend my son’s baptism.

After a divorce, I returned to graduate school and was living in Bloomington, Indiana. No longer studying musicology as I had years ago at Ohio State, I had switched to studying British history with a certificate in Victorian Studies at Indiana University. As the managing editor of Victorian Studies, a position give to graduate students who received tuition and a small stipend, I made enough money to pay rent, buy food and textbooks but little else. Nana was now in a nursing home and no longer able to write letters back and forth with me.

She died in 1975 while I was in Bloomington. My Mother and my aunt had discussed sending me a ticket to fly home for the funeral but decided not to. They feared I might cry as I had at my father’s funeral — silent tears, not loud sobs. Fifty years later, my cousin Peggy and I were chatting as we often did about the family. She asked “MaryJo, do you remember when you embarrassed the family by crying at your Father’s funeral?”

Nana, a difficult, opinionated, eccentric woman, with whom I spent much of my childhood, had initiated my rescue from an orphanage. She had loved me unconditionally and had enjoyed being with me when my Mother didn’t. Not surprisingly, I remain less critical of this grandmother than my cousins.

Nana loved me unconditionally. All children need to be loved unconditionally but even more so for adopted children. Children who had been abandoned, put in orphanages, or given over to foster care where “parents” were paid for child caring felt their abandonment.

Metaphorically, they said I was “her baby.” And certainly I was the favorite grandchild. The combination of having been an orphan as she had, that my Mother didn’t want a child, and that I spent days and nights on end at Nana’s and sometimes even weeks if my parents took a trip made favoritism a given. She was partially blind and said I was her eyes. Fussy about everything, she would insist that I make her instant coffee because no one else could fix it the way she liked it.

Red Cloud, Nebraska

Vera Wilson Mizer was born in Red Cloud, Nebraska in 1888. Her husband Frank Paul Mizer was born the year before in Red Cloud. His father owned the general store in town. The couple was married in Red Cloud on Christmas day, 1909.

My Mother was born In Red Cloud just before Thanksgiving, 1911. Two more children were born in Nebraska before the Mizers moved to Otis, a small town on the northeastern plains of Colorado where Frank’s brother Max had a farm. Then to Casper, Wyoming where my Grandfather whom we all called “Dad” thought he could make it rich in the oil fields. When the oil venture failed, the family settled in Denver. Dad then tried panning and digging for gold around Black Hawk, Colorado where gold had been discovered in 1859. Sometimes my cousin Steve and I would go along for the ride. Dad never found gold.

Willa Cather, the great American novelist, made Red Cloud famous. Her parents had moved from their sheep farm near Winchester, Virginia in 1883 when Willa was 9 years old. Before they moved, Cather’s uncle, George Cather, had moved from Virginia to land that would later be called “Catherton.” He built a dugout in 1873, becoming the first of the Cather family to resettle in Nebraska.

Four years later, Nana’s father, Albert Wilson, followed his friend George from Winchester to Catherton and filed for 160 acres provided free under the Homestead Act of 1862.

In 1886, Albert married Mary Frank Robinson. The daughter of Joseph and Sarah Robinson, she was born in Warwarsing, NY, a small settlement in the Hudson Valley. Eventually the family moved to Wayne, Pennsylvania where 23-year-old Mary taught school.

Records show that that a dozen or more families moved to Catherton from Winchester, Virginia in the 1870s following George Cather (Willa Cather’s uncle) and Albert, including Albert’s parents and his siblings. Perhaps over conflicts from the Civil War between those who had supported the Confederacy and those who supported the Union. In 1883, Willa Cather’s father would move his family to Catherton. These homesteaders so proud of their Virginia heritage, they named their church the “New Virginia Methodist Episcopal Church” and their cemetery the “New Virginia Cemetery.”

Some in my family believe that when Albert left his small “plantation” in Virginia in 1877, he let his slaves go even though Lincoln had freed the slaves in 1864, 17 years earlier. Albert’s parents probably owned slaves.

Family Tragedy

On July 13, 1902, The Richmond [Virginia] Dispatch published Albert’s obituary:

Intelligence was received today of the accidental drowning near Red Cloud of Mr. Albert Wilson, a wealthy native of Willis County. The drowning occurred a day or two ago when Mr. Wilson and several friends were in bathing. He was seized with cramps and nearly dragged to death a companion who went to his rescue. Mr. Wilson was the son of John Wilson of Fredericksburg and was 45 years of age. He went West some years ago a poor boy and amassed a fortune as a farmer. A widow and two [three] children besides several brothers and sisters survive.

Mary Robinson Wilson died a year later. Some say she had a heart attack. Others say she died of a broken heart.

My grandmother, her younger sister Maud, and their little brother Kenneth, now orphans, would be cared for by their Mother’s family in Chicago, despite having uncles and aunts in Red Cloud. By 1910 Nana and Kenneth were back in Red Cloud, boarders at the Miner boarding house (the prototype for the Harling Boarding House in Cather’s My Antonia). Maud had moved to Denver and was living in a hotel on S. Broadway Ave. Eventually she would move to Los Angeles and lived in a hotel until her death.

A large, framed photograph of my grandmother taken by a professional photographer in Hastings shows an unhappy young woman wearing a large hat with glasses so thick her eyes aren’t visible. A goiter protrudes from the side of her neck.

She Died in 1975.