Helen Hawkins' Memoirs

Memoirs of Helen Foley Hawkins and the Foley Family

Part One:  Joseph Foley

Above:  Helen with her siblings Jack, Joseph, Grace, Paul and Walter

John Foley (father of Joseph H. Foley) died of pneumonia while quite young. He was rumored to have been a policeman. Their sons, Joseph and Frank were apparently little. Their mother, Nora (also known as Nona to her family) had to return with her boys to live with her mother (name unknown) and the four sisters. She worked as a bookkeeper to earn a living. Times must have been hard. Joseph Foley told of the “adventure” of ordering coal to heat the house where they lived in Jersey City without having the money to pay for it. Joseph went to the Christian Brothers for his schooling up to about the eighth grade and told how seriously that family took school, for if you came home saying that the Brother had hit you for doing something wrong, your mother would hit you again!
He left school after eighth grade and went to work for the Irving Trust Company in NYC, as a runner or an office boy, so that he could help support the family. He had only one suit, black wool, which he wore winter and summer. He mentioned that he used to pass St. Peter’s Prep, a Jesuit school for boys, when he was young and wished that he could be going there. He had great satisfaction in sending his sons to St. Peter’s Prep in later years.



 Although he had no further formal education, he was truly a self-made man, having learned accounting and other financial subjects over the years. He was and remained to the end of his life a prodigious reader. He moved up the ladder over the years in the banking field, culminating his career as Manager of the Philippine National Bank, New York Office. After retiring from there, he acted as financial advisor to the new Philippine government after World War II and other individual companies, like those owned by M. J. Ossorio and Andres Soriano. He was a close friend for year of H.I. Isbrandtsen ship owner, and many important people in the sugar and financial industries. During the l930s he was a councilman in the town of Leonia, and served for one 3-year term as mayor. It was an unpaid job, but he apparently did a fine job getting the finances of the town back in shape after the difficult days of the depression. My mother did not want him to run again—there were too many compaining calls to our home (mayors had no offices) for things like garbage not collected or snow not plowed!

Part Two:  Mary Lawler Foley

 Mary Lawler grew up in lower Manhattan. Her father, James Lawler, was at one time a New York City policeman and later did upholstering. She and her sisters, Kitty and Ella went to Catholic grammar and high school and learned shorthand to be able to become stenographers. Ella may have taught school. Kitty worked for the City of New York, which is where she met Sidney DeLemos, a civil engineer, who helped design the State Supreme Court house in Foley Square, whom she married. The girls used to go some place upstate (Poconos, Lake Placid?) in the summer time for a week’s vacation, which is where they met Joseph Foley. It was said that he first dated Ella but then decided he liked Mary better. Her family called her “May”, but he never called her anything but Mary.

They dated for a year or more, he traveling all the way from Jersey City to lower Manhattan each time. They were married in 1917 in Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mott Street, which probably was her parish church. They went to live in an apartment first in the Bronx and then later in Jersey City. He was in the Army towards the end of World War I, but did not go overseas.

Foley Family and Leonia

Sometime around 1925, having seen advertisements for Leonia in the subway, Joseph decided to look there for a home for his growing family. When they moved there to 223 Van Orden Avenue, toward the northern end of town, they were parents of John James and Joseph, Jr., born in New York in 1919 and 1922, and Helen Anne and Grace Marie, born in Jersey City in 1923 and 1925. Paul John and Walter were born in 1927 and 1931 in Teaneck, New Jersey.


 

During those  years (l920s and l930s) there were a number of families on Van Orden and the surrounding blocks with children, but none so numerous as the Foleys. Friends used to complain that when the Foleys had to go in, games were over for the day, because there wouldn’t be enough kids left to play with. The boys in the family went to Leonia public schools at grammar level, but Grace and Helen went to Holy Angels Academy in Fort Lee, getting there every day on the trolley car or later the bus. Jack went to St.Peter’s Prep in Jersey City by train and Joseph went to St. Cecilia’s High School in Englewood. Paul and Walter also went to St. Peter’s Prep .During the years we were growing up, my mother had a series of maids to help her with the large amount of work involved with a household of six children, as well as Aunt Kitty who lived with us for quite a few years and our grandmother Lawler who would come each summer from Illinois to visit for a few months. In order to have enough room for all the above, it ended up that all four boys slept in the attic (which had been finished reasonably well, although it was terribly hot in the summer), Grace and I had a room, our parents had a room, the maid had a room and Aunt Kitty or our “Grammie” Lawler had the other bedroom. It was always a full house.

Part Three

Our father, due to his job with the Philippine National Bank, made occasional trips to Manila. It would involve going by train across this country and then taking one of the P&O liners from San Francisco to Manila. The ocean trip usually took about 28 days, stopping on the way in Hawaii, Japan and China before Manila. He would be gone about three months. Once or twice my mother would go out to the west coast to meet him and they would travel back to the east on the train. He would tell us that each time he arrived in Manila they would have half a dozen linen suits made up for him immediately, because of the intense heat (long before airconditioning) business men would shower and change three times a day to keep comfortable and well dressed. They also slept under mosquito netting at all times. It was always wonderful to see what interesting things he brought back (or in the case a complete set of dinnerware, had sent back) after he returned.

In about 1936 the family began going down to Seaside Park, New Jersey, in the summer—at first for one month and later for the season. We loved being there and made many friends, having enjoyed being part of a large crowd which played records, had beach parties, went on bike rides, went dancing up in Point Pleasant, went to the Life Guards balls. The last year was 1940, but with the threat of war and the draft, things were beginning to change a great deal.

Jack enlisted in OTC (officer training corps) and became a lieutenant in the Artillery, Joseph was drafted and landed in the Air Force as a mechanic. Paul and Walter were drafted when they reached the appropriate age. Jack served mostly up on Cape Cod in an anti-aircraft battalion and Joseph was in England for a year or so.

Because our father’s job was with the Philippine National Bank, and the Philippines had fallen shortly after Pearl Harbor, he worried that his income might be cut off at any time. Therefore, it was decided that I could no longer count on continuing my education at Chestnut Hill College, where I had been awarded a partial scholarship, but had better plan to earn a living by joining my sister Grace in taking a 9-month course at Katharine Gibbs School in New York. We started there in September l942 and commuted to NYC via bus, finishing in March 1943.
 Life had changed quite a bit in Leonia. Once the war started more things were rationed. The family was only entitled to an “A” sticker for gasoline, which amounted to about 3 gallons of gas a week. Our family car was a big 7-passenger Buick, and the local joke was we could have enough gas to go to church once a week. Luckily, there was a bus line running right along Broad Avenue, at the end of our block, to use when we wanted to go to a nearby town or into New York through the Lincoln Tunnel. When I was a child to go to NYC we had to take a trolley to West New York and then a ferry over the river to 125th street, where we got on the elevated subway line to go downtown. It took my mother all day to go from Leonia to Macy’s at 34th Street in New York and back. My mother did not drive, but due to how close everything was in Leonia and the good bus service, plus the fact that many of the stores she used would deliver to our home. These included the grocery store, who came twice a day if needed, the butcher shop, and even the ice cream store who would deliver a quart or so of ice cream at noon on Sunday if requested by phone.

During the war I had started working for the FBI in Foley Square, and Grace had a job with Gulf Oil also downtown, and we commuted by bus. But at home, it was getting more difficult for my mother to keep us warm (oil was rationed). Grace and I had a kerosene heater we used for an hour or two while studying in the evening. Also it was quite a challenge to feed us in our usual way with plenty of the food we were accustomed to (meat was rationed, as was butter, sugar, coffee, etc.) As working girls, the lack of silk stockings was particularly trying; silk was needed for parachutes. (Nylon had hardly been available before the war started) And shoes were also rationed. We tried painting our legs to look like stockings, but they turned out rather orange and we soon gave that up. At one point towards the end of the war, my mother found a store in Hackensack which would sell her silk stockings (for Grace and me) if she bought several handkerchiefs each time. She had quite a collection of handkerchiefs, which was not such a waste as there was no Kleenex available anyway!


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