RSS 2.0 FeedMay 6, 2011, Bellmore Life
Happy Mother’s Day, Ruth Saylor – and other moms!
Mom of eight and grandmother of many gets this year's honors.
“The family that plays together stays together” might be the motto of Bellmore Life’s 2011 Mother of the Year. That, and “You gotta dance, and you gotta love kids.”
Ruth Saylor of North Bellmore is Bellmore Life’s Mother of the Year because, among many reasons, she kept the television off when her eight children were growing up and in the house.
“I really enjoyed my kids,” she said, “and so when we weren’t outside working the vegetable garden or in the pool we would play inside working on puzzles, painting, doing arts and crafts, and having storytime.”
She said she maintained a very strict rule for the kids when they were growing up: “After lunch every day, I made them all take a nap. We laid down in bed and I read to them until they all fell asleep.”
At 81, with eight children (one who has since died) 13 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren (with another on the way), Mrs. Saylor can tell it all with the voice of someone who has been there, done that. “I used to love to cook, and we had a six-burner stove so I went to adult education classes and learned to cook even better meals.”
During her earlier years, when she had only three, four and five children, there was a large vegetable garden in her back yard, a back yard that could see all the farmers’ lands beyond the fences, and she took to freezing the vegetables to be able to feed her family in winter.
“It was around the time when frozen vegetables were just being introduced,” she said. She would buy a box of the frozen vegetables, she said, the family would consume them and then she would save the box to place her own garden string beans, broccoli and carrots into the special boxes and freeze them.
When the kids weren’t working the garden, learning what weeds to pull out and what vegetables to pull up that were good enough to eat, she would allow them to play in the above-ground pool, which brought all the kids in the neigborhood around.
But she also kept a big freezer in the basement, “filled with ice cream that all the kids could eat” when they were over. Mr. Saylor is sure that’s what Cecilia, her youngest daughter at 43, meant when she wrote in a letter to Bellmore Life nominating her mother, saying “She fed everyone with food when they came over.”
While she stayed home for 20 years to raise her children, she was not without her recreations. She says when she first met her husband Anthony – after forming a cheerleading squad to welcome home armed forces soldiers and being introduced to him as “Bub,” who she now calls Bob – and they went on a date to dance, she danced instead with his two friends all night.
Well, “Bob” quickly learned and, once married, they would occasionally go to the Orchard Restaurant at the corner of North Jerusalem Avenue and Newbridge Road. “They had a room in the back large enough for dancing,” said Mr. Saylor. And dance they would.
“You gotta dance, and you gotta love kids,” said the Mother of the Year.
Because she had, at first blush, wanted to be a teacher, even enrolling at and being accepted to St. John’s University, she instead got a “fabulous job” working in Manhattan as the associate to the vice-president at Equitable Assurance Company, Seventh Avenue and 34th Street. “We held the files that knew what everyone in the company got paid,” she said of her time there.
When children came along – “I wanted 10 children and told Bob he better be ready or bail out now” – she quit her job to care for her children. But, with the teaching spirit still in her, she was able to receive a certificate from the Rockville Centre Diocese to teach religious instruction, and taught religious instruction to seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders from the late ’50s to the late ’70s at St. Raphael’s in East Meadow.
While she gave religious instruction once a week, she would feed, wash, play with and put the kids to bed before she went out to teach.
Bob was home from work anyway, so she could afford the time to teach. After Bob retired – he’s now 85 – he was “drafted” to become a maintenance person at the St. Raphael’s, where he also became a coach to his boys in baseball, football and basketball.
The children include Stephen, 60; Debrah, 57; Patricia, 56; Robert, 50 – who will become the Bellmore Knights of Columbus Grand Knight this month; Ken, 49, Marygrace, 48 and Cecilia, 43.
Her son Michael died in 1974, at the age of 22.
She also had two miscarriages: That would have made 10 children!
After the first five children, she told Bellmore Life her doctor told her that “maybe you’re finished having children.” But them came Patrick. “There was a snowstorm that day,” said Mr. Saylor, and all the roads were blocked. “I was pregnant with Patrick and my water broke that day,” said the Mother of the Year.
Because the ambulance couldn’t get into her street from Newbridge Road due to snow, “ambulance workers came to the house and laid me down on a bobsled, and pulled me all the way to the ambulance that was on Newbridge Road.” From there they took her to what is now Winthrop Hospital.
After attending St. Raphael’s until the completion of eighth grade, the children all spent a year at Jerusalem Avenue Junior High School. All but Stephen then attended Mepham; he attended Calhoun because of special advanced classes in engineering that were available to him.
Today, Mrs. Saylor conveys that ‘all her illnesses are assembling at once.” She walks with a cane, debilitated by fibromyalgia. The doctors say she has giant cell arterial disease. She had breast cancer, but “a good surgeon removed it.” She then had a challenging bout with MRSA after her surgery.
