Ted Streuli, The Daily Record Newswire
“You can choose your friends but you sho' can't choose your family, an' they're still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge 'em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don't.”
Harper Lee wrote that line in To Kill a Mockingbird. I am not the first to wonder, if I could have picked my family, whom would I have chosen? Would Lee have been a particularly good mother for me?
I wonder if I would have chosen a journalist or a writer. Elizabeth Jane Cochran, better known as Nellie Bly, surely was an interesting woman.
She was hired by the Pittsburgh Dispatch after penning a rebuttal to a misogynistic column and ended up at Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, where she all but invented modern investigative journalism. Her undercover assignment at the Women's Lunatic Asylum, where she feigned insanity for 10 days, led to a series of stories soon collected in book form as 10 Days in a Mad-House.
She did not have any children, but I bet she would have been one darn interesting mother.
Katharine Graham might have been a good maternal option. She was in charge when the Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers and for the Watergate investigation. She led the Post's diversification into magazines and cable television, too.
“To love what you do and feel that it matters‚ how could anything be more fun?” she said.
She had three sons and one daughter. I don't know how she was as a mother, but she was a hell of a woman, and I bet her dinner table was always a fascinating place.
Linda Alvarado might have been a cool mother. She grew up in a poor family of six children in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and went on to launch Alvarado Construction in Denver when she was 25 years old. The company builds big, multimillion-dollar things. By age 27 she had been invited to join the board of United Bank, and in 1992 became both the first Hispanic and first woman to own a Major League Baseball team, the Colorado Rockies. In one interview, Alvarado said she was guided by her mother’s philosophy of empieza pequeño, pero piensa muy grande (start small, but think big). She started as a laborer with a landscaping company.
It would be cool to have a mother who owns a Major League Baseball team. I don't know whether Linda Alvarado has any children, but if she does, I bet they think big.
Frances McKnight came from a family of 15 children who grew up in a humble Cleveland, Ohio, home in the 1920s and '30s. Her father, George, was a hat salesman and her mother, Hulda ("Mumma" to her family) stayed busy with all those babies. Frances was tiny, 4-foot-10 and 95 pounds, and although she wasn't a gourmet cook, she could bake like the dickens. She made intricately decorated sugar cookies, and fudge, and coconut cakes from coconuts she cracked herself. She loved children more than anything and would have had a dozen or so of her own if she'd had the chance, but she married late and had just one. She was thankful, and though she never learned to drive, she navigated buses and trains and sat idly through hours of skating lessons and Cub Scouts and swimming and bowling and listened to years of futile piano practice. She laughed often, opened her door to all, and gave to anyone who needed. She believed that kindness mattered most of all.
I may not have had a choice, but I would take her again if I could.
