They are forget-me-nots.
At 86, Monaghan has not forgotten his mother and how she used her talents as a painter to get the family through its brush with poverty during the Great Depression.
Camphor and beer
Anna Jung was born in Springfield on April 23, 1890, to German immigrants John and Johanna Jung,
“Her mother spoke only German. She was a big, heavyset woman,” Monaghan said. And when it came to illnesses, “boy, she had everything,”
He disliked visiting his Grandma Jung upstairs at Foster and Main Streets as a boy because the place “smelled like a hospital,” he said.
Just as the eye-watering fumes of camphor oil filled the upstairs, the smell of beer perfumed the downstairs, which housed Jung’s Tavern, a business started by Anna’s father and continued by her brothers — brothers Anna largely raised.
Because of their mother’s illness, Anna “quit school in the first grade to take care of her siblings,” Monaghan said. “Imagine, a second-grader raising the family.
“The boys, they needed somebody. They were either drunk or getting into trouble. Her dad, he didn’t have much push in him. He had a spittoon and missed it half the time. He was a good guy, but lost his shirt in the Depression.”
The Monaghans
The Jungs almost lost the house they eventually moved into at 2532 E. High St., as well. But by then, Anna had married David Edward Monaghan, and they were able eventually to buy the house from the estate.
“He wasn’t a real church-goer until he met Mom,” Monaghan said of his father
Perhaps because she’d been raised at St. Bernard, the German Catholic parish, and he at St. Joseph, the Irish Catholic Parish, as a compromise, the Monaghans relocated to St. Raphael.
“He was a pattern-maker, which was a good skill,” Monaghan said. But when the Depression came to Springfield, even pattern-makers at places like Robbins &Myers were largely idled.
“He’d work a day or two a week,” Monaghan recalled. So while raising three children, Anna developed her interest in art — particularly in painting china edged with gold paint — into a source of income.
“Not that Mom made a fortune,” Monaghan said. “but she kept the thing together.”
“She taught herself (to paint) and took lessons from the best people in town,” Monaghan said. She eventually made money giving lessons, too.
Her husband pitched in.
“They had a kiln in the basement, and Dad would stack it. There was a tricky way to stack all that china, and you have to watch the heat,” Monaghan said.
The fuel was coal oil.
“She was big on peacocks and things with color,” Monaghan recalled.
He dates the forget-me-not set to sometime in her prime as an artist, maybe in her mid-50s.
By then, she could turn out work quickly and was buying china — high quality Bavarian china — “by the box,” he said.
Her art work also appeared on stoles given as gifts to priests, “and she did a lot of work for the antiques guys,” Monaghan said.
When lamps were being converted from gas to electric, “she would paint a globe to match the vase,” he said, making an older or broken lamp usable and saleable again.
Mementoes
Monaghan has some other special items his mother left behind.
One is a tobacco jar.
“She gave this to Dad on his 21st birthday,” Monaghan said.
Holding it, he recalled his dad’s writing him every day he was in the service during World War II. Once, after a period in which mail delivery was interrupted, he received 48 letters in a single day, all from his dad.
Another special item is the bowl that sits in the center of Monaghan’s dining room table.
“My dad would always come home on Friday and put his paycheck in there,” he said, “even on his last paycheck for $132.”
He also carries a memory of his mother’s sister, who told fortunes and for years wanted to tell Monaghan’s father’s.
“Dad wanted no part of it,” he recalled.
Monaghan also recalls going to the monument company with his mother to have a headstone picked out after his father’s death. Although she was born in 1890, she at first asked that 1892 be put as her date of birth for the marker.
“In my day,” she told him, “a good woman never married a man younger than herself.”
So that the grandchildren would have the right information, she was persuaded to have the real date inscribed.
After showing a couple of handsome portraits of his mother, Monaghan pulls out a snapshot in which a tiny woman wearing a hat with a flower encircled brim stands at left.
“As she got older, her colors got brighter,” Monaghan said. “I noticed that, but I was not about to tell her.”
The years of fine work also eventually took a toll on her eyes as well.
“She was almost blind,” Monaghan said.
That she lived to 95 after raising her brothers and sisters, then helping her own family through the Depression — “that shows you what kind of fire she had,” said Monaghan, a son who forgets her not.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368.
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