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Mom died 10 years ago this week. She had lived over 80 of her 95 years in Ely.
When she died, my sister gathered dozens of photos and sent them to me. I assembled them into a video with 14 minutes of old recordings of Josephine’s singing -- some from as far back as the 1940s. The music video is organized in reverse chronological order beginning with Mom translating the lyrics of a Slovenian song that ends with “youth has left us -- the winter winds took it away.” We shot that a few months before her death. The video ends decades earlier with her as a toddler.
It’s posted on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/zcpVb_W4CL4 Josephine was the third of five children born to Slovenian immigrants Frank and Mary Shepel. They came through Ellis Island separately and met and married in Ely. Frank was a blacksmith at Pioneer Mine and Mary was the matriarch of our musical family.
I was born when Mom was 30 so I knew her for about 65 years during which she was a mother, a musician, and a teacher.
But looking at the pictures in the video, especially the one here, I realized that I had missed a third of her life. She was once a kid, a teen, a college student, a young woman. It was like looking at someone else’s life. Rationally I understood that I couldn’t have known her in her first three decades. But I desperately wish I could have been there to witness those years -- to see her raise a glass while sitting ‘neath the pines at a picnic table -- with that ingenuous radiance on her face possible only when one is young -- before life’s weight piles on.
I wondered if my arrival was some of that weight.
Mom’s life in Ely was split between motherhood and music and she excelled at both.
Countless voice, violin and piano students stood or sat in our living room at 28 West Conan, the castle house, and absorbed what she knew so well and knew how to teach. She directed Our Savior Lutheran’s children’s choir, Ely’s Sweet Adelines, was the EHS vocal director, soloed with the Ely Slovenian Choir, played drums with a combo in Ely night spots, sang in Europe twice on tours once with the Suomi College Choir and later with her sisters.
At home she cooked all the meals, did all the housework, and raised three kids. Two were highly successful in their careers. The other was too dumb to take music lessons from his mom.
Back to the moving experience, the emotions that grabbed me when I saw Jo as a young woman. I can’t assemble those feelings nor express them in writing.
But I encourage you to find a photo of your mom as a youth. Frame it and place it where you’ll see it often. It may let you see into your mom’s life -- her whole life -- the part you weren’t there for.
Doug Luthanen grew up in Ely and graduated from Memorial High School in 1967. He wrote a weekly viewpoint column for the Northwest Arkansas Times for four years and is an occasional contributor to The Ely Echo.
