Blanche Barbara Hartley

Blanche Hartley 1923-2014

Blanche was born on October 7th 1923 to Michael and Anna Subzda. At the time of her birth she had an older brother Henry, age 9, and a sister Helen, age 6. Another sibling, Julie, died at age 2 in 1918, a victim of the Spanish flu.
Times were tough back then, the stock market crashed in 1929, followed by the Great Depression of the 1930’s, closely followed by World War II. Though times were tough, the family bought a house on Richardson St in Wakefield. They were able to hold onto it through those challenging years ahead. My mother also endured personal hardship during those years. Her father Michael died when she was twelve, and her brother Henry tragically died in an automobile accident when she was eighteen. After the accident, Blanche spent extra time caring for Henry’s little girls, Lorraine and Joyce, who looked up to their young Auntie Blanche .Despite these emotional setbacks, my mother proved to be very resilient. She was a very good student, often on the honor roll and graduated from Wakefield High School in 1941. She was able to make many friends during the school years. After high school she entered the working world.

MARRIED LIFE:

After the war, she became engaged to my father Louis Hartley, also of Wakefield, and they were married in December of 1947. About a year and a half later, their first son, Ronald, was born on July 27, 1949. Two years later, their second child, Henry (me), was born on July 29, 1951. Two months after that, the couple bought their first home on 10 Pearl St. Wakefield. The neighborhood was very close, with many children during the baby boom of the 1950’s. Blanche and the other mothers on Pearl St formed a club they called The Mops (Mothers of Pearl).
Through the years, my brother Ron and I always felt like we could invite friends to visit at our house, and our parents always made them feel welcome. If they visited on Saturday afternoon they got to enjoy Blanche’s homemade French fries.
During the 32 years that Blanche and Louie were married, there were many memorable and enjoyable times. Highlights were summer family vacations, usually taken with her sister Helen’s family. Helen and her husband Bill also had two children, Billy and June. Vacations were sometimes at Lake George NY, York Beach Maine, but most often at Old Orchard Beach in Maine.
Other highlights were holiday get-togethers with Louie’s side of the family, which included brother Ivor and his wife Pat, and their six children, Sister Helen with her husband Fred and their two daughters, and sister Dot with her husband Ben, and their three children.
Blanche had a great sense of humor and was a good sport. One of the pictures shows her proudly displaying a bowling trophy she earned by being the worst bowler in a women’s bowling league. That was a distinction she accomplished seven out of the eight years she was in the league.

WORK:

Blanche was always a very hard worker. She kept a spotless home. She liked to fill the walls with pictures, and every available table had several knick-knacks or other ornamental items. It was not unusual for someone who came into our house for the first time to ask, “Is this a gift shop?” or say, “I didn’t know your mother ran a gift shop.” Besides housework, Blanche also worked part time at home. One day some men delivered a very curious looking machine to our home. It looked kind of like a typewriter, but it was much bigger and had a container to the left of the typewriter that held several hundred rectangular cards. It would deliver one card at a time automatically to the typing area, and then it would move the typed cards to another bin that stacked the cards in precise order. It was a keypunch machine. Keypunch cards were the way programmed information was fed into computers back in the 1950’s and 60’s. Blanche was able to work at home doing this work, while Ronnie and I were young. When we got older, my mother was able to work full time and became a supervisor in the keypunch department at Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. in Reading MA for many years.

FOOD:

My mother loved to see people eat and enjoy food. She did her part to make that happen by becoming a wonderful cook. She was especially talented at making delicious meats, homemade French fries that were incredible, and pies and pastries that were out of this world. Because my father was English, every Sunday afternoon at 1:00pm we had the same exact meal of roast beef, with Yorkshire pudding and gravy, vegetables and salad. None of us ever complained about having the same meal every Sunday. She made homemade pies just about every week, sometimes several of them. There were apple pies, chocolate cream pies, lemon meringue pies, blueberry pies and so on. No matter how many she made, they never lasted too long at our house,

THE GRANDCHILDREN:

My mother was a willing babysitter for our son Sean, and Ronnie and Nancy’s two children, Kyle and Bethany. If we ever had to pay for the baby sitting she did for us, it would have cost a small fortune. Sean was there so often as a small child, he actually thought Blanche’s dog, Gretel, was his dog. Later on, when Blanche lived downstairs from Ron and Nancy, Bethany recalls how often she and Kyle would sneak a quick visit down to see Bunja (Blanche), where they could enjoy cookies, pies, banana bread, ice cream and so on, “the good stuff” as Bethany called it.
When my wife Maureen won a trip for four to Disneyworld when Sean was nine we told him he could invite a friend to go with us. Without hesitation he chose his grandmother Blanche. There are a couple of pictures in the video of that trip.

BLANCHE'S DOGS:

Blanche always had a dog or two, and she would spoil them rotten, giving them treats and cooking for them. My father always said that if he died and came back as an animal, he wanted to come back as one of Blanche’s dogs. The following is a list of dogs that Blanche owned (spoiled): Sparky, Buster, Queenie, Lady, Hurricane, Casey, Gretel, Sammy, and Heidi. They left this world much more loved, and heavier than they came in.

NURSING HOME YEARS:

The last three years of Blanche’s life were at Wingate (nursing home) in Reading, where she received great care form a very patient and loving staff. Even in her last days, Blanche thought of others. The nurses at Wingate said Blanche would often visit with residents who did not get many visitors. She would wheelchair over to them, talk to them , or sometimes just hold their hands.

The night before she died I thanked her for everything she ever did for us. We will miss her until we see her again in the resurrection on Earth. - Rev:21:3-5, Acts 24:15