My Grandmother: Helen Eyles Heydrick

As I write some posts about people who I knew personally--and that does not extend beyond my grandparents' generation--I think that each biography naturally needs to expand to fit the subject. So it is with my grandmother. Because Helen Heydrick lived in an upstairs apartment at the home of my aunt and uncle, Helen and Russ Dutcher, my cousins got to grow up with her. I've asked them for some of their recollections of our grandmother since they knew her much better than I did. I'll be putting them is some separate posts, as well as my mother's memory of growing up with her parents.

Still, I feel fortunate that as a young adult I was able to visit Philadelphia many times and spend some time with Gramma Heydrick (as we called her, or Gram, as my cousins called her). I've saved all the letters she wrote me over the years, particularly those written to me when I was going through some tough times. She was wise and loving and full of common sense. She had not a shred of self-pity and did not foster that in others at all times she was a pragmatic, practical woman. She had a deep religious faith but was quite eclectic in her beliefs and was certainly not a proselytizer.

I have plenty of photographs of Gramma Heydrick and I will include them here even though I haven't yet mastered what everyone else in the universe seems to know how to do--scan photographs. At least for the moment I am using the antediluvian procedure of photographing my photographs and then posting them. Never fear--I'm working on getting them scanned so the quality of the photos will be improving!

Helen Esther Eyles Heydrick
born in Chicago, Illinois 25 September 1893 -  died in Philadelphia 18 May 1983
married William Jacob Heydrick 14 June 1917

Anyone who knew my grandmother, Helen Eyles Heydrick, would admit that she was an extraordinary woman.  My grandfather, William J. Heydrick, had died before I was born and so I never knew him.  He was much older than my grandmother anyway and I think that only my cousin Carol Dutcher Bream--their first grandchild--has any memory of Granddaddy Heydrick.
My own memories of my grandmother are few--at least as a child.  We lived in Colorado and the cost of air travel was something out of reach of not only my parents but my grandmother as well.  The couple of times that Gramma Heydrick came to visit she arrived via Greyhound bus.  I cannot even imagine what a 2000 mile bus journey would have been like  but she seemed to pull it off.  The first time she came to visit I was three years old.  I think that my father was in Korea during that time and my mother was on her own with 4 small kids and Gramma must have arrived to help out. 

Gramma Heydrick was a lot of fun. She had a way of tieing up a regular white handkerchief so that it resembled a mouse  and then using it as a story prop.  She also entertained us with made up Pygmy and Giant stories.  “The Giants talked way down low like this; and the Pygmys talked way up high like this.”  I loved it.

           Yours truly age 3, brother Jim, 6 mos.
                    and  Gramma--1958

Later, after our family had been to Puerto Rico and back,and were resettled in Aurora, Colorado, she gave her “Art of Living Together” talk at our church.  She was an accomplished public speaker and the Art of Living Together was her best known talk although it was never written down and no recording or copy of the speech exists.  That’s a pity.
In the fall of 1963 our family had just returned to The States from Puerto Rico, my father retiring from the Army after 21 years.  I guess he was finalizing all of that at Fort Dix, New Jersey and we stayed with my grandmother and Aunt and Uncle, Helen & Russ Dutcher, at their Rhawn Street house for some period of time.  We’d also stayed there for a while on the way to Puerto Rico as well.  I loved my grandmother’s second-floor apartment.  It was cozy and had a particular “grandmotherly” smell that was soothing.  I think that my sisters and I may have slept up there on either a sofa or a cot of some kind.  In retrospect I don’t know how the Dutcher’s 3 bedroom house accommodated the 6 McKeemans in addition to the 4 Dutchers already there.  I think my cousin Carol was away at college during those stays.
It was during the stay in 1963 that my grandmother was honored by the Philadelphia City Council for her years of civic contributions to the city of Philadelphia.  There was a big official presentation and many accolades, I'm sure. My Aunt Margie came from California with cousin David who was about 5 years old. We all lined up to take a photograph a copy of which I have somewhere.

In 1966 she was named a "Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania" joining a group of women from previous years such as Pearl Buck, Grace Kelly and Mamie Dowd Eisenhower. She had also once been awarded "Pennsylvania Mother of the Year" and then “Pennsylvania’s Sweetest Mother” a title she once told me that she dismissed completely as a candy industry ploy.  

Until the very last years of her life, Helen Heydrick was always actively giving back to her community, her church and to her family. She was much loved and admired. The next posts will be remembrances of her by my mother and my cousins.