Some thoughts....

I was thinking the other day about my Aunt Pearl. She lived, from the time that I recognized her, which must have been when I was about two or three, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. What got me to thinking about her was that a very good friend of mine moved to St. Paul last fall. Aunt Pearl came out West quite often because our folks, most of them lived in the West!!!! She was married to my Uncle Ed Peltier who worked for the Great Northern Railroad and so was able to get pretty much discounts on her traveling, (if not free rides!) She and Uncle Ed had two girls, Eleanor and Helen, who grew up and married and lived in St. Paul too! After her girls were able to take care of themselves, Aunt Pearl started to do catering for the Cudahay Meat Packing Co. They were quite a large concern with plants all over. In order to sell their meat and meat products they would put on dinners,etc. for some of their business clients!!!! My Aunt was, I guess, a pretty good cook because she worked for them for years and I can remember as a teenager, her visits and how enthused I was about her cooking and used to ask her for all kinds of recipes!!!She always obliged and would even cook some of them with "my" help! My oldest Aunt, Jo, would tell me, "Sure, she can cook but do you see how many dishes she uses?!" (Aunt Jo usually cleaned up after one of our "cooking sessions!) After Cudahay shut down , or moved or whatever, she had quite a reputation of being a good cook and got invitation from lots of people to cook big dinners for them!!!! Maybe that's where I got my love for cooking! The last time that I saw Aunt Pearl was in the 1970's. She, of course, had retired and came out to California to see her Grandaughter who lived in Ventura County. She went home from that visit and passed away later that year. She was always quite a lady and of course had to keep herself well-dressed and "neatly-combed" as the saying goes. She was very pretty and had the most beautiful white hair for years!!!! Uncle Ed died before she decided to go to work. I saw Eleanor and Helen when they were young and that made me very young! Then I remember Eleanor and her family, (this grandaughter I mentioned was just a little girl and Eleanor and Bill had a boy, Billy too. Bill was an accountant for some big firm in St. Paul and he had a nervous breakdown and sometime after that he died! ) Helen didn't come out West too often and I didn't know too much about her family but some of them did move out when my folks still lived in Torrance. Anyway, God bless you Aunt Pearl for giving so many "wonderful" memories of you and as I said at the beginning, I think she gave me the real desire to cook!!!! I always helped my Mother cook when I was a young girl and we all had "tasks". My sister, Genevieve, liked to "baby-sit" and as I said in one of my earlier blogs, I liked to iron, cook, etc. I didn't mind doing the dishes either (as long as I could wash them! I hated drying them and putting them away!) Enough of this! Hope you are reading about this, Ann, and I do wish I could remember where my Aunt and her family lived in St. Paul, It would be interesting to know which Parish they belonged to, etc. Probably St. Paul Cathedral which wasn't I'm sure not a Cathedral in those days!!!!! Bye now!!!!!