Her name was Leah Rebok Myers Henschen. She was my grandmother.
She was raised an only child; showered with her parent's love and affection, and steeped in good manners, in the Jazz Age of the Roaring 20's. Previously a homemaker, Agnes had begun to work as a secretary - a typical vocation for a woman of her time. Due in large part to the women's suffrage movement and the resulting 19th Amendment, many women were looking to break barriers and take their skills outside the home. Selwyn worked as a conductor on the Pennsylvania Railroad. During the 1920s it carried around three times the traffic as other railroads of comparable length. After leaving work on "The Pennsy", he returned to Carlisle and opened a barber shop. I'm sure Agnes and Leah were happy to have him home more often. With both parents employed and only one child, Agnes and Selwyn were among the many families riding the wave of economic prosperity following the close of the first World War and the devastation of the Spanish Flu.
At such a young age, Leah was completely unaware of the more burdensome goings-on of that time....things like Prohibition (...I can't imagine!) and the consequent rise of gangsters and speak-easies. She may have been vaguely aware of the nation's growing obsession with baseball, thanks to the game-changing ways of the iconic Babe Ruth. Leah and her parents probably spent most evenings after dinner gathered around their radio, which was the most popular mode of receiving news, bulletins, advertisements and music. On the other hand, she also may have had a close relationship with her babysitter, considering movies had garnered color and sound by 1927, and was the nation's prominent form of entertainment.
A school-aged Leah may have read To Kill a Mockingbird, reveled in Agatha Christie mystery novels, enjoyed playing Monopoly, idolized Amelia Earhart and swooned over Clark Gable. She likely purchased a cold pop from a newfangled device called a 'vending machine', received cutting-edge antibiotics for an illness, styled her 'do' with the fashionable hair-dryer, and eventually traded in the nightly radio broadcast for the favored TV program....the color variety (my land!).
Leah was an impressionable 10-year-old when the infamous Black Tuesday stock market crash laid to waste the good fortune and affluence of the previous decade and ushered in the longest, most-widespread and deepest depression of the 20th century. Anyone who has heard their seasoned loved ones speak of The Great Depression can only pretend to comprehend a fraction of what the experience was like, and understands that it altered, shaped and molded each individual differently and completely.
In high school, Leah began dating a handsome classmate named Robert Harold Myers, whom she later married in 1945 (so there! all you "high school sweetheart" pessimists). While Robert went off to Pharmacy school at Temple University in Philadelphia, Leah garnered an admirable secretarial job at the state capitol in Harrisburg. Upon graduation from pharmacy school, Robert proposed to Leah and promptly left the country for a two-year tour of duty with the US Navy (what a tease!). Fortunately, Leah was patient and strongly committed to the man she loved. Ten weeks after returning from Australia & New Zealand, Robert and Leah were married in Carlisle, PA.
Robert and Leah moved to Landsford, PA where they opened their first of many pharmacies together. After their first daughter Sharon was born in 1949, they moved to Emmaus, PA and opened two more pharmacies. These were slightly different in that Leah bought into the Fashion 220 cosmetics franchise and ran that side of the business out of the same store as Robert's pharmacy. Leah must have longed for a sibling or two in her youth, and she made sure Sharon would not want for the same. Nancie and Marsha were both born while the couple lived in Emmaus.
The family of five returned to Carlisle, PA upon Sharon's graduation from high school in 1967. As you would expect, another family pharmacy (aptly named Myers Pharmacy) was built, and the tradition continued. Robert and Leah were both avid Bridge players and met many friends through this favorite pastime, including Homer and Shirley Henschen.
In 1971, Robert was diagnosed with cancer and just over a year later, succumbed to the deadly lymphoma. In preparation for what the doctors explained was an inevitable conclusion, Robert merged his business and it became known as MGM Pharmacy from that point on. Always having been very involved in keeping the company's books among other aspects of the business, Leah stayed on after Robert's passing as a partner.
A heartbroken Leah found solace in her friends and family. Particularly in Homer Henschen, her longtime friend, who had similarly lost his spouse Shirley to cancer only a few years after Leah lost Robert. In March of 1979 they were married in Carlisle, three days after the nuclear explosion on Three Mile Island. It was the worst accident in US commercial nuclear power plant history...the explosion, not the marriage ;)
Leah and Homer blessedly enjoyed 30 happy years of marriage, abundant travels, countless games of Bridge, f wonderful grandchildren and two precious great-grandchildren before Homer's death in September of 2010 and Leah's passing on January 30, 2012.
I will always respect and remember my grandmother for her loving spirit, devout faith, tireless etiquette, effortless ability to shuffle a deck of cards, and tendency to spoil her grandchildren. I will follow her example in hopes of enjoying my own long and lovely life.
