Word: philadelphia
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...mother. Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt said that flowers on Mother's Day were "sweet and nice," but something ought to be done for the 14,000 mothers who die every year from childbirth. A Manhattan tobacconist displayed a selection of women's pipes and four men in Philadelphia were arrested for breaking into a greenhouse and stealing 2,000 Mother's Day carnations...
Anna Jarvis is the 60-year-old Philadelphia spinster who invented Mother's Day. Whenever she thinks of what the flower shops, the candy stores, the telegraph companies have done with her idea, she is disgusted. She has even incorporated Mother's Day to help keep unscrupulous florists and confectioners from using her patented trademark for commercial purposes. But "nobody," she says, "pays any attention to law any more...
Once she was arrested for disorderly conduct for interrupting a Philadelphia meeting of American War Mothers, whom she accused of profiteering on Mother's Day carnations. In 1934 she kept James Aloysius Farley from putting "Mother's Day" on his special 3? Whistler's Mother stamp, which she said was just another racket. Last week on Mother's Day she contented herself with denouncing a Manhattan "Mother's Peace Day" parade and a "Parents' Day" meeting in Central Park. (One of her current slogans is "Don't Kick Mother out of Mother...
...idea for Mother's Day came to Miss Jarvis on the second Sunday in May, 1907, the first anniversary of her mother's death. She persuaded a Philadelphia church to hold a special service: in a few years every church in the land was holding special services. In 1908 the Governor of Florida issued a special Mother's Day proclamation. Before he died a few years ago he called Miss Jarvis to his bedside and asked her if he had been the first Governor to get aboard the bandwagon. Tenderheartedly she said yes, but actually the Governor...
...beginning to be afraid that Mother's Day has got completely out of hand. She still sends violent telegrams to President Roosevelt, occasionally walks round Philadelphia streets carrying a black satchel full of publicity releases and pictures of herself taken shortly after her mother's death. But mostly she stays behind the heavy curtains of her old red-brick house on North 12th St. Her telephone is not listed. Her letterhead does not have an address. Her sister, who lives with her, is almost blind; her Negro answers the doorbell only when it rings a certain number...