Pearl Farm

The following is a story that my grandma wrote about her Aunt Genevieve Doyle Dockry, her mother’s youngest sister.  

Aunt Gen By Marj Pearl Guerich Date:  Unknown -late 90s

Many times during the years I have been told that I look like Aunt Gen.  She was the youngest of my mom’s sisters and only thirteen years old when I was born.  I always looked up to her as a model of what to do.  

When she finished training to become a laboratory technologist in New Jersey, she came home to St. Marys, as Grandma Doyle was not well.  She used her new knowledge to help Grandma collect specimens to take to the doctor, and I decided right then and there that I did not want to become a laboratory technologist!

Aunt Gen married a medical student, Patrick Dockry, in Milwaukee, at a time when it was against the rules for an extern or intern to marry.  Aunt Gene was teaching in Kenosha, Wisconsin, at the time, and she told us about attending a shower for the newlyweds, and I think she probably stood up as Aunt Gen’s bridesmaid.  When she was telling Mom about it later, she talked in hushed tones, as if she was afraid the authorities in Milwaukee would hear her talking.  

We all loved Uncle Pat, and he was readily accepted into our family circle.  After he and Aunt Gen moved to Green Bay, he was in medical practice with Dr. Cowles.  They often traveled to Kansas at Easter time to visit relatives.  On their way into town, they would swing down Sandy Hook way, and when they drove into our yard, Uncle Pat would jump out of the car and kiss Mom and us too, I suppose.  We usually didn’t see any other man except Dad kissing Mom, so it was something to remember.  

One year, Uncle Pat and Aunt Gen sent Mom a Mother’s Day congratulatory telegram, which was a nice gesture.  We didn’t use the telephone much except for emergencies.  

When I was in radiology training in East Chicago, Indiana, in 1941, Aunt Gen made me a beautiful red and white flowered Easter dress and bought a tan straw hat, which she trimmed with a wide red flowered decorative band to match the dress.  Not knowing my exact measurements, she left the side seams of the dress loose, and Mrs. Nelson, my landlady, tried it on me and sewed up the seams.  

Aunt Gen was always doing something special for someone, and she invited me to come to Green Bay to visit them at my birthday time that year.  It so happened that Sister Mary Conception was coming through Chicago from South Dakota at the same time, and we managed to meet at the railroad station in Chicago and traveled by train together to Green Bay.  This was in November 1941.  

Another time during the year I spent in Chicago, Aunt Gen called to tell me that she had accompanied Uncle Pat to the “Windy City”, where he was attending a medical convention.  She wanted me to come to Marshall Fields Tea Room and have lunch with her.  I caught a ride into the big city from East Chicago, which was nearly forty miles away, and met Aunt Gen, and we enjoyed a nice lunch in the prestigious Marshall Fields store.  

Uncle Pat was quite a hunter, and we were always hearing about his trips to South Dakota with some of his friends to hunt pheasants.  After my bout with pneumonia, he invited me to finish my recuperation in their home, and he had a job lined up for me at St. Mary’s Hospital in Green Bay.  The hospital was just two doors down from where they lived.  He said he would keep his eye on me, which he did. 

Aunt Gen was expecting Dennis at the time, and Pat and Mike were little tikes.  Mary Ann shared her room with me as it had two single beds.  She was a very light sleeper, and she always opened her eyes when I started to get up, hard as I tried to be perfectly quiet.  

Aunt Gen and Uncle Pat’s children’s, Mary Ann, Pat, Mike, and Dennis (the baby).

I will always remember the fun Sunday nights we spent together watching Jack Benny and munching on sandwiches that Aunt Gen had made earlier in the day, and eating hot fudge sundaes.  

I enjoyed the hustle and bustle of a physician’s home, and their friends dropping in, the luxury of being in a home where there was a hired girl and a hired matron who came on certain days, Mrs. Gaelig, by name.  I regained my health and went on to enroll at St. Louis University in the fall of that year.  

Uncle Pat died at the age of forty-nine.  He had specialized by that time and became a proctologist and was in practice for himself.  Aunt Gen was left to finish raising the four children.  She continued to keep in touch with the Kansas relatives.  

She was here at the important times and always seemed to be where she was needed when she was needed.  

We were together in Aberdeen, South Dakota, at the time of Aunt Evelyn’s death.  She and the family were here for Jerry’s wedding in Marysville, Kansas, on April 14, 1958.  She was here for my daughter, Ann’s wedding reception.  

Sometime after Uncle Pat died and the kids were all settled into their careers, Aunt Gen opened a gift shop in Ephraim, Wisconsin.  She hand made some of the gifts that she sold, and she began the practice of making a Christmas ornament for each of her and Pat’s nephews and nieces.  She mailed those precious breakable ornaments in carefully wrapped packages to us each year in time to put on our tree.  They were such unique creations and so well made, that I still have most of mine.  

Aunt Gen loved Christmas so much that the Lord took her home to be with Him at Christmas time in 1977.

Note from Amy: here is a link to a post about the Dockrys.

The Dockrys