Mom
I’ve written a lot about my Mom, Babs Dahlman. She’s been gone almost ten years: Friday would have been her 103rd birthday. I’ve told some of her childhood stories of England, and about her exploits as an agent for Special Operations Executive in World War II. She wrote many of those stories herself, and I am still working at getting them online for folks to enjoy (The Dahlman Papers). It’s a body of work, and still more to come.
My Mom’s life was lived in phases. There was her childhood, growing up in post-World War I England, still an Empire. That ended with the beginning of World War II. Then there was the crucible of her generation, “their war”. Mom lost many of her closest friends in the early part of the War, including her fiancé. She chose to fight back and joined the Special Operation Executive, an impromptu clandestine service in the British government.
Most of her comrades from the SOE didn’t survive the war, but Mom did, and fell in love with “an American” as the bombs fell on London. They both had “adventures” in the last year of the war as the Nazi Reich collapsed. And when it was finally over, Mom committed to going to the United States with her new husband, Don, and to a town in the Midwest called Cincinnati. Dad arranged passage for Mom on a returning Liberty Ship, the Francis D Culkin. It was in January of 1946 that Phyllis Mary Teresa O’Connor Dahlman, “Babs” to all who really knew her, stepped off the boat and into several feet of snow in Portland, Maine.
Partners
Before it was “fashionable”, my parents had an “equal” relationship. They were a team, whether it was in their first business venture, or raising three kids. Dad from the very beginning wanted to have his own business. So soon after they arrived in Cincinnati, they started a small one with a big title: The United States Bottling Company.
They had a building by the Ohio River in Kentucky, and the two of them were literally “the head cooks and bottle washers”. Mom would mix batches of their soft drinks, pouring bags of sugar into vats and stirring in the flavorings. Dad would help, but mostly he did what he always did best: sell. Dad went from store to store, convincing them to purchase the drinks for sale, delivering it to them, then picking up the used bottles – to wash and refill. In 1950 when my grandfather from England came to visit for several months, he walked from their small apartment in Cincinnati through downtown and over the bridge to help with the manufacturing.
At the same time they had two children, my sisters Terry and Pat. So they were raising the kids, wrestling sacks of sugar, and driving all over Cincinnati marketing their product. But they also found ways to have a great time together, dancing to the Big Bands and partying with both Dad’s old friends from before the war and making new ones as well.
The 1952 Ohio River flood wasn’t the worst, but it was bad enough to drown the United States Bottling Company. They sold what little was left to a company from Atlanta, Coca-Cola, then searched for another industry to make their mark.
Television
Dad went into the new broadcast medium replacing radio called television. He started as a “local” salesman, selling commercials for the new station owned by Crosley in Cincinnati, WLW-T. When he wanted to close a deal, he brought in what he called “his best asset”. It might be at dinner in a local restaurant, or around the table at their apartment or later the home on Glenmary Avenue just down the road from the Cincinnati Zoo. But when Dad wanted to “impress” the buyer – he introduced him to Mom.
Mom didn’t learn to cook in England. But when she came to the United States, folks always wanted to see what “English cooking” was all about. So Mom had help, The Settlement Cook Book, and with that, her charm, Dad’s wit, and a fully stocked bar, many sales were made. Business and family were always one and the same, and often the now three children (I showed up in 1956) were a part of the sales pitch.
I was going through some of Dad’s papers recently and found a 1974 note from a business associate. The letter discussed their business agreement, then thanked Dad for including him in a family dinner with his “liberal children”. I guess things haven’t changed much.
When Dad grew frustrated with his career at Crosley, Mom backed his move to a different career track in television, selling programming. Dad worked for the Fred Ziv Corporation, producer of many early television shows. You have to be a certain age, maybe even older than me, to remember Highway Patrol or The Cisco Kid or Sea Hunt. Ziv had those shows and others; they were some of the top series of the late 1950’s and early 60’s. Dad was travelled all over the country to sell them to individual stations.
Mom’s Corps
He went on the road on Monday, and often wasn’t back home until Friday night. Mom was home with us kids. It was a lonely life for both of them, with Dad calling from hotels in such exotic places as Dubuque, Iowa or South Bend, Indiana. But Mom had help from the fast friends she made in Cincinnati, her “corps” of women who were always around. Maggie lived just up the road from us, Libby and Helen were not too far away.
Mom didn’t drive. It’s hard looking back to understand how she could jump out of burning airplanes and secretly bring bombs and radios into occupied Europe, but couldn’t drive a car. I never got the story completely straight, something about 1942 and a bad car accident with friends hurt. Dad would always try to “teach her”, especially when we were on vacation in rural Canada. And Mom would try, but really didn’t have her heart in the effort.
So she knew all the cab drivers in Cincinnati, even into the early 2000’s. And if a cab or the bus wasn’t going to work, Maggie would volunteer. We kids sang a “car” song about Maggie – set to “You Can’t Get to Heaven”. As an adult now it tells me a lot about what was going on back then.
“OH you can’t get to heaven, in Maggie’s car, ‘cause the gosh darn thing, stops at every bar!!!”
Family Business
Dad moved us all to a Detroit suburb for a year. I remember it as being one of the best. We went to parks or lakes every weekend and spent a lot of time together just having fun. I built a NASA spaceship from refrigerator boxes in the backyard, and got my hair cut like my hero, John Glenn. I didn’t know he was going bald. Much later, I learned it was the toughest financial year Mom and Dad had. But as a kid, I never knew it.
Then it was back to Cincinnati and WLW – this time Dad was in Dayton. A couple of years later we moved there, then after six years back to Cincinnati. It was the “family business”, we went wherever Dad needed us to go. And everywhere we went, Mom and Dad found new friends. There was always a group of people around the table for Friday or Saturday dinner.
Friends
And that was Mom, always drawing people together. There were the “official groups”. When we lived in Dayton, it was the Dayton Opera Guild. In Cincinnati, there was “Unquotes”, where members presented papers to each other over a variety of subjects. Sometimes it was a professional subject or their most recent trip. Mom wrote a paper on the Knights of the Templar and the search for the Holy Grail. It required research, and on a trip “home” to England Mom investigated castle ruins trying to ferret out where the goblet went.
Mom was a founder of the “International Group” made up of men and women who came from overseas to work for the big industries in town, particularly Proctor and Gamble. There were too many countries represented to remember, but as a sampling: Tamara from Russia and her husband Carlos from Argentina, Peter from Texas (kind of a foreign country) married to Luce from Belgium, Paul and Elisabeth from the Netherlands, Marguerite from India and her husband Robert. And there was Dick and Lois, both American, but who worked decades overseas for Proctor and Gamble.
The Table
They became more than just “associates” in the clubs. They were friends, often gathered around the handmade wooden table that graced all of Mom’s dining rooms (now in my niece’s dining room). The conversations covered every conceivable topic, from politics to travel. Sometimes it got a little tense. One night an engineer for General Electric was describing an exotic airplane. The chardonnay was flowing, and we learned all about what would be called the Stealth Fighter – years before the government acknowledged its existence. I was waiting for the FBI to break down the doors.
Mom and Dad told stories as well. Most of their friends were too young to have fought in World War II; it was their parents’ war. When Mom was released from the Official Secrets Act in 1970, we began to hear her “spy” stories. And both she and Dad would talk about their international adventures, whether they were flying in hot air balloons in LeMans, France; toasting with akvavit in Sweden; or accidently videoing lots of Chinese feet on the Great Wall.
Life in Love
Mom and Dad were a team in Dad’s work – from being part of a “crowd scene” in a 1950’s production at WLW-T, hosting celebrities at midnight in Dayton, or “checking out” one of Dad’s potential salesmen. If he couldn’t make it through a Dahlman family dinner, he probably wasn’t up to the task of selling the Phil Donahue Show nationwide.
When I asked Mom if she felt she missed something by not having a “career” of her own, her answer was pretty simple. She proved herself in the war. She and Dad were a partnership – and together they made a family, a successful business career and a life. And for sixty-eight years they loved each passionately, literally until death did they part. She didn’t miss a thing.
Mom died almost ten years ago. Dad left us five years after that. I’m not a religious man, but I’m sure they’ve found a way to be together again. There’s a big dinner party on a Friday night – and a group is still sitting around a table, hours past the main course and even dessert, pouring another glass of wine and telling the stories of their lives. Mom and Dad have some of the best.
