Some of the boxes I brought home from my parents' duplex in Austin (after my parents' move to an assisted living facility in October 2017 and my father's death just a few weeks later) contained a number of notebooks, as well as 106 check registers.
The registers were dated from February, 1958, which was when my parents moved back to Houston, Texas (where Mom was born and they met) from Chicago, Illinois (where Dad was born), through November 2014. Any registers after that time would have been in Dad's financial files, which my lawyer/accountant younger sister (the executor of their estates) needed to keep.
I'd knew I'd want to take a look at these old notebooks and registers at some point, and I finally got around to doing so a few months ago, when I needed to sort through much of the things I'd brought back to decide what to keep and what could go. I decided these could go - but not until I went through all of them and made notes. I ended up with 29 pages of them! I also pulled a few registers and notebook pages as samples to keep.
The first check in the first register (most recorded in Mom's handwriting) was dated February 24, 1958, and was made out to
John B. Murphy, MD, for a doctor visit and shots (smallpox and polio) for me on January 27. The check was for $10. Later that year, Murphy became chairman of the pediatrics department at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, Illinois, where I was born.
Mom had saved the doctor's orders from my various well-baby visits in a separate place, and here is the one that corresponds to check #1. The doctor made notes of all the vaccinations I had received at that point, since we were moving to Houston:
The notebooks began in January 1963 and went monthly through August 2016, and are all in Mom's handwriting. In the last three years, they became messy, incomplete, and sporadic as time went on and Mom's frontotemporal degeneration manifested and worsened.
Most of the time, Mom just used spiral notebooks for these records, mostly from her alma mater,
Incarnate Word Academy in Houston (where her sister, my aunt Sister Jean Marie (Jo Ann) Guokas, was principal from 1964-1978). A few years, she used a Simplex Home Budget Guide, but I don't think she liked its formatting (I didn't!).
In the early years, the records were very much a budget, as illustrated by the January 1963 page below. Money was tight - my parents had four children at that point.
A couple interesting observations about this page. Note that my parents paid a
poll tax that month. They did so in January 1964 and January 1965 as well, but the poll tax was declared unconstitutional on February 9, 1966.
K.C. was Knights of Columbus - probably an annual membership for my dad. My parents budgeted money to donate to the United Fund and to the Catholic Church. Humble is Exxon today and that would be their automobile gasoline.
Mading's was a pharmacy, and
Dr. Hubert L. Reid was our pediatrician.
Foley's,
Nieman Marcus,
Battlestein's, and
Suniland Furniture were all stores where my parents had credit cards, and I'm guessing these were their monthly payments on their accounts (since the actual always matches the estimate).
Also note that there's a charge for kindergarten, even though I attended a public school (
Ridgecrest Elementary in the Spring Branch Independent School District). School districts were not required to
offer at least half-day kindergarten for
free until May 30, 1995. Interestingly, the next year my year-younger sister and I went to school at our
St. Jerome Catholic Church parish school, she in kindergarten and me in first grade, and I found no record of my parents paying tuition for either of us. It's possible that tuition was included in their church contributions, or that one of my grandparents paid it.
I could write lots more about things I found in these registers and notebooks, but I'll close with this torn piece of paper I found tucked in one of the notebooks. Mom apparently tallied the tuition she and Dad paid 1964-1979 to
St. Francis de Sales Catholic School for first (second in my case) through eighth grades for me and my four siblings. As you can see, monthly tuition (especially when four of us were enrolled at the same time) was not all that high. The grand total for our educations at just this one school for 15 years was just under $6,400.00.
In a future post, I'll write about Catholic high school tuition and state university tuition and required fees. I'm thankful today that my parents invested so much in my education - I received an outstanding one through Houston-area Catholic schools.
