Premonition? Part One

My grandmother Lottie in her ubiquitous apron/housedress with my sister Jane circa 1961

When I was a kid, my maternal grandmother was not someone I felt particularly close to…but that pretty much applied to everybody back then. Even today it’s basically the rule.

Lottie was a squat potato-shaped woman who had lost the tops of two fingers working in a factory during the Depression and I could never not stare at them. The walls of her house in Linden, New Jersey, had long outgassed decades of cabbage and kielbasa cooking on the stove. The house — which no longer exists — stood in the shadow of the Standard Oil Refinery, which garnered national headlines when it exploded in December, 1970 and blew out all of her windows.

She wasn’t a warm woman, and when we made our monthly 30-mile trek south from Glen Rock, my mother’s jaw seemed to clench even tighter than at home.

I knew nothing of her life and never thought to ask…what kid does? But since I started researching my own life, that soon branched out to digging into my mother’s life, and then to Lottie’s. It wasn’t the first explosion she’d lived through; the first came when she was barely an adult, which I wrote about in the very first Rooting Around post in September 2024.

In 1917, when she was 18 years old, she was severely injured when she was walking down the street when a nearby gas explosion blew out all the windows within several blocks. [The Jersey Observer and Jersey Journal, October 18, 1917. The article came up the third or fourth time I searched for “Lottie Keller” on Newspapers.com…more on that in a few paragraphs.]

Thanks to my cousin Carol, who had conducted a lot of genealogical research when one of Lottie’s daughters was still alive — barely — I learned that my grandmother had survived an abusive ex-husband and somehow mostly singlehandedly raised four kids during the Depression and World War Two on basically pennies a day.

Which of course sparked the realization: No wonder my mother was the way she was…then, no wonder I turned out the way I did.

Carol’s research also revealed that Lottie was very musical just like me —Keller was her stage name — and when Carol gave me a story that Lottie had written, I was stunned to see that she was also a very good writer, and that she had experienced unexplained premonitions…just like me.

Here is Lottie’s story. I wish I had more.

There is way too much to unpack here; I’ll tackle that next week. But suffice it to say that while I’m not sure how far Lottie went in school, she was a natural storyteller, which makes me ponder about the source of my own skills.

This Week’s Takeaway: Do you have something tangible from a relative that may reveal some clues about that person’s life? Whether it’s a photo, letter, or object, take it out and hold it. Just sit with it for a bit and see what floats up. More next week.

In other news, my book Propaganda Girls has been nominated at Goodreads for Best History & Biography of 2025!

Can you take a minute to vote for it? Here’s the link.

Many thanks!