A friend of mine, Diane Galusha, President of the Middletown Historical Society, recently mailed me this Delhi card. The Delaware Republican newspaper office was in the former Bishop and Hill law office on Main St, where the Lost Bookstore is now. Robert McIntosh, with his wife and children, lived in the apartment over the newspaper office. The eldest girl was Kate and her younger sister was Helen, a very close friend of my mother, Alta McCaffrey. In March 1995 I visited my Mom and, for a reason I can’t remember, went down to the cellar. I was surprised to find a round, Victorian looking hat box. I took it upstairs and my Mom said it contained the dairies of Kate McIntosh. I asked her why she had them and Mom said because after Kate died her family thought Helen might come to Walton to visit my Mom and take Kate’s diaries home with her. Helen didn’t come and/or didn’t want the diaries. So I brought them home with me. The very next year was the January flood of 1996 and my mother’s cellar took on 3 feet of water.
I read every diary, starting in 1918, when Kate was 18 years old, the year she graduated from high school. She had the world by the tail and was eagerly anticipating going to Albany Business College. She had no reason to think her life wouldn’t be rosy. Then her father died, her brothers and sister got married and moved away and Kate became the daughter who stayed home to care for their mother.
Kate wrote in a diary nearly every day, every year from 1918 to 1969. Some diaries were 5 year diaries but most were only 1 year. As a daughter of a newspaper editor, she wrote down everything. She worked as a secretary at one of the insurance offices in Delhi, waited on table at Kiwanis suppers and mentioned the names of her friends in Delhi. She kept a record of when she had the window screens taken off and the storm windows put up and the cost. She bought a pink blouse for $2.50 at Stewart’s store and baked cookies or made a pie in the evening, after supper. She didn’t drive but in 1954 she went with friends to DeLancey to “look at the television”. She knew before most people that Truman had beaten Dewey in 1948 because she listened to the election on the radio. Kate’s mother eventually went to the Infirmary because she couldn’t manage the stairs to their apartment. Kate got a ride on Saturday mornings to visit her mother there.
Life goes on and in 1969, when I was 21 years old and living in Delhi, my Mom came to visit me and asked me to go with her to visit Kate because she wasn’t feeling well. I remember climbing the steep stairs to Kate’s apartment but no other details of that visit.
When I got around to reading the diary of 1969 I noticed there weren’t very many pages filled in. Her last diary entry was January 26 and read “Alta and Marianne McCaffrey came to visit me today”. Five days later Kate died. Mine was the last name she wrote in her diary. I became a diarist and donated Kate’s diaries to DCHA in 1996.
