Here Back East

It’s Voting Time Again

Here we are with the Presidential primaries underway, and I await my absentee ballot for the New York election in April. In my memory, voting was always an important time as a youngster growing up in western New York. My mother only had an elementary education and started working at age 13 to help support her mother and brother. She was not a citizen, as she had immigrated as a child of three from Lithuania with her parents, and she encouraged me to obtain my daytime driver’s license at age 16 so I could take her grocery shopping as well as to Public School #9 on Joseph Avenue, which held classes for the citizenship test.

The first Presidential election my mother would be eligible to vote in was Eisenhower vs. Stevenson in November 1956. We were up against a deadline since Mom had to pass her test and be naturalized well before voting day. We started the weekly drive right after I passed my driving test in late October 1955. Over the next year, Mom studied for her citizenship test. Mostly illiterate, she did attempt to read the English-language newspapers but was only able to write on a very simple level. Fortunately, the courses she took were basically elementary reading and writing.

Mom’s literacy skills steadily improved as she studied the Constitution and election rules. Reading the local Times Union paper, she became conversant in national politics and, having lived through the war, she supported Democrats, the party of FDR whom she admired. In fact, I recall her crying upon Roosevelt’s passing. Mom wanted to vote in the election of 1956, and neither Dad’s dinner plans nor the Rochester snow deterred her from our journey together to the #9 school. Rather than drop her off, I would wait in the back of the classroom while she listened and practiced her reading and writing. At home, I would question her in anticipation of the test to follow her classwork. These were unusual days and evenings we spent together with a common goal at hand — for her to attain citizenship was just as important to me.

Mom did eventually pass her citizenship test in time, though Stevenson lost, notwithstanding her vote. Years later, when I was in law school, coincidentally, I summer interned for Senator Kefauver, who was Stevenson’s running mate in that election of 1956.