Written 3/24/26.

Mom’s side of the family I will limit to the Kerns, and what I know of them about their work directly from my Grandmother and Mother. There is a picture of four Fred Kerns together, my cousin, uncle, grandpop and great grandpop, I always cherished, for I sensed I could never be in such a picture. My mother said that I was not an affectionate baby, with her taking care of me and my brother and sister the main job of hers I have first hand experience in. Theresa was an angel, my brother and I were brats.

Grandma had a job as an air raid officer during the war. Other than that, she raised her son and two daughters while grandpop worked. She told me that his parents were German immigrants who started a pudding factory in Baltimore in the 1870s. There is a picture of Fred behind a row of seated Kraut elders, with my grandpop and his brother, who died young, as toddlers. Their mother had died young, Great Grandpop would bury four wives. I visited him with my wife and oldest son the day he died. He was making and throwing paper airplanes with our 8-year-old boy and smiling. I never knew what he had done for a living.

Grandpop Kern, told me he had been a house painter, walking 17 miles from the city to the outer suburbs painting big houses. He was not accepted into the military during WWII due to being deaf in one ear. He went to work for the Baltimore Gas & Electric company, walking and taking a bus to work his entire life. He did not bother getting a car and driving until retirement, as a way of visiting the scattering family. He believed that a man should get a job with a reputable company, abide by the rules, not miss work, be on time and not dally at bars on the way home, but get back to the wife and children directly after work. The children could go around the corner to the bar and get a bucket of beer filled up at the tap and bring it upstairs for Mom and Dad. Grandpop drank a six pack of bottled beer a day in retirement, watching sports with a stoic, calculating eye, never cheering, two TVs stacked with two games, and a third game on his transister radio, plugged into his good ear.

Sports were very important to the Kerns. My Uncle Fred made a college team and became a head coach at Calvert Hall High School, then at VMI, then defensive coordinator for ARMY. From there he worked for Lee Norris Coal Mining Equipment in Pittsburgh, settling his family in Washington, PA. This was important, as it gave my parents a place to resettle us when Dad got his promotion to regional sales manager out of Wheeling, West Virginia, just down Route #40. Uncle Fred’s work would take him to Illinois. Cousin Fred would stay with us for a year to finish High School.

I recall Mom having a job for a while when we lived in Baltimore County. Grandma Kern, who yelled and beat us with a yard stick, or Grandma LaFond, who was an angel, would watch us. Both got the same results—my brother and I arguing and then me running and hiding when the little demon tried to kill me. This was stressful for Mom. I recall her dressing up and wearing a pearl necklace over a pink dress and black high heels to go to work. I think it was at an apartment store. That was the impression I got.

Once we made the move to Washington, PA, and things went south with Dad’s business and Mom went to work. I recall her working for a collection agency out of a small office on a side street five blocks from the print shop Dad managed. I got the impression that the job was terrible.

When Dad left Mom, he called us in for a meeting, one by one, to speak with him at his office in the house, where his various books, Velikovsky, Norman Vincent Peale, Power of the Pyramids, all resided. I was thrilled. Now I could play the tyrants off against each other at age 15, which I did, effecting my release from the mind prison called school with grim elation. I did not care at all that my Mom was crushed, her big job, the marriage, dissolved, the first woman on Moger Drive to be divorced. In retrospect she was suffering what the steel workers and coal miners were, the evaporation of decades of dedicated purpose. My brother and sister were very upset.

Eventually kicked out by Mom, Tony and I ended up with Dad for a good year or two before Baltimore took me and the Army took him. While working in Baltimore City, I stayed with Mom for a few months in the County, until I could rent a room down in the city. I saw very little of her for the rest of our lives. Most holidays I worked and she entertained my wife and sons. She ran an office for a real estate law firm for 15 years, then served as the secretary for the Head of Human resources for the largest employer in Maryland. In this capacity she worked very hard until age 75, when I attended her retirement party. Mom had followed her father’s dictum of getting with a reputable company and being loyal to the letter, buying her own house in a white flight subdivision. She has often commented that she was lucky to be a woman when women could do such things on their own.

Mom’s passion was antiques. The entire time she worked her corporate jobs, she dealt in antiques on the weekend, going to estate sales, yard sales, flea markets and out of the way places looking for deals. She rented a part of a shop in Fells Point, Baltimore, then her own shop in Belair Maryland, and finally a booth in a mall in Havre De Grace, MD, which she ran until age 85. As I write this, a month and a half after Mom’s 86th birthday, she is selling off, donating and gifting her books, jеwels and china and such.

This side gig of Mom’s lit a business-like fire in my youngest son. For from age 5 thru 11, as I worked two jobs and his mom worked weekend’s as a manicurist, Mom took the little guy on her weekend of old business, where he interacted almost entirely with older adults of a business-like disposition. In him, both sides of the family came together, the creative independent mind of the LaFonds and the Company Mind of the Kerns. At age 13 he started his own collectible trading card business at the Northpoint Fleamarket. His older brother, working as a plumber and HVAC mechanic for over 30 years now, has followed in my footsteps. He affectionately calls his younger brother, Richie Rich.

Like Dad, Mom worked hard and long in life. In her old age she likes to “spread joy,” with thoughtfully addressed cards to grieving old people and smiling young people alike. She is looking forward to one of my fighter’s oldest daughter’s, helping her sort her books and finery some spring afternoon.