Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.
From 8-year old Hilda Firestone’s diary:
Today is Aunt Tillie’s birthday, and tomorrow is mine. I don’t know exactly how old Aunt Tillie is. When I ask her, she says that it isn’t polite to ask people how old they are, so then I said that all her friends must be very impolite because everyone who comes to see us always asks me how old I am. She said it is quite polite to ask children, and I asked what is the difference. She just said, “Because it is.” That’s just the same answer that Grandmother gives to me.
I made Aunt Tillie a beautiful pen wiper for her birthday, and it is shaped like a pig. Alma taught me how to embroider beautiful blue eyes on him. This afternoon, Aunt Tillie is going to have her birthday party. Lots of ladies are coming to play bridge. I love Aunt Tillie’s parties because I don’t have to go to them. I can stay upstairs, and try on all the ladies’ clothes that are piled up on my bed, and when they have finished their tea, I can go downstairs and finish all the little sandwiches and cakes that are left over.
Hilda’s aunt Tillie was born in 1882 and would have been 30 years old in 1912. As I read about Hilda’s family in San Francisco, I find myself thinking about my grandmother Helene and her family in Europe at the same period. Helene was 25 years old, single, and living in Vienna. She often visited her orphaned Zerzawy nephews and nieces in Bohemia who were schoolchildren with no thought of the war to come. Helene wrote regularly to her cousins in San Francisco, sometimes sending gifts to their children.
At a time when people wrote with fountain pens, pen wipers were useful tools, and came in a variety of materials. Helene may already have been working at the stationery shop in Vienna in 1912 — the shop window advertised that they repaired fountain pens, so undoubtedly she sold pen wipers too.
Photo of Helene (and perhaps Harry) in front of her stationery shop in Vienna from the early 1930s. Awning sign shows picture of a fountain pen and the words “Repairs Immediately”
In my family papers, several letters mentioned Tillie’s and Hilda’s birthdays, including a letter from Harry asking his sister to purchase flowers in 1944.