Kathleen Sullivan

00:00 My name is Benjamin Wukusick I am 10 years old. Today is November 23rd. November 23rd, 2023. I'm speaking with Kathleen Sullivan, who is my grandmother. We're recording in Green, Ohio. I want to say, like, hi first. Hi. What do you think you were going to be when you grew up?

00:25 When I was a child, I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up, and I wanted to be just like my mother when I grew up. I think the most important thing for me was being more like my mother than being a teacher.

00:45 Why is your mom like.

00:47 My mother grew up at a time when people didn't have a lot during the Depression, and her family was very poor and they had seven children, and her father died when she was 9 years old. So it was very hard for them. And they all chipped in together as children, and they helped earn money so they could feed their family and help their mother pay the bills and take care of them. And when I was growing up, my mother always made sure that we had everything we needed. And she always spent time with us, and she taught us how to do things like play games and cook and go to barking and climb trees and do all kinds of really cool things that a lot of mothers didn't want to bother with. So even though we didn't know it at the time, we weren't very rich. We didn't have a lot of money, but we were so happy and so much. We enjoyed our life so much that we never knew that we didn't have a lot of money. So I want to be the kind of mother that was like my mother and cooked things and did things with my kids and made sure that they had everything they needed and were never deprived of stuff that was important.

02:07 Can you tell me what you did for a living?

02:14 When I was younger, before I got married, I was a waitress, and I worked as a waitress until I got married. And then when I got married, after my children went to school, I went and I worked at Walmart and I checked things. Well, first I worked in the store itself and I helped people and I kept the shelves, and I did price changes and did all kinds of anything that would help the customers. And then later on, I started working in the receiving room, where I would take stuff off the trucks and enter it into the computer system. And if the prices were different than the Walmart prices, where I had the power to refuse the order and tell the truck driver I wasn't going to take it because they were charging us more than we were going to Pay. So it was kind of fun telling them. No, but I worked there for 20 years, and then I retired.

03:16 Out of those two jobs, which one would you say you liked more?

03:23 I think I liked working in the receiving room at Walmart more because it was more of a challenge for me.

03:33 Can you tell me about your childhood? Do you remember any of the stories they used to tell you?

03:41 My father grew up in Ireland, so he used to tell us stories about growing up with his brothers. And like, when he was finished with sixth grade, he graduated from school. He didn't go any farther than sixth grade, so he had to work on the farm, and he worked at a rock quarry, and he'd have to ride his bicycle to the rock quarry and work there and then go home and do his chores on the farm. But he had a bunch of brothers, so he used to tell us stories about things that he would do with his brothers. To tell you the truth, I don't even know how many brothers he had because they passed away from some strange things. One of my uncles got kicked by a donkey and he died. One of my uncles fell on a pitchfork and got infected and he died. So my father told us that one of the reasons he left Ireland was because he didn't want to die. He wanted to get out of there and go someplace more modern and had better work opportunities. But my mother, when she was growing up, remember I told you she was kind of poor. They used to live near a railroad track, and the men would come that would drive. They would hop on the train, the hobos. And there was a field near their house, so they used to. They used to sit in the field and talk to the hobos about all their adventures and things that they did. And they would roast potatoes for them and feed them roast potatoes on a campfire that they meet in the field. And one time she told us a story during World War II where they actually made a dummy of Adolf Hitler and they pretended they were going to end the war and they destroyed Hitler in their field. And that was one of the stories she told us.

05:43 Are there any traditions that have been passed down in your family? If so, can you tell me about them?

05:53 Well, we always used to go to my grandmother's house for Christmas when I was little, and I had 27 cousins. So we would all be at my grandmother's house for Christmas with my aunts and my uncles. And then when we were growing up, after we got older, we stayed at our house. And when we got married, we all went over to my mother's house with our kids for Christmas and all the cousins would show up and we would be there for Christmas. And that was one of the things that was kind of important in our family, is that everybody could be together at Christmas time.

06:34 How many people showed up for that.

06:36 Gathering when I was little or when your mom was little, when you were little? When I was little, it would be about 48 people in the same house. Yeah, it was a lot. And it was very noisy because you know what it's like with just you four. Try to think of 27 kids instead of four. The noise level. When we were at grandma and Grandpa.

07:14 Burke's house for Christmas Eve, the kid. As a kid, we would hear sleigh bells, and that meant Santa was there. And Santa would actually come and you would hear like, clomping on the roof. And then Santa would come inside and talk to each one of us at the party.

07:28 Cool.

07:28 It was very cool.

07:29 Yeah, it was. And we'd be in there with like, our big cousins. Like, the older cousins would be telling.

07:34 Us, like, oh, what do you hear at Santa's here? What is your grandma's house? Like a big house? Or they. Or were you all smushed into like a. Like an average or small sized house?

07:49 My grandmother's house was about the same size as this house. Yeah, I don't think she had as many bedrooms upstairs, but it was about the same size. And the teenagers would go upstairs because they didn't want the. The younger kids bothering them.

08:10 Thanks for telling me about your life.

08:12 Well, I'm glad I was able to tell you and help you to learn some about your history.