Hazel had what could only be described as a challenging childhood. Her father left her mother and moved away when she was a very young child, and so she spent most of her early years living in poverty. It was the Depression era, and while her mother worked, they often found themselves barely making ends meet.
She met and married my late father-in-law, a good man indeed. And while there fortune improved a bit, they still faced difficulties. Cyril contracted pleurisy and spent months away from work and home at what was then called a sanitarium. In time he got better. He always worked hard, but they lived very modestly in half of a duplex in Gloversville, New York--a small industrial city north of the Mohawk River.
Hazel never forgot the challenges of her childhood and as a result turned her talents into hats and mittens and scarves for the underprivileged children of the community. She tried to teach my wife, Linda, how to knit, but for years Linda resisted. That just wasn't her thing! But then, when her Mom was advanced in years, Linda sat down with her and learned a few basic stiches. And she started to knit a basic hat. She took anybody's unused yarn--in many different colors, and stitched them together into colorful hats--first solids and then stripe
s. And she followed in Hazel's footsteps--she made them for kids in need. Literally hundreds of them every year!
Today, Linda knits about 200 hats a year--and she has a team of "elves" as she calls them, who also knit. They send hats to an Indian reservation in South Dakota, to an organization that distributes them to homeless folks in New York City, to organizations in her hometown and for the first time this year, to Boston, where two of our grandchildren will see to it that they go to the right place.
All this because of Hazel. That's why she calls the program Hazel's Hats. What a wonderful tribute to a wonderful woman.
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