Josephine Sailer Welles

Our mother and her younger brother and sister grew up in Englewood, New Jersey where the family attended the Presbyterian church. The ties to their mother’s large Quaker family in Philadelphia remained strong and our mother remembered fondly many family reunions and happy summer visits in Jamestown, Rhode Island with her mother’s relatives.

Our mother graduated from Vassar in 1917 and then completed a year of training at the Shady Hill program in elementary education. Her father was a strong-minded, scholarly man who lectured and wrote books about foreign missions, and he was very anxious that his children should enter this field. In later years, our mother thought that he put particular pressure on her as the oldest child. Following his wishes, she sailed to China to learn Chinese at a language school in Peking (now Beijing); afterward, at his direction, she toured the Chinese countryside to observe Chinese methods of teaching in primary schools. Her father’s plan was that she would then instruct the Chinese teachers in how they should improve their teaching methods. But instead of feeling critical, our mother found herself admiring how the Chinese taught their children. She returned home to Englewood and dealt with her guilt at not following her father’s wishes by remaining in bed with stomach pains for several months. Finally, rousing herself, she taught second grade for a year or two in New York and then married our father.

There was a missionary streak in Dad’s family as well. The two of them went back to Peking, where he headed a Christian school for Chinese boys, and here their three daughters were born. It was a chaotic time politically in China. During one uprising, our mother, while pregnant, had to flee to Korea for safety with her eldest baby daughter.

Several years later, Dad became principal of the American school in Shanghai. Here our mother fulfilled the duties of a principal’s wife, but continued to be much involved with us children. She loved music and all three of us children began taking piano lessons when we were old enough. We loved to stand around the piano and sing while our mother played: hymns on Sunday and, on other days, rousing songs from the A. A. Milne songbooks. She read to us every night at bedtime and also, with endless patience, when one or the other us was sick in bed. Tragically, our oldest sister, Betty, died during the last of the five years we spent in Shanghai. Our mother, especially, never fully recovered from this loss.

Back home on furlough in 1937, our father decided not to return to China. We moved to Connecticut, where he became headmaster of a country day school. With Holly and I now busy all day in school, our mother was able to live a less domestic life. She was a quiet, even shy person, but she had a keen mind and a gift for organization. Our father’s school, in those early years, was in the process of growing and developing, and she was able to make some valuable contributions. Over the years, for example, she set up and built the school library, created the school bulletin and alumni magazine, and taught a course in history. With her interest in history and politics, she also found time to take an active part in the town’s League of Women Voters.

Our parent’s marriage was a very happy and close one. Back in 1940, Mother and Dad had built some rustic cabins, without electricity or running water, on an island in a beautiful, remote lake in northern Ontario. Here, for five weeks of every summer, our father was able to escape from the ever-present demands of the school. For many years our family went up there every summer. When Holly and I left home, Dad and Mother still continued to spend peaceful vacations there together, canoeing, reading, and painting.

It was a shock to all of us when Dad, who seemed in robust health, died of a stroke very suddenly, just before his retirement. Our mother bravely moved by herself into the small new house in the woods that they had planned together. Here, for some years, she made a new, if initially lonely, life for herself. She moved eventually to a retirement home near Philadelphia, not far from Holly’s home in Germantown. Here she made new friends, continued reading and painting, chaired a current events group, and knitted many sweaters for her grandchildren.

As time went on, she gained confidence in traveling by herself, visited friends in Italy and in Mexico, and even during part of the summer, spent time alone on the island in northern Ontario. When she was in her eighties, she was invited to fly to China with an old friend who had taught at Yenching University in Peking. The trip was originally planned to include Shanghai and Mother had been looking forward to visiting Betty’s grave there; but, sadly, plans were changed and Shanghai was eliminated from the itinerary.

Accomplished though she was, our mother was always quiet and unassuming, devoted to her friends, and a deeply loving mother and grandmother. We miss her very much.

Written by Katharine Welles Piper