This posting was inspired by the postings of Glen Thomson,'60, and Judy Davis Kueshner, '55. The subject of my posting is Mrs. Threase Beck Moss, Grandmother of Norma Speer of Crafton and Great-Grandmother of a 1961 classmate, the late Bob Speer.

     When I was a kid, Mrs. Moss lived two doors from us, in Idlewood, at 118 Fountain Avenue, where she had resided since 1889.  She was born in 1860 in Westmoreland County, lived to be 100 years old, and was affectionately know by everyone in the neighborhood as either "Grandmother Moss" or "Mossy".

     During my preteen years, in the early '50s, I had occasion to visit with her on a regular basis, most memorably on Fridays. We always had fish on Fridays and my mother would prepare an extra portion for Grandmother which I would take to her every week. During those visits and others, I would listen to her tales of living in log cabins, cooking in an open fireplace and having an Indian Squaw as a babysitter. She spoke of the Civil War, of her father having seen Abraham Lincoln and how she remembered the Battle of Little Big Horn taking place when she was a teenager. While I enjoyed these visits and tales immensely, sitting wide-eyed and slack-jawed I'm sure, I have to admit that I didn't fully believe what I was being told at the time. I suppose that my 11 year old perspective and concept of time was just too narrow for me to realize that much of what she was telling me was actually so. As I eventually learned that what Grandmother was telling me was historically correct, given the date she was born, I often lamented the fact that I didn't fully appreciate those visits for what they could have been. I was talking to a living history book and wasn't old enough to realize it or to take full advantage of it.  Oh, to be able to talk with her today!

     I have a picture of Grandmother Moss hanging above my desk, which was taken in January of 1950 on her 90th birthday (and which was printed in the Crafton Times in that same year, billing her as "the oldest Republican in Crafton"). Near her picture, also, sits the Catechism she gave me which she received when she made her First Communion in the mid 1860's. Each time I see her picture or that Catechism, I think of her and those memorable times in her kitchen and at her fireplace and of all the questions I wish I had asked. 

     I once heard that each time a person passes away, the knowledge lost is equivalent to a library burning down and, having known Grandmother Moss, I know how very true that is. 

Ray Shoup, '61

(Posted on the CraftonReunion eGroup on 9/9/2002)