Sunday, May 11, 1919

MOTHER'S DAY.  Rainy off and on all day.  To church and S.S. (Sunday School).  Took nap in P.M.  To Epworth League and Church.  To Haye's Room for call.  To bed 10:30 P.M. Thankful for good Mother.

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What did people do to honor mothers in 1919?  Stanford doesn't say specifically what his family did, but perhaps attending church was one way.

Since World War I was still going on at this time, some soldiers who were far away from home wrote to their mothers to wish them a Happy Mother's Day.  Here is the text of one poem incorporated into a flyer that the American YMCA gave to soldiers at the front on May 11, 1919:

Hundreds of stars in the pretty sky;
Hundreds of shells on the shore together;
Hundreds of birds that go singing by;
Hundreds of bees in the sunny weather.

Hundreds of dew-drops to greet the dawn;
Hundreds of lambs in the purple clover;
Hundreds of butterflies out on the lawn;
But only one Mother the wide world over.

A copy of the flyer can be seen here: Mother's Day 1919, Brest, France.  It was sent by a Paul B. to his mother.

Sanford apparently paid a call that day to a friend named Hayes.  With a little digging in the diary I found that Hayes was Wilber Hayes, a friend Stanford spent a good deal of time with.  Wilber was a lab assistant at General Electric in 1920, and he lived at 104 Jay Street, which was the address for the Gleason Building, apparently a rooming house.  The Gleason Building was named for William Joseph Gleason, a prominent Schenectady resident. He was a real estate developer who also built the Gleason Bachelor Apartment Building. The Gleason Building still stands; here is a picture of it:

You can also see it on Google maps. It was about 0.4 miles from Stanford's home at 110 Park Place. I got the information about the building from the website: Schenectady History.

When I discovered the first name of Hayes, I also discovered the first name of the friend mentioned in the May 9th post, Mr. Young. He is Everette L. (not S., as I first thought) Young.  In 1920 he was an instrument clerk at General Electric, and boarded at 9 Hegeman Street, about 2.5 miles from Stanford.  His 1917 WWI Draft Registration card stated that he was born in 1894 in Rexford, NY and that he had a physical disability that exempted him from the draft.

Stanford certainly had a lot of friends!