Mrs. Dawson ran a rooming house my mother worked at as domestic/kitchen help at some point before or during WWII. It was located near Lafayette College on College Hill in Easton and I suppose that she had a number of college professors as tenants at that time. It also served as an unlicensed restaurant of sorts. She would sell you a meal if she knew you. It was hard to tell but it was my understanding that her husband had been a bank official in Florida at one time. I am not sure if he was caught embezzling or if he just lost his position during the Depression, but I suppose running a rooming house was a bit of a come down under any circumstances.
Today the place would be closed by the board of health, but in those days before aggressive inspections, just about anything was allowed. Mom told me she found a bug of some sort in the soup pot one day and that when she pointed it out to Mrs. Dawson, she was told to put it back in, that the tenants had been eating a bug or two for years and she hadn’t gotten any complaints. One other situation with the soup pot stands out. Mom told me that every Sunday night Mrs. Dawson would make a big pot of vegetable soup for her tenants and those she chose to provide meals for. As it would rarely get completely eaten, she would keep the pot and throw all the left over vegetables from other nights into the pot to punch up what was left. This pot always sat on an unused back burner of the stove and was never refrigerated in any way. In the summertime it would be bubbling when it was cold. YUMMY! She would throw some baking soda into the pot to kill the acidity created by spoiling that was yielding the gas bubbles, and go ahead and serve it anyway to people who did not know the difference.
The Dawson’s dog did not like to get a bath. He would run and otherwise make himself scarce when he heard the wash tub rattle. If he was in the kitchen he would run into the little alcove off the kitchen and usually into the dining room, through the swinging door. This one day he messed up. He ran into the alcove but turned right instead of left and ran full tilt down the basement steps. I"ll bet that was a trip he never forgot.
There was one other sort of disturbing incident that happened in those days. The Dawsons had a son who was a young teenager at the time, maybe 15.He was caught giving homosexual favors to some of the guys over at the college and as a result was sent away to a kind of juvenile reform school, an ALL BOYS SCHOOL. That never made any sense to me.
The Dawsons also had a daughter who was married to a Roskilly. The Roskillys had two sons who were in school and Sunday School with me when I was in junior high.