Florence Esther Thompson McWhirter

It's taken me, like, 5 months to write this post because it's about MY MOM. Until I met my husband, she was the most important person in my life.

Mom was born August 6 1923 in Homewood, a neighborhood in Pittsburgh, PA. Her father delivered most of his wife's six babies. When Florence was a very little girl she had fainting spells but they didn't have the money to take her to the doctor. She'd just be walking around and pass out.

Mom was born after her older sister Alice Luella Thompson had died on her fifth birthday of pluerisy, so I think she was special to her parents. He mother called her "Flossie" but her father called her "Foddie."

Here are some photos of my mother as a child:

Baby Florence Esther Thompson about 1924


In her buggy/stroller

Flossie Thompson and her Patsy doll.
Right after this pic was taken in front of their garage, she did something that made her older sister, Helen angry, and Helen grabbed the doll and threw it, breaking the doll's head.

Florence and her baby brother David Raymond Thompson

Taken at Lake Erie after she wed my father, John Howard McWhirter

Growing up up best girlfriend was a girl named Bertha Arnsberg. She graduated from Westinghouse High School and went to work at a company that made cash registers as a secretary.

She met her husband, John Howard McWhirter, through his cousin Jean and when he was drafted they were married on January 1 1944. She traveled with him while he was stateside, working for a good while as a secretary at a company that repaired airplanes from WWII that had been damaged. She spent time in Savannah, GA and in Virginia. When he was shipped overseas she went back to Pittsburgh to live with her in-laws.

When he finally returned from the war, they started their family and had Amy Georgina (named for both grandmothers,) Janet Louise (named after my dad's maternal grandmother, Janet Inch Anderson Strang,) Then came Edward Howard, named after my dad's dad and for my dad's middle name. Then along came Marjorie Jane (named after my mother's cousin) and John Earl, whose name is a combination of my dad's first name and my patrernal grandfather's middle name.

She was a stay at home mom until about 1969 when she went back to work at Kemper INsurance where her brother Bill was a manager. About 1976 she was diagnosed with lung cancer and was given five month to live. A year or two later she was diagnosed with brain cancer. She endured operation after operation, spent a lot of time in misery on O2 and finally passed away on July 9, I think...may be wrong, of 1981.

Florence Esther THompson McWhirter is buried next to her hsband at Mt Hope Cemetery in PennHills, PA