Happy 100th Birthday Anniversary to Mom

Charles and Anna Plohar Maigatter

One hundred ten years ago today, at 11:57 pm, my material grandmother, Anna Plohar Maigatter, gave birth to her fifth child and third daughter, Evelyn. Anna and her husband Charles lived in a small town along the northeastern Wisconsin shores of Lake Michigan. They had grown up outside of a farming village even farther north along the shoreline, both raised by parents and grandparents who emigrated from 'the old country' decades before.

The month my mother, Evelyn, was born featured such newsworthy headlines as:

Boston Braves no-hitters

General Pershing troops march into Mexico

Mary Pickford - first female film star to get $1M contract

Boeing aircraft flies for 1st time

Boy Scouts of America forms

Democratic convention - Wilson campaigns on slogan "he kept out of the war"

and Theodore Roosevelt declines nomination of the Progressive Party

Voters in East Cleveland approve(s) women suffrage

 

Headlines today (in 2026) would show little change from those of over a century before. Still in the news are presidential campaigns (slogans of Wilson vs Trump), major league baseball games, Hollywood film stars' salaries, news of airplane flights (Boeing vs Spirit), and strategies of war (or "excursions into Iran").

 

Mom and Dad were both born in 1916. The intervening years took them from birth, through schooling, marriage, family life, experiencing the growth of a nation, retirement, and aging in the era of the internet. What transpired over those decades is worth more than a cursory glance, not only in terms of family genealogy and world events, but in the moments of daily lives that brought the country and its citizens from a life of austerity appreciated to one of privileged prosperity.