Queen Dutt

Since I started my Substack in October, I have read dozens of Substacks, but never once have I seen an obituary. Well, guess what: it cost $4,000 to put a decent-sized obituary and photo in Florida Today. I think there are better ways to use $4,000. Apologies to those who expected something different from my Substack.

This Substack is about my mom, Joan Dutt or Queen Dutt. I started reminiscing with my mom and interviewing her in 2018 because I felt that I did not know her well. Our conversations and deep memory dives ended up being good brain exercise for both of us. Over the years she would toss out a few tidbits about her life, but I had random pieces, never a coherent story. I learned things about my mom that I never would have guessed.

Like bridge. “It’s mostly about communication with your partner,” she once said.

Around this time a friend (thank you, S.) mentioned calling her mother several times a week to keep in touch. They lived thousands of miles apart, whereas the distance from Ithaca to Cocoa Beach is about 1,200 miles. Why not call her every day, or every other day? At times it was a challenge to come up with something fresh to say, especially during the last fifteen months when The Queen spent most of her day in her room at Zon Beachside. I only regret not starting the calls sooner.

My mom and I did not always get along; in fact, in many ways and maybe most ways we were opposites, and we clashed, but as I began to talk with her, I found similarities that surprised me. Then in 2021 my eldest, Anna, had a newborn. No question she raised the bar on mothering and patience, and I realized just then, how judgmental I had been with my mother. Why do we sometimes expect perfection from our mothers?

Mike and I were in Florida the 4^th to the 10^th because our regular Airbnb had availability; we weren’t summoned because death was imminent, but by the 6^th, my mother’s condition had deteriorated, and she pretty much stopped talking. Sitting by her bed, reading, meditating, helping the nurses, holding her hand and talking to her: I felt like there was no other place I wanted to be. My mom passed away peacefully, Sunday, August 11^th around five p.m.. And for as long as I can remember, and there is no rationale for this, I have always felt sad on Sunday evenings.

∞

Joanne Margaret Dutt (Synder) was born at home in Blasdell, New York, on Electric Avenue, across from the bus station, on December 29^th,/30^th 1933, when many of the roads in that area were dirt. Typical of our mysterious mom, she’d give both the 29^th and the 30^th as her birthdate. She was the third child of Catherine Kegelmyer and Mahlon C. Snyder. She lived at Electric Avenue until 1941 when the family moved to 42 Eastwood Avenue, Hamburg, New York.

Joan Dutt, sometime in the 1950s.

Joan, or Joanne, as friends called her, attended grade school in Blasdell at the Wanukah School first to sixth grade (walked a mile to school every day), then Stella Niagara from seventh grade to half of tenth grade, at which point she went to Immaculata in Buffalo. She attended one semester at D’Youville University and asked why only one, she replied: “Everything they taught us I learned in high school!” The public transportation into Buffalo was inadequate, and Joan was not encouraged to go away to college like her brothers were.

Growing up during The Depression, just about everyone was poor, food was rationed, and no one ever asked for seconds at dinner. You made up your own games (no TV), which Joan often played with her younger brother and pal, Jerry. They had a few toys. “You had to rely on your imagination back then,” Joan said. One game they played was kick-the-can/box. According to Joan, while playing one morning in the street, a human hand fell out of a box. Mom later commented it was probably the mafia, who were still active in the city of Niagara Falls.

After college, Joan worked at Snyder Tank Corporation on the shores of Lake Erie, a company that fabricated tanks and that her father founded. She worked there until she met George Dutt. “I’m going to marry him,” Joan said, after meeting him once. Later, during an interview, she remarked, “That was the best day of my life.” 

Joan and George Dutt, Buffalo, August 1952.

The newlyweds lived in an apartment in Hamburg. George, an engineer who grew up on a farm and went to Penn State on the GI Bill, worked at Bethlehem Steel in Buffalo. They bought a house and five acres of land in 1954 on Cole Road, Orchard Park, on a hill where if you looked out the kitchen window above the sink, you could see the sun set. “You could see the rainbows in the sky,” Joan said. The view from the back windows was an endless forest of pine trees. They bought the red brick ranch a few months before Leslie was born. Joan wanted to live in the country and have 12 children. “Then I decided, well, maybe eight. Then six, then after four, I said, ‘Enough!’”

Joan raised four kids out in the country so her kids could have the freedoms she had, and she raised those kids without much help. “That’s how it was back then.” She cooked three meals a-day (except when George cooked), cleaned somewhat, changed diapers, and washed laundry with a scrub board and a wringer, then hung the clothes outside to dry. Water was from a well which periodically dried up.

Having learned bridge in high school, Joan possessed that love of card games up until the last year of her life. She learned to play a better game by reading the column on Contract Bridge in The Buffalo Evening News. Then someone at Synder Tank taught her “a few things about stocks,” and it wasn’t long before she was regularly reading the stock market pages in the News and became a shrewd investor. This was before most people knew what stocks were. And when the kids were older, she took painting lessons and reinvented herself again. Many of her watercolors and oils hang on our walls. Her other interests included vegetable and flower gardening, canning – especially homegrown tomatoes in August – greeting people from all over the world (as a Buffalo World Hospitality member), trying out meditation and various religions, and getting someone, anyone to laugh and joke with her. Including the milkman, Ernie.

By giving her children unsupervised days (like when she grew up), the children could explore the woods and the creeks, do somewhat risky moves on swingsets and off of shed roofs, then walk to a mile or two to Maulie’s. Fine, whatever you wanted to do as long as everyone was home for dinner by 5 or 5:30. Joan did not frown on the unusual pet – the bat, eventually confiscated by the health department – or shy away from purchasing a humongous and powerful rock saw for another child. Deciding that a field of weeds would be the ice-skating rink for her kids (“Because I loved ice-skating!”) she burnt down part of the woods during a drought.

She made sure all her children had music lessons and went to good colleges — even the girls. We became engineers, woodworkers, computer builders, businessmen, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, serious members of religions and serious meditators, geologists, gardeners, painters, activists, and writers, and she encouraged us at every step of the way.  

In 1981 Joan and George moved to Cocoa Beach and bought one of the first condos in Stonewood on A1A. Along with them came the lovely and energetic schnoodles: Bobo and Fang. Fang succumbed to old age (apparently while passed from Joan to George) while Bobo, who had an insatiable appetite for coffee, succumbed to caffeine poisoning. Around that time, Joan learned to get on the computer and found the perfect identifier: Queen Dutt.

Joan’s beloved husband, George, passed in March 2005. After that, Leslie and Nancy, with phenomenal grace, undertook the roles of caregivers, advisors, and entertainers.

The charismatic Queen continued to play bridge at a mad pace, then would relax in front of the TV, or float in the pool at Stonewood and exchange ideas with her friends Pat, Carol, Linda, and other acquittances. She was also very close to her sister, Eileen Murray (Buffalo, NY, deceased) and Ruth Kovaka (Orchard Park, NY, deceased), who she used to drink instant coffee with and laugh uproariously at just about anything.

Joan was generous with time, money and advice, and frequently visited her four children who lived all around the country; she came when there was a divorce, a move, another new baby, and once, a stillborn. She rarely held a grudge. “She was very skilled at making people feel good and creating a festive atmosphere, and not letting the small stuff get to her. She helped people to be themselves in the best way,” one grandson said. Another grandchild: “I remember summer nights where she taught us grandchildren to play canasta, and we would sit with snacks for hours playing in her dining room. She would draw a card and every time say, Be a two! (twos were wild cards) and she’d laughed a lot regardless of whether she was winning or losing”

She taught us to be fiercely independent and question authority. Almost to the last week of life, she was telling the nurses, “Holy crow! Holy shit!” trying to get a rise out of them.

She is survived by her brother, Gerald Synder of Zon Beachside (FL) who visited her room just about every three or four hours during the last week of her life. She is also survived by her four children: Leslie, Patsy, Bobbie, Bryan; twelve grandchildren and eight grand-grandchildren; and many nieces and nephews.   

For many of us who knew Queen Dutt, a shuffle of cards, and thump of the deck on a table, and there she is with that wicked grin on her face, eyebrow raised eye to her partner: So, what do you have in that hand of yours?