Shared by Joseph and Ruby’s daughter, 2026.
Gretchen, Dodie’s daughter, is the niece who sent Ruby a package in the winter of 1937–38 (“Your Special, Mailed New Year’s Eve”).
In the 1930s she graduated from college with a degree in home economics. McCormick & Company in Baltimore hired her for one particular problem: finding a way to get rid of the black spots that allspice left on the surface of pumpkin pies. (“I never make a pumpkin pie without thinking of her.”)
While she was working at McCormick she met and fell in love with the mail boy, Jim Welsh. He proposed and she accepted. When Gretchen took her new love home to meet her parents, Clair and Dodie Van Slyke, they were horrified: how could their well-bred, educated daughter marry a mail boy?
But they did marry. And by the time he died, Jim Welsh, the mail boy, was Executive Vice President of the entire company.
Her parents worried about the marriage for a long time. By the end of her life Gretchen had become a benefactor to dozens of charitable organizations in the Baltimore area, and the taxes alone on her estate came to more than seven million dollars.
Besides their home in Baltimore, Gretchen and Jim had a house in Carmel, and every time they were out West the family drove over to Carmel to visit them.
A Christmas card from the Welshes
A photographic Christmas card the Welshes sent to the family, probably in the 1950s. Gretchen, in a long dress, reaches up to tug the neckties of framed portraits of Jim and their son, Michael: a pun on “you can tie, but you can’t beat.”
