Mary Dolores Bedesem

1920s–1930s

Born 15 October 1924 at Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia to Paul Peter Bedesem and Ida Mary Greenwood. Grew up on North 17th Street in the Oak Lane neighborhood and went to Holy Angels School.

1940s

Attended St. Mary's Academy, then worked as secretary to the general auditor at Philco from 1942 while earning a stenography certificate at night. Married Dick Kelble on 23 April 1949.

1950s–1960s

Left Philco in 1950 to raise five children in Glenside, first at the Keswick Apartments and then on Charles Street. Joined St. Luke's choir and parish guild.

1970s–1990s

Led Girl Scouts and filled summer evenings with concerts at Robin Hood Dell. Went back to work in 1973 and spent fifteen years as a secretary at Honeywell before retiring in 1992.

2010s

Died 19 May 2012, four months after Dick.

A Philadelphia Childhood

Mary Dolores Bedesem was born on October 15, 1924, at Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital on North Broad Street in Philadelphia, the first child of Paul Peter Bedesem and Ida Mary Greenwood. From about 1925 the family lived at 6724 North 17th Street in the Oak Lane neighborhood, where she grew up with two younger brothers, Paul Jr. and Bill. Paul became a botanist; when he died in 1961, at only thirty-three, the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club published a tribute to him.

Dolores went to Holy Angels School and from about 1938 to St. Mary's Academy, a Catholic girls' school, where she sang in the glee club and in Christmas 1940 played one of the herald angels in the school's nativity pageant.

Philco and a Soldier's Postcard

In June 1942 Dolores went to work as secretary to the general auditor of the Philco Corporation, the big radio and appliance maker at C and Tioga Streets, typing letters and financial statements and taking calls. She studied at night at the Peirce School, earning a professional certificate in stenographic secretarial work on October 9, 1944, and walked in the commencement in the ballroom of the Warwick Hotel that December.

In December 1942 she received a postcard from a young private in training at Camp Polk, Louisiana: Dick Kelble of Glenside. On April 23, 1949, they were married at Holy Angels Church. Dolores stayed at Philco until October 1950, when she left to raise her family.

A Parish Mother

Dolores and Dick raised five children, among them Virginia, first at the Keswick Apartments in Glenside and then in the house on Charles Street that they had planned together, down to a balsa-wood model of the living room. Their life revolved around St. Luke the Evangelist parish. In 1960 Dolores was recording secretary of the St. Luke's Guild of Catholic Women, and for four decades or more she sang in the parish choir.

Her diary for 1972 shows how full those years were. She led Girl Scout Troop 44 skating, bowling, roller-skating, and camping at Camp Neumann, and had the troop over to dye Easter eggs. She chaperoned eighth graders to a Mass with Cardinal Krol at the Cathedral, took a first-aid course, went to guild luncheons, fashion shows, and card parties, won a bottle of Cold Duck at the parish Monte Carlo night, and drove out to see the Delaware in flood after Hurricane Agnes. Summer evenings she took the girls and their friends to the outdoor concerts at Robin Hood Dell, where they heard Van Cliburn, Beverly Sills, Jan Peerce, Madame Butterfly, and The Barber of Seville.

The choir gave her some of her favorite memories. There was the Easter Vigil that ran until almost 1:30 in the morning, followed by breakfast at the rectory, after which she was up until three or four filling her children's Easter baskets. One snowy Christmas Eve the choir director was stranded and the choir sang carols instead of the Mass. On spaghetti-supper weekends, Sunday rehearsals in the old auditorium smelled of simmering sauce. She loved the Gregorian chant Mass the choir had to learn in a hurry for a new priest's first Mass, and a twelve-page Alleluia that she thought beautiful even though it was one word over and over.

Back to Work, and Later Years

In January 1973, twenty-two years after leaving Philco, Dolores answered a newspaper ad and began taking assignments from a temporary agency in Abington. In March 1977 one of those placements became a full-time job as a Secretary 2 at Honeywell in Fort Washington. She handled letters, travel, purchase orders, and a computer database of orders for the next fifteen years, until she was laid off in a workforce reduction in August 1992, and she retired at the end of that year.

Through the 1990s she and Dick visited their daughter Ginny's family in Vermont for their grandson Ben's birthdays; her own seventieth birthday was celebrated at home in Glenside in October 1994. She was still singing with the St. Luke's choir in 1999, when it performed at the Cathedral in Philadelphia. In later life she and Dick moved to The Meadows at Shannondell in Audubon, Pennsylvania. Dick died in January 2012, and Dolores died on May 19, 2012, at eighty-seven.