The Inspiring Story of One Woman's Rise From Poverty to Prosperity

A while back I attended a workshop conducted by my good friend Connie Domino. Towards the end of the day she looked at the group and asked us all to write down who our "hero" was, and then tell the class why we chose this individual. I immediately wrote down a name without hesitation and waited while everyone else thought about it.

The name of my hero you ask? Eleanor. My mother-in-law.

Now Eleanor may not have been financially prosperous during her life, but she was prosperous in love and life and was perhaps the richest person I have ever met.

Here's why.

Eleanor was the world's lighthouse. She was a shining example of how to do it right, and everyone who knew her loved her. She turned a world of serious negativity into a positive love-filled one. In fact, most of us would have folded under the pressure of it all. Not Eleanor. You see, she had this incredible habit of picking herself up when life threw her down. So she not only survived it, but also raised five children (and helped raise three grandchildren) who are all incredible human beings in their own right. Eleanor taught me lessons about love and humanity that will carry me to the end of my days.

She was perhaps, the greatest teacher of them all.

Here is her inspiring story.

About a month before she died, my husband Ron and I took the family out to dinner. It was a normal evening and we chatted about this and that while waiting for our food to arrive. After our drinks were served, mom looked at me with the strangest expression on her face and told me she wanted to talk to me. For the next hour she told me the most amazing story of courage and love that I have ever heard in my life.

Eleanor was born on May 15, 1931 and was the eldest child of thirteen. The world was a different place back then. The stock market had just crashed and America was in the throes of the great depression. Money was a commodity and many families lived in deep poverty. Eleanor came from one of those families.

Did you know that my mother made us flour soup?

As I sat there and listened, the first thing mom told me was that her parents had no income. How is that possible? I asked her. How can you live with no money coming in at all? I had a hard time wrapping my brain around it and asked her about it. She just shrugged and said it was simply the way it was. To survive, she said, they lived in abandoned apartment buildings in Hoboken, NJ. With no heat or hot water and little food, life was hard. They used dresser drawers as cribs for the babies that came along, and stood in the long food lines for rice and potatoes. The Salvation Army had a food pantry of sorts, she explained, and her mother would go there for free donations of food and clothing.

I wondered about how they got shoes and was told the Salvation Army gave them to her family. Her mother put cardboard in the shoes when they got holes in them so more than one child could wear them. Cat baths (a bowl of cold water and a washcloth) were a daily ritual and hunger was constant.

"Did you know that my mother made us flour soup?" Eleanor told me with a strange smile on her face. I immediately cringed at the very thought of it and she laughed at my reaction. It seems that a soup of flour and water was often all her mother could offer the family to eat.

"So where was your father through all of this?" I asked. She just shrugged her shoulders at me. A gambler who was rarely at home, her father used whatever money he managed to get his hands on to gamble with his friends. She suspected that he was an illegal immigrant and couldn't work because of it (although mom never found out for sure if this was true). If you can believe it, her father even had a girlfriend on the side and often brought her over to the apartment for lunch!!! Her mother had to make a meal for the woman!!! I could clearly see the deep pain and anger towards her father wash over her face as she spoke of it, and a tear formed in her eyes as the memory took her back in time.