Remarks to Cynthia's memorial by Katherine Stapp, her grand-niece.

A couple of years ago, Cynthia started working on a book that was a combination of reminiscences about her life and a cautionary tale about the problems she was having with her sister Lois's conservator.

I helped her organize it for a while until I had my daughter Nika, but I still have some of the files, and reviewing it recently I was reminded what a good writer she was, and what an interesting life she led.

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Quotes from Cynthia's memoirs:

It's not big events that stick on the floor of memory so much as little things, impressions. Like the picture, framed by the windshield of [my brother] Dick's new/old rumble-seated roadster of a broad band of sunlight, like they have in religious paintings, dust particles drifting earthward in the sunlight as it did back on Emerson Place in Buffalo where I was born in 1923, the last of seven kids. Each particle of dust was visible, not crowded together but hanging like a veil and there before me was the dustbin of personal belongings waiting for the rubbish pickup. I happily rescued high-heeled rundown shoes so untypical of my own mother, so exciting for a six year old.

I remember again that same strange light in the summer of 1942. What is that lovely place somewhere between Salt Lake City and Colorado Springs? Bryce Canyon? My brother Dick softly nudged my shoulder to wake me just as the sun rose. He had stopped the car. A family of sheep was crossing the two-lane country road quietly, softly baaing to each other with no recognition of the foreign object, us, sitting quietly barely breathing, inches from their curly shoulders.

We are the first generation of women who knew emancipation without a struggle before the inspired Women's Movement. World War II had opened up a new world for women. But come easy, go easy. Most of us foreswore skirts for lack of time. We wore nothing but jeans and slacks from '41 through '45, with our hair in snoods as welders, milling machine operators, riveters. I personally spent the last year or so of the war as a shipyard welder on Terminal Island in California. My sister Lois, I remember was an aircraft inspector wandering through the huge hangars with her micrometer checking for errors. We had equal pay and the government subsidized nurseries for $2.50 a day per child so we could work. Before that we knew the depression and worked through school.

Early on our dad expressed a libertarian view. Contrary to his Methodist upbringing, and himself very much the abstainer, he went to jail eight times to protest Prohibition. He felt Prohibition was legally wrong; that the government had no right to dictate its adult citizens' morals. He was determined to make a test case by getting arrested and appeal his arrest to the Supreme Court. Thwarted by his father’s connections with the local authorities, he had to re-enact the arrest process seven times, Grandpa getting him out on seven occasions.

It was Prohibition days, hot and heavy. Dad bought the wine needed for his carefully planned arrest and stored it in our cellar. It was in the house where I, the last of the lot, was born. For us kids the cellar was our prison to bind the robbers or the Indians as the case may be, depending on the name of the game. Sitting on the shelves in full view, the bottles were an open invitation to some of the kids to take the occasional one and sell it to the local nightclub, the Chez Ami, for the wondrous sum of 25 cents, unbeknownst to Dad, of course.

The wine was legal. Dad was very much a law-abiding citizen. Churches could buy wine for baptismal purposes and the like. So Dad organized the Joy Christian Church. A few of the local newspaper reporters obligingly became ministers, essential for the building of this church. When ready, Dad took his cache to the corner of Main and Utica, a half block from the nearest police station and not too far from our wonderful, wretched potholed street with the lofty name of Emerson a couple of blocks from the Buffalo Bison baseball field.

Father would climb onto his soapbox and proceed to draw a crowd, berating the government’s intrusion into the private lives of its citizens, ending with, "If it was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for mortal man." Then he’d hand out the wine to the happy crowd until he was taken off to jail to their encouraging cheers.

Thereafter Dad was presented to Judge Knight’s chambers on seven separate occasions, to be dismissed on all occasions by Judge Knight on the strength of his father, the Rev. Benjamin Copeland’s recommendations. All occasions that is, except the last. Finally, Dad, not to be put off, this time came prepared. He addressed the judge with: "Well, Judge Knight, since you see fit to release me yet again, I thank you." And reaching into his pocket he came up with a flask, and arm outstretched, said, “Have a drink, judge.” The Judge responded with a sigh, “Alright, Copeland. If that is the way you want it.” And with a slam of the gavel: "Take him away!"

So it was that the next day the front page of the Buffalo Evening News had a picture of my beaming father with both hands embracing the prison bars. With irony of ironies, the headline over this triumphant picture read, "PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT REPEALS PROHIBITION."

He was released.

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On aging:

Bette Davis was right when she said, "Getting old ain't for sissies." I’m so glad to have lived into my seventies for there is much I would not have learned. Things like: there is indeed a difference between loving and being in love … the first you would die for; the latter you more selfishly want to live for.

I looked in on a retired career woman I had known in New York as a patient for seven years before her retirement. She was not yet ready to be put on the back burner.

She said: "This 20-story paradise on the ocean is filled with widows. We have one old, not very interesting male on this whole floor and the women fight for their turn to have his company to escort them out to dinner or whatever. He struts around literally like a rooster. I think of those years as a single woman when I sometimes felt perhaps I had made a mistake. Well, they all ended up in the same boat as me … but I think I had a helluva lot more fun."

Cynthia could be charming, irascible, stubborn, brave, generous, provocative, kind, funny and always full of boundless energy and enthusiasm. And one thing I think we can safely say is that Cynthia had a helluva lot of fun in her life.