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4

first interview, second version; Packard ancestors
 
Grandfather Packard's wife was Clara Adelaide Fish "a most esteemed and popular young lady"(Chicago Legal New 1874)whom he married in her home town of Lombard, Illinois. Although Clara was a professed Christian and also a member of the Congregational Church, she never accepted her husband's fundamentalism (rather like Theophilus and Elizabeth). They lived in the later rather fancy suberb (see p5) of Chicago, Oak Park. Clara's interest was centered in social work. She organized a reading room for servant girls, whose pay in those days was $3.00 per week. She was an active supporter of womans' suffrage and of Jane Addams' work at Hull House in Chicago. She became interested in the labor movement and served on a state committee to investigate the causes of a mine disaster. Clara's father was a postal employee whose ancestors went back to pre-revolutionary days. Clara was eligible for the DAR but never chose to join because she was out of sympathy with their objectives. Clara's sister Ellen was the first woman graduate of a medical school in Chicago.

My father's oldest sister, Stella, worked with Jane Addams at Hull House (Chicago) for some time, after graduating from Smith Coll. His sister Laura graduated from Vassar, where she had become a Socialist. She married Ed Redman, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth. (Of their three children, one became a reactionary Republican, one a Democrat and one a Communist.)

The youngest sister, Esther, graduated from Smith College and became a social worker in New York state, appearing before the state legislature in Albany on various occasions in support of social legislation. Her husband, Philip Chadbourne, became a special representative of the State Department in Russia during the Wilson administration. Their first son was born in Petrograd during the first week of the Russian Revolution.

My father's young brother John became a lawyer and a socialist, partly as a result of my father's arguments in favor and partly because of Grandmother Clara's friendship with Upton Sinclair and partly because his wife, Rosemarie Hutcheson, was a close friend of the Sinclairs. He became a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Party and an active member of the Democratic Party during the New Deal days. In 1936 John was