Explore "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" by John Loughery on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE YEAR THE WAR ENDED, Dorothy turned forty-eight. Her hair was fast turning white, she looked older than her years, and she wore only the frumpy dresses she could find in her size in the clothing donation room at St. Joseph House. Yet she was still an arresting presence. She had a height and a chiseled jaw that commanded attention; a voice that, when she chose, could hold a room; an unaffected laugh and a probing stare; Modigliani eyes, as Garry Wills would write after her death.
She had a grandchild to exult in, a new generation to welcome as the older generation was passing away. Grace Day expired of a heart condition in October 1945, at the age of seventy-seven, with her daughters at her side, and, one by one, longtime members of the community died. In The Catholic Worker in 1946, Dorothy wrote about the deaths of Kichi Harada, their much-abused house cook, and Mary Sheehan, one of the first women to join the community. She speculated about those whose safety she had fretted over throughout the war-Joe Zarrella, Gerry Griffin, Tom Sullivan-and waited to see who would be returning to New York and who would be moving on to a new life. The late 1940s was the period in which the Catholic Worker would need to regroup as its numbers and influence appeared to be on the wane.