When she was looking for the right candidate for the first annual Mary O’Connor Spirit Award to honor a woman from the local Irish-American community, Karen Conaghan says Rosabelle Gifford came to mind immediately.
“She’s very brassy, but not abrasive. Opinionated, spirited, courageous,” says Conaghan, who, with her sister, Sarah, coordinates the Philadelphia Rose of Tralee pageant, of which the award is now a part. “She’s better dressed than anyone we know. She enjoys life. She’s a total inspiration.”
I met Rosabelle Gifford this week. It’s all true.
Named for the original “Rose of Tralee,” who refused to marry her true love because she knew it would tear him from his disapproving family, the first Mary O’Connor Spirit Award is going to a woman who knows intimately how love can go wrong—and the meaning of courage and self-sacrifice.
She was Rosabelle Blaney of Gortward, Mountcharles, County Donegal, when she married Edward Harvey of Castleogary. The couple moved to post-war London where they went on to have five children, including a set of twins. But the marriage was not to last.
“It was a very bad marriage,” says Giffor. “He was drinking, running around with other women, and a wife-beater. I had to go.”
At a time when there was little help for abused women and families—and there was almost no housing in bombed-out London—Gifford had to plan her own escape. She sent two of her five children back to Ireland to live with her parents and one to Scotland to stay with her sister. “I knew they would be well cared for and I had to do it—I had no place to live,” she recalls.
In the early 1950s, when her oldest son, Ted Harvey, was considering enlisting in the British military, Gifford suggested that he go to America instead. “My two older sisters were living here and I told him that if he went, we would follow.” He did, and in 1958, his mother and his siblings moved into the apartment in Bryn Mawr he had rented and furnished for them.
“I got a job taking care of children. I was good at it,” chuckles Gifford. In fact, some of the children she cared for will be attending the award ceremony on Saturday night, June 27, during the 2009 Philadelphia Rose of Tralee Selection Gala.
While at a New Year’s Eve party at a friend’s house, Rosabelle met Charles Gifford, who worked in the accounting department of a steel company. They fell in love and married. She has been widowed for more than 20 years. “He was a good man. I needed that,” she says wistfully. “He was so good to my children too—so good to them.”
Her son, Ted, died many years ago of brain cancer. Three of her four remaining children, Rosemary McCullough, Kathleen Harshberger, Frank Harvey, and assorted grandchildren and great grandchildren will be attending the event. The fourth, son James Harvey, an educator, will be in China at the invitation of the Chinese government.
You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t mentioned Rosabelle Gifford’s age. That’s because she doesn’t. “I don’t think it’s anyone’s business,” she says. “I think you’re just as old as you feel.”
Indeed.
