Emalie C. Saulsbury

Emalie Catherin Sontag Saulsbury, June 23rd, 1935 - September 24, 2024. 

Emalie was a singer, excellent pianist, schoolteacher, and loving mother to 3 children, Gary (Claudia Cahill) Saulsbury, Kathy (P.J.) Saulsbury Long, & Cindy Saulsbury. Emalie was the best grandma to Alex Saulsbury, Gary Saulsbury, Jr., Emma Long, & Ella Long. She was the best great grandma to 2 new little sweethearts, Jaxon (Alex & Amber) Saulsbury & Sadie (Gary Jr. & Samantha) Saulsbury. Emalie was a loving aunt to Donna, Karen, Steve, & Chris Sontag. Loving great aunt to many!! Dear sister to the late Charles Elmer Sontag & the late William F. (Sonny) Sontag, daughter of the late Fred & Emma Wiebe Sontag. 

A lifelong resident of Cincinnati, Emalie graduated from Hughes High School & The University of Cincinnati Teacher’s College. She met her husband, Ron Saulsbury, while playing the accordion in the high school orchestra. She spent her long teaching career with Cincinnati Public Schools. 

She was an active member of Ninth Street Baptist Church where she started teaching Sunday School as a teenager. She attended & was a counselor at the Baptist Youth Camp, Tar Hollow for many years. Emalie continued to serve when Ninth Street moved west and became Lakewood Baptist. During her life, she directed the Children’s choir, the NBC band, decades of holiday musicals & cantatas, too many to list here! Emalie was a member, soloist, and often the director of the adult choir. 

Emalie joined her mother Emma Sophia, her Aunt Greta Weber, and brother William Sontag, singing with the May Festival Chorus. She was a member of the Green Township Bicentennial Chorus, 4 for the Lord, Western Hills Music Club, and directed the Oak Hills Community Chorus. 

She was an avid gardener and won many ribbons for her show stopping roses at the Harvest Home Fair. She loved animals, specifically horses, cats, & dogs!! She is being buried with the remains of her sweet cat, Sugar.

Emalie was a Cincinnati Reds fanatic. She and P.J. often joked about how Pete Rose was doing. Visitors always asked her how the team is doing this year.

She fought breast cancer in 2007 & it returned this year. It metastasized to her lungs, was untreatable, and took her precious life. She will be buried with her mom, dad, and brother at Mt. Moriah Cemetery. 

Family and friends are invited to a Visitation on Tuesday October 1, 2024 from 5 pm to 7 pm, followed by a 7 pm Funeral Service at the Dalbert, Woodruff & Isenogle Funeral Home 2880 Boudinot Ave. Cincinnati, OH 45238. Graveside Service will be held on Wednesday, October 2, 2024 10 am at Mt. Moriah Cemetery 686 Mount Moriah Dr. Cincinnati, OH 45245.

In Emalie’s own words: 

June 23, 1935………

It might not seem to be an important date in history, but it was an important date to me. It was the day I came into the world. I was born at Bethesda Maternity Hospital in Walnut Hills. My parents were both of German heritages. My maternal ancestors were from Wiesbaden, Germany. My paternal ancestors were from Saxony. 

I spent the first 10 days of my life in the hospital, as was the custom in those days. At the age of 10 days, I went to 2225 St. James Avenue where my mother, Emma Sophia; my father, Frederick William; my brother, William Frederick and my grandmother, Emma Wiebe lived in Walnut Hills in Cincinnati, Ohio. I had a half-brother, Charles Elmer, who was much older than I. He had a daughter, Sylvia, my niece, who was older than me, her aunt. Later, he had a son, Charles. Elmer's mother, Lottie, died of an ear infection when he was 17. He was away at school at the time. He went to The Ohio Military Institute in Cincinnati. This was 1927. 

In 1928 my daddy married my mother. She was 36 years old at the time. Daddy was 46. Mother worked for Mr. Saul Aptor as a bookkeeper in a luggage and leather goods store. Mr. Aptor liked mother and didn't want her to quit her job. He gave her a very nice "fitted" piece of luggage for a wedding present. 

Mother worked her way up from her humble beginning. She lived at 13th and Walnut Streets in downtown Cincinnati. She lived over an undertaker's livery stable and always liked to say she lived in a stable, just like Jesus. When mother was 9 years old, her brother, William, was 12, her sister, Frieda, was 7 and baby sister, Greta was 6 months old, their father, William, died of cancer. Uncle Willie had to go to work and Grandma Wiebe took in washing and ironing and scrubbed steps for people, including Norman Vincent Peale's mother. Grandma had a nervous breakdown, and her doctor prescribed an ocean cruise for her nerves. This, of course, was impossible in her financial situation. 

My mother finished the eighth grade and went to East Night High School, so she could work in the daytime. This is where she learned to be a bookkeeper. Uncle Willie worked at the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company all of his adult life. Aunt Frieda went to Denison University, a Baptist college in Granville, Ohio. She met and married Millard Franklin Collins at Denison. After graduation, they went to work as missionaries at The South Chicago Neighborhood House. Later, Uncle Millard worked for the Y.M.C.A. as an executive secretary. At one time, this job took him to Wiesbaden, Germany to live. They sailed to Germany on the Queen Mary. My cousin, Frieda Jane, went to school there. My older cousin, Helen Eugenia, went to college in Geneva, Switzerland. 

My family may not have traveled farther away from Cincinnati than Clermont County, but we couldn't have been happier. Mother was 43 years old and daddy was 52 when I was born. Daddy gave me my 6 a.m. bottle each morning before he went to work. He owned a grocery store, 1 block away from our home. Sometimes he delivered groceries until midnight. Every Sunday morning, he got up early and washed the car before church. We went to Ninth Street Baptist Church in downtown Cincinnati. Daddy was a deacon, and mother was the Superintendent of the Primary Department and sang in the choir. Mother and Aunt Greta had beautiful voices. The May Festival director told mother she didn't have to audition to sing in the Chorus. She had a very high voice and was asked to sing 1st soprano. Aunt Greta, also, had a high voice, but sang 2nd soprano in the May Festival Chorus.

We lived across the street from Windsor School at 2225 St. James Ave in Walnut Hills. Mother always stood at the window filing her fingernails as she watched us play. If anyone ever got into trouble, she would knock on the window with her fingernail file. Her fingernails were always beautifully manicured and polished. It was Grandma Wiebe, however, who happened to be looking out the window the day "Sonny Boy," as they affectionately called him, hit his first home run. She was so happy to have witnessed this great event that she told us about it every so often. A lady would walk by every day and my mother would tell me to say, “Hello, Miss Snow.” We rode to Coney Island on a boat, the Island Queen. We liked to go on the top deck and listen to the calliope! So much fun!! 

We had a summer home in Epworth Heights, Ohio. Miss Holder lived next door. 

When Sonny was very young, he had many severe ear infections. They were serious enough to require two double mastoid operations. These surgeries involved extended hospital stays so mother, aunt Greta, and Grandma Wiebe spent many hours playing "Ding, dong bell, Pussy's in the well." I understand this was a game played with a napkin or other piece of paper, wadded up and tied with a string. As the rhyme was repeated, the paper was raised and lowered over the headboard of Sonny's hospital bed. Mother and Daddy were probably extremely anxious about Sonny's ear problems, as Daddy's first wife had died of an ear infection. 

When I was 5 years old and my brother was 9, I couldn’t get a swing on the playground, so we moved to a 100-acre farm in Amelia, Ohio on Bach Road. The first word I learned to read or spell was "PONY," so my favorite possession on the farm was my pony, Bill. Sonny had a horse named Old Dick. You could hear his insides slosh when he trotted. We had 3 pigs, 2 calves, boxes of baby chicks from the hatchery, many cats and a Collie dog named Jack. Jack came to live there before we did. Daddy owned a grocery store in Walnut Hills, so we took bones from the meat case to Jack every weekend. We never knew what or where he ate during the week. He waited there for us every weekend and lived with us after we moved there.

We always had a John Deere! Although I don't think he knew it at the time, the John Deere tractor proved to be one of Sonny's fondest memories. Before we got the tractor, mother would ride Old Dick and daddy would walk behind with the plow. He showed us how to sow wheat. Mother made bags out of feed sacks to hang over our shoulders. We put the wheat grains in these bags and took handfuls out and spread the grains out in front of us as we walked. What an education.

Another use for those feed bags was dresses for me. Daddy had to choose new patterns every time he bought feed, so I could have new dresses. I don't remember if mother or Aunt Greta made those dresses, or they worked together on them. I do remember that they were very pretty. 

My teacher’s name was Miss Love. I took a piano lesson at lunchtime from my teacher’s sister. She lived across the street from the school! I had a boyfriend, Freddie Vollmer. He had a sister, Mary Lou! He sat next to me in school. One day, the teacher moved his seat. I said, “Miss Love,” Freddie is crying.” She said, “He will be alright.” Poor Freddie! 

My Uncle George gave us a baby goat to take to our farm. Uncle George worked for the Cincinnati Health Department. His job was to inspect milk farms. One day a farmer gave him a baby goat to give to us. I had lots of fun! 

Aunt Greta met Uncle George when they worked together at the City of Cincinnati Health Department. She had a best friend, Louise Wortman. Uncle George was in the First World War. He wrote beautiful, romantic letters to Aunt Greta. When the war was over, Aunt Greta went down to Fountain Square with thousands of other people to celebrate. 

When we moved to the country, Sonny and I spent a week at Aunt Greta's house every summer. We looked forward to our annual trip with Aunt Greta and Uncle George to the opera at the Cincinnati Zoo. My favorite opera was the Barber of Seville. Uncle George enjoyed singing "Figero, Figero, Figero, Fee-gaa-row," from “The Marriage of Figaro.” Nothing could compare to the expectation as we rode 2 streetcars to get to the zoo, bought the tickets at the huge front gate and walked quickly up the big hill to the opera pavilion. It was all very exciting to two young children. Combined with the beautiful music and drama of the opera, we always waited to hear the sounds of the sea lions and monkeys floating through the dark, night air. The atmosphere couldn't be duplicated or forgotten.

The experience wasn't over yet. When the last notes of the opera were fading away, and all the curtain calls were over, the entire audience moved as one body, rushing back down that long hill, through the big revolving gates, to get a seat or at least a place to stand on one of the many waiting "owl" streetcars. These were the last cars to run each night. This was just the beginning of the long journey home to Price Hill. At Eighth and State Streets we had to transfer to another streetcar. I could hardly stay awake, as we stood there on the street corner with dozens of other people waiting for our next streetcar. When we got off of the 2nd streetcar, we still had several blocks to walk. It seemed like the middle of the night, when we finally reached Aunt Greta's and Uncle George's house at 1101 Benz Avenue, but it was definitely worth it. I'll never forget it! 

Mother would have liked to go to the opera also, but daddy wasn't a music lover, so she never got to go. She was just happy that Bill and I got to go. When we were born, she gave up singing in the church choir and the May Festival. She gave up a lot for us and never complained about it. Aunt Greta never had any children, so she didn't have to give up anything. She enjoyed visiting with us and taking us places, but she could always take us home! Grandma Wiebe also lived with us, and her other children would come to visit occasionally. Aunt Frieda came once a year. Uncle Willie came occasionally, and Aunt Greta came once a week. 

Another ritual of my vacation at Aunt Greta's house was to learn to play a new song on her piano, so I could surprise mother when I got home. One year I learned to play "Go Down Moses." One year we went to see the movie, "Lavender and Old Lace." We went to choir practice with Aunt Greta at Ninth Street Baptist Church. Uncle George was Catholic, so he didn't go to church with Aunt Greta. He had a "City" car, but he wasn't allowed to use it for personal use, so we had to ride a streetcar everywhere we went. When I got older, Sonny and I spent separate weeks at Aunt Greta's house. I think, when we first went there, Grandma Wiebe went with us.

Aunt Greta came to our house every Friday. She rode to town in Uncle George's "City" car and then she rode a bus all the way to Amelia and got there before we left for school. I always looked forward to her fixing my hair in "horns" every Friday. Horns were two rolls of hair pinned in place with bobby pins on the top of my head. If I remember right, they looked like two egg rolls lying side by side on the top of my head.

When we got our John Deere, mother would hitch up the wagon bed to it. Grandma Wiebe, Sonny and I would ride in the wagon while mother drove the tractor. We would go out to the woods for picnics, to play in the creek or to pick blackberries. One day we brought home a whole flock of baby ducks. They had floated down to our creek after a big storm. We put them in our pond and when they grew up, they would walk in a line every evening from the pond to the chicken house and back again in a line to the pond every morning. Mother made us wear a whistle around our necks every day in case we got lost. In rainy weather we all wore tall rubber boots.

We bought a bunch of baby chicks from a hatchery. They had to be kept warm with light bulbs. Every morning, we would find a few dead chicks, which had been smothered by the others overnight. Many survived to grow up only to have their heads chopped off for our Sunday dinners. After chopping their heads off, daddy would immerse the chickens in a bucket of scalding water. This would loosen the feathers so he could pluck them.

We always had company for Sunday dinner. Fannie Riehle and Bessie Adamson for sure and sometimes Nellie and Richard Brown and Mark Young, a little Chinese boy they were raising. Everybody from Ninth Street Baptist Church loved coming to our farm for picnics. 

When we bought the farm, it had no bathroom. We had an outhouse complete with a Sears and Roebuck catalog. On Saturday evenings, mother would heat water on the stove in a teakettle to warm up the water in a big, round galvanized tub in the kitchen. This became our bathtub for the traditional Saturday night baths. We soon built a bathroom with all the modern conveniences.

Every summer, my Aunt Frieda, Uncle Millard and cousins, Frieda Jane and Helen Eugenia would come to visit us on our farm. They lived in Chicago, so we only saw our cousins once a year. We really looked forward to those visits.

Daddy built a huge barn behind the two chicken houses. Then he painted it silver. It was beautiful. Our chicken houses were huge. They were big enough to play in and store all of our toys in. We played in one of the chicken houses. The other one was cleaned up and whitewashed, furnished with used chairs of all kinds, children's chairs and tables and a pulpit. Pictures were hung, Sunday School materials came from somewhere and all the neighbors assembled every Sunday afternoon and had church. They all voted for a preacher and Bob Hall won the election. Mother taught the children a Sunday School lesson and did some kind of handwork activity. She really enjoyed this. It's amazing how many people liked getting together on Sunday afternoons to have church. I guess that's what people did before T.V. Also, since gasoline was rationed, we couldn't drive all the way down to Ninth Street twice a day to go to the evening service. 

One of Sonny's favorite activities was to pull me and my friends around in an old horse buggy. When we got thirsty from playing hard, we went to the well or cistern. We pumped the handle, and everyone drank from the same tin cup, which was hanging there. I always had many cats and kittens to play with. I would dress the kittens in doll clothes and push them around in a doll buggy. I don't know why, but they were always very cooperative and docile. Mother fixed up one of the smoke houses as a playhouse with curtains, furniture and even an awning supported by two poles. When we had our pigs slaughtered, Daddy used the other smoke house to practice smoking pork as he remembered someone doing it in his childhood. The bacon was very salty. 

One day, a stray dog came to the house. We allowed him to come in but when mother turned on the vacuum cleaner, the dog bit me. We made the dog leave, and I was taken to the doctor. Since we couldn't find the dog to have him examined, I had to have shots to prevent rabies just in case the dog was infected. I had to get a shot every day for 14 days.

We never locked our doors when we were back on the farm or in the barn so one day when we came down from the barn, a man was pretending to be knocking at our door. He said he was looking for work. Mother said it was strange because he had the door partly open. In reality, he had already been in the house and had taken all of mother's diamond rings and other jewelry. Mother remembered seeing a catsup bottle sticking out of the man's pocket. The police found him and all of the jewelry, which he had put in that catsup bottle.

When I was in the second grade, I announced to my second-grade teacher that I was going to move. She looked shocked until I smiled and told her we were moving to Hamlet, which meant we would not be changing schools. I guess my daddy missed the grocery business, or we were running out of money because he built a grocery store next to the house we bought. The house was very small, so I guess that was one of the reasons we didn’t live there very long. 

In the summer, we moved to 2164 Elysian Place in Clifton Heights. It was a big, three-story brick house. It had a big yard with a steep hill behind the yard. I missed my pony so much that mother spent days and days and days trying to make terraces and steps down that hill to a flat area where she said someday, I could ride a pony. It never happened, but we did make a badminton court out of that flat space. I guess daddy missed the farm too, so he terraced the back yard and had a huge garden. There was a smokehouse on the property, so mother fixed it up like a playhouse for me like she did on the farm.

Bill was old enough to go to town by himself, so mother taught him the names of the north and south streets in order so he could always find Vine Street and the Ohio Avenue steps to get home.

We went to Fairview School. It was a long walk, up and down hills, but we even came home for lunch. Mother was always home when we got there with a hot lunch of chicken noodle soup and sandwiches or something like that ready for us to eat. Mother and Grandma Wiebe were always there when we got home after school every day, also.

When I was in the seventh grade, Bill came down with polio. The whole family was quarantined. There was a sign on our front door. Bill had to go to General Hospital because polio was thought to be contagious. He was given water therapy to strengthen his muscles. His right foot was weakest. Mother thought it was weakened by his recent trip to Chicago in his little car with a small round accelerator. This would put a constant strain on his right big toe. Bill told me later that other parts of his body, like his neck, were also affected.

At Christmas time, mother was really a magician. We usually had big sliding doors between our living room and dining room. On Christmas Eve day, these doors would be closed so we couldn't see when Santa came. I don't know how she did it, but by evening, the entire living room including a very beautiful village on the mantle and the Christmas tree was decorated. All the presents were under the tree, and I never knew she was in there. We opened our presents on Christmas Eve, which I believe was a German tradition. Mother said it was because she didn't think we would be able to sleep thinking about what we might get for Christmas. It was wartime, so one year, I remember getting a doll with a wig of very nice-looking hair. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was one of my old dolls dressed up and with a wig added. Even though it was wartime, we got many, many more presents than mother and daddy got when they were little. Mother often told of getting an orange for Christmas and that's all. That was a treat, however, because that was the only time they got an orange. 

We were actually very lucky to have as much as we did have because so many things were rationed. A few things I remember being rationed were butter, sugar, shoes, gasoline, meat, coffee and I'm sure much more. 

I took piano lessons from Doris Day’s father, Mr. William Kappelhoff.

When I was in the seventh grade, all the girls took home economics. We learned to cook and sew. I made a quilted potholder and an apron to wear when we cooked. Our big project was making a dress which we had to wear and model.

When I graduated from Fairview School, I went to Hughes High School. I was scared to death the first few days of my freshman year. That school was so much bigger than Fairview it was hard to find your way around. I took German, English, history, glee club, choir, orchestra, harmony and joined the horseback riding club.

When my brother Bill was in the army, our mother and I went to see him in Mineral Wells, Texas on a train. There was a wreck on the tracks ahead of us! We drank coffee from paper cups for days! It took days to repair that train! Our train had to back up to take another track! My brother like to say, “Give me a buck’s worth of gas at a filling station.”

TV was invented in 1927! Before we had a television, we looked in a store window on Calhoun Street to watch.

Harry and I went roller skating at Sefferino Skating Rink every Saturday. All the girls waited at the door for him. When he walked in, they would all yell toward him, “Can I have the Starlight (dance), Har?”

When I showed my father my engagement ring, he said, “Who is that from?” When I said, “Harry,” he said, “That kid!” Harry was 19 . . . I was 22!

When I was an adult, I had a horse named Crushed Velvet!! We kept him at Marcia and Dave Bacon’s farm. I love horses! I also had a miniature horse named Dutch. We kept him in a tiny barn on Ebenezer Road. We built a dutch door for him.

Sugar is 13 years old, my buddy, my pal, my shadow! She followed me everywhere! Bed, Bathroom, … I keep looking for her to come around the corner.