Papers of Dorothy Evelyn Genevieve Fappiano Hawkins and Esther Elvira Linnea Anderson, 1930s-2020 (inclusive), 1930s-1982 (bulk)

Esther Elvira Linnea Anderson was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1906. She was one of six children of Ludwig Anderson (1873-1973) and Hannah Rydberg Anderson (1870-1957), both immigrants from Sweden who met and married after coming to the United States. Anderson grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. After finishing the eighth grade she went to work to help support the family. She met her husband Guglielmo Fappiano (1900-1945) when they were both working at Bradley's, a candy making company. They married in 1932. They had two sons and one daughter, Dorothy. Guglielmo Fappiano, who went by the name "Babe Gibbons," was a semi-professional boxer, prizefight announcer, gym manager, and for a brief time, a vaudeville announcer. In the late 1930s, he managed the Connecticut Yankees of New Haven, a women's sports team that played indoor baseball, softball, and basketball. Anderson worked as a cleaner in the Yale University dormitories and then as a waitress in the dining hall. She also worked as a laundress in private homes and did catering jobs. After her husband's death, she changed her name, as well as those of her sons, from Fappiano to Anderson, and briefly moved to California with her daughter Dorothy Hawkins' family, where they combined households to make ends meet while her daughter's husband completed his medical training. Anderson returned to New Haven in 1950 and spent her remaining working years living in households as cook and housekeeper. Anderson died in 1997.

Dorothy Evelyn Genevieve Fappiano Hawkins was born on October 8, 1923 in New Haven, Connecticut. She attended Hillhouse High School where she graduated in 1941 after completing a college preparatory course. During the war she worked at a local machine gun factory. She matriculated at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in January 1945. At college she met medical student Joseph Albert Hawkins from East Saint Louis, Illinois. They married on February 6, 1946 at the Swedish Congregational Church in New Haven. They had three daughters, Stephanie Hawkins Smith, Deborah Hawkins Lockwood, and Claudia Hawkins McLemore. After the birth of her first daughter in November 1946, Hawkins did not return to college and the family moved to Boston so Joseph Hawkins could attend Harvard Medical School. After his graduation they moved to Long Beach, California, for his internship. When she became pregnant with their second child she left her job and Joseph Hawkins joined the Army in order to receive an officer's pay while interning. Joseph's military job as an army doctor took the family to Germany (1950-1952), where Hawkins had her third child; San Francisco (1952-1955); Denver (1955-1956, 1960-1967); Honolulu (1956-1960); El Paso (1967-1970), where Hawkins returned to college and earned her B.S. in Education at the University of Texas at El Paso (1970); Washington (1970-1972); and Phoenix (1972-1999). Hawkins died in a car accident in 1999.