Kevin Riordan: Photos, memories of uncle recall joy of Armistice Day

November 11 will forever remind Dorothy Blair of the Armistice Day celebration her beloved uncle captured on paper in 1918.

Thomas Staller Edwards was 19 and at work in Center City when news arrived that World War I had ended.

"When the mad crowd went rushing and roaring past . . . I completely lost my head. I grabbed all the papers from my desk and dumped them out the window," he wrote.

"I wanted to kiss someone. I ran out on Chestnut St. and kissed all the pretty girls."

Edwards rendered the joyous chaos in blue script on 14 pages that his niece, 87, keeps folded among the abundance of personal treasures in her Maple Shade home.

"Uncle Staller was a master of beautiful words," Dorothy says. "The poetry he wrote . . . he would respond to letters with poetry.

"He was a Bell Telephone man for 50 years, an executive. When I was 16, he took me to a fancy event at the Aronimink Country Club. I wore a pink dress.

"It's nice to talk about those days."

Dorothy spends a lot of time these days trying to organize her keepsakes.

"So many beautiful things I've been left with, from my grandmother, my mother, my uncle. . . . He lived with me for five years, until he died in 1977," she says, in a voice that's genteel - and thoroughly Philadelphia.

"There's so much to tell you."

Dorothy walks slowly, cane in hand, through the spacious ranch house she and her husband built 40 years ago.

Luther "Burt" Blair ("it was one of those love-at-first-sight things") died in 1982. The couple's son Tom lives in South Carolina, and their son Bill lived with his mother for two decades until he passed away in 2010.

Dorothy's granddaughter and her family live next door.

"I never thought I'd be alone. I don't know how this happened to me - I really am alone," Dorothy says. But on this day, the focus "isn't about me. It's about my uncle.

"He never had any children, and I didn't have a father after I was 2," she recalls. "I was the apple of Uncle Staller's eye. He called me 'honey.' "

A favorite photograph shows a little girl with a bow in her hair and a dashing chap with a twinkle in his eye. "He was a ladies' man," Dorothy says.

Before Staller's marriage, he lived with Dorothy and her mother at 28th and Lehigh in North Philly. Her visits to his office downtown were an inspiration.

"I saw a big room with 100 typewriters in it, and I knew I wanted to take the commercial course at Simon Gratz. It was a beautiful high school."

The Philadelphia Housing Authority hired Dorothy as a $25-a-week secretary in 1944. She worked her way up through bookkeeping and accounting positions until she retired "on Feb. 28, 1987."

Dorothy says she could write a book about the people she worked with ("I'll change the names to protect the guilty"), if only she could get her computer running properly.

It's among many things that aren't working as they should, particularly when Dorothy thinks about how full life used to be.

"All those years I was the matriarch of the family," she says, showing me photographs of her as a lovely young woman, with a handsome husband, with their handsome boys.

"This house was so beautiful when I would have dinners here. Every birthday, every holiday. I decorated with live greens for Christmas."

A photo shows Dorothy displaying "my first and last beef Wellington." Another, a mock funeral she staged at a place she owned in Brigantine.

"Eccentric? Oh, yeah. Very," she laughs. "I think I got my sense of humor from my Uncle Staller. When I have an inspiration to do something, that's when I'm really living."

These days, she's inspired to write affirmations and paste them on the refrigerator. One proclaims, "Don't give up."

Another: "I am still worth something."

"So much sadness," Dorothy says. "I don't have anyone to share my thoughts with. And I can't do as I used to."

Nevertheless, she recently did something she's wanted to do for years: Share a bit of her Uncle Staller's story, and his reminiscences of Armistice Day nearly a century ago.

"Philadelphians," he wrote, "showed to the world the great relief [at] the end of this horrible nightmare that has engulfed the civilized world for the last four years."

Dorothy and I finish our tea.

"I'm so happy I called you," she says.

I am, too.

on Twitter @inqkriordan. Read the metro columnists' blog, "Blinq," at www.phillynews.com/blinq.