Mose Drachman never knew where he would lay his head at night. His wife, Ethel, had a penchant for renting out most of the rooms in whatever house they were living, including their own bedroom.
Some nights, he was relegated to a mattress on the parlor floor, and on other occasions, he crammed his 6-foot frame onto the living room couch with his feet dangling over the edge.
Little did he realize when this petite attractive young woman danced before his eyes that he would be feeding and housing strangers the rest of his life.
But Ethel had made up her mind she wanted to run a boardinghouse, and Mose knew early in their marriage that if Ethel wanted something, she would find a way to get it.
Born June 7, 1865, in Danville, Virginia, Ethel Morton Edmunds readily admitted her life was ideal on the family’s small Southern estate.
“Until I was 19 years old,” she confessed, “I had never even hung up my own dresses, laced my own shoes and certainly never washed a dish.”
In 1889 she came west to visit her brother who had ranching interests in the Tucson area.
The day her sister-in-law asked her to wash the dishes, Ethel had to confess she did not know how.
“All my life I’d thought what a prize person I was,” she said, “but rubbing against Western life certainly gave me a new sense of values, and I realized I wasn’t good for much of anything.”
The one thing Ethel did excel at was dancing. She was a popular partner at Saturday night parties but realized most of her partners glided across the floor as gracefully as a drunken coyote so she started conducting dance classes at Tucson’s Orndorff Hotel. One of her clients was Mose Drachman, one of 10 children born to Philip and Rosa Drachman, who were among Tucson’s early settlers. Mose had enrolled in Ethel’s class on the pretext he knew nothing about dancing but in reality, as one of his friends acknowledged, “he could cavort like an 1892 Fred Astaire.”
Forgoing dancing for teaching, Ethel was hired by a school in Phoenix as Mose continued his courtship. In December 1897, the couple eloped to Long Beach, California.
According to Mose, “My marriage did not please the rest of my family. We were Jews — not very strict Jews, but they thought I should have married a Jewish girl.” The union, however, blossomed, and the couple settled into their first home.
One night, Mose came home to find strangers in his house. Ethel explained she had rented out a room to get a little ahead on money. She had put the couple in their bedroom and much to Mose’s surprise, he found himself spending the night in their parlor on a mattress. Thus began the journey of Ethel Drachman into becoming one of the most gracious and well-known landladies in Arizona.
Ethel eventually bought the property next door and proceeded to supervise the building of another boardinghouse. Bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers, plumbers and electricians came under Ethel’s scrutiny and woe be the worker who tried to skimp on any part of the house.
Now with two boardinghouses to run, and the births of daughter Rosemary and son Philip, Ethel hired a maid to help with the laundry but preferred to do the cooking herself. In fact, except for her own home, she never built kitchens in her boardinghouses. She grew her own potatoes, beans, onions and carrots.
As Mose’s business interests began to revolve more around the Tucson market, he and Ethel moved to the Old Pueblo shortly before the arrival of son Oliver.
With the proceeds from the sale of her Phoenix houses, Ethel’s Tucson home included an excess of bedrooms, plenty of space for boarders, but only one bathroom.
Daughter Rosemary explained, “A bathroom in those days was a place to do what one had to do in it and leave, not a place to rest, cold-cream one’s face, or read a book.”
Ethel had the stark white stucco house, located on what is now University Boulevard just east of Stone Avenue, enclosed on two sides with screened-in porches that sat among an abundance of rosebushes, ivy and flowering vines. She added palm, pepper, umbrella, peach, apricot and fig trees to the property.
If she was lucky enough to rent out all the bedrooms, she would line up 5 mattresses or cots on the porches for the family to use and enjoy the night air, something Ethel propounded as healthy for everyone.
“I never knew a time when we didn’t have people with us,” Rosemary wrote in her book “Chicken Every Sunday,” which was published in 1943 followed by the movie in 1949 starring Celeste Holm as Ethel and Dan Daily as Mose. The film premiered at Tucson’s Fox Theater.
“We liked having boarders,” Rosemary remembered. “It was a family enterprise with us.”
In the meantime, Mose Drachman ran a successful laundry business along with interests in banking, groceries and retail stores. He served several terms on the Tucson City Council, represented Pima County in the second Arizona Legislature, was named to the University of Arizona Board of Regents and was elected to five consecutive terms on the Tucson Board of Education.
But Ethel was in charge of the boardinghouse. She cooked by instinct and seldom used a recipe. She could take the same food served one night and make it taste so different that her boarders had no idea they were eating the same thing the next night.
When Mose bought a new car and wanted to build a garage for it, thrifty Ethel surprisingly agreed. As the garage went up, so did an attached two-bedroom house that could accommodate additional boarders and bring in enough to pay for the entire project.
Ethel died at her home Sept. 11, 1946, at the age of 81. The boardinghouse stayed in the family until 1969 when son Oliver sold it. People still drive by today to see the boardinghouse that Ethel built so long ago.
