Joan Headland; store owner was hard-headed, soft-hearted

In the 1940s, Joan A. (Ferraro) Headland fought World War II on the homefront by working on the railroad. She hauled 50-pound blocks of ice to cool the engines of trains parked in the roundhouse in Mingo Junction, Ohio.

''Here was this tiny, 5-foot woman in overalls loading these huge blocks of ice onto the cars. She was like Rosie the Riveter," said Mrs. Headland's daughter, Corey O'Brien, referring to the wartime poster-girl tribute to women who took on manual labor while the men went off to war.

After the war, Mrs. Headland owned and operated a grocery store in Mingo Junction for more than 40 years. Mrs. Headland, who moved from Ohio to Watertown in 1986 to be near her daughter, died of a heart ailment Thursday at Chilton House in Cambridge. She turned 93 on New Year's Day.

In her somewhat legendary life, the feisty but gentle-hearted Mrs. Headland could be compared to other heroic women in fact and fiction.

In the early 1970s, for example, Mrs. Headland's Georges Run Grocery Store was held up by a man in a suit with a stocking over his face. He poked a gun in Mrs. Headland's ribs and demanded money. She picked up a crowbar, refused to give him the $10 in her cash register, told him to get a job, and chased him out of the store.

Mrs. Headland was born in Pittsburgh, one of 10 children of Italian immigrant parents. As a girl, she knitted scarves, socks, and gloves for soldiers in World War I. Though she caught the flu, she survived the epidemic in 1918, which killed one of her sisters.

Her parents separated and Mrs. Headland moved with her father to Mingo Junction, a town near Steubenville, Ohio.

''Mama had a hard life," her daughter said. But she persevered, working multiple shifts on the railroad while her father worked at a steel company.

Together, father and daughter built with their own hands what would become her grocery store, with three rooms in back where she lived. Mrs. Headland opened her store in 1945. ''Mama worked very hard 365 days a year, from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.," said O'Brien, of Watertown.

While working on the railroad, Mrs. Headland met Vern O'Brien, an engineer, and after the war, they married. After eight years, Corey O'Brien said, her parents divorced. Yet, she said, after his death, her mother cared for his two children from a previous marriage.

When O'Brien was about 10, she said, her mother married Kenneth Headland, a steelworker. They had been married for 20 years at the time of his death.

''Mama wanted me to have a better life than she had had," O'Brien said, ''and she scrimped and saved to make that happen."

She saw to it that her daughter's musical talents were developed and paid for her piano lessons, though they didn't have a piano at home. O'Brien's partner, Wende Allen said that when O'Brien was taking piano lessons as a child, she would draw a piano keyboard and practice playing imaginary keys on the kitchen table.

That was too much for Mrs. Headland to take. ''Joan took Corey to Pittsburgh, and when she asked the piano salesman how much the pianos cost, he looked at her and told her she couldn't afford them," Allen said. ''She persisted and asked what the best piano was. She bought Corey a mahogany Steinway grand."

It sits in their Watertown home today.

Mrs. Headland's savings paid for O'Brien's tuition at the New England Conservatory of Music and at the Conservatoire Nationale de Musique in Paris for a year.

Mrs. Headland's family was not the only beneficiary of her generosity.

O'Brien recalled an occasion in 1958 when a domestic violence victim came into her mother's store with her child. Not only did Mrs. Headland give the woman groceries; she took the boots off the feet of her own child and gave them to the woman's.

When she moved to Watertown, Mrs. Headland insisted on living independently and had brief thoughts of retiring.

''She was in the apartment for one day and decided she had to find a job," her daughter said.

She found work as cashier and clerk at Christy's Market in Belmont.

The next year, Christy's, since closed, gave her its employee achievement award. After about seven years at Christy's, Mrs. Headland took a break from working but soon was back, this time at Winter's Hardware in Belmont. She stopped working at age 88.

Mrs. Headland leaves no other relatives.

A memorial service will be held tomorrow at 11 a.m. in Payson Park Congregational Church in Belmont.