Grandma’s siblings always called her that. . . .the story I heard was that she was the ‘baby’ of her family. Interestingly enough, that isn’t strictly true: she was second to the last ahead of her little brother Donald (he died of an adverse reaction to a new drug called Penicillin as a relatively young man). I actually do remember that her brothers that I knew (John, George, and Oscar) did always call her ‘Babe’. Of course, Grandpa always called her ‘MOM’ in my presence. I think I was probably around 10 before I knew that her name was ‘Esther’.
Great Aunt Clara (Grandpa’s older sister) told me this story when I was a little boy. Grandpa’s siblings also called him by his nickname (‘Doc’), and I asked Aunt Clara why, being a curious little twerp. She said that when he was a little boy, they caught him putting a cat’s paw in his mouth. . . .when asked why he was doing that, he replied ‘Because I’M the Doctor!’. According to Great Aunt Clara, he’d seen a Doctor put a thermometer into someone’s mouth, so that was what he was doing with a cat’s paw! The name stuck: I hear people call him that until the end of his life.
Grandma told me that when she and Grandpa were first married, she always called him ‘Doc’ like everybody else. One day Grandpa was up in the pulpit (I assume giving a message for the Gideons, which I saw multiple times during my childhood), and my Dad (just a little kid at the time) called out “Doc’s up there!” so that the whole congregation could hear him. Grandma said that she was so mortified that she resolved to call her husband ‘Dad’ thereafter, which she did until his death.