Two things to think about

In my township early this week one of the road guys went up the very crooked lane of a house in the trees, to see if the homeowners were around. The yard was overgrown with vegetation; did they need help? He could not reach the door for the undergrowth, and there were currently licensed vehicles in the yard. Back at the road he called for a policeman, who brought two more officers plus EMS. They all went to the house, got in and found the homeowner, deceased, evidently for several months.

We discussed this at length at the town meeting this week. Nevermind the woman had children in the next town who had not seen their mother since their father’s funeral, early in the year. What should we have done.

Two postmistresses ago the mail and the utility disconnect notices would not have accumulated in the box, to be scooped up by the carrier for “return to sender, undeliverable”. There will be no help from the current postmistress, who has banned the annual Christmas donation station from the post office. Quite obviously not there to serve the community.

Our county sheriff has a senior watch program that pairs a deputy with a registered citizen, regardless of age, who lives alone, is disabled or infirm, for regular checks. We will do this in our township; ask our seniors to register themselves, and then brainstorm to be sure we have listed everyone we know of (even old curmudgeons!). In our house we secretly check on one old person on the road, and we will continue to do so, together with putting them on the town list, if they want to be there or not.

The idea after that conjunction is important, too. “If they want to be there or not.”

I never had to deal with a curmudgeonly parent; our mother resisted her inevitable dependence, but eventually got aboard gracefully. My grandmother, who lived to be just short of one hundred went kicking and screaming to assisted living, but could not overcome the united family front. A month or two in she also had the grace to admit three rooms of her own and two meals a day were very nice. The change of mind was good, as she lived there, happily ever after, for another twenty years.

Siblings or family members who may become responsible for an elderly parent need to prepare themselves before hand. How to keep the old ones safe can become bitterly divisive, with mom, dad, grandma pushing all the old familiar buttons. Perhaps you could make it a side bar at the next family picnic. Plans need good foundations; get started now.

My grandmother, on her sixteenth birthday. She almost reached one hundred years.

March 17th

Growing up I had only one grandparent, for all practical purposes, my Grandma Rolf.  My father’s mother died before I was five; I never knew, and scarcely knew of his father.  It took the great folk revival of the sixties to learn I was Irish.

I pressed my father once about nationality.  “I’m American.” I pressed my luck a little further. “What about your parents?” “They were Americans, too.”  He went back to his Scientific American. I asked my mother, and learned my dad was Irish.  Her grandmother called him shanty Irish, and he did not go back into that house until after her grandmother’s death.

In fact my father’s mother was all Irish, his father all Scots-Irish.

My great grandfather, John William Lytle, was born in 1832, in Pennsylvania.  He worked as a tailor, then a clerk, then took up teaching.  That career was interrupted by the Civil War.  He fought and was wounded at second Bull Run; his brother was killed at Spotsylvania.  He soldiered on, and was wounded so severely at Antietam he was discharged.  A short biography I found of him said his wounds hindered him all his life.  He resumed teaching, married Annie Crum, was the town clerk of Coalmont, Pennsylvania.  He held lodge and G.A.R. offices.  In short, a solid citizen, excepting, as the biography said, he had renounced religious affiliation.  “He believes that religion does not consist in form or mode of baptism, but in character and act.”

John William and Annie had several children; all became school teachers except George Marion, my father’s father.  George was a coal mining engineer.  He brought Mary Emma Hogue, his bride, back to Coalmont to live.  She did live there for seven years, through the birth of my father, John Lindsey, his brother and two of his sisters.  Mamie Hogue Lytle left Coalmont for her childhood home, Akron, Ohio, pregnant with her fifth child in seven years.  George Marion posted bond to assure his appearance in court, presumably on a child support charge.  He skipped, went west, lived under an assumed name, and died fifteen years later.  He abandoned his children.

Mamie Lytle, my grandmother, was the daughter of a stereotypical hard drinking Irishman, James Lindsey Hogue, and devoutly Catholic wife, Mary Cecelia Maley.  James was in the building trade, and together with his business partner, Frank Bisson, built the homes on Bisson Avenue, a steep hill in Akron. Grandma Lytle and her five small children lived first in the attic of the Hogue home on Bisson Avenue.  Mamie’s eight living siblings, her parents, her children burst its seams.  Mamie and the five children lived in a series of rented homes in the area, leaving when the rent was due.  The children lived on and off with relatives and in the Akron Children’s Home.

Alcoholism and Catholicism were the genes predominately infused in the Hogue line. My father was bitter about each.  His grandfather Hogue was a mean drunk, his grandmother a strict Catholic.  His mother being the oldest sibling, he grew up with some of his aunts and uncles as contemporaries.  As adults he saw some fall to alcohol. He was equally bitter about, as he considered it, the sacrifice of a cousin and his sister Ruth, to the church as priest and  nun.  When I asked her, Aunt Ruth never believed she was forced to be a nun; I have no idea what his cousin thought.

My father left the church at age twelve.  His lot was miserable.  He was generally in charge of his band of siblings; his mother absent.  There was not enough food.  Housing was iffy.  His Catholic education was supervised by his grandmother, until his epiphany: his mother was devout but the institution that led to five children in seven years was not housing the children or feeding them, no matter what the reason his mother had left his father. The Hogue clan never forgave him.

 

I grew up on the North Hill of Akron, Ohio, with a large contingent of red headed Hogue descendents living on the other end of the parish that was St. Martha’s.  The rift was so complete, in spite of my mother’s best effort, we never knew them.  My cousins, children of my father’s sisters, do not know them.  Apparently there is no grudge like an Irish grudge.

My father was aptly named for his grandfather, the Scots Irish who soldiered on.  The father who abandoned the children was brought home by his brother to be buried, but apparently in an unmarked grave.  There is no stone marking George Marion in the line of Lytle’s beginning with John William and Annie Crum Lytle.

My own Grandma Lytle lay in an unmarked grave for fifty years, until my mother said enough is enough.  Her children did not mark her grave, I will.  And so my Grandma Lytle has a stone, in All Soul’s, where her non Catholic children chose to bury her.

Considering my heritage on this St. Patrick’s Day, although I like to consider myself Irish, I pull up Grandma Rolf’s corset strings and follow Mom’s conscience when there’s work to be done.

And since I’m still Irish, Erin go bragh. 

March 16th

March 16^th is my grandma’s birthday. Ethel Lenore Cox Rolf, March 16^th, 1894 to February 1^st, 1989. Middle child of Melvin Cox and Lenore Smith Cox.  Born in Austinburg, Ohio, the home of all her farming grandparents, but grew up in Cleveland where her father was a house painter and her mother kept boarders.  Her mother’s congenital heart defect meant my grandma did much of the heavy housework. 

At sixteen she joined the other pretty girls in shirtwaists, getting on the street car, going to jobs.  Grandma was a cashier at the May Company from the time she was sixteen until she married Walter Rolf in August, 1915.  Perhaps she worked there until my mother was born, three years later.  My grandma worked all her life.

My grandfather was of solid German heritage, son of the greengrocers on the corner.  He was an only child who left school at an early age to work in the grocery.  When he and my grandma married he worked several manual jobs, but soon left to apprentice himself to a jeweler.  In 1923 he struck out on his own; was able to secure a mortgage on a house on West 23^rd Street, and set up as a watch maker in the front bedroom.

Mother said Grandma Rolf worked alongside Grandpa Rolf, and was a driving force in his success.  “She never let him get discouraged.”  She delivered fixed watches and clocks to the jewelry stores around Cleveland.  Grandpa Rolf, however, was in charge of the grandfather clocks; the movements had to be reset in the cabinets that were not taken to the shop.

My Grandma Rolf was a widow at the age of 51.  I was a year and a half old.  I was the first grandchild, a mighty fine position to hold in a family. After Grandpa Rolf’s death my Grandma took a job again, as cashier at a Hough Bakery.  A very lucky grandchild to have a grandma so employed.  I spent many weekends at her house.  She made the trip from Cleveland to Akron in her green standard transmission Ford, license plate ER 64, to collect or deliver me.  We were a one car family in the 1940’s and much of the 1950’s.  My grandma had the freedom to travel.

I stuck to my grandma like glue.  I know she didn’t spoil me, she grandmothered me.  When my brother was born she tried to sweep him into the group.  The first weekend she had both of us she woke me in the middle of midnight, put both of us in the car and delivered Walter back home, where mom soothed his hysterics.  Grandma and I went back to Cleveland and to bed. 

My grandma had friends all over the country, and took me on jaunts to visit them.  I remember sleeping in a two storey shotgun house with a railroad in the back yard.  The house shook when trains passed.  My grandma stopped and bought a beautiful steak and some other groceries.  The woman we visited fried the steak in a pan.  “I knew she would do that!” grandma sniffed the next day, when we were back on the road.

In our trips we visited the Blue Hole in Castile, Ohio.  The Henry Ford Museum. The tulips in Holland, Michigan.  I always sat in the front seat beside her. I learned family secrets!  “Your father intended to build all their furniture when he married Lenore!  If it weren’t for our family and friends they would have sat on the steps!”  Oh, the secrets I know.  “Henry should have married Iris Mielke! Florence set her hat for him, and snatched him away!”

I never let go of my grandma. She lived forever, until she was 95 and long tired of living.  Until she went into a wheel chair I travelled from Mentor to Cleveland to take her to Akron, to bring her to Mentor, to be part of the family gatherings.  She sat in the front seat and we kept up the conversations.  Grandma’s always began, “I remember….”.  She rests beside Walter Rolf in the Acacia Memorial Cemetery.

I remember my Grandma.  Happy Birthday.

Mom in Las Vegas

Mom came by her wandering foot genetically.  She was born in 1918 and on her father’s vacation excursions.  Niagara Falls or the Pacific Ocean, all the same to him, from Cleveland, Ohio.  I wonder what my grandmother thought of lugging bedding for a family, and probably guests, from one set of tourist cabins to another.  I do recall Mom telling of one vacation in which she had cherry pie for breakfast every morning.

Travel and vacations were important when I was a child.  A trip of several days to St. Louis when I was about six or seven involved motels and hotels, and probably tipped my frugal mother (and father) into the camping mode, the accommodation I recall from my childhood.  Some of my first blogs recounted family camping, and especially a tent my dad fashioned of a parachute, marbles, and a tent pole.

Mom budgeted for the annual family vacation.  She had a shoe box with envelopes, each labeled with something she was saving for.  One envelope was the vacation fund and the figures would accumulate down the outside of the envelope.  On one very cold winter morning the engine block of the family car cracked.  But by cashing some bonds and using the vacation fund our family left behind the 1935 Dodge.  My brother Walt and I were not sorry to be sitting in the back seat of a 1948 Dodge.  No more sheet metal slicing the backs of our legs.

When we moved to this house Mom was seventy, and still travelling.  In the preceding decade she had visited friends and relatives in Missouri, Texas, Florida and points between, accompanied by friends or her sisters-in-law.  Camping days were over, but I know Mom looked for the best motel deal available.  I have mental images of her at a motel counter, with tiny, white haired Aunt Helen Rita, negotiating a better rate.

Our Uncle Hank retired after we moved here, and mom noticed him and Aunt Flo taking a lot of little weekend trips—by bus.  Their church senior group organized the jaunts and mom was welcome to join them, if there was an unsold seat left.    After missing a few trips she would have enjoyed mom took matters into her own hands and joined Uncle Hank’s church.

The senior group of the church organized tours that required air travel and although Aunt Flo and Uncle Hank could be off to Disneyland or Broadway, mom was not interested in those tours.  Until the trip to Las Vegas came up.  Her cousin Tommy and his wife Mary would be coming from Texas to join them for several days in Las Vegas.  Mom was so excited she bought a new suit case. 

It would be my mother’s first ever airplane trip and I said I would see her to her gate and wait until she boarded (1995). Well, she could figure that out by herself!  It’s a long trudge to the gates at Cleveland Hopkins, but she only allowed me drop her.  As I slowed down, knowing my mom, I handed her two dollar bills and said that the approaching man, the Sky Cap, would be carrying her bag, and please tip him, and everyone else who helped her.  That’s how they earned a living.  I could not get out of the car in time; she got her suit case and marched right past the outstretched hand of the Sky Cap.

When I picked her up a week later she handed me two dollars, announcing she had carried her bag herself.  Everywhere. She and Tommy had a wonderful time.  In my files I have a picture of others in the party facing their machines, pulling handles, but Mom and Tommy sitting shoulder to shoulder, backs to a machine, chatting like long lost cousins.  I may never find the picture to illustrate the story, but you can see it in your mind’s eye, I know.  Oh, yes, she didn’t waste any money on those casinos, either.

Mom and Uncle Hank on vacation, about 1931

On the road with Mom

Mom passed most of her driving skill genes along to her kids, and I’m pleased to say I sent those genes, at least, on to my kids.  Both are very good drivers, unlike their father. (I knew him before the term Road Rage existed; that’s the descriptor, I’ve come to understand, for his passing a driver who irritated him, cutting back in front and hitting the brakes.)

When I was young I had no idea my parents drove well.  We never broke down, had an accident or were stopped by a policeman, so there was nothing to hear on that score except a remark on the wrong doing of anyone observed pulled over to the curb by a policeman.

Mom was more obsessed with speed limits than dad, especially concerning his love of beating a train to a crossing.  Any 1950’s road he tried this on could not sustain more than 35 mph, and he certainly would not have defied flashing red lights or descending gates.  I think she disliked the impression he might impart to three children bouncing in the back seat, urging him on. 

This is the same woman whose father taught her to put a car in neutral at the top of the hill “to save on gas.”  And certainly the same woman who did not protest when Dad speeded up a hill to give three jumping kids the thrill of being air born at the crest.

In thinking back on her stories, a lot of Mom’s driving skills came from her father, who I did not know, and her mother, my Grandma Rolf who took me on many trips with her.  Her dad loved cars, loved to drive and saw as much of the country as he could back in the twenties and thirties.  He taught Mom how to drive those big Buicks across country or through New York City.

Mom’s big city skills were impeccable. She was an excellent leader of a caravan of cars and took good care of her train.  For instance, my first rotary, in Boston.  I was following mom; we were in the wrong lane, and needed the rotary to stay on our route out of town.  She applied a firm rule:  my plates are out of state, let me in.  I followed in her slip stream; there was no metal on metal and not even loud application of brakes, we did it.

Her finest skill was “making the hole.”  She kept her caravan together, or changed leaders of the pack, by dropping back slightly and allowing another of us to pull in ahead of her.  We would return the favor if we needed to swap leaders.  Occasionally she would see the need of another driver, drop back and wait.  “Good, he saw the hole!” Or, “Come on, I’ve made a hole for you!”

The penultimate driving statement remained:  “My plates are out state.”   “Our plates are out of state.” “Can’t you see these plates are out of state!”  We saw the USA before interstate highways were invented.  Our plates were out of state!

My Uncle's caption.  Mom in the front seat, watching her father's progress.

Soup that Dad made

When I was ten years old, sixty odd years ago,  the world was more calm than now.  We went to school, came home, went out to play.  Mom was always there when we went in the house; dads did not come home until supper time.

One day early in September I came home from fifth grade, ahead of my brother Walt in the third grade and Mel in kindergarten.  I always beat them home; they had too many rocks and sticks to handle, gutters to investigate.

My dad was home!  Not Mom.  Dad!  He said he was waiting for Grandma to come from Cleveland and sent me out to wait for my brothers.  Our Grandma worked too, in the baby department of the Higbee Department Store on Public Square in Cleveland. 

Grandma had not arrived when three kids gave over playing and trouped back into the house behaving like hungry children.  Our dad came into the kitchen and announced he would make supper for us.  This was such a novelty we stayed to watch.

Dad found a tall pot and filled it pretty full with water, put it on the stove, put on the lid, lighted the fire and waited for the pot to boil.  He took a package of ground beef from the refrigerator, broke it into chunks and put it in the pot.

He looked in the refrigerator for some vegetables to cut up into the pot.  All he found was a stalk of celery, so he cut most of that up and put it in.  While the meat and celery simmered he opened and closed cupboard doors until he found a package of macaroni.  He put that in, and stirred the pot occasionally.  Then he told us to set the table for soup, and we did.

That big pot of soup, with milk and bread, was the best soup we ever ate.  Then our grandma came and dad left.  Grandma cleaned the kitchen, then put us to bed.  The next morning we got up for school and Grandma told us we had a baby sister.

One night some time later one of the three of us who could talk asked for soup like Dad made for supper.  We had to explain the ingredients. “That’s just depression soup!” Mom sniffed.  We out clamored her, and there was Daddy Soup for supper.  Of Mom’s meals, Daddy Soup and Swiss steak with mashed potatoes were the meals we requested.

Daddy Soup persists, unchanged, past the Grandpa Soup generation.  It was Grandpa Soup, for years and still is; easier to say than Great-Grandpa Soup.  It has been experimented with, but returns to the original—ground beef, celery and pasta.  We had a big pot of Grandpa Soup on Jan’s birthday this week and told Laura and Emily why it is called Grandpa Soup.

Some of the Grandpa Soup generation, fall 1976. Michelle, Roy, John, Shelly, Beth and Dad.

Names happen

When I was ten or eleven, and had a new baby sister named Janice—Janice, Dad said.  “I didn’t name her Janus"—my friend had a new baby sister named Kimberly.  It sounded wrong.  How could a kid go through life named for Kimberly-Clark, the Kleenex company. I come from a family that swapped names around, generation to generation.  

In retrospect, it was the cusp of not your father’s name.  Or mother’s, either.  It happened in my own family, right on the heels of Kimberly.  My Aunt Flo, faced with naming her daughter Ethel, after her mother, or Ethel, after her mother-in-law, named my cousin Barbara.  When my next cousin was born two years later, she named him Kenneth.  Barbie and Ken.

My mother was named Lenore Caroline, matriarchal family names.  Her brother, my Uncle Hank was named Henry Melvin, from his grandfathers on both sides.  His paternal grandfather, Charles Henry Rolf, actually had the same name as a sibling who died as an infant.  Except, the sibling was Henry Charles.  Thrifty people, those German immigrants.

My grandfather expected my mother to be a boy.  No girls had been born in the family for generations.  He was so surprised he dubbed her Nicodemus, and she was called Nikki by everyone except my grandmother.  All my aunts, uncles, cousins called her Nikki or Aunt Nikki.  My dad called her Nikki. 

When I married the naming situation was serious.  My husband was adamant our first child would be a boy, and would be named after him.  Another Junior.  When she surprised him, he named her Joanne (after me) and Elizabeth (after the girlfriend who dumped him after high school).  I was not about to have a big Joanne and a little Joanne in the house, and had no problem with Elizabeth, except for its length, so I told everyone to call her Beth.  It’s worked out well.

My second daughter also acquired a name she wasn’t given.  Her father again intended her to be a boy and be named junior.  Foiled again. I suggested a name to honor her Irish heritage, but quit that idea immediately on learning he would convert it to an ugly nickname.  For a girl, he said, he wanted Michelle. The name du jour in 1967.  Of Beetles renown.   She was Michelle from September, 1967 until July, 1968, when my brother and sister-in-law had a baby, and named her Michelle.

“We can’t have two Michelle’s in the family,” Helyn informed me.  Yours will need a nickname.  I protested ours was named before hers was even conceived.  “But we liked the name first,” she settled.  I’d never liked Michelle; Shelly was fine with me.  In truth, I don’t think my husband called her anything but Shelly.  And, my brother’s Michelle has always been Michelle.  A good name for each of them.

My granddaughters have traditional family names.  Shelly used my dad’s sister’s names, Laura and Ruth, for two daughters, and Beth named her daughter Caroline Lenore to honor her grandmother, Nikki.  Her son, France, may still be on the road to his name.  Born William Francis, he got his first name from his father and his second name from the gourmet hot dog establishment in the lobby of the hospital.  In honor of its being open on Christmas Eve, when he was finally born.  We call him Francis, but I’m thinking he’ll grow up to be a mighty tall Frank.

Nikki, standing by her father

Walter Ernst Rolf, Lenore Caroline Rolf, Henry Melvin Rolf, Ethel Lenore Cox Rolf

An anniversary

The pretty little Libester token this week caught me up short and set me thinking about the year I’ve been blogging.  It’s been way over a year since I found blogs, and followed many by bookmarking them.  Never confident enough to comment, completely entranced by the possibilities.

But, what to write about.  There really is nothing new under the sun.  One day in my kitchen I was telling Beth an old family story.  Again.  Again she said “You never told me that!”  Grrrr.  But, there it was.  I could write down as much family history as I remembered or found.  Next time I could say “Go look it up!”

The last ten years my Grandma Rolf lived, (and she lived 95 years), family members would pick her up and bring her to family events.  But she no longer looked involved, and I felt sad about her, alone on the sofa.  I’d sit down and ask her seriously about how she did something when she was young.  As if I’d wound the mainspring, she had stories for hours.  I can still see her become eighty years younger, with far away eyes, floating on air across the parlor floor to the doll on the Christmas tree.  She knew it was hers. 

I heard hours of stories and only looked at it as a way to make Grandma happy she was there. I can recall thinking “I should be writing this down.”  Of course I didn’t. I regret this. Later on, the last few years of Mom’s life, I’d ask her the same kind of questions and spent pleasant Sunday afternoons with her observations and recollections.    “I should be writing this down.”  Of course I didn’t.  I regret this.

Beth gave me a reason and an impetus, but how to start.  Still couldn’t bring myself to jump right in.  I got a blogger page opened, then I went to Pittsburgh with Carol, and this delightful kitten came into my life.  The rest, as they say, is history.  Today I even bought a new office chair, because, as you can see, he no longer fits on the old one.

I love blogs.  I’ve met people from all over the world, seen places I’ll never go, had conversations with people I’ll never meet.  I’m having a good time with the stories, and a good time with the cat who loves everything.  Last night I chased him up the steps.  Chin high, long white streamer between two front legs.  He’s much faster than I, and was around the corner and depositing his treasure in the girls’ room.  A paper towel.   The very first thing my three youngest granddaughters will do in June is crawl around under beds and dressers to get out all the forks, pine cones, spools, yarn, socks, toe people, and now paper towels he’s hidden away.

A year of Toby, who will be one on or about Mothers’ Day, USA:

St. Patrick’s Day green yesterday

Beth took a ravioli class and was so pleased with the result she called and asked Jan two burning questions.  Did we still have the noodle machine and did Jan know how to make noodles.  And, would her Uncle Walt be available to turn apple wood into apple wood planks.  It all came together yesterday; Beth and Caroline came down, Walt and Mark came over, and Bill and Francis went on the other side of Beth and Caroline’s line, where they carry everything on their backs and hike out and back for two days, for the pleasure of eating powdered eggs and oatmeal in the morning.  Although, Caroline informed me, her father also took the last two bagels and the cream cheese.

The ravioli instructor handed out pre-made dough, dismissing that stage saying “Everyone knows how to make basic noodle dough.”  Beth wanted to share her new ravioli skill, but needed to get over the basic noodle dough barrier. She also wanted a noodle machine, but recalled there had been one in use when she was a child.

The noodle machine came to live with us in the ‘70’s.  In fact, it was responsible for the reconciliation between Jan and Grandma Rolf.  Grandma never approved of her, and Jan responded in kind.  Grandma was still an independent woman when she got her last grandchild, but becoming rigid and unforgiving.

Back in the kitchen in Mentor, Jan and I used to throw parties that featured a house full of friends.  Lots of noise and confusion and the sort of food we normally didn’t have.  There were Jan’s famous Thanksgiving in July parties; her Chinese egg roll parties.  And, the beef stroganoff party.  Except ours would feature homemade noodles, just like Grandma Rolf used to make. Recalling all the time Grandma also spent rolling them out, I decided to spring for the noodle rolling machine.  Jan recalls it cost $49.95.  In 1975.  That was a chunk a change.

There we were, a party coming up and the noodle machine on the table.  We didn’t know how to make noodles.  Jan called Grandma Rolf.  Grandma was pleased beyond words to tell her long haired hippy granddaughter how to put flour on the counter, make a well, crack the eggs into the well, how many egg shells of water, start working the flour in with the fork.  All the way up to rolling and drying.  Jan didn’t tell her about the noodle machine, in respect of the new rapport.

Jan  told Beth exactly how to do it, and she did.  Uncle Walt was hanging out in the kitchen, having planked the apple wood.  We reminisced about the drying noodles when we were kids and Grandma Rolf was in our kitchen.  Noodles hung over the backs of every chair, in addition to being on towels on every counter.  Walt also told me about beans on the shelf.  He hated green beans.  He noticed his older sister’s method of disposing of runny scrambled eggs, and immediately added green beans to the ledge.  The cat didn’t eat green beans.  Walt got in trouble.

Because it was St. Patrick’s day, and because her mother and her Uncle Walt are very Irish, Beth made spinach ravioli.  When she and Caroline went home, they took the noodle machine and the apple wood planks.  The machine will live in her kitchen and her restaurant will feature apple wood planked scallops next week.

“C” is for cut squares, not cat

Diane  On the Alberta/Montana border wondered if Toby filed himself in the “C” drawer, and then she wrote a wonderful post about her father leaving the cookies under “O” for Oreo in his filing system, but looking for them under “C” for cookie.   My “C” drawer is refilling itself, so there will be more quilts.

Thanks to everyone for the kind words about Jan’s project to fill the world with quilts.  Here’s the story.  Although not officially diagnosed, I admit to a touch of obsessive.  Or is it compulsive.  Whichever, it keeps me doing “something.”  Jan is an artist and I have no idea what keeps her cutting fabric into little bits and sewing them together a new way.   

We quit weaving in 2003 and by 2004 Jan was quilting full time and I transitioned to my elected position with no authority in my township.  Most days of the month I’m out of the office by noon. For several years  I spun and knit, for a local gallery, until they closed.  Then I walked into the studio and discovered those tubs of fabric scraps that quilters can’t throw away.  I immediately devised a plan to work them off and made steady progress at those scrappy blocks until Jan’s customers began dropping their scraps behind my chair and stealing away.  Like a bag I had over looked.  Just like Topsy, it grew.

We learned about keeping busy from our mom, who always had something going on.  Quilting, needlework, canning, gardening.  She was seventy when we moved here, and after the bustle of putting things away she was out of projects at hand.  She walked right into the studio and said “Teach me to weave.”  We did. 

All my life Mom quietly demonstrated the wider purpose of doing.  When I babysat a little girl down the street Mom had me take her downtown and buy school shoes and a coat.  When the church needed a piano, they got hers.   I read the genealogical letter Mom wrote for my daughter’s research, and Mom learned by example.  She said about her father, He never was much of a church goer, but, theBroadview Baptist Church and everyone around him benefitted from his generosity.  No one in the neighborhood went hungry.  He was most happy when everyone around him finally recovered from the depression and got off WPA.

And I learned from my Grandma Rolf, Mom’s mother.  I spent time with her when I was  young, and we rode the trolley from West 25^th street to meetings of rooms full of ladies.  They cut and sewed  piles of clothes, while I sat on a chair and ate cake or slept in a corner.  It may have been the Broadview Baptist Church.  It probably was clothing to be donated.  I remember entering the room once, about five years old.  The ladies already there were quite dismayed.  My grandmother let go my hand, looked around, took a deep breath and said “Pull up your corset strings ladies, we have work to do.”

Some people write books.  Some people build skyscrapers.  Some people create art.  Some people sew five inch squares together. As long as Jan has guild friends who need to clear their stashes, the “C” drawer will be in business. 

Devil with the blue dress on

Joanne 1944

Maybe.  Maybe not.    The dress certainly is a beautiful little blue dress.  I do wonder where the rocking chair went; it’s a beauty,too.  Google Earth took me right over there yesterday morning, to 4214 West 21^st, in Cleveland.  The closed in front porch where the rocking chair rocked and Grandpa Rolf’s W.E. Rolf, Watchmaker hung in the window, has been restored to an open porch.  It appears to have the same garage as housed his shop.

 The road is still paved with bricks, although the horse drawn milk wagon isn’t using them now.  Brick pavement seems such a time consuming undertaking………

Just back from a side venture into brick road paving, which may be making a comeback.   Jane Street Clayworks says a brick road lasts fifty years, as does concrete, but does not have concrete’s pothole problems.  Asphalt needs resurfaced every fifteen years.  And, only specific failing bricks need to be replaced.  Learn something every day!

Our neighbor has lived here all his life, up on the corner of the main street.  Actually, it is many years past “main,” having been replaced by a freeway bearing its old route number.  When Skip was a boy the road was brick.  The sub-road still is brick, we could see it when the asphalt was ground up and re-laid last year.  Skip says on really, really hot summer days, when it had been ninety plus several days in a row, he and his grandmother sat on the front porch and watched bricks shoot up out of the road.  Occasionally they shot a radiator.  Our town historian doesn’t really believe that, but I do.

Not too old to figure it out

    

Well, the video issues are over.  With apologies to Blogger, it was a Joanne issue, not a Blogger issue.  The last post about my grandfather making movies is worth the look; it’s just charming.  Here’s one more of my brother Walt and his bouncing.  So happy my girls didn’t do this.

Bouncing baby boy

 
I have video!  In the end I realized I am techno-incompetent and took my movie DVD back to the fellow who DVD’d the VHS.  I downloaded some software to "rip" video's and got a ten minute free trial.  In ten minutes I couldn’t even figure out how to use it.

Here’s a little clip of visiting Uncle Ray in South Boardman, mid 1946.  The cast of characters in order of appearance are Mom, Grandma Rolf, Walt, Joanne, chickens, Uncle Ray on the tractor.  This is not the best clip of Walt bouncing, but I don’t remember what I titled the other clip.  So, stay tuned…..

The commentators are Jan, myself and Aunt Flo.  We did this probably in 98.  Aunt Flo was the last of my parent’s generation, and she survived Uncle Hank by ten or twelve years.  Aunt Flo was Uncle Hank's wife and grandma Rolf's daughter-in-law. We lost her this past November.  I made one clip of Aunt Flo having fun on a picnic, to post later.  And someday I’ll write about Aunt Flo at another picnic.  She was the eternal girl.

The very white Thanksgiving

In our family we remembered the Thanksgiving of 1950 as the year Grandma Rolf wore her spring coat and stayed a week.  She arrived the day before to help with pies and such.  We celebrated Thanksgiving on Thursday, November 23^rd, as usual.  In fact, I don’t specifically recall the day at all.  That holiday became memorable commencing the next day, Friday. 

The weather the day after Thanksgiving was bitter, bitter cold.  Snow was beginning to fall.  Not the sort of weather a grandma would set out home with only a spring coat.  So, Grandma stayed.  By Saturday night there was two feet of snow.  The neighborhood kids were out, the parents stayed in.  There was no solution but to wait it out.

The snow got to three feet by Sunday, when it tapered off and the men went out with shovels to tackle the drifts.  They did not make appreciable progress.  Back in the house Mom and Grandma were inventing things to do.  There was enough food on hand, the milk was stretched out with powdered.  The biggest disaster was dad running out of cream for his coffee and bemoaning all the cream whipped up and gone with pumpkin pie. 

My memory of Mom and Grandma is the two of them sitting on the sofa, the black darning box between them.  The box had compartments that held various colors of darning cotton, the darning eggs and darning needles.  Every holey sock was darned, every thin sock was reinforced.  My brother and I came and went, exchanging wet mittens and socks with warm dry mittens and socks pulled out of the register grates.

By Tuesday the men had made a passable lane up both Moraine and Gardendale, augmented by the ashes from all the coal furnaces on the street.  On Wednesday it was still cold, but the mothers couldn’t take another day of kids and our neighbor, Calvin Cole, walked all the little kids to school so they wouldn’t be confused in snow drifts over their heads.  Grandma went home.

There are no family pictures of the event; here are some I found on the internet.

The picnic table

Dad built the picnic table even before there was a patio underfoot or overhead.  There were so many people to seat around it, he built it big.  Actually it was the normal width, but extra long.  Twelve feet according to Beth, and that’s probably right.  She inherited her grandpa’s mechanical ability.  My supporting evidence is that picnic cloths were too short, it was stationed lengthwise in the screen house and when placed the width of the patio went from edge to edge.  Accessible from the front, only.   Even so auxiliary tables were required and some older relatives preferred to be on the periphery with their own side table.

Six to seven people could be seated on each side.  We were careful to keep count to stay balanced.  The table could accommodate even numbers on each side, but if one side outnumbered the other by three the table went up on its legs like a teeter totter.  “Sit down, sit down” the light side would shout to the person who stood up.  Or, “Don’t sit here.  Go sit on the other side.”

An Easter picture of what would have been considered the normal crowd.  Way before there were spouses and grandchildren!

Grandma Rolf didn’t trust the picnic table.

To combat the often present cloth flipping breeze dad made U clamps to hold the cloth to the table on all four edges.  They were aluminum strips about an inch wide and formed into U’s.  Another childhood drill.  When the tablecloth came off the clamps were slid back onto the table to be ready for the clean cloth.  We never lost or misplaced them.

Twenty or more years later I screeched up short in the picnic aisle of some department store.  There were my dad’s clips.  No way.  “My dad invented those!”  And so it goes. 

From Grandma Lytle to Shelly

Mom wrote this informational narrative to my daughter, who was assembling genealogical information.  Tommy and Jimmy are mom’s cousins, sons of Grandma Rolf’s brother, Elmore.  Ruby is their mother.  I found some more Rolf vacation snap shots and put them in a reasonably appropriate place.   And, this 1921 labeled by my Uncle Hank.

Letter from Grandma Lenore Lytle to Shelly, May 11, 1990

Dear Shelly

Tommy sent the information I asked for.  Aunt Ruby’s first marriage was to Elmore.  She had an unusual middle name for a girl.  She was an only child.  Her Mother was a widow and married a man by the last name of KOESTLE.

You said Laura’s genealogy listed occupations.  Uncle Elmore was a “moving picture” operator at the Denison Theater on 25^th Street.

Grandma (Lenore) kept a boarding house for the operators of Selzer Ave. because Grandpa Cox (Melvin) was a painter and work was non-existent in the winter.

My father was a watchmaker and was an apprentice in that trade for several years.  In 1923 he went out on his own in the front bedroom at 5214 21^st St. in Cleveland.  Later, he converted the double garage into a shop and assembled clock movements for the Service Records Co.  It is still in business.  The instruments were mainly in the then fledgling trucking industry.  Drivers were paid for running time at one rate and standing time at another.  My Dad also developed other clocks for other purposes.  The biggest headache was to get a strong enough spring in a small enough space to run the clock for 72 hours.  Times have changed.  Now we throw watches away and buy a new one.

Grandma Rolf work alongside Grandpa and was the driving force in his success.  She never let him get discouraged.  She made the deliveries of fixed watches and clocks to the many jewelry stores in Cleveland.  Dad took care of the Grandfather clocks because he had to reassemble the clock when he repaired the clock movement in his shop.

Henry and I cleaned many a clock movement in high-test gas with a solvent to prevent explosions.  Even though we were warned to keep the door and windows open, we occasionally disobeyed.  It didn’t take long to get “high”.  However, we were reminded over and over of the danger so we pretty much “obeyed”.  Guess that’s why I’m still here.

Dad employed my Grandfather Lou Troike’s next door neighbor Wilbur Ludwig, two men he had trained—Harry Maxwell and Eddies Jenkins (only had one eye). Eddies was my secret hero when I was in the 8^th grade.  My Maxwell had polio as a youngster and was on crutches.  Also, a young diabetic boy worked, but I can’t remember his name.

Back in the 30’s no one had much money.  WPA was the form of employment for many men.  Dad repaired alarm clocks at 25c and that’s what kept him going during the worst of the depression.  Then the Lewis Recorder hired him as a contractor and things got better.

Great Grandpa Rolf (Walter Ernst Rolf) loved to travel.  He would love all these highways.  Guess I got my wandering feet from him.  He never was much of a church goer, but, the Broadview Baptist Church and everyone around him benefitted from his generosity.  No one in the neighborhood went hungry.  He was most happy when everyone around him finally recovered from the depression and got off WPA.

Uncle Hank, tourist

Mom, 1933.  Another vacation, I'm sure

Great Grandma Rolf (Ethel) quit school after 9^th grade.  Algebra was enough for her.  She went to work at 16 as a cashier at May Co. downtown.  Money was needed at home.  Typhoid, scarlet fever, and other contagious diseases were the order of the day.  Rows of houses had signs on them.  I don’t know how the well people fared.  They had to stay elsewhere.  Bring groceries and leave them on the steps.  The Mom of the house really had it rough.  She was quarantined too and had to take care of the ill.  Uncle Elmore was about 18 when he had typhoid.  He managed to survive.

Before the stock market crash of 1929, Dad helped an unemployed carpenter by having him build a cottage in the Sheffield Lake Village off Route 2 East of Lorain.  We cousins had a lot of fun with our friends.  Tommy and Jimmy built a miniature golf course in the vacant lot between our two cottages.  You had to pay a penny to play.

Mom (right) and Uncle Hank at the cottage, 1932

We had Catholic neighbors behind us.  Of course, our parents went to Cleveland every day to work.  The mothers went in once a week to do laundry (no Laundromats) and we all were on our own.  We didn’t go swimming that day even if it wasn’t raining.  I was about 12 or 13 and younger than the 4 Catholic girls.  I had to go and hold their hands when it stormed and they were alone.  Never could figure out why they were so scared.  Always felt their religion should see them through any problem.  They went to Church every Sunday.  I didn’t go in the summertime.  Once in a while a visiting preacher would come to the dance hall and the community would attend.

As for me, I finally grew up.  I graduated from James Ford Rhodes in Jan. 1936.  I turned 18 the next month.  I went to a Burroughs Calculator School.  I had to be the fastest operator because I was the only one who had a watch.  I had to get done so I could time the rest of the students.  Good thing my Dad was a watchmaker.

I went to work at Bailey Wallpaper Co. in May, 1936 at 33 dollars a month.  My own claim to fame at that job was helping to set up Social Security.  I typed up those little cards for the employees.

I met your Grandfather through a neighbor who lived on our street.  Daisy Haupt knew Frank Neillie from WPA days.  She helped Laura and Frank and the three children (girls).  Again, neighbors helping neighbors.  Laura and Frank lived in Independence and we would all congregate there to play “Armbusters”.  You removed all valuables from your arms because 10 or more people playing solitaire can get quite hectic.  Iris, another neighbor, and I always made food to take.  We had to hide the cake in the trunk because Henry and Mike Baehm would eat the nuts and or the frosting.

Daisy and Don built a house on Valley Rd. and your grandfather helped wire it.

By the way, Grandfather went into the Army at 17.  He was medically discharged in 1931 and he always said 1932 was the year he didn’t eat.  He did manage to accumulate tools.  Walter still has most of them.  He had been a radio operator and instructor in the Army.  When he couldn’t get a job at the radio station in Cleveland, he got on a wheat carrying freighter on the Great Lakes.  He stayed there until he got caught in a cable and flipped overboard and broke his ankle.  He stayed with Daisy and Don, but I didn’t meet him then even though I walked past his house every morning and he would come to Dad’s shop to pass the time.

He went to work at Babcox and Wilcox in Barberton.  By then, Laura and Frank put two voting booths together and called it home.  We managed to meet there in late 1941.  We were engaged by Easter 1942 and married in June.  He wanted to be married before he was 35.  His birthday was in August.

When I was pregnant with your mother, he got the last work release issued by B&W and went to work for Goodyear Aircraft.

He always felt that he had been born in a wonderful time.  He had come into the horse and buggy age and went out in the middle of the Space Age.

Enough memories for one day.  There are more good ones than otherwise.  I’m grateful.  Love, Grandma