Imagine yourself someone else

I've thought recently about people who write books with characters. How they can live in the lives of all those people, start to finish, until done with them. Or actors, moving from character to character, not letting go of the persona until “it’s a wrap,” or however a film ends.

This isn't like walking a mile in someone’s shoes. I can do that, mentally. I've lost loved ones, some so young. I know gut wrenching, mindless wailing grief. I've stood at the finish line, cheering a marathon runner on to the end. I've listened to old folks relive their lives. Slipping into a character isn't walking a mile in their shoes. A mile or so and I can leave.

I cannot imagine a soldier. I've never been terrified. I cannot imagine myself a refugee; I've never been hungry enough, or seen my children in want of life’s necessities. I cannot imagine living in a patriarchal society. I cannot imagine accomplishing heroic feats of strength or daring. I cannot even imagine myself accomplishing a feat.

I cannot imagine having a screaming fit, or throwing things. I cannot imagine assembling or preparing a gourmet meal; setting a table for eighteen; having a dining room big enough. I can imagine cleaning up afterwards.

I am too literal. I am more corner German greengrocer than shape shifter. I cannot imagine how a writer moves through a piece of fiction, hanging all the facts in their precise places, characters saying the right things, arriving in the proper place, at their time.

When I was very young I wrote stories in my head. Once I had such a complex bit of conversation forging on in my head I began reciting it out loud, to keep everything straight. “Who the hell are you talking to,” my cousin asked me, from up in his apple tree. That was so daring, to hear my three year older cousin swear, I made up a story about that, too. In my head, of course.

I am so literal, my stories all are about me, and the characters in my life. I can write about them, but only as I see them.  My world of flat Stanley’s. Take my cousin Bob, there in the apple tree. I loved his mother, my Aunt Laura, but never understood Bob. I once met a man who knew Bob for years. He mused a moment and said “Strange couple, Bob and his wife.” I nodded. “Live like the lilies of the field,” he added.

Lilies of the field, a lovely image. Living that close to the moment, not. So, Bob hasn't been in my stories. Because when all is said, I’m of the corner German greengrocer stock; he got all the Irish dreams to live on. I cannot imagine that.

1943, the greengrocer's son and me

My Grandfather Rolf

When driving required forbearance—winter war stories

The earliest I remember being in a car and knowing it was a moving vehicle was after the 1936 Dodge coupe needed a back seat, about the time my brother became a toddler and was awarded the space between my parents. I've written of the misery of that back seat, but I have other memories of that car, too. Winter memories.

Ours was green

We lived on North Hill in Akron. The operative word is hill. In order to visit half my relatives, as my parents did about every weekend, my father drove that little coupe into the same valley I still live on top of, back up the other side to visit my aunt and uncle in Richfield, or my grandmother in Cleveland.

Dad put chains on the tires in winter. The chains clanked on the roads across town, and crunched on the snow on the hills into the valley, over the river through the covered bridge, along the railroad track and back up Everett Road, off on our visit.

Snow that melted to slush was a problem. Other cars threw it up and dirtied the windshield. I remember a trip home, dad stopped several times on Riverview Road to wash the windshield with a handful of clean snow from the roadside.

I wonder how snow was removed from roads back then, especially residential roads. I remember the neighborhood men shoveling the hill on Gardendale and spreading ashes from the furnaces in order to get up the hill to go to work in the morning. I can think of close to ten families whose breadwinner had to get a car up the hill. My brother reminisced of times all the cars were parked along the cross street and Gardendale hill was the neighborhood sled run.

We did not have our garage on Gardendale until about 1950; dad parked in the drive at the front of the house. But since that drive went downhill, in the winter he parked next door, on the Cole’s level drive. He drove Helen Cole to work in the mornings.

Automobiles were “warmed up” back then, brought up to temperature. One morning Dad walked over to the Coles, started the car, came back for breakfast. A very few minutes later our phone rang. “John, John the car’s on fire!” I heard Helen’s voice through the phone, dad dropped the receiver and ran next door. The 1936 Dodge was a total loss!

My last childhood memory of cars and winter is 1955. Mom and I were downtown Akron and starting home in rush hour traffic.  It began to snow heavily, the traffic moved fitfully across the high level bridge onto North Street. Mom surmised the problem was no one could get up Dan Street Hill. She pulled into the yard of a construction company, locked the car and begin walking. Dan Street hill was indeed the problem, snarled with cars sliding every direction. It was the best route home, but too dangerous with cars, so she took the longer, easier slope up Home Avenue. We went straight up the middle of the road, walking the invisible center line.

Cars passed us, moving slowly, until one just abreast began fishtailing. We watched for a moment, Mom sizing up the situation. She went to the driver’s window, announced she would tell him how to get up the hill. She would push from his side, her daughter on the bumper, and he would follow her instructions for the accelerator. Mom always said what she meant and meant what she said; the driver fell in with her plan. I was just the twelve year old in saddle shoes in back; we walked that car to the top of the hill, to, I hope, undying gratitude of the long line behind.

A screen grab.

Shoveling snow at my grandma's house,
before there was a back seat in the Dodge coupe.

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.

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

“Visitors to the Office”

My grandparents had a cottage in Sheffield, where the kids spent summers swimming and playing, dads visited on weekends and mothers went back to town on Monday to do the laundry.  Aunt Flo mused that Grandma Rolf didn’t appreciate all the work involved with a cottage full of guests every weekend, and I can sympathize after watching a clip of the parade of people in and out of the cottage door.  I’m sure the women visitors were as relentless in keeping up as my grandma, so the floor would be swept after sandy footed children, dishes washed, dried and put away after every meal.  Nevertheless, all that food preparation! And it still would be Grandma driving laundry baskets of bedding, towels, household linens and kid’s clothing back to Cleveland every Monday to wash, hang out to dry, and possibly even to iron before schlepping it all back to Sheffield.  With a week’s groceries on the seat, too.

All the guests appear to enjoy the cottage.  There are shots of people in reclining Adirondack chairs, talking.  My Grandma Rolf and another woman in a swing, sewing.  The inevitable mending, I suppose.  A lighthearted clip of my mother and her dad poking each other.  Here’s another clip of simple fun.  The young man holding open the door is mom’s brother, my Uncle Hank.  The man in the office is his dad, my Grandpa Rolf.  No idea who the other people may be.

As mom noted, they had hollyhocks.

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.

Making movies

What do you do with a moving picture camera?  Take pictures of moving things, it seems.  How simple.  How fun.  Here are two clips I can replay and replay and smile at their charming simplicity.  I have no idea who is the old man in the first clip.  A neighbor?  A friend?  The universal sweet old man.

This clip is another production of Grandpa Rolf.  Two little girls on tricycles.  No, not enough action.  Call out the neighbor across the street.  How about half the neighborhood, like clowns coming out of a tiny car.  A car leaves, an aeroplane flys.  That’s my Uncle Hank, a young man, strolling down the side walk, then Grandpa Rolf pacing.  That’s my mom, waving and going around the corner.  Probably leaving for work.  Just ahead of the milkman.  Making movies, 1936.

Fascinators

Dad used to have a joke or a quip about fascinators.  I don’t remember, but I thought it a bit silly that women’s scarves would be called fascinators.  I was going to post another clip of bouncing Walter tonight, but the clip I had made is too big to upload. Not because Walt bounced for six minutes (and eats dirt!), but because there actually are three separate short clips that I was too bleary to designate as separate when I went through the DVD.  It’s back at the shop to be broken up.  It’s worth the wait.

As I looked over the clips I have I paused at the file I called Ohio Turnpike and wondered why men are  fascinated enough with progress to do something like take a movie of the Ohio Turnpike the day it opens.  And then, as noted by Aunt Flo, spend an extra nickel to get off and film from the overpass.

Before the modern era

Way before DVD’s, Americans rented and bought 16mm films to watch and enjoy with family and friends.  The equipment was expensive, and while Eastman Kodak did its best to bring home movies to the mass market, you probably had to be a rich techno-nut to want and afford the camera and the equipment.  A 16mm camera cost two thirds as much as a new car!  Kodak introduced 16mm color photography in 1935.  In 1936, according to my mother, her father was taking color movies.  He was not rich, but he was a techno-nut, and I’ll bet he repaired a few clocks for jewelry houses, where clocks and cameras were also sold, in trade for his first outfit.

My Grandpa Rolf, who I never knew, left a couple of miles of 16mm film behind.  When I was a child the family movies were often brought out and were the conclusion to a fine day of visiting and eating.  We children looked forward to seeing the big reel of family movies that Uncle Hank had spliced together.  These started in the early 1930’s and went through the mid ‘50’s, with Uncle Hank’s 16mm home movies. 

Grandpa Rolf about 1936

Twenty years ago I had the movies transferred to video tape, and passed out copies to relatives.

When I was little the 1936 Great Trip West was booed down if anyone suggested loading it into the projector.  I watched the video tape once.  An hour or two of nothing but scenery to California and back.  When I sold one of the souvenir Apache baskets on EBay, the one and only tape of the Great Trip West went into the shipping box as a bonus.

In an absolute stroke of genius I had Aunt Flo watch the family movie tape with us and tell us what we were watching.  The recorded conversation was dubbed over the VHS.  Before she would come watch the tapes with us Aunt Flo made sure she wouldn’t have to watch the Great Trip West.

Aunt Flo in the late '40's

The tapes I passed out languished, as far as I know.  Jan and I watched ours once, including the great trip to you know where, and then they collected dust on a closet shelf.  Gathering around a TV to see their parents as kids wasn’t the wonder to a newer generation.  Or, perhaps the bigger than life movie screen in Uncle Hank’s family room was the magic ingredient. 

Joanne in 1944

Recently I had the tapes transferred to DVD.  It’s a two or three hour watch, and I must agree that people who were adults eighty years ago still aren’t fascinating.  But much of what was filmed still interests me.  My grandfather had people walk up and down the street as he filmed them.  His parade starts out as a small group of youngsters and grows as adults apparently come off their porches and join the line going up the street, across and down.  Adult subjects had to be set in motion.  Children were filmed at what they do best.  Most amazing of all, my parents and grandparents did not come with white hair.

Watching the DVD again and taking off some screen shots has given me a whole new project.  I must learn how to make video clips.  My brother Walt bounced himself up and down in the arms of whoever held him.  You have to see it to believe it.

Walt, bouncing Grandma Rolf, 1946

I'm working on the video!

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

Walter E. Rolf trips

At Quaker Oats on the way to Niagara Falls.  In front to back pairs, Uncle Hank, Grandma Rolf.  My mother is the young girl in front of her tall father, Walter Rolf.  Beside Walter, Grandpa Cox.  In front of him, Grandma Cox.  And assorted friends and other relatives, including Grandpa Rolf's step-father, Lou Troike. 

My mother saw a deal of the country as a child in the late ‘20’s and 1930’s because her father loved to travel.  He packed up more than his family.  These were group excursions, friends and relatives, travelling in vacation convoys.  My grandfather looks quite the expansive and ebullient patriarch in these pictures; I see him as a Teddy Roosevelt, Rough Rider kind of expedition leader.  Mom’s grandparents, Grandma and Grandpa Cox were generally along on these trips.  Grandpa Cox didn’t drive.  Grandma Cox didn’t drive well.  Car transmissions were standard shift back then.  Marcia could navigate the flat well, but the hills were iffy.  To solve this, her car was always between two others.  Her standard instruction was to shift to neutral and be pushed up the hills by the trailing car and go down the hill on the bumper of the lead car.  Apparently it was a standard and well oiled routine for all of them. 

Marcia Cox and Ethel Rolf at Niagara Falls

I understood mom’s stories of Tourist Camps; we passed a lot of these highway cabins and motels in my own family vacationing in the 1950’s.  The link is to an excellent description of tourist accommodations and dining in the 1930’s.   Mom said on their trip west in 1936 she ate cherry pie for breakfast every morning.  My Grandma Rolf told me that Uncle Hank was a difficult eater, who, to her mortification, exclusively ordered mashed potatoes and water.  She only got substantial food into him when she could make him a sandwich from the provender of a grocery store.

Uncle Hank, Grandma Rolf (at the car), unknown friend.

Grandpa Rolf had a movie camera on the great trip west in 1936.  There are hours and hours of moving pictures of scenery. In black and white. In the entire film the one scene with people was my grandmother, mother and uncle emerging from a trading post.  Ten seconds of footage.

The surviving souvenirs of the great trip came from trading posts.  When my grandmother sold her house, most of the Apache trays, olla’s, rugs and pots were packed away at my parents’ house, then sent to my house, where all remained packed away except one large olla, where we threw our wet mittens and scarves every winter.  The souvenirs all moved in here with us and kicked around for a few years until I decided to send them to a more appreciative home via EBay.  The prices the baskets brought were astounding, and even after I took a severe email lashing from someone who could not believe the olla “had been the family junk basket for over one hundred years,” in its very deteriorated condition it sold for several hundred dollars.  As did the pots and rugs.  A winnowing tray was the real sleeper, and as a bonus, we sent the purchaser a tape of the hours and hours of moving scenery from the great trip west.

Mom remained a great traveler and commandeered children and grandchildren for annual vacations.  In 1980 we took our own great trip west, to make another visit to Yellowstone and to see Mt. St. Helens.  Somewhere in Wyoming mom looked out from the interstate and said “Look.  Over there.  It’s the road we took in 1936."  A snaking little road way down in the valley, climbing up the mountain.  We left at the next exit, worked down to the road and took it for the rest of the day.  It was serious, tiring, hand over hand mountain driving. We had a flat on the camper trailer on the mountain and I off-loaded ten kids to the other side of the guard rail while it was being repaired.  A rattle snake backed us all up to the guard rail and we climbed up and just took it all in.  I could just see Grandpa Rolf, jaunty pipe, leaning back in the seat and leading his expedition.

South Boardman

Friends of my Rolf Grandparents, Ray and Marie Hudson, lived in South Boardman, Michigan.  How did they meet, a farmer from the north of the lower peninsula, and a watchmaker from Cleveland?  I have a picture of them visiting with my grandparent’s friends, the Becksteds; perhaps that was the introduction.  My grandmother didn’t date these pictures.

Walter Rolf, Ray Hudson, Marie Hudson, Elsie Becksted, Ethel Rolf

Walter Rolf and Howard Becksted in South Boardman

Uncle Ray farmed with horses, which were still at pasture when I was a child and they had been replaced by a tractor.  I remember Uncle Ray telling me when I was twelve or so, the horses had always rested on Sunday; now they were retired, spending seven days a week at leisure for their long service.  They were big horses, and I won’t say Clydesdales, as I don’t know for sure, but they were very large work horses and had fringes of hair around their hooves.

I barely remember Aunt Marie, except as a large and pleasant woman who ran a tight farm kitchen.  She cooked on a wondrous wood burning stove with many lids that lifted up with special handles.  There was also a kind of boiler where hot water for dishes was available.  She made dinner for the men coming in from the chores or the fields.  Breakfast was not to be believed.  Every individual food I ever had for breakfast, all served up together and consumed en masse by the men.  Bacon, ham, eggs, pancakes, oatmeal, pie, toast, butter and jam, and more I’m sure I don’t recall.  Even more food on the table for dinner, this time fried or roasted meat, mashed potatoes, vegetables of every sort, custards and puddings, loaves of bread, pies.  I can’t recount it all.

Ethel Rolf, Marie Hudson, Ray Hudson and Shep, Lenore Lytle and Joanne-around June 1943

John Lytle, Walter Rolf, Ethel Rolf, Lenore Lytle and Joanne-same trip

I do remember Aunt Marie clearly from a visit when I was three or four; after that there was a slender, quiet lady named Aunt Louise.  In recollecting trips to South Boardman, the grown-ups always mentioned that no one ever knew Aunt Marie’s age, not even Uncle Ray, but they assumed she may have been as much as twenty years older.  Personally, I would have been worn to a nub by the amount of labor required of both Uncle Ray and Aunt Marie.

Uncle Ray and Aunt Marie had no children.  Uncle Ray still farmed in the ‘40’s, and had dairy cows as well.  I was sent down the lane one night to bring the cows home and was so proud, never realizing Shep, the border collie, had done the job.  They had no children, but took in and raised up children from town or from neighboring farms where there were too many mouths to feed.  I was introduced to one such young man when I was twelve and visiting with my grandmother.  He was home for the summer, from college, and visiting.

In a memorable visit when I was three or four, Uncle Ray was milking cows and I was watching.  Two barn cats sat nearby, and caught squirts of milk he occasionally sent their way. 

Not Uncle Ray, but a treasured picture, found on the internet

 When he sent a squirt at me I ran out of the barn and wiped the milk off my leg with weeds and grass!  On that same visit I was standing near him when he opened a kitchen drawer, took out a long black box and pressed a little gold button.  I was all big eyes as he took a long silver knife and closed the box.  He tested the knife against his thumb and invited me to come with him.  We went out the kitchen door onto the long side porch, down the porch, down the stairs and down the path to the chicken yard.  He caught, killed and took the heads off two chickens so quickly I did not know what had happened.  We went back up the path and the women were waiting on the porch with boiling water to scald and pluck the chickens.  I left.  I knew if anyone ever again opened a long box and extracted a silver knife, I would not go with them.

When I in my teens, on family vacations, we visited the Hudson’s on our way north.  I remember we had to pass Fife Lake to get to the farm, and there was an octagon barn near them.  We would go on north; I recall stopping for the Cherry Festival in Traverse City one year, and Uncle Ray and Aunt Louise were there.  We would go on to cross the Straites of Mackinaw on the ferry and keep on going west.  The Mackinaw Bridge was completed before I grew up.  It remained a family destination and Jan says they still took the ferry.  Mom would go out of her way to take a ferry.

When Grandma Rolf died in 1989, mom sent a note to the Hudson’s in South Boardman, with another note on the outside to asking it please be forwarded if anyone knew if Ray Hudson might still be alive.  Her note came back marked UNKNOWN.  How sad.  Contact was kept well into the 1960’s, but how could anyone have known to contact the Rolf’s on the passing of the Hudson’s.

For several years I exhibited at an art show near Charlevoix.  On the way home one year I turned off to South Boardman.  Nothing was familiar and I went up and down a few roads, including one called Hudson Road, but I didn’t recognize the farm, or even find the octagon barn.  The memories are familiar only in my mind.