The secret life of Grandma

“The secret life” has been a rejoinder between Laura and me for the last six months. Emptying the trash one evening, she spied an empty Panera coffee cup. “What’s this!? When did you go there!? I didn’t know about it!”

“The secret life of grandma,” I replied.

Since then, if she knows, she smugly remarks she knows about the secret life of grandma. But, if she doesn’t know, she sets about finding out. Toward that end, I try to leave a clue about new secrets. 

Today I met a new acquaintance for lunch, and told myself to bring back a napkin or some such thing for a trash clue.

Lynn is not so much a new acquaintance. We’ve sat beside each other for months, waiting for our respective one p.m. counselor appointments. We get on so well for ten minutes every other Wednesday, we decided to go to lunch. And so we did, today.

We discovered in short order, we grew up on North Hill in Akron. My sister and I often remarked how often children who grew up on the hill moved back as adults, as Lynn had done. North Hill is big enough to have three elementary schools, a junior and a senior high, so being from the hill doesn’t equate to being from the neighborhood.

Lynn, though, grew up on the third street behind me. She’s six years younger, and I didn’t remember her, so I asked if she knew my sister, Janice Lytle. “L-y-t-l-e,?”, she asked. “Was Melvin Lytle your brother? I still have the love letter he wrote me in fifth grade!”

The restaurant closes at two, and they sort of boosted us out, so we’ll pick this up another time. And, I forgot to bring home a clue. So, let's not mention this until next time.

Easter, about 1955

My brother Walt, me, mom, Mel,

and Janice, the baby who can't lift Mom's purse.

I've used this picture before, and sub-titled Jan as the one who never was spanked.

Take a peek, Mel....

Five years ago I wrote about Mel's jade tree.

Mel is our brother who died when he was twenty-eight. Long time ago.

He started this from a cutting--the world must be full of jade trees folks just wanted to grow.

I don't know how old it was when Jan rescued it from Mel's kitchen sink, back in 1976.

When she and Tom, Mom and I set up housekeeping, the jade tree came here, of course, and did what happy jade trees do. It grew.

It was not happy enough to bloom more than once, in 2005.

But it did grow, and was moved to a bigger pot several times.

When it went to this pot it took three of us, and we did it in the foyer, not outdoors.

It was obvious the plant had a small window of opportunity to get through the front door.

I wrote the Cleveland Botanical Gardens and offered them a jade tree, approximately three and a half feet by three and a half feet square. They had only to move it.

They did, in 2011.

I said one day I would take a look at the Melvin Lytle Memorial Jade at the Cleveland Botanical Gardens.

Today Ruth and I went.

There it is, in the foyer.

Look what professional pruning will do.

Jade trees can live five hundred years or more.

This one is just shy of fifty.

Now you know where it is, kiddo.

Keep an eye on it.

She always had a window

When I was small, my brother and I had a window to ourselves in the backseat of our little car, and it was the safest form of entertainment. Standing up was tolerated until we also were hanging over the driver or passenger. Room was limited, but shoving against the back of the front seat to rearrange our bodies in our space drew even sharper rebukes. Best just to glue the nose and watch the cows graze and the corn grow.

Eventually my youngest brother was big enough to be intolerable in the front seat. He never sat still. He was sent back. At first I think Mel didn't notice he retained his relative seating position, between two people. But one day, and we were all dressed up, and probably going to visit a grandmother or cousins, Walt and Mel were in a spirited round of fisticuffs outside the car’s back door. It was over seating by the window.

Our father settled it on the spot. He told us the date and divided it by three. The scheme was, if the remainder was one, Joanne sat in the middle. If the remainder were two, Walt took the middle. If the number divided evenly, Melvin sat in the middle.

The plan proceeded beautifully. Well, the one in the middle often was miffed and engaged in surreptitious poking, there were admonitions from the front, but eventually we arrived somewhere, tumbled out and were pleasant until the drive home. The plan did not change when I was ten and one half years old and a new baby arrived.

As usual she lay on mom’s lap, then sat in the middle of the front seat. But before Jan could be sent to the back seat my parents were driving a big Dodge station wagon, a mobile living room, so to speak. A rear facing seat at the back, a regular bench seat in the middle. My brothers sat in back, where they could hang over the gate, as the window rolled down into the tailgate. By a push button up front!

I don’t know what became of the middle rule. Jan was seven when I left home, nine when Walt joined the military. Families had more than one car in the sixties. As I recall, there were two cars when I was a teenager, then a third that Jan drove. Melvin bought something candy apple red. Walt was stationed in England.

I asked Emily and Laura how they determined who sat in front. I expected an even or odd day answer, but learned it was whoever touched the door first. At least they worked it out.

Mel and his candy apple red, two door car. Best man at his best friend's wedding, I think 1966. Two door cars are another story, together with cleaning Beatles albums with alcohol (vodka!) Another day.

Humor, wit and mobility of the cornmudgeon

Jan and I went to visit Walt last night, in the rehab facility. It’s a new building on the campus of the Summa hospital system that is one third of the near south side of Akron. His room had one reclining chair and one folding chair. Perfect for two guests.

Walt was asleep, but Jan knocked and he was awake and ready for visiting. He said he had no idea of how he got home last Saturday, except it frightened him and he was grateful there were no repercussions. For my ears, a totally unexpected confession.

We chatted a bit; Jan excused herself to use his washroom. When she returned, “Why is your wheel chair in the shower?” The old sly grin. “I used it to get in there and set off the alarm. They found me using the facility and confiscated my wheels. I have to ask for help now.”

Two days later he knows all the staff by name and tells stories about them. A doctor asked why he was there and he said because his kid sister sent him. I laughed and remarked he would not have gone had I suggested it and I got the “What do you think?” stare.

I asked what he’d done for therapy and got “Walk, walk, walk.” I was stunned. “Between two rails?” which I considered preposterous as he left arm lies useless. “No, up and down the hall.” I went into the hall and demonstrated on the rail on the left side. Back in the room the dummy grin again. “No, the right side.” He has enough function in his left leg and enough upper body strength to slowly navigate the hall.

“How did you get past open doors?” I was still dumbfounded. Two fingers walked, 
s-l-o-w-l-y through the air. “Across the hall to return?” Same two fingers, in front of the dummy grin. I guess he intends to perambulate through the front door.

Twenty more minutes of idle chat, and I asked “So, what else are you thinking about?”

“Electrophoretic separation.”

I howled, Walt grinned, Jan demanded to know what was so funny.

The beautiful science fair project he and dad built when I was in the eleventh grade. Dad drilled me on the answers and was not pleased when I was booted in the second round. He thought I should win a scholarship; I barely rose to an inkling of what was happening in that device and why. I told the judges at the second level that it was my dad’s project, which was my out. Years later it is among the good stories Walt and I share. I never felt a moment’s remorse, though it took my dad a few years to get over it.

There’s no discharge date written on Walt’s wall chart yet, but he intends to walk the left wall frontwards in two or three weeks. Oh, and will I bring him a 42 ounce coffee from BP next time. As he is committed to recovery, I will return to my regular programming next week.

Dad, my youngest brother Mel on the left, Walt on the right. I guess Mel was around five, so the picture is 1952ish.

Crocus

I enjoy looking around at the magnificent homes in Hudson on my several trips weekly to the high school. This year is my first time through in spring; Hamilton’s jazz group practices after school twice a week.

Crocus in Hudson.
The house is being repainted.

Last night I pointed out a discovery to Hamilton—a yard full of crocus. It is so wet this year they do not look their best, struggling up through puddles as they are. They made me smile, and remember planting crocus around my brother’s grave. 

Today I enlisted my sister to be the driver when I took pictures. Not to mention, she’s the only person who can still find our little four square of family graves, our brother, our uncle, mom and dad.

Mom and Dad

Uncle Bill and Mel

The four of them are together in Crown Hill cemetery in Twinsburg. I wanted to see if, almost forty years later, there still were crocus around my brother’s plot. I've been to the cemetery three times before. Mom was too pragmatic to take us there when dad was buried; it was twenty below and chest deep snow the winter of ‘77. I do not remember Uncle Bill’s funeral. I do remember Mom’s and Mel's. And, once we took Michelle to show her Grandma’s grave and her dad’s.

The story is the cemetery, not the crocus. I was going to tell how Shelly and I got locked in the cemetery the night we planted them. As we drove Jan said she was sure all crocuses were drowned by now. We arrived, and the poor place looked shabbier than ever. The detritus of winter, soggy all over the grounds.

It’s a perpetual upkeep memorial grounds. It’s always struck me as a Hansel and Gretel kind of place, Crown Hill cemetery, crooked fences, funny stone houses. There are no monuments, only flat markers. That appealed to mom, but it didn't work out so well at Crown Hill.

I wish I knew a little more about the history of the cemetery, but I didn't find much on the internet. I won’t call the office; they want me to preplan my use of the three plots mom gifted me.  They call me so often I may need to see what I do to get rid of them.

When I was a child passing these walls they all were intact. Now they are falling and fallen, sections filled in by old iron fencing. We stopped for a closer look and think the walls were built of old paving stones, blast furnace slag and even big chunks of coal. 

I cannot believe the walls and buildings of a cemetery were folk art fantasy. The cemetery was founded in 1929 and I wonder if the depression influenced the construction.

Instead of planting crocus and being locked in the cemetery, I think I’ll follow up with the story of Mom’s funeral. Everyone has a good funeral story, and I have hers.

My problem with Catcher in the Rye

        

I finished reading the book last night.  It took me three nights; I couldn’t just skim it.  I started reading the words, looking for clues.

I last read Catcher in the Rye in the early sixties, early on in college.  I was so naïve in those days whole concepts were explained to me.  “Stoned,” for instance, on the release of one of Bob Dylan’s songs.  Holden Caulfield’s ideas are straightforwardly complex; I know I didn’t need any code words explained.  I read the book, probably wrote a required composition on adolescent issues, probably concluding Holden would join the adult world and be no different than the rest of us. 

Remembering only a kid who was affluent enough to live on his own in New York City for two days, I started in again.  I ploughed two thirds through before I could begin to engage with the book.  An alert here; Holden had a brother who died at a young age, and I also have a brother who died too young.  Holden’s Allie died of leukemia around eleven years of age, I believe.  My brother Melvin took his own life at age twenty nine.  The book began having parallels for me.

Holden was troubled about Allie almost from the beginning, and as his state of mind became more obvious, I thought about my brother troubled over his beautiful daughter becoming deaf at six months.  One of Holden’s escapes was alcohol, my brother’s was street drugs.  Probably a drug added to marijuana, PCP, triggered my brother’s paranoia and mania.

When Holden walked from the bar, too drunk to be functioning, asking Allie to get him across the streets and down the blocks, the book finally engaged me as a treatise on mental illness.  I remembered my brother’s despair at the treatment of bi-polar disorder in the 1970’s.  The drugs that made him “sane” kept him asleep day and night.  Without them he could be violent.  And, he was a big man, over six feet, broad shoulders, curly blond hair, cornflower blue eyes that twinkled, an impish smile.

 

Mel sat at my kitchen table one day that spring of 1976.  We were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and talking about his illness.  “I’ll never be Melvin again, will I?” he asked.   I knew he wouldn’t, but, of course, I lied.  I figured he’d be someone, and Mel trying to be Mel was OK with me

.

It didn’t work out any way.  He closed his garage door, started the car, put all his music on and laid back and listened to the end. 

I was grateful Holden’s planned withdrawal from the world would be as a deaf mute, a plan so unworkable I had to smile at teen age angst.  And that Holden felt enough responsibility for Phoebe not to draw her into his eight dollar plan of running away.  We still end with Holden sitting in the California sanitarium finishing out J.D. Salinger’s cliff hanger:  will he go over the edge or not?  All these years later, I don’t know.  I’ll be interested in my grandson’s take on this one.

The basement train line

About the time my little brother, Mel, could put his finger tips over the edge of a table and pull himself up for a better look my dad started the freight business from the depot outside his shop, around the basement, through the steps.  The open topped fright car delivered a load of soap under the steps for mom to put in the washing machine and came back to the depot, to the utter delight of the little boy peering over the top of the plywood platform.

With a man and two boys for underwriters, the train business grew.  The square footage available at the large plywood station in the corner multiplied as the train tracks went up the hill against the shop wall, through a tunnel, stopped for crossings, went down a hill into the switching yard, to the round house.

The Lionel™ engine left the round house under a full head of steam, climbed the slight grade along the drive way wall, rounded a nice curve to the backyard wall, still climbing.  She headed straight through the open steps, stopped at the platform by the set tubs to off load mom’s scoop of soap and whistled along the down grade of the track on the next lower step, down, down, down, back to the yard.

I remember helping my mom with of loads of laundry while three guys whooped it up over their trains, which were a major source of entertainment for several years.  Then interest waned and the trains were boxed up on the shelf.  We kids still whiled away a rainy afternoon having marble races on the downhill track.  Two cat eye shooters can race side by side on O gage track!

Eventually all the rolling stock and equipment from the train yard in the basement was long donated to the train museum in Akron, and I thought no more about trains until my uncle was cleaning out his basement and gave me a Lionel™ locomotive he thought he’d borrowed from dad.  It had been run hard and put away wet, but I suppose that is the fate of steam train engines, the engineer and fireman’s combined ages not exceeding twenty one years.

I asked my brother Walt, the original engineer, to build a glass box to showcase the old war horse.  It was missing the cow catcher, saddest of all, and we had to buy a piece of O gauge track on line.  He built a wonderful glass box with walnut trim the glass panels slid into. I could interest none of my children or grandchildren in having the extremely heavy paper weight, so I took it to a nursing home.  It went on a ledge in the common room and had an audience of men in wheel chairs reminiscing, when I left.

With thanks to Bill Lisleman, who visited a train yard any engineer could love.

The Lionel™ Museum

Little boys lost

Dad took us to Temple Square after supper one night, Christmas shopping.  Three kids, ages eight, six and three.  About three miles from home, Temple Square actually is a triangular section at the intersection of Cuyahoga Falls Avenue and Main Street, housing a flatiron building with no majesty as it is only two or three stories tall.  There must have been quite a few shops in the building; the two I remember are the dime store and the hardware store.

We went to the five and dime first, to buy Mom’s Christmas Present.  Then we would go to the hardware store.  My dad and my brother Walt, even at age six, were no strangers to hardware stores.  The smell of a hardware store made their eyes glassy.  At age three, Mel could see over enough counters and into enough glass cases to be mesmerized himself. 

At the counter, as I paid for the gift, Walt asked if he and Mel could start for the hardware store.  Dad said yes, and they went off, steps ahead of us.  Dad and I left the dime store and went next door to the hardware store.  Dad looked around briefly.  No boys.  He took my hand and we commenced an aisle by aisle search.  No boys.  Back to the dime store.  Ask all the clerks.  Other shoppers alerted. Up and down the sidewalks.   I was hustled into the car and dad went home for help.  Neighbors set out in cars to search.  Neighbors came to stay at the house.

A couple of hours later, two little boys came in the back door.  Very tired and very cold.  Especially the three year old.  As the searching neighbors checked in they were given the good news, and by midnight the cold, dark adventure was over.  To be recalled in later years as the night the boys walked home from Temple Square.

The next summer we spent a weekend in St. Louis.  Dad was at a convention there and mom drove the family down for the weekend and to bring dad home.  We stayed at the Roosevelt Hotel.  We went to the St. Louis Zoo.

You know what happened.  We walked for miles and looked at everything.  We were watching a sea lion performance when they went missing.  First parents scan the near horizon.  Then the far horizon.  They snatch the hand of the remaining child and go into full search mode.  Park authorities are notified.  Mothers cannot remember if they put red T shirts or blue ones on children that morning.  And, why has every mother in the park dressed her little boy in a colorful, striped T shirt!  We walked more miles, accompanied by a zoo ranger. 

Suddenly, in the sea of little boys, mom saw them!  Sitting on an amphitheater bench, watching an elephant performance.  They thanked the ranger and hauled me down the aisle.  The boys looked up, then back at the elephants.  We sat down behind them and waited for the show to end.  At least, Mom said, they didn’t walk home.

 1952.  Mom and Dad.  Me.  Walt and Mel, who walked home last Christmas, but not this summer.

Private ambulance

Mom said if kids got in accidents, the worst happened the first week of summer vacation, or the last.  That was mom psychology about the excitement of leaving school and the excitement of returning.  There were major kid accidents in my family, except for Jan.  She tells me that was because she watched and learned.  Being the last child saved her broken bones and stitches, according to her theory.  It did save her lickings. 

Walt was seven or eight when he broke his leg.  It got him a pair of crutches and a ride to and from school every day.  Walt fell from a neighbor’s tree; a reasonably acceptable excuse for breaking a leg. 

Mel broke his arm, which didn’t get him rides to school because it was summer.  It also cost him a two mile walk home holding his broken arm and then extra visits to the doctor to keep getting new casts as the swelling went down.  It swelled badly because he had been somewhere he shouldn’t, doing something he shouldn’t, and would only confess to a sore arm for a day or two, for which mom gave him a hot water bottle.

To anyone younger than sixty, this must sound rather primitive.  There was no 911 back then and I never remember seeing an ambulance anywhere as a child.  Parents took injured children to the doctor, to set broken bones, and to the emergency room for stitches.  I suppose to get an ambulance you dialed 0 for operator.

My two trips were for stitches.  I cleverly sliced an artery in the back of my hand doing supper dishes.  Blood spurted to the ceiling.  My dad came around the corner, took the dishtowel out of my brother’s hands, applied a tourniquet, wound it tight with a wooden spoon, called a neighbor to mind my brothers and took me to the emergency room.  The forty stitches in my leg (fell out of a tree) were equally low key.

My brother Mel should have received the award for childhood injuries.  As the doctor picked the shrapnel out of his left buttock he could only say he hadn’t seen an injury like that since World War II.  The details are fairly hazy as I don’t understand bombs.  Apparently all the neighborhood boys, my brothers included, pooled their caps, stuffed them into a length of pipe, did whatever is required to make it shoot straight ahead and gathered one afternoon to give it a go.  All the little heads bent over the cast iron pipe as it was ignited for its trip across two fields. It went nowhere, except around and around, shooting increasing numbers of sparks.

Run!  Everybody ran.  Mel ran the wrong way, not fast enough and the little device exploded, against his left buttock.  With the support of most of the crew he limped home, where he and Walt invented a fantastical tale of running and falling down that fell to pieces when he had to drop his drawers for a mother exam.  Leading to our wonderful old family doctor remarking on his luck and the extent of the injury as the poor kid lay on his belly and had shrapnel picked from his rear end.  Mel was eleven that summer.

The shrapnel incident closed the book on mom and dad as the ambulance, but only because all further escapades didn’t involve blood or bones.

Left to right:  crutches, stitches, ambulance driver, shrapnel

Foreground:  never had a licking

Just goofy

The whole extended family often visited when the children were young. Several generations of brothers, sisters, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, grandparents, aunts and uncles in the summer, in someone’s back yard, watching all the children at play.  Children were required to get dirty so they could get a bath and go home to bed.  My niece and a nephew:

Sometimes the grown-ups might have made themselves just as dirty.  My dad on a tiny tricycle. Early ‘70’s.

My Uncle Hank back from a spin up the road.  I believe that’s my brother’s motor scooter.

When I got my motorcycle I drove it home from the dealer to my parents’, but needed practice trips through the neighborhood before I rode to Mentor.  I practiced corners, downshifting, stopping and starting.  Feeling pretty confident after a couple of hours, I started back up Gardendale hill and saw my two brothers across a vacant field, on Moraine.  There was a footpath between the streets that went down a hill, across a flat plain of ground that Grandpa Schook gardened, back up a hill and onto Moraine.

The grades down and up were fairly steep, and as I started up the grade to Moraine my bike gave a little choke signaling imminent stall.  Walt and Mel were yards away, above my head on the road.  Mel yelled “Downshift and give it some gas!,” both of which I promptly executed.  The front wheel immediately came up off the ground.  I looked up at two brothers laughing so hard as to be no help as the front wheel rose higher and higher.  No question I would be over backwards in a minute.  What to do?

I stood up on the pegs and leaned over the handle bars to get the front tire back on the ground.  And my brothers kept on laughing.  Leaning on each other, tears rolling down.  I crested the hill on the back tire and got the front tire down only when I reached the level of the road.  My brothers were behind me, shaking with laughter.  I was furious.  I did a one footed U turn and aimed straight for them.  At the last moment they moved aside, revealing the big oak tree they were in front of.  I missed it, too, and turned to face them.

“That,” said Mel, “is called a wheelie.  You’re damn good.”

Little brothers

Thanks to everyone looking at the old movie clips, and commenting.  I think they’re charming in their innocence.  My grandfather with a new toy, a movie camera, marching his cast of characters to show off the technology.  The images are soft, both on the film and in our perception of an older time.  Grandmothers, and mothers, no longer look like the image of my mother and grandmother on the film.  Grandmothers wear jeans and sneakers, not corsets and house dresses.

Babies are more in focus these days than seventy years ago. They are the focus.  Parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles could let children struggle to understand and learn.  I remember doted upon, but not smothered.  When at a year and a half I carried a Lionel locomotive across the living room to my grandfather and father, I wasn’t told to stop, or conversely praised for being a little girl with a heavy load.  Nothing was said until I arrived with my prize; then I was told to put it back.

We certainly were set loose in a minimum of clothing.  Underpants were the uniform to age three or four, when I grew up in the early forties.  Kids would get dirty anyway, so save the clothes.  And how about those big, floppy diapers.

Here are my little brothers, Walt and Mel.  In another clip Aunt Flo reminisces that Melvin was the cuddly baby.  Walt was the brave bouncer.  Mel is the blond, curly haired cherub sporting the flapping diaper.  Melvin was born in 1948, so this clip is 1949.  I recall two birthday presents.  My bicycle and my brother Mel.  Actually, he wanted his own birthday, and took April 1^st, the day after mine.

We lost Mel many, many years ago.  He’ll always be twenty eight, with piercing blue eyes, blond curls and an impish smile.  Walt is still Jan’s big brother, the one who picked her up, dusted her off and put her back on her bike. And here they are at a picnic. 

The other side of the mountain

Mom was a vacation improviser.  If there was a river across our route she scoured the map for a ferry crossing.   If it only took us a day out of our way, she navigated dad to the ferry.  If we were going west and she could finagle it, we took “the northern route” across the Straights of Mackinaw and the U P of Michigan.  I’m sure only natives spent more time driving the pine forests of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Mom’s other passion was “grey line roads.”   I was probably six or seven when mom convinced dad a grey line road would be the best way across a mountain in Pennsylvania.  To her credit, she did have experience with secondary roads thanks to her father’s great family excursions, and the family always came back intact.  But that secondary road across that Pennsylvania mountain tested her faith in map accuracy.  Or maybe it was a red line road on the other side of the fold.

I don’t remember our destination.  It may have been the year we went to Coalmont to revisit Dad’s grandparent’s house.  I was six or seven, Melvin was a toddler. About 1950.  Mom was watching the map and the road ahead for the road on the map.    She found it and dad turned onto it.  It was a typical secondary road.  Crushed stone, two lanes, graded.   A road through a forest.

Dad continued as the two lanes became one, and he was not pleased.  Little kids in the back seat knew that.   In the back seat we actually sat down and hung on. We heard what kind of a logging road he had got himself onto and the familiar “Now, John” as the 1948 Dodge rattled through the two ruts, climbing and climbing, cresting and starting the slow, tooth chattering descent.  We went down, down, down until we were back on a passable grey line road that ended as an alley between buildings in a little town.  Dad proceeded to the road ahead.

“Slow down, John.  Let me see where we are.”  Mom leaned out her window and called to a pedestrian “What town is this?” 

“Beaver Falls.”

“Beaver Falls!  John, your friend Pete’s parents live in Beaver Falls.  Don’t they have a grocery?  Let’s find it and buy some things for lunch.”  She quizzed a kid on the sidewalk and we were directed to a little Italian deli.  Mom went right in, introduced herself to the man behind the counter.  Such a commotion.  The man called his wife to come meet Pete’s friends.  We were taken right upstairs to a wonderful apartment over the store and mama put out a beautiful lunch for us.  The adults ate and talked, and Walt and I just ate.  It was too much to take in. 

When it was time to go we went back down the stairs and through the shop.  In the middle of the store Pete’s father stopped us, opened the silver lid of a big silver box and brought out silver wrapped objects he gave to Walt and Mel and me.  He showed us how to tear the foil and they were ice cream bars!  We’d never seen such a thing.  I’m sure we had to be reminded to say Thank You.  I don’t know where we went, but I do remember where we stopped after we went over the mountain.

Calling

One way of arranging play dates back in the olden days was calling.  Children used it probably up to the age of ten or eleven.  Not calling on the phone, we didn’t have access to that grown up device until we were well into our teens.  We really called.  As I’d reach for the back screen door mom would turn from the sink and ask “Where are you going?” 

“To call for Patty.”

“Come home when I call you for lunch.”

I’d walk the block and a half to Patty’s, or ride my bike when I had a bike, go up her drive and round to the back door.  Standing in front of the screen door I’d call out “Patty.”  Inside the house her mother or older sister would call out:  “Patty.  Someone’s calling for you.”   And Patty and I would amuse ourselves for the rest of the morning.  We always used back doors.  Unless the house had a side door, instead.  We went home when our mother called us.

 If we strayed from earshot some neighborhood friend we’d passed on the way probably would run and find us.  “Your mother is calling you.”  Telling someone their mother was calling was a sacred obligation.  Childhood was most enjoyable when your mother was happy and lunch was hot.  I can’t remember anything except Campbell’s soup and sandwiches.  Toasted cheese for tomato soup and bologna sandwiches for every other soup.

Mothers passed the calling home job down the line as children were old enough to lean out the back door and yell with high childish voices for their siblings.  For the person being called home, this one could be ignored a little longer, but no longer than when you heard your mother’s follow up call.

In our neighborhood there was one call that everyone knew and everyone passed it along.  It was my sister Janice calling for her big brothers, Walter and Melvin.  WATERMELLON!  WATERMELLON!

Water

Mellon

Bicycle update

Jan tells me bicycle story corrections are required.  Her brothers taught her to ride in circles on the blacktop.  She crashed into the garage twice and then got it.  Her narrow squeak between the grape vines and the uprights was result of being six and only learning mechanics.  She came down Gardendale behind her brother on his ten speed.  Mel idly amused himself pedaling backwards, which didn’t affect his bicycle.  She thought he was pedaling forward, and not to be outdone, redoubled her effort.  Down the hill.    She was totally out of control at the bottom and grateful for the relatively soft landing.

Mel wasn’t so fortunate when he crashed.  Excess speed was not a factor.   He came down the hill under reasonable control.  At the bottom his wheel broke, the bike went forward, the forks embedded in the ground and he went over the handlebars.  Chico’s mother, a nurse, saw the accident from her kitchen window and called for the ambulance before she went outside.  He spent at least one night in the hospital, being assessed and treated for a concussion.  As serious as the time he got a buttocks full of shrapnel.  Always up for adventures, Mel was.

Bicycles

CUV’s—childhood utility vehicles.  We rode them far and wide.  Places we should be, places we shouldn’t.  I was eight when the mystery of the box behind the chair in the basement was revealed on my birthday. My mom told me she got her first bike at age 18; she was employed and bought it herself.  I have no idea where she rode it.  We rode ours everywhere. 

I don’t remember the actual presentation of my Schwinn.  My ever practical parents may have sent me to the garage to discover it.  That’s where we kept them; dad built a bike rack.  In the summer the almost nightly question, “Did you put your bike away?” could result in “Um, no, I’ll go do it,” and a hasty trip up the street to retrieve the bike from behind some garage.

I totally recall learning to ride my bike.  It probably was the very day.  It was cold, I had on a sweater.  Mom and I set out from our front drive; Moraine was level, as opposed to Gardendale going up hill.  Our residential street was not paved by the city during my tenure.  There was some squabble with the city as to the streets’ status.  Akron claimed it was a private road and they didn’t even plow it.  Consequently the potholes deterred any attempt at speed by an automobile and kids on bikes ruled the road.  After they learned how to navigate the holes and ruts.

Mom held the rear end of the bike in the time honored fashion and I wobbled past my house, past the neighbor’s house, past the vacant lot.   I wobbled right and turned into the drive of our next neighbor.  The drive went uphill, I pedaled hard.  I wobbled right again and was on the path through the vacant lot.  The bike picked up speed, I was not in control.  The wind was in my face, my head buzzed, my vision blurred.  I heard Mom saying “You’re doing fine,” and saw her down on the road.  I realized she had let go long ago.  I realized I was a bike rider!

In retrospect, although we rode our bikes everywhere, we never rode them to school.  I don’t know if we suggested and were denied, or if riding to school was just not done.  There was a bike rack at our elementary school, but it only held bikes after school and during the summer, when we went to play on the equipment.  I also remember we were older than grade school when we did that.  It was half a mile to our grade school, a mile to the high school and 1.999 miles to junior high.  The statute specified a two mile distance to require a bus; there were no school buses in Akron when I was a kid.  Bicycles on those busy streets would have been deadly.  We jaywalked Tallmadge Avenue as it was, to avoid a block to the light and a block back to the school.

The grade on Gardendale was serious.  In the winter cars that came out of drives part way up the hill generally went down first, turned around on our blacktop and got a running start.  A serious hill that requiring serious attention.  I was a cautious kid; I used brakes on that hill.  My brother Mel pre learned his motor cycle skills on that hill, even knocking himself unconscious in one misjudgment of gravel, turning radius and speed.  My poor little sister was sent up the hill at six or seven years of age by two big brothers who failed to give adequate advice.  She came flying down, made the turn onto the blacktop, went straight through the grape arbor and crashed in the garden.  Walt was heartsick.  Mel probably thought it was good training.

The Jade Tree

The big guy was in the family a long time.  Over forty years, counting the papa tree that lived in my Mentor living room from a sprig.  At the last pot transplant it had to stay on the floor in front of the south window and when someone begged me for it I only feigned sorrow at being such a good sport.

This jade started as a cutting I gave to my brother Mel.  He tended to lose interest in plants that needed watering more often than when it rained in Arizona; Jan rescued this puppy from his kitchen sink back in 1976.  It lived in the east bay window on Moraine Avenue, and slipped happily back into a south window when we moved here in 1988, where it embarked on a growing mission.

We helped.  We kept cats out of the so tempting outhouse by littering.  Pine cones, sea shells, prickly debris.  Great cat deterrents.  When it became dangerously top heavy we supplied the next biggest pot.  It was a fixture inside the front door. 

One spring it bloomed.  Just once.  People with ever blooming jade trees gave us advice about moving it outdoors in summer, putting it in the basement.  Things they did.  Like Mel and the watering, we didn’t have much interest beyond the problem of top heavy and crashing over on an unsuspecting passerby.

We transplanted it last four or five years ago.  It took all three of us to manhandle it.  It was too big to get to the front porch, so we dealt with the mess right there in the foyer.  Tom broke the old pot; he and Jan heaved the old fellow up in the air, I put the new pot under.  What a team.  We all said we’re never doing that again.

Last spring I gave it a critical appraisal.  It liked the new pot and rewarded us with several more inches of height and girth.  I concluded it had one last chance of getting through the front door, and sent the Cleveland Botanical Gardens pictures of its magnificence and an offer.  They didn’t refuse.  We told them it is the Melvin Lytle Memorial Jade.  I’ll drop by and take its picture some day.

The scream house

Unlike the sidewalk, the scream house construction didn’t get documented with pictures.  Half way down the sidewalk, on the left side, there’s a shed type structure put up by the current owner.  Sadly, he tore down the patio and covered up the cobbles to do it.

In the beginning there was the screen house.  Dad built it about 1957.  It was a frame of a house, complete with pitched roof, and screens for walls.  Jan was four.  It was her scream house.  Before he built the scream house dad had to make the patio under it.  He laid hundreds of brick cobbles that he discovered as construction waste at Botzum Brothers, the company mining the pit.  They were his for the taking.  The pile surely weighed a ton and was three quarters of a mile from our house.  A quarter mile of that was the climb back up out of the pit.

Dad furnished the clothes line and paid the neighborhood kids a nickel a cobble to drag those bricks up from the pit and down the street to our back yard.  I think that took us the entire month of June.  After dad laid the stone floor he assembled the scream house on top of it.  Every fall he took it down and stored it in the garage.

The cobble stones, on the left.  Quite a few years after they were laid; probably between the screen house and its replacement.

A glimpse of Jan's scream house over her shoulder.

Dad ran electricity to the garage and the patio.  He dug a trench the length of the yard and laid a pipe that went through the basement wall.  Walt held the ball of cord at one end and dad started up the vacuum at the other.  The line was sucked 200 feet out to the garage.  Then the cord was tied to the electrical line and slick as you know what, the electrical line was pulled through.  This probably did not violate a single zoning code in 1957.

Mom, Jan, Joanne, Walt, Mel, Uncle Bill, Dad.  That grin on dad's face is knowing the timer will trip perfectly.

The scream house was our haven in summer.  Mom set up her sewing machine.  She may even have set up a quilt or two. We ate every meal there. She made pancakes in her trusty electric skillet on the weekends.  One time I reached up to unplug the coffee pot I had just emptied into my parents’ cups.  Just as I reached dad jumped up and shouted “NO,” but my hand had already closed on the plug.  Bare feet on damp stones.  I was thrown the ten foot width of the patio and landed on my back.  Unconscious.  When I opened my eyes dad was compressing my chest and counting.  He looked at me and said, “How often have you been told to wear shoes!”

In 1965, early one April there was a freak wind storm.  My brother Mel had just put the scream house together, and it sailed away forever.  The next patio cover was not screened.  However, it did not have to be disassembled and reassembled annually.  Dad’s health was not up to new construction and Walt was in the Air Force, so Mel and our neighbor Chico built the new patio roof.  The new roof was barrel shaped, with fluted green fiberglass covering.  From then on, when dad was not using his camera for family events he would reach up and store it safely from harm on one of the four by four rafters.

 Mel and Chico, constructing.

Mom supervising.

The camera holder completed.  Right up there on the cross rafter in the foreground.