“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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.