Transcribed from Lenore Lytle’s typed account:

A year or two before her death in 1997 (which took all of us by surprise, as she intended, at minimum, to usher in the new millennium) Mom took the typewriter and spent several days clicking away.  We found this account when we sorted through.  I’ve posted some photos as her narrative goes along, and made a link to the Cleveland stockyards.

To anyone who might be interested in the background and events in the life of Lenore Caroline Rolf Lytle;

HENRY CHARLES ROLF                                                                        1868-1907

CAROLINE SCHACHT ROLF TROIKE                                         5-10-1871 – 10-2-1953
WALTER ERNST ROLF                                                             1-10-93 – 2-18-45

MELVIN ELMORE COX                                                             8-10-72  -  6-9-54

LENORE SMITH COX                                                                1873-1923
ELMORE COX                                                                          1892-1918
ETHEL LENORE COX ROLF                                                       1894-1989
HELEN LOUISE COX SHULTZ                                                    6-24-04 - 6-18-76

Children of Walter & Ethel

LENORE CAROLINE                                                                 2-4-18
HENRY MELVIN                                                                       12-16-23

Children of Elmore & Ruby Eberhard Cox Keller

EUGENE HOWARD                                                                  1-25-16
ELMORE THOMAS                                                                   5-1-18

Children of Raymond and Louise Shultz

MELVIN                                                                                   1923

My great grandparents lived in the Harvard Avenue area of Cleveland as did my paternal grandparents.  They owned and operated a grocery store.  Dad had a 6^th grade education which, at that time, was deemed sufficient for a boy.   Grandad died in 1907 from a massive heart attack, and Dad went to work.  In 1908 Grandma married Louis Troike who had been born and raised in the Sandusky, Ohio area.

During Dad’s early teens, the family moved to 3891 West 20^th Street off Denison Avenue.  Grandpa Troike had gotten a job in the stockyards.

Elmore & Mom were born on a farm in Austinburg, Ohio.  In the early 1900’s the family moved to 2404 Selzer Avenue.  Aunt Louise was born there.  Grandpa, along with his three brothers, Norval, Clarence & Pearl were painters and paperhangers.  Grandma took in borders.

Mom completed 9^th grade and quit.  Algebra was enough math for her.  She worked downtown Cleveland at the May Company as a cashier.

Recreation was simple for the young people.  Tobogganing down the hill at the old Zoo, now known as Cleveland Metropolitan Park System, boating and ice skating in the same area.  The boys were happy to quit walking when motorcycles were made.

Grandma had a goiter and leakage of the heart as did her sisters.  Being in poor health, a lot of the work and responsibility fell on Mom’s shoulders resulting in a nervous breakdown at age 16.  When there were contagious diseases such as measles or scarlet fever, houses had a sign plastered on the door.  Anyone who worked stayed with relatives or neighbors.  Uncle Elmore was stricken with scarlet fever but survived.

Practical jokes are an age-old custom.  Mom told about the time she was upstairs cleaning, saw Elmore in the yard, yelled and spit.  Right in the eye!  Trapped!  Fortunately, he thought it funny and he didn’t retaliate.

In the summertime, clothes were washed in the back yard using a wash tub and a scrub board.  Same tub used on Saturday nights for baths.  No inside plumbing either for quite a while. Most of the washing fell on Mom’s shoulders.  Men boarders wore white shirts.  Elmore had been pestering Mom and when she heard footsteps in the side yard and whistling, she took the sopping wet shirt and threw it.  It wrapped around the unsuspecting face of Walter Rolf.  What an introduction to her future husband.

Ethel & Walter Rolf, 1915

They married August 6, 1915 in the Congregational Church.  They lived with his parents until February, 1918.  The worst flu epidemic of the country was in full sway.  Mom was in Lutheran hospital having me.  Dad was taking the only medicine available—whiskey, and was moving them into the Roshier Building on West 25^th Street.  That was his introduction to Keston and Emma Brigham.  They were sharing the same elevator.  Emma became a life-long friend.

Ethel & Lenore Rolf, 1918

When I was a little over a year old, they moved to Gifford Avenue on the West side of Cleveland.  Dad was working for a sewing machine company in the Harvard Avenue area.  Most of the time Dad walked to work because he didn’t have a nickel to ride the street car.  The motorcycle had been sold, because three couldn’t ride at the same time.  Mom said their main diet consisted of macaroni and tomatoes.

While living there I got my first scar.  Seems the boy from downstairs pulled over my highchair and we all went down the stairs.  Cut my upper lip only.  I guess I was a happy tot.  Mom dressed me in a lace curtain, her old shoes and I paraded up and down the street with a groom alongside.  Now that is history.  I know because my Mother “told me so.”

Lenore, by an itinerant photographer with travelling prop

Before I left Gifford Avenue, we got a collie dog.

When I was about four I became aware of Grandma Cox’s house on Selzer in a very dramatic way.  I had a handful of nails in my hand.  There was the nicest hidey-hole in the baseboard, so I stuck them in there.  The electricity shot across the room, the one fuse in the house blew.  I lived and had many happy times in that house.

I only remember my Grandmother as not being well and laying on the davenport in the living room and/or in bed.  When she died in the spring of 1923 I remember that she wore a grey dress and had an American flag stuck in her bosom.

Back to the history lesson.  Dad left the sewing machine job and went on the railroad as a fireman.  World War I was going strong and they needed help.  That lasted until the train derailed on the Howard Street overpass in Akron and pinned him between the boiler and the front of the cab. He then went to work for a jeweler by the name of Russell and learned the watch making trade.

By 1922 the jeweler was bankrupt. Dad had a hoard of leaded cut glass and decided that was enough of working for somebody else.  The war was over and men needed to be trained for jobs.  He went to the Cleveland Trust Bank on the corner of Broadview and West 25^th street and after much discussion between the manager and Dad, he got the loan to buy the house at 4214 West 21^st street in Old Brooklyn.  Again, I know this because “MMTMS”.

1923 was a momentous year.  I started kindergarten at Benjamin Franklin School.  I walked up 21^st, down Valley Road to Creston.  Crossed a couple of streets until I reached Spring Road.  About those elementary years, I remember very little.  I must have been a good student, Mother never had to go the Principal.  I do remember in kindergarten of being very disappointed that there was no electric train under the Christmas tree.  Dad was a train buff and we always had an electric train.

Grandma Cox died in the spring, Grandpa married Marcia Enos in the Fall and along came my brother on December 16^th.  I never knew Mom was pregnant until Grandma Troike came over to take care of me.  I was so excited I threw up all over the bathroom

Henry Rolf, 1925, W. 21st Street

When I was about 3, I needed a new winter coat and shoes.  There was little money, but Dad took me by the hand to see what he could buy with what he had.  As he rounded the corner of Selzer and 25^th, he put his foot on something skittering along the sidewalk.  Nobody was in sight and when he picked it up he had $20.  I got my coat, a hat, a muff and shoes.  I loved that muff and carried it everywhere.  Of course, somewhere along the line I left it hanging on an outhouse door somewhere.

He opened a shop in the front bedroom and had two trainees.  For quite a while, I went to sleep with the ticking of clocks and chiming cuckoo clocks on the wall in the hall. 

Henry Rolf, mid 1930's

Junior High was in the same school.  I loved Geography.  By then we changed classes.  Also, French was introduced into the Junior High level.  Doris Sorge was my teacher.  I had her all through high school.  She was promoted to the high school when our class graduated.

Dad and Mom bought a cottage in Sheffield Lake near Lorain in the spring of 1929.  My cousins Jimmy and Tommy (Elmore’s boys) lived next door with their Grandmother, Mrs. Koestle.  Dad went to Cleveland every day and we went swimming, played cards, played cops and robbers with cap guns.  The new outhouses were the jails.  You got put in the front door and snaked out the clean out door.  Our outhouse had hollyhocks.

Rolf Family & cottage

Or, he could have been named

Himself

Tailmaster

Bizzy

Jan was in the studio this morning, on the phone with a customer.  On the other side of the room Bizzy, one eye on Jan, put a series of tools on the floor.  Then he went to the Gammill and, thump, thump, thump, unrolled a batting from the tube.  Still on the phone.  Click.  I’m sleeping now.

Trouble

My grandchildren get socks for Christmas. I knit them year round, and put them on the Christmas shelf in my closet.  This summer Trouble discovered socks on the needle.  He carries them around, chin high, just short of announcing “I killed it myself.”  Now I put socks on the needle in a zippered bag.  Spare balls of yarn are in a tied bag, which he works at and sometimes gets opened just enough to fish out a ball.  Over the summer Emily rescued a completed pair that could only have come from the Christmas shelf.  Yes, they had.  He can climb the dresser, remember. Short hop to the Christmas shelf.  Now Christmas sox live on the top shelf of my bookcase.

Zippy

It’s winding down to fall here, and this morning I got out wool socks for the first time.  Opened the drawer, put them on the bed.  A black flash, one sock gone.  A knee sock, sailing like a pirate banner.  I chased him, all the way to the living room.  Under the chair.  He neglected to hide his tail, too, so I slid him out—sans sock!  He knew what I was after.  I had to move the chair and restrain the cat to retrieve my sock.  For good measure, I held onto him until I had both socks in hand.  I see I need to invest in a laundry hamper with a lid.

Where the glue didn’t stick

Dad’s mother was one of ten children, nine surviving.  Mary Cecelia Maley (or Melia) was married to James Lindsay Hogue in 1887.  The ten children were Mary Emma (Mamie, dad’s mother), Elizabeth Cecelia (Aunt Bessie), Eveline Cecelia (Aunt Eva), Agnes Genevieve (Aunt Gen), Sarah (who died at eight months of age), James Lindsey, Margaret Helena (Aunt Helen), John William, Albert Martin and Clarence Soloman (Taps or Tip).  These are the grandparents who lived on Bisson Avenue and took in the Lytle family when they came from Coalmont to Akron in 1914, after Aunt Ruth was born but before Aunt Helen Rita.  This is dad’s grandmother, whose head touched the top of the door frame.

These were my dad’s aunts and uncles.  But some aunts and uncles were born in the same time frame as my dad and his siblings, and were children together.  Mary and James Hogue were married in Deerpark, Maryland and the first six children were born there.  Mary Emma HogueogH, or Mamie, Dad’s mother, was the oldest, born in 1889.  By 1901 the Hogues lived in Akron, where the last four children were born.  Mamie married George Marion Lytle from Coalmont, Pennsylvania in 1906, when she was 18.  Dad was born in Coalmont in 1907.  So, Dad’s Uncle Taps was his age, his Uncle Al was two years older, Uncle John four years older, and so on.  On Bisson Avenue they were simply Taps, Al and a couple of Johns.  Dad was Robin, to make the distinction.

I had plenty of second cousins living not so far from me.  But in a separate universe.  Many of them had red hair, from carrot to auburn.  How I envied them the red hair, like dad envying Taps the shoes.  I passed them often on the way to school, me walking down to Jennings and they up to St. Martha’s.  Sometimes they said Hello back.

Some of these aunts of my father lived less than two miles from us, and a circle less than five miles in diameter could have encompassed the lot. Some came to our house when my Grandma Lytle died.  I can remember one visit to Aunt Gen, one to Aunt Helen.  In my entire life!   Both visits were to see my Aunt Ruth, who was also visiting there.  My father probably would not have gone on his own; I’m sure mom drug him.

My dad was bitter about parts of his childhood.  I believe he took responsibility for himself from the day he was born and always strove for the best possible outcome.  His anger was toward those who made imperious decisions about small children. And the Catholic Church, which he held as responsible for so many hungry, homeless children as their parents.  The church did not put a roof over your head or food on the table; do not sin, be good to your mother and pray for the priest did not translate to a bed or a meal.  I know he did not factor in the despair of eighteen people in his grandmother’s house, his mother needing to move every time the rent was due.  I do not know how he felt about going for a picnic and not coming back from the Children’s Home.  But I do know how he felt about Uncle Bill’s lack of education, Aunt Laura being put in vocational education, Aunt Ruth in college (at the Convent) but eventually taking orders.  His cousin Pat put in the guardianship of a distant family acquaintance in Texas, after the death of her own parents when she was quite young.  He always saw what happened to the other children as unequal and unfair, engineered by his grandmother, his mother, his aunts, the church. 

Mother, the family glue, was no more successful than my dad at getting Uncle Bill back, and they certainly were not allowed to assume guardianship of Pat, who is only a couple years older than I.  The great Catholic machine moved on; no one would meet my parents half way.  In a small aside, contact was kept with Pat who made a good life in Texas, when she was old enough to leave her guardian.  A story similar to Aunt Laura’s!  But, her wonderful husband doesn’t have a wooden leg, and her children do have red hair, just like she did.  And, she has not been Catholic since the age of 18.

So, mom wasn’t able to spread the family glue to the Akron contingent, excepting Pat and Aunt Eva.  Like Uncle Bill, Aunt Eva was under educated; I doubt her education went past third grade.  She was married to (as opposed to “she married”) a Charles Minor; she refused to live with him.  Aunt Eva took in laundry, did domestic work.  She watched after Pat before Pat went to Texas.  Eventually she lived with Aunt Helen Rita, then with Aunt Helen Rita’s daughter, Margie.  She visited often with us.  Jan tells of Aunt Eva taking her down to Scott’s Five and Dime in downtown Akron, in a taxi.  When Aunt Eva was done shopping she asked the store manager to call another taxi, and Jan and Aunt Eva sat on the bench and waited.

But, my aunts said they made their lives good and happy.  You don’t have what you don’t have; get on with what you do.  Aunt Ruth was a nurse for many years, and later taught nursing.  Aunt Laura and Aunt Helen Rita raised loving families, Uncle Bill came home, Pat loves living south of the Red river.  And I’m writing down as much as I remember, because my daughter did not know her grandpa was called Robin.  Before he was called Jack.

The bits and the glue

When I was growing up parents were not as essential to children as they seem to be now.  We walked to school; the big kids looked out for the little kids.  We walked home for lunch and after school.  We walked or rode bikes everywhere.  Baseball games were pick-up in our side lot.  We walked to church, unless our mother was going, then we went in the car.  Because we were in the house as little as possible, we had little need to interact with adults.  If adults were around and talking, they shooed us out.  So, the stuff we learned about our parents, about their lives before they had us, how they related to other people, mostly came from overheard tidbits we may or may not have been interested in.

My grandma, however, was great with the tidbits when I was a little older.  I learned my father had been a Catholic, but gave that up long before he met my mother, who was a Baptist.  I learned the only representative of my father’s side of the family at their wedding was his mother, the rest of his large, Catholic, Irish family having disowned him for leaving the church and breaking his mother’s heart.  Of course they could not attend his wedding.  My own grandma didn’t approve of my father’s Irish heritage, but I loved her and didn’t listen to those opinions.

We lived in a largely Italian Catholic neighborhood; a few Protestants here and there on the six or so streets that were our immediate range.  I was very small when informed by older children that my brother and I were not Catholic, and they could not play with us.  But, there were more than enough friends to go around! Ironically, my sister’s best friend was the younger sister of some of those older children who could not play with us. 

My brothers and I had a very strange encounter once.  We were probably 9, 7 and 4 at the time, and home alone because Mom had gone to get Dad from work.  A Catholic priest and two of those children who could not play with us came to the door.  It was summer, and through the screen door we learned our father was condemned to hell, we children were bastards destined to the same fate.  However, we could save our father and ourselves by bringing our father and mother (who had to be converted) to the church to be married and us to be baptized, and so forth and so on.  We got rid of them before Mom and Dad got home and never breathed one word of it to our parents.  I asked my brother once if he remembered that visit.  He laughed.  That episode was part of the normal state of ignoring what we didn’t care to bother about.

The Catholic business was more exotic than disconcerting.  My father’s mother died when I was four, but I do remember her.  She was a very large woman, and I can remember her standing at the kitchen stove preparing dinner while I sat on the floor and tied the shoelaces of my Buster Browns in one knot after the other, all the way to the tips, muttering “Shoe won’t tie, dammit,” to her extreme amusement. Her lap was very comfortable. Things like that.  She became ill and was in an upstairs bedroom and a priest came to the house.  I wasn’t allowed upstairs.

Then she died and our house was full of people.  My Aunt Ruth (my father’s sister, who was a nun) and her friend, who was a nun of another order, tried on each other’s habits while I sat on my parents’ bed and watched.  They laughed and looked at themselves in the mirror.  Aunt Ruth’s was black, the other was grey.  I liked the grey one best.  I told my mother about it years later and she said “Of course.  They were young women and would like to see how they look in different clothing.”  I had another bit from my mother about that funeral in later years.  When Grandma died it was hot, hot, hot, she was pregnant with my younger brother and shopping for a burial plot.  Never again.  She bought four more plots, two for herself and dad, and two for “contingencies.”  And, she gave me title to three plots in the same cemetery and I believe she did the same for my older brother.  

I remembered another Catholic bit while sorting through pictures.  My dad had a sea chest, from his days on the Great Lakes.  It was made of wood, and green.  Dad was sorting through the chest, looking for a book.  A portrait fluttered out of a book.  A young boy in a jacket, short trousers, white stockings, high black shoes, holding a book and beads.  In handwriting across the bottom:  Robin’s first communion.  I knew it was my dad.  He picked it up before I could.  I’ve never seen that picture again—it’s gone.  My mother would not have thrown it away.

Our Mom ignored all the barriers, too.  She was good friends with all her sisters-in-law.  We visited with some aunt, uncle and cousins two or three times a month.  When my mom, my Aunt Laura and Aunt Helen Rita were all widows, these aunts were generally my mom’s vacation companions.  Mom drove everywhere and until just a few months before her death.  With other friends they drove to see relatives or friends in Texas, in Florida, in Michigan, in Missouri.  Mom loved to travel.  Our Aunt Ruth had restrictions that kept her from the vacations with her sisters and with mom, but Aunt Ruth was her own kind of travelling woman and used her driving privileges to spend time here.  When we sorted out Mom’s papers there was a fairly new receipt for a grave marker for her mother-in-law.  It needed done, and fifty years later it was down to her.  And, she did it.

In the middle, the bride and groom, Mom and Dad.  Next my Grandma Rolf, my mom's mom.  Then a pretty girl, then my Grandma Lytle, my dad's mom.

The gizmo

I am so excited!  Going through all these old pictures I’ve been posting, I turned up a negative.  Some of us remember those!  I held it to the light and hollered:  It’s the gizmo!  Long story, getting the print, but here it is.

This picture is probably 1955.  The little girl is a family friend, exactly one month older than my sister.  The gizmo is probably ten years old then.   It’s been through we four children and all the neighborhood children; lost two rubber baby buggy bumpers, along with any paint it may have had announcing its name.  See the smile on Dorothy’s face?  The gizmo was that loved and wonderful.

Any child with short enough legs could ride it sedately.  Once mastering sedate, the gizmo rider went to the top of the street and came down the hill, shrieking, legs outstretched.  Much larger, older children did this routinely. 

Back down the hill, on the several hundred square feet of blacktop in front of our garage, just riding was OK, but a thrill ride assist from an older child was to die for.  Well, occasionally be injured for.  A big kid could grab the tail end or the front of the gizmo and swing the rider around and around and around in a circle.  Then let go.  Generally the big kid fell down and the gizmo pilot rode it out, braking as much as possible with bare feet, hoping to crash land on the grassy bank or in the grape arbor, not against the garage or in the street. I believe the gizmo corpse that was scrapped another fifteen years later had lost its final rubber baby buggy bumper.

This engineering marvel and childhood fascinator has been described over and over to anyone we thought could replicate it from pipe and an old bicycle seat.  Sadly, the only clear image was in our childhood minds.  Jan emailed this picture to our nephew:  Show this to your dad, maybe with a picture he can make it. 

Or does it require a hill and a quarter acre of blacktop to qualify.  My god, it might need a bicycle helmet.  Never mind.