A thumb piano and a didgeridoo

In spite of my tin ear and inability to carry a tune, even in a bucket, instruments fascinate me.  Mom was a decent pianist and saw to it we had music lessons.  Mel, Jan and I gave up the piano in short order.  Walt was pretty good on trumpet.  The music gene apparently skipped a generation; music lessons stuck for Beth and Shelly and each can play you a tune or two.

Summer outdoor art festivals frequently included outdoor music groups with guitars, banjos, and even dulcimers, hammered dulcimers, lutes, and other folk instruments.  Wandering the booths before a show opened, I occasionally found craftsmen who made and sold folk instruments that fascinated them.  Of course I could not do them justice.  The thumb piano may just as well have been called an all thumbs piano.  I bought them any way; I appreciated the work and workmanship, and thought I could always find someone who could play them.

At our house that is Tom, who gets a tune out of everything I’ve brought home.  You’ve already met the flute walking stick.  It was made and demonstrated to me by an artist in New Jersey.  I think the walking stick bit was a marketing ploy; you wouldn’t want to be stuffing plugs of dirt up the end of the flute.  It’s very mellow; Pan would have liked it in his old age.

The thumb piano is a very old African instrument.  Mine has lost its neck thong and been scuffed around a bit. The tines are set in octaves. Mine (but long since passed to Beth), is one octave, great for simple mellow melodies.  Here is a fellow who uses all his thumbs beautifully.

I followed the sound of the didgeridoo to the maker’s booth and listened entranced to the humming sound, rising and falling like waves, like water, like the wind, like sand through an hour glass.  I cannot describe it.  Tom, the old coronet player, can made sound with it, and it’s fun to have in the corner for the kids to try.

I found this legend of the first Didgeridoo

 Three men were camped out on a cold night in the outback. One ofthe men told another to put a log on the fire, because the fire was getting lowand it was very cold. So, the other man turned and grabbed a log, which wasawfully light to the touch, for it was hollow. As he went to drop it into thefire, he noticed the entire length was covered with termites. He did not knowwhat to do, for he could not throw the branch into the fire, because it wouldkill the termites, and his friends were telling him to do so because it was socold. So, he carefully removed all the termites from the outside of the log byscooping them into his hand, and he deposited them inside the hollow branch.Then he raised the branch to his lips and blew the termites into the air. Thetermites blown into the air became the stars, and the first Didgeridoo wascreated.

“Mr. Lytle left the family in 1918”

Mary Emma Hogue Lytle, my grandmother, left her husband and returned to Akron and her family with her children.  Mary told one of her daughters the constant moving was the reason she left George Marion Lytle and took the children back to Akron. To what would be a childhood of neglect and poverty. 

Mary Emma was born in 1889, the oldest of 10 children.  Her last sibling, a brother, was born four short months before my father became George and Mary’s first child.

I believe Mary married George, fourteen years her senior, simply to escape home and the responsibility of tending to so many younger siblings.  There would have been endless loads of clothing to be scrubbed at the board, hung to dry, taken off the line, ironed. All those younger siblings to keep an eye on and keep diapered. The sheer drudgery is depressing to contemplate.

 She was seventeen when they married. Perhaps it was a love match.  I only say that because Mary Emma was from a staunchly Catholic family and upbringing, which shunned family members who strayed from the faith. George Marion’s religious affiliation is safely assumed in knowing he is buried along with his siblings and his parents in a Methodist cemetery.  But I think the most I can give Mary Emma is infatuation, and perhaps a bit of romance in leaving with a mining engineer to live in Pennsylvania.

My grandparents were married in 1906 and, like in the home she left, the babies arrived every other year.  When Mary returned to her parents’ home in 1915, after nine years of marriage, she was pregnant with her fifth and last child.

George Marion travelled because of his job.  But Aunt Laura, the daughter Mary told of leaving because of travel, also has memories of living with her paternal grandparents in Coalmont.  Parents may tell children whatever they wish, but Mary’s story of frequent moves isn’t that plausible.  I can’t see George moving from assignment to assignment trailing a wife and four children when he had a home base in Coalmont, where Aunt Laura said they lived until they moved to Akron. 

The record I was able to get from the Childrens’ Home contained the tantalizing line “Mr. Lytle left the family in 1918.  He did not appear in court in Pennsylvania.”  This is Mary Emma’s statement to the Childrens’ Home about 1921 when she placed her five children in the Childrens’ Home.  In the years after moving back in 1915, there was not enough food or clothing, or adult supervision, according to Aunt Laura.  She says her father did come one time, she thinks to attempt to reunite, but Mary refused.

I pursued ‘He did not appear in court in Pennsylvania.” Huntingdon County, where Coalmont is located, has a wonderful historical society that provided me with some information about that entry. A genealogical researcher located George Marion Lytle in the Plaintiffs Docket for 1921, where he posted a five hundred dollar bond guaranteeing he would be available for extradition to Ohio.  And when they went to pick him up in 1922, George Marion could not be found.

I looked for the entry on the other side of the ledger here in Summit County, where Akron is located, but the Clerk of Courts found nothing.  I assume Mary Emma filed some action against George, probably in domestic court, probably concerning support, that resulted in a judgment for George to be returned to the State of Ohio.  He jumped bail and disappeared.

The last bit of this puzzle also came from the Childrens’ Home.  In their records they had a letter from Peebles County, Colorado, informing them of the death of George M. Lytle.  He died of consumption, and known by a different name, but in his wallet they found letters from his daughters, pleading for his return.  The return address of the envelopes was the Akron Childrens’ Home.

George Marion died in 1930, a full fifteen years after the separation from Mary.  I have to assume he continued working; he was working when he died in Colorado.  Over that fifteen years his children grew up.  In extreme poverty.  Who left whom is not relevant.  I don’t know why Mary came home in 1915, but told the authorities in 1918 her husband deserted the family.  The order against him likely concerned support; the legal system was as eager in 1918 to see children supported by parents as they are today. My father didn't speak of the father who abandoned the children.  His three sisters, Aunt Laura, Aunt Ruth and Aunt Helen Rita, loved their father unconditionally to the end, and had no charity toward their mother.  AuntRuth, Sister Mary Pasqueline, said they were nobody’s children and they survived.

Another story from my family tree.

The three children who did marry and have children provided homes they surely wished for in their childhood.

My parents on their wedding day.  Grandma Lytle is beside my father; Grandpa and Grandma Rolf on either side of my mother.  The only pictures of Grandma Lytle are from that day.  She was the only member of my dad's family at the wedding.  My father had left the Catholic Church, my mother was not a Catholic.  Dad's many aunts, uncles and cousins did not attend because of this.

Jobs we’ve had

Driving home from work today, a satisfying morning’s effort behind me, I thought about the kinds of jobs I’ve held, then burst out laughing at the kinds of jobs my oldest daughter had.

To pay room and board I worked food service when I left home and started college.    The dorm cafeterias were not open in the summers; I worked at the Student Union cafeteria.  Only open five days a week, weekends were iffy for food.  Bread was most easily smuggled, not enough to last two days.  I had no allowance the last two years; my dad was in a hospital in Columbus, recovering from histoplasmosis.  I was grateful to be able to go to school.  I worked odd filing jobs around campus and typed papers for a quarter a page.  I scraped by, unimaginatively.

Shelly, my youngest daughter, worked food service jobs, too, at college.  The same job I did for room and board in my day only covered board for Shelly.  She left school after two years, went to English Nanny School.  It was a perfect fit and she was a nanny for several years before she married.  Shelly and I both worked the usual college jobs.

Beth, however, just didn’t do things usually.  She’d already graduated high school a year early and entered college younger than most.  She needed to work, too, to stay in school and had clerical jobs the first year.  By the end of that year she assessed her experience and decided she could do better.  I took a deep breath.

She picked a vehicle to suit her life style.  A Volkswagen bus, named Grumbelly by her friend Christina.  For the sound it made.  Then, she moved off campus, into a series of homes to make mothers cringe.  She made life-long friends of some of her roommates; one is married to my friend Ann.

One summer she had a job inventorying Cleveland’s trees.  I learned about that job from a friend who said he saw my daughter unloading a van of inner city kids and supervising them recording the size and type of Cleveland’s tree lawn specimens.

Another year I learned of her gainful employment through the W-2’s that came in the mailbox the next January.  She was a hot dog vendor at Cleveland Indian home ball games!  Don’t think I didn’t see her for four years.  She called home for money, if needed, and came home to do laundry occasionally.  Grumbelly was infrequently serviced by my mechanic, and since his wife worked with me I’d hear from Gail that Ed had found Beth broken down or out of gas along the freeway, and bailed her out.  For over a year she worked in a deli that specialized in wine and cheese, an education that fostered her current career.

When she finished her undergraduate degree she went on to a masters in anthropology.  She earned her spending money working at Kinko’s, where she learned everything to be known about graphic design.  This lead to a part time marketing job at a major manufacturing company.  Eventually she replaced her boss.  She says it was because she could never teach him how to use a roller ball mouse.  Mouse design was rather fluid in the early days of computer.

I was quite satisfied, this morning, with what I’d accomplished at work, and driving home my mind flicked over job satisfaction.  Mine, Beth’s with her restaurant, Shelly the nurse.  Long way from hungry weekends at college, I thought.  Well, that was pretty mundane stuff Shelly and I did in college.  Then I burst out laughing remembering Beth, the van of inner city children, and all those W-2’s. 

 I drove Beth’s Grumbelly to the junk yard on his last gear, with no brakes.  Mom followed, to bring me home if I arrived safely.

A Civil War story

I’m piecing together a little more of my dad’s childhood by going through the family tree work done both by my cousin, Kathleen, and my daughter, Shelly.

I find those family trees deadly boring.  Real tooth gritters to sort through.  Sadly, I am barely interested in the branches; I love the people and their stories.  I found my Grandfather Rolf’s World War I and World War II draft registration cards out on Ancestry.com.  I threw them into something called my Shoebox, to go over later.  I have several neat finds in that Shoebox, out there in the clouds.

Going through Kathleen’s work I realized I have a place to fit one of my Dad’s stories.  I can take it out of my mental shoebox and give it a good look.

Dad was born in Coalmont, Pennsylvania in August of 1907; the grandfather for whom he was named had died in April of that year.  Dad lived in Coalmont with his mother and father, brother and two sisters until his mother moved them back to Akron about 1914.  I surmise they lived with his widowed grandmother, or very close by.  I have Aunt Laura’s recollection of living at the grandmother’s house.  Other male relatives in or about the house were Dad’s two uncles, Horace and Blanchard (Uncle Pete).

The Civil War story is one of the few stories where my dad referenced himself, so that I knew it was about his family. I only heard it one time. It was about two uncles in the Civil War.  The story had some daring and a little swashbuckling, and I absorbed the details, but in thinking it over years later just couldn’t square the dates, any uncles he had being the same generation as his father and too late for the Civil War.

Flipping those tree pages of Kathleen’s back and forth, I think I pieced together a real story.  Dad’s grandfather, who he never knew as he died in the spring before Dad was born in the summer, was a Civil War veteran.  A private in Co. D, 5^th Regiment, Pennsylvania Infantry and a sergeant, Co. H, 125^th Regiment, wounded at Antietam and discharged in 1863.  John William, the grandfather also had three brothers, all of whom were younger, and all of whom could have served during the war. One died in May, 1864, during the war and aged 25.  I need to look into this to see how he died..

Dad may have heard the story from these great uncles themselves; or it may have been passed along by his uncles who heard the story from their uncles.  As Dad heard the story before he was seven, sorting all those uncles wasn’t a priority.  It was a wide-eyed story.  Here it is – at last.

Dad had two uncles in the Civil War.  They were from Pennsylvania, they fought for the Union, and they were spies!  Not the sort of spies who skulk about under cover looking for secrets.  They went about their business in broad daylight, in full view of the enemy.  They were photographers who posed as itinerant photographers.  They packed their equipment on mules and went among Rebel camps in Virginia, making pictures for soldiers to give to their sweet hearts and mothers.   Information gathering was easy, chatting up the men they were photographing,  and to get important documentation they would pose their subjects in front of ammunition dumps or gun batteries. 

I imagine a small boy would be all ears for a story like that, no matter which uncle told it.  I have no idea how the information went back to “headquarters”, but we know that could be done. 

Source

We can hope these fellows went home to their mothers, their wives and their sweethearts.

Genealogy research moves even more slowly than government

I can say that with authority, as I am deep in both. 

Way last year I wrote about my father and his brother and sisters in the Childrens’ Home, and included my Aunt Laura’s magnificent Chronicles.  I thought it a poignant story of events that happened more than a hundred years ago.  I had comments from several readers who had similar childhood experiences, or had listened to relative’s stories.

When the Childrens’ Home (now called Children Services) responded to my request with their records of my father’s stay at the Home, it was a scanty type written page transcript of records they had recalled from deep storage in another state.  The records were returned before I had opportunity to see them.  I did ask for and received a copy of the one record they identified in the transcript, a letter from Peebles County in Colorado notifying the Home that George Lytle, my father’s father, had died there.  But this avenue was quite the dead end.  The woman in the “Client Rights Office” was prompt to tell me these were not public records I was requesting and they had no legal mandate to help me, but she was doing as much as she could, short staffed and all.  Or, don’t bother her any more.

I took one nugget of the Home's information and ran with it.  “Our records indicate Mr. Lytle left the family in 1918.  He was located in Coalmont, Pennsylvania but did not appear in Court in Pennsylvania.”  Bingo.  Why was my grandfather required to appear in court?

I trolled the internet to see if I could find court records for an obscure hamlet in Pennsylvania.  I came across the historical society of Huntingdon County, where Coalmont is located and sent them an email asking if they could tell me what court to approach.  They replied with several suggestions, and concluded by saying that for a forty dollar donation they would go look for me.  You can believe that went in the next outgoing mail.

Within two weeks I had a packet from a genealogical researcher with copies of court records concerning George Lytle’s order of extradition to be turned over to the State of Ohio.  And an offer of further help, if requested.  I sent another forty dollar donation, the cost of the return tank of gas.  What a bargain.

I have written to the Summit County Clerk of Courts to learn what courts were in operation at the time of the order of extradition.  That has been two weeks; I may have to get another historical society involved.  I’ve pieced enough together, though, to have an interesting story to post tomorrow.

The sun is melting all the snow and seducing the cat. Jan quoted me the song Good Morning, Mr. Sunshine.