My Grandfather-A memoir
Copywriter: Tom Corbin, March 26, 2011
Experts claim we don’t remember much about what happened to us before the age of three. When I was three we moved to Japan where the Eastman Kodak Company relocated my father. He graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in Chemical Engineering and was well suited to deal with the fledgling Motion Picture industry in Japan, and other Far Eastern countries. Air travel, foget-aboud-it, we traveled by ship where people are labeled first, second, third class or steerage, depending on what one could afford. It was 1930, a year that marked the beginning of the Great Depression in America.
My first memory is the day we arrived in Tokyo eighty years ago. Traveling through the city by motorcar, I saw people clacking along on wooden shoes, or whizzing by on bicycles, people wearing strange costumes skittering along a street lined with sidewalk peddlers.
A second most vivid memory is returning to America, seven years later, awestricken kid marveling at wide-open spaces, inhabitants speaking a language, fully understood.
Most shocking memory is discovering that I had grandparents, four of them! Ushered into a room where four ancient people were waiting, Dad said, “Remember these folks, Tom?” I must have had a look of colossal disbelief, because my silence and furrowed brow set everyone in the room on a quest for familiarity.
Life in Japan during the depression years was exceptional. Because we did not speak the language, Kodak supplied my folks with English speaking Japanese servants to smooth the transition. While my father was away solving problems for Kodak in Singapore or H, the center of his family’s social life was the American School in Japan, populated by the sons and daughters of political and commercial emissaries from foreign countries. Cloistered as it was, it was a refuge for folks like us: Afghans, Russians, Germans learning math and science in a well-blended community. Ice skating was one sport we participated in as did a group from school. Costume parties held there were fun and project oriented.
ASIJ was a Winnetka Plan school, a progressive, goal oriented learning system, wherein a student was encouraged to progress as far as his intellect, and ambition would carry him, instead of being constrained by a grade level commensurate with his age: arts and crafts were emphasized.
Retuning to America was a trying time for me. Seven years away from America, immersed in the ASIJ community where for my first four years of school we spoke proper English, shielded from street language and American colloquial comment, with profanity outlawed at home and school. Worse than that, there was a gap between ASIJ’s curriculum and public school in America. I was ahead in some subjects, behind in others.
I did not get to know my father’s father until one summer’s vacation when my parents farmed me out to Winnebago, Illinois, where Den and Jane (Grandpa and Grandma) lived and worked. Grandpa was general manager of the Sanford & Zartman lumberyard. They lived in a home on the company lot, which included a grain mill and a hardware store.
Grandpa Den (Dennison) was the Grandfather Norman Rockwell illustrated so often, the kindhearted old gent that took his grandson out on adventures his working father never could. Main Street Winnebago was a block from their home. When Grandpa walked to Cash Pickle’s grocery, he would take me along in a little red wagon, explaining the importance of objects we passed along the way. He knew everyone in town and introduced me to anyone we happened upon. Records show the town was populated with around six-hundred-fifty souls in the nineteen-thirties.
Milling was busy in the summer when farmers brought husked corn there by the wagonload. Wagons, with loads to weigh before grinding, pulled up onto the scale by either a tractor or a team of horses, then up to the mill, a few yards away to dump the load into a big hopper. When the grinder started, it was near impossible to hear anything else. Grandpa just turned off his hearing aid.
Ernie and Pat Patterson helped with the heavy work while Marie handled the paper work in the office. Heavy work included delivering truckloads of coal, filling up residential coal-bins and used to heat homes in the area.
Main Street merchants sponsored a free movie show Saturday nights in the summertime. Pickup trucks blocked off the street and folding chairs set up for whoever might like to watch old black and white films interspersed with sponsor’s commercials. To visit a movie theater, one had to travel out of town; it would be fifteen years before Television was available. Grandpa, well respected in the community he served, often extended credit when a farmer fell on hard times. National unemployment rose to forty-five percent in the 1930s.
Grandpa would sing as he went about his chores, his favorite was, “Froggy went a courtin'.” He let me have the run of the S&Z lot, with the exception of the electric saws used to cut up lumber they sold. I learned a lot about danger and how to avoid it next time; like stepping on the end of an unsupported board in the lumber shed. I plunged ten feet down to the next level, just as Sir Isaac Newton predicted. I also had my hand crushed as I tried to put it through the ringer rollers on Grandma’s washing machine.
His retirement plan was a farm he bought, a few miles out of town. A sharecropper operated the dairy farm, which in addition to a dairy herd, included same pigs, and chickens to add to their personal food supply. Crops raised on the farm were primarily fodder for the milk producing critters and commercial crops such as alfalfa and soybeans
Not appreciating how innocent I was about life in the real world, Grandpa would encourage me to try my hand at doing something new to me, like the time we walked up to the main train depot where both passengers and freight were deposited or picked up. After a short conversation with the stationmaster, we walked down the platform a ways to where they parked a brand new Chevy pickup truck. Bright green and smelled so clean, he let me examine it inside and out before asking me if I’d like to drive it back to S&Z. He was patient as we bounced and jerked our way along three blocks back home.
Billy Gilbert lived across the street from my Grandparent’s home. One of several Gilbert boys, he was my age and so much wiser about assorted forms of mischief. His favorite toy, as well as his constant companion, was a B-B gun. Pigeons, his favorite target, were plentiful, nesting high up in barns and farm outbuildings. If a B-B bullet should ‘accidently’ strike one, the bird shrugged it off and continued about its business.
We would go on a night-crawler hunt with a tin can and a flashlight, preparing for a weekend trip to their cottage on the Rock River. A trek to the cottage was always an event. Grandpa drove a black 1934 Dodge sedan he spit-polished every chance he had. They spent the evening before, loading up the car with food and other essentials. The road to ‘Nibroc’ was not long by today’s standards, but teeth chattering on gravel roads.
Grandma’s cat, Dusty, all black and friendly, and I got bored and kept asking, “Are we there yet,” fifty times until we were there. Grandpa got out of the Dodge and opened the gate to a five-acre summerhouse on the banks of Rock River.
Their cottage, perched high above Rock River, was without electricity or running water. Having grown up deprived of today’s household conveniences, it did not bother them, but I bellyached about having to traipse a few yards up from the house to the outdoor, fly specked, facility.
Grandpa was loaded with stories, and took any occasion to reel one off to a willing listener. He was the first to tell me the one about the loudspeaker under the outhouse seat; theirs was a two-holer, meaning it would accommodate two people. Folks were friendlier in the old days. So, if you haven’t heard, it goes like this: A woman was using the outhouse and unbeknownst to her a prankster mounted a loudspeaker under the seat. The perpetrator would watch, and when the timing seemed right, yelled, “Watch out lady, we’re workin down here!”
Grandma Jane was a piece of work, self-educated, read every book she could lay her hands on, bought, begged or borrowed, and knew more of the world she lived in than most of us do today. She grew her own fruit and vegetables, canned what they could not eat, raised chickens for meat and eggs, and ruled the household with an iron fist. She could name every species of animal or bird that inhabited their place on Rock River, filling feeding trays strategically placed so that she could watch them through her binoculars.
Grandma played favorites; she kept reminding me I was her favorite among the eleven grand kids because my parents named me after Grandpa’s Father. When you were on her black list, as was my mother and all her forbearers, she would come up with some downright contemptible comment whenever their name came up. She would get mad as all-get-out just thinking about them, and a minute later change her tone and say something nice like, “But they can’t help it, can they, because they are a Smith (or Jones),” with a big friendly smile and a giggle. She had the four kids my parents raised aligned with either my father’s or my mother’s family, simply by the way we looked or behaved, failed or succeeded.
Grandma loved to cook and bake. There was always plenty of lard on hand from slaughtering pigs on their farm. Fried chicken, fish, eggs, and potatoes, headed the list. Then there was apple, or Logan berry pie, cinnamon rolls, and cookies, all cooked with lard. Grandpa, a meat-n-potatoes man, consumed large portions, but was always skinny as a rail.
Folks who were lucky enough to have an imagination during the depression years learned how to eke out a living using their hands instead of cash to acquire food as well as stuff to garnish their living quarters. Grandma was a whizz at making something from nothing. Having saved every piece of cloth, old clothes, worn-out dishtowels, she spent hours ripping each piece into strips wide enough to braid into a colorful rug, or sew into a quilt. Their farm provided them with milk, cream, butter, bacon; the list goes on. Grandma made the best ice cream.
During the three summers I spent with my Grandparents I learned how a simple life can be a happy life, just by making the most of what you have. I spent the following three summers at Camp Wigwasati, a wilderness camp for young boys, a hundred miles north of Toronto, Canada. Skills Grandpa taught me soon put me in charge of a group of boys my age. I taught them how to chop wood, build a fire, and most important, how to survive the wilderness.
Agrarian life in America was simple at the turn of the twentieth century, a time when neither big business nor big government cramped one’s lifestyle. Time spent with my Grandfather enriched my life forever; I remember it well.
Photo credits “Norman Rockwell Behind the Camera”
Saturday Evening Post, Aug 3, 1929
