My grandfather's name was Alaric Craddock January. Alaric was the name of the Visigoth king whose armies sacked Rome in 410 A.D.
They called my grandaddy Ace because his initials were A.C. and because he was a professional golfer. As a young man, all his friends in Lampassas, Texas called him Big. While he was a large man, I think this nickname referred more to his largeness of spirit and heart. He was a gifted athlete and a born competitor. He taught me to play gin rummy.
As a young man he toured the south as the pitcher for a women's softball team. This was a novelty sport in the 1920's--Fast Pitch Softball. All the fielders were women and the pitcher was a man. I can only imagine what went on with my charming granddad riding on a bus with a bevy of athletic girls.
From baseball he moved to professional golf. This was before the days when there was big money in the sport, but he made a living. One day as we were driving through Denton, Tex, my grandfather pointed out the little nine-hole golf course that is run by Texas Women's University. He said, "I opened up that golf course. Me and Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan were the first threesome to play it. I shot a 59 that day. The course has only nine holes, so we had to play it twice."
During the Depression my grandfather supported his family by gambling on the golf course. He had helped to design and build the Lakewood Country Club in Dallas and this was where he made his living by being, as he described to me, "just a little better than my opponents." This is the first rule of hustling--don't beat them too bad. He also told me a maximum truth about life and gambling: "It's not so much a matter of how good you are as it is of how well you pick your opponents."
Ace was strong. He didn't use a driver off the tee. He used a one-iron with a piece of lead soldered to the back. He called it his knife. Irons are more accurate than woods and he was strong enough to be able to hit an iron as far as most players could hit a wood.
We spent many days together on the golf course as I was growing up. He could have made a real golfer out of me if I had more meat on my bones. He had taught his son, my uncle, fairly well. Don January has made millions on the PGA tour. There is the story in my family of how when Don was growing up my grandfather owned a roofing business. Don had to turn his golf scorecards in to my grandfather every day. If the score wasn't good enough, there would be a pair of work overalls on Don's bed the next morning and instead of playing golf he would be mopping hot asphalt on roofs that day.
He taught me more on the golf course than I can describe. He taught me to respect other people. That's why they call it 'the gentleman's game.' When we went places together everyone treated him with great deference. Doors would open, Yes, Mr. January, No, Mr. January, What can I do for you, Mr. January? He was treated this way because that is how he treated people.
I loved him and respected him more than any man I have ever known.
My grandfather died when I was in prison. He didn't know I was in prison because nobody in the family could bear to tell him. I was his first grandchild and we had a special bond. The rest of our large family thought I was his pet. When they told me he had died I didn't cry because during those years I couldn't allow myself to cry. I haven't cried for him since then. Maybe I'll do it now.
Tell Me About Your Heritage
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Lightning Rod
- Posts: 5211
- Joined: August 15th, 2004, 6:57 pm
- Location: between my ears
- Contact:
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abcrystcats
- Posts: 619
- Joined: August 20th, 2004, 9:37 pm
Your grandpa sounds like a neat guy and quite a character. You probably take after him in many ways, so be proud. I still can't figure out what a guy like you was doing in jail in the first place. On the other hand, some people are destined to go through shit, and come out the other side of it as better human beings.
As for your question, I LOVE it. I am incredibly proud of my heritage and will tell you way more than you want to know.
On my father's side (through maternal line) I am a direct descendant of Elder William Brewster and also indirectly related to Sydney Biddle Barrows. My great grandmother was a Barrows (yes, The Barrows family -- the family tree is well-documented).
On my mother's side, my heritage is pretty unclear. I have done a bit of research, but I need to learn German to do this practically, so it will be a while. My grandmother was German and my grandfather was Slovenian. His family immigrated to the United States after World War I. My grandfather and all his brothers fought in WWI, which was no doubt a devastating experience.
The ancestors I am proudest of, however, are the ones on the paternal side of my father's family. The original immigrating ancestor was an uneducated orphan from Devon, England. He ran away from an apprenticeship and became a coal miner. After he was injured in a mining cave-in (he had a permanent and painful limp for the rest of his life) he took his compensation money and bought passage to America.
He prospected for copper in the Big Woods of the Northern Territories, married, became a farmer for a while, and eventually took his family in covered wagons west to Colorado.
Many tragedies beset the family on the way to this destination. The most remarkable of these adventures involved Quantrill's Raiders. Just before my great-great grandfather was about to leave Iowa, Quantrill's Raiders stole his horses. He went after them on a borrowed horse -- one man alone with a gamy leg -- and within two weeks he somehow managed to retrieve the same number of horses Quantrill had stolen. Family legend has it that they were "not necessarily" the same horses Quantrill had stolen. My ancestor never revealed what he had done, so perhaps he was a horse thief. I would like to believe that he was wily enough to sneak up on them in the night and recapture the horses without incident, but we'll never know.
This same man established a homestead for our family here in Colorado. The house he built with his son still stands, and the ranch land is now part of preserved state park territory, at about 7000 feet altitude in the Rocky Mountains. The view from the farmhouse is gorgeous -- the entire city of Denver sparkles below it in a wide vista. I can only imagine the great ambitions of the man who chose this land for his own.
His grandson -- my grandfather -- is a man I am even more proud of. My grandfather was fascinated by geology and had his career as a geophysicist and a mining engineer. He designed and built the first (at the time, the only) uranium mine on the North American continent. Later, he developed his own theory of the comminution of ores and this theory is still in use today and bears his name. My grandfather was also deeply interested in religious philosophy and pursued that interest throughout his life. His thinking in this area went deep, and he took the time to write three books (unpublished) before he died. Two describe his beliefs in detail, and the third is an autobiography. He kept detailed diaries his whole life long, and his life story is filled with adventures in South America and the wilds of Canada, connected with his mining career.
I remember him as a kind and thoughtful man who spoke seldom, but whose words were always welcomed with respectful silence by the rest of the family. As a child, my great delight was to be able to sleep in my grandfather's study when I visited. It was lined with old books from floor to ceiling. The books had intriguing and mysterious titles and I felt as if I was sleeping in the heart of all wisdom.
We have so many family stories, and my father has been working on our genealogy for a long time. He has been able to document many things about our original ancestor and perhaps soon we'll be able to verify the exciting story about Quantrill's Raiders as well as many other things.
As for your question, I LOVE it. I am incredibly proud of my heritage and will tell you way more than you want to know.
On my father's side (through maternal line) I am a direct descendant of Elder William Brewster and also indirectly related to Sydney Biddle Barrows. My great grandmother was a Barrows (yes, The Barrows family -- the family tree is well-documented).
On my mother's side, my heritage is pretty unclear. I have done a bit of research, but I need to learn German to do this practically, so it will be a while. My grandmother was German and my grandfather was Slovenian. His family immigrated to the United States after World War I. My grandfather and all his brothers fought in WWI, which was no doubt a devastating experience.
The ancestors I am proudest of, however, are the ones on the paternal side of my father's family. The original immigrating ancestor was an uneducated orphan from Devon, England. He ran away from an apprenticeship and became a coal miner. After he was injured in a mining cave-in (he had a permanent and painful limp for the rest of his life) he took his compensation money and bought passage to America.
He prospected for copper in the Big Woods of the Northern Territories, married, became a farmer for a while, and eventually took his family in covered wagons west to Colorado.
Many tragedies beset the family on the way to this destination. The most remarkable of these adventures involved Quantrill's Raiders. Just before my great-great grandfather was about to leave Iowa, Quantrill's Raiders stole his horses. He went after them on a borrowed horse -- one man alone with a gamy leg -- and within two weeks he somehow managed to retrieve the same number of horses Quantrill had stolen. Family legend has it that they were "not necessarily" the same horses Quantrill had stolen. My ancestor never revealed what he had done, so perhaps he was a horse thief. I would like to believe that he was wily enough to sneak up on them in the night and recapture the horses without incident, but we'll never know.
This same man established a homestead for our family here in Colorado. The house he built with his son still stands, and the ranch land is now part of preserved state park territory, at about 7000 feet altitude in the Rocky Mountains. The view from the farmhouse is gorgeous -- the entire city of Denver sparkles below it in a wide vista. I can only imagine the great ambitions of the man who chose this land for his own.
His grandson -- my grandfather -- is a man I am even more proud of. My grandfather was fascinated by geology and had his career as a geophysicist and a mining engineer. He designed and built the first (at the time, the only) uranium mine on the North American continent. Later, he developed his own theory of the comminution of ores and this theory is still in use today and bears his name. My grandfather was also deeply interested in religious philosophy and pursued that interest throughout his life. His thinking in this area went deep, and he took the time to write three books (unpublished) before he died. Two describe his beliefs in detail, and the third is an autobiography. He kept detailed diaries his whole life long, and his life story is filled with adventures in South America and the wilds of Canada, connected with his mining career.
I remember him as a kind and thoughtful man who spoke seldom, but whose words were always welcomed with respectful silence by the rest of the family. As a child, my great delight was to be able to sleep in my grandfather's study when I visited. It was lined with old books from floor to ceiling. The books had intriguing and mysterious titles and I felt as if I was sleeping in the heart of all wisdom.
We have so many family stories, and my father has been working on our genealogy for a long time. He has been able to document many things about our original ancestor and perhaps soon we'll be able to verify the exciting story about Quantrill's Raiders as well as many other things.
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Zlatko Waterman
- Posts: 1631
- Joined: August 19th, 2004, 8:30 am
- Location: Los Angeles, CA USA
- Contact:
"Seven Quarters"
Dear Friends:
I'll try adding my own autobiographical reminiscence and portrait sketch to your little gallery.
You two are hard acts to follow.
I apologize for not being able to jog this little squib about my father into proper paragraphs. They show properly in the draft window, but not in the preview or the posting.
--Z
(paste)
Seven Quarters
I can only explain my father’s addiction to treasure hunting by touching on his other profligacies. He was a drinker and a gambler who left both his early wives behind and me in their trail, his accidental child. For he intended only to beat upon women as upon a rug. He was a hit and run artist who blew a tire. I was an accidental loving palliative to the simple country girl, my mother, who should have spent her life with her twin goats in a Tillamook barn.
Alcohol lubricated my father’s slide over uncertainties, and so, before he loaded his gold pans, grabbed credulous Uncle Bill to take with him, pulled on his hip boots and his plaid jacket and headed for the Feather River Canyon in his Nash Rambler, he had several jolts of Jack. He never brushed his teeth, with the result that he had full dentures at forty, so my mother knew when he was drinking. He checked the back seat of the Nash to make certain no empties were rolling free and then summoned my mother and me to kiss him goodbye.
Then he skipped Bill this time because he had finally found the seven quarters about which more later, and thought there might be treasure more serious yet. He took out the beer glass from the glove box and, steadying it on the front seat and steering with his knees down Old River Road, poured in three fingers of Jack, humming “Pennies From Heaven.”
Up those spurs of blue granite along the river channel the old car went, and after he parked high up on the crown of the peak, he slid back down the same blue talus in his hip waders. Shale spilled in front of him as he ground through the low bushes of poison oak with his equipment bouncing behind him in a khaki duffel. Under the pans and the other gear rode, as usual, the lunch my mother made him with a thermos of iced tea.
Once he flopped to a halt at the verge of the stream, icy cold where it jumped straight off the snow, Dad pulled his duffel open grabbed his lunch, unfolded his canvas camp stool , and started to pan the black sand at this, his favorite bend in the South Fork.
He had found the seven quarters there. After he shied around for a few nuggets he would go back upstream to that spot today where he had found the seven quarters, the quarters that had once ridden in a bag inside the Brinks truck that went off Snowshoe Pass right here four hundred feet straight down off a hairpin curve above the South Fork. The money had never been recovered-- thousands and thousands and thousands, so the story went.
More rational locals thought that the wind had dispersed the bills, since the bags would have broken open, and that the coins had been tumbled down the riverbed, season after season-- after all it had been eighteen years. But a gambler like my father didn’t look at it that way, and as he knelt over the gold pan he thought of what he would do with the money.
He sluiced the black sand up and over his huge butcher’s thumbs. Once he had bracketed my hands with his , letting me try the pan and had asked me what I would do with a lot of gold if I found it. Buy a pony, I said instantly. He told me that would be a smart investment and said he would probably buy an Arabian horse farm and then I would have plenty of ponies to play with and ride. At first I was excited because then I thought my father would really do the things he talked about. Years later when his treasure mania had acquired the patina of a family joke, his remark made me sad. His tall, lanky and leathery sister used to click her false teeth in rage and say, “If he had any good qualities, he kept them well hidden, like that treasure of his . . .”
Crouched between his knees, I pretended to move the water over the sand, making feeble little-boy motions while my father guided the pan. But chiefly I stared at my father’s left thumb near mine, the way the weird black half-nail curved down where he had come close to cutting it off with a boning knife. Happened in a fight with a drunken Indian, my father said, and smiled, showing thinning brown incisors in front. He didn’t smile much, but now he smiled. He would use the money to build a little mountain cabin on the way to Reno, he said, and then, no more motels. And he would buy a plastic laminating machine for documents, he thought secretly. His own business, no more working for chicken shit outfits like Safeway. Laminating documents, that was the future. He had always been interested in the future.
But treasure, that was something only his sweet bed pal in Reno knew about, laughing, the shot glass in her hand serving him, her sharp red knees pressed down into the green chenille motel bedspread. You either knew treasure or you didn’t, and my mother didn’t.
And so he went after the Brinks truck, whenever he had a spare hour or two. Some old prospector in Sparks had told him he found the whole rear chassis of the truck once, and somebody else found a door, washed miles downstream, that still had “Brinks” painted on the side.
So whether he tried cave diving, which wasn’t so good because the air hose kinked and he found he was claustrophobic, or he bought a jet dredge with Uncle Bill and rocketed away half the sand bar in their little tract of the South Fork, or whether he bought a “Wildcat Claim” in Hungry Valley outside of Reno and found nothing but waste metal from an old smelting plant, he never gave up.
His favorite Luckies killed him with lung cancer at age 53, and my mother took one of the seven quarters he always carried for luck in his pocket and had it made into a watch chain to drape across his stomach in the coffin. It would look nice on his charcoal pinstripe suit, but by then I was twenty and talked her out of it. She still had the military chaplain at his funeral though. Hatred of the military was one of the few things my father and I had in common, and when the flag that draped his coffin was folded and placed in my lap I said, “Sorry Dad,” softly to myself. I did manage to put the last six quarters in his front pants pocket where he always kept them.
It was a closed casket ceremony, the corpse having been excavated so drastically from the inside by his cancer, very little bone remained on which to mold an undertaker’s mask of what my father should have looked like in his early fifties. When my mother visited her husband during his last days, the patient next to Dad’s bed used to shake his head sorrowfully and say to her, “Your father isn’t looking at all well today, honey.”
I'll try adding my own autobiographical reminiscence and portrait sketch to your little gallery.
You two are hard acts to follow.
I apologize for not being able to jog this little squib about my father into proper paragraphs. They show properly in the draft window, but not in the preview or the posting.
--Z
(paste)
Seven Quarters
I can only explain my father’s addiction to treasure hunting by touching on his other profligacies. He was a drinker and a gambler who left both his early wives behind and me in their trail, his accidental child. For he intended only to beat upon women as upon a rug. He was a hit and run artist who blew a tire. I was an accidental loving palliative to the simple country girl, my mother, who should have spent her life with her twin goats in a Tillamook barn.
Alcohol lubricated my father’s slide over uncertainties, and so, before he loaded his gold pans, grabbed credulous Uncle Bill to take with him, pulled on his hip boots and his plaid jacket and headed for the Feather River Canyon in his Nash Rambler, he had several jolts of Jack. He never brushed his teeth, with the result that he had full dentures at forty, so my mother knew when he was drinking. He checked the back seat of the Nash to make certain no empties were rolling free and then summoned my mother and me to kiss him goodbye.
Then he skipped Bill this time because he had finally found the seven quarters about which more later, and thought there might be treasure more serious yet. He took out the beer glass from the glove box and, steadying it on the front seat and steering with his knees down Old River Road, poured in three fingers of Jack, humming “Pennies From Heaven.”
Up those spurs of blue granite along the river channel the old car went, and after he parked high up on the crown of the peak, he slid back down the same blue talus in his hip waders. Shale spilled in front of him as he ground through the low bushes of poison oak with his equipment bouncing behind him in a khaki duffel. Under the pans and the other gear rode, as usual, the lunch my mother made him with a thermos of iced tea.
Once he flopped to a halt at the verge of the stream, icy cold where it jumped straight off the snow, Dad pulled his duffel open grabbed his lunch, unfolded his canvas camp stool , and started to pan the black sand at this, his favorite bend in the South Fork.
He had found the seven quarters there. After he shied around for a few nuggets he would go back upstream to that spot today where he had found the seven quarters, the quarters that had once ridden in a bag inside the Brinks truck that went off Snowshoe Pass right here four hundred feet straight down off a hairpin curve above the South Fork. The money had never been recovered-- thousands and thousands and thousands, so the story went.
More rational locals thought that the wind had dispersed the bills, since the bags would have broken open, and that the coins had been tumbled down the riverbed, season after season-- after all it had been eighteen years. But a gambler like my father didn’t look at it that way, and as he knelt over the gold pan he thought of what he would do with the money.
He sluiced the black sand up and over his huge butcher’s thumbs. Once he had bracketed my hands with his , letting me try the pan and had asked me what I would do with a lot of gold if I found it. Buy a pony, I said instantly. He told me that would be a smart investment and said he would probably buy an Arabian horse farm and then I would have plenty of ponies to play with and ride. At first I was excited because then I thought my father would really do the things he talked about. Years later when his treasure mania had acquired the patina of a family joke, his remark made me sad. His tall, lanky and leathery sister used to click her false teeth in rage and say, “If he had any good qualities, he kept them well hidden, like that treasure of his . . .”
Crouched between his knees, I pretended to move the water over the sand, making feeble little-boy motions while my father guided the pan. But chiefly I stared at my father’s left thumb near mine, the way the weird black half-nail curved down where he had come close to cutting it off with a boning knife. Happened in a fight with a drunken Indian, my father said, and smiled, showing thinning brown incisors in front. He didn’t smile much, but now he smiled. He would use the money to build a little mountain cabin on the way to Reno, he said, and then, no more motels. And he would buy a plastic laminating machine for documents, he thought secretly. His own business, no more working for chicken shit outfits like Safeway. Laminating documents, that was the future. He had always been interested in the future.
But treasure, that was something only his sweet bed pal in Reno knew about, laughing, the shot glass in her hand serving him, her sharp red knees pressed down into the green chenille motel bedspread. You either knew treasure or you didn’t, and my mother didn’t.
And so he went after the Brinks truck, whenever he had a spare hour or two. Some old prospector in Sparks had told him he found the whole rear chassis of the truck once, and somebody else found a door, washed miles downstream, that still had “Brinks” painted on the side.
So whether he tried cave diving, which wasn’t so good because the air hose kinked and he found he was claustrophobic, or he bought a jet dredge with Uncle Bill and rocketed away half the sand bar in their little tract of the South Fork, or whether he bought a “Wildcat Claim” in Hungry Valley outside of Reno and found nothing but waste metal from an old smelting plant, he never gave up.
His favorite Luckies killed him with lung cancer at age 53, and my mother took one of the seven quarters he always carried for luck in his pocket and had it made into a watch chain to drape across his stomach in the coffin. It would look nice on his charcoal pinstripe suit, but by then I was twenty and talked her out of it. She still had the military chaplain at his funeral though. Hatred of the military was one of the few things my father and I had in common, and when the flag that draped his coffin was folded and placed in my lap I said, “Sorry Dad,” softly to myself. I did manage to put the last six quarters in his front pants pocket where he always kept them.
It was a closed casket ceremony, the corpse having been excavated so drastically from the inside by his cancer, very little bone remained on which to mold an undertaker’s mask of what my father should have looked like in his early fifties. When my mother visited her husband during his last days, the patient next to Dad’s bed used to shake his head sorrowfully and say to her, “Your father isn’t looking at all well today, honey.”
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Dave The Dov
- Posts: 2257
- Joined: September 3rd, 2004, 7:22 pm
- Location: Madison Wisconsin which is right here
- Contact:
As far as my background is concerned. I'm German,Slovenian,Austrain,English,Italian.
Part of my background could have been in this country for who knows how long. Where as the other half has been here over a 150 years to 100 years.
The Italian ancestor was a Catholic priest who may have been raising kids while he was still a priest. He was one of the first in an area of Wisconsin to give the very first mass. He then left the priesthood to which he married and then years later he went on to fight in the Civil War. He became a Mason and a mailman. There is this rumor that on this farmland that he had owned. There is the Commuion Cup that he used when he was still a priest is buried on it. I've seen a picture of him in his priest attire and I look just like him.
My Slovenian ancestor had the distinction of speaking 4 languages. He would often interpret for others in his family.
_________________
Mercedes 560
Part of my background could have been in this country for who knows how long. Where as the other half has been here over a 150 years to 100 years.
The Italian ancestor was a Catholic priest who may have been raising kids while he was still a priest. He was one of the first in an area of Wisconsin to give the very first mass. He then left the priesthood to which he married and then years later he went on to fight in the Civil War. He became a Mason and a mailman. There is this rumor that on this farmland that he had owned. There is the Commuion Cup that he used when he was still a priest is buried on it. I've seen a picture of him in his priest attire and I look just like him.
My Slovenian ancestor had the distinction of speaking 4 languages. He would often interpret for others in his family.
_________________
Mercedes 560
Last edited by Dave The Dov on March 2nd, 2009, 6:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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abcrystcats
- Posts: 619
- Joined: August 20th, 2004, 9:37 pm
Z -- your description of your father is not prose, but poetry. As a true only child, you've turned your father's life into a colorful legend -- almost a ballad. Do you still have the other quarter?
There was a gold nugget in my family, panned by my grandfather in one of his mining/engineering adventures. The gold was passed on until it reached my father, who made it into a ring, a tiepin and a pendant, all in the letter "B" with my father's own business logo. The pendant will go to me and the other two artifacts to my brothers. I hope you have the quarter.
Dave, as you know, we've shared these family stories before. Your ancestor sounds amazing. I hope you can dredge up more stories about him as time passes. These things are precious. Family legends survive because they tell something about the person you may become. So many people have lost their heritage and it ought to be prized and passed on, again and again. I think there is a lot of heroism and adventure in the past. Your priest ancestor challenged the Catholic Church and dared to start a life of his own in strange unknown land. He was a rebel. That is the message you are supposed to take with you, and I assume there are many others.
These stories are great, and I hope they keep coming! Thanks!
There was a gold nugget in my family, panned by my grandfather in one of his mining/engineering adventures. The gold was passed on until it reached my father, who made it into a ring, a tiepin and a pendant, all in the letter "B" with my father's own business logo. The pendant will go to me and the other two artifacts to my brothers. I hope you have the quarter.
Dave, as you know, we've shared these family stories before. Your ancestor sounds amazing. I hope you can dredge up more stories about him as time passes. These things are precious. Family legends survive because they tell something about the person you may become. So many people have lost their heritage and it ought to be prized and passed on, again and again. I think there is a lot of heroism and adventure in the past. Your priest ancestor challenged the Catholic Church and dared to start a life of his own in strange unknown land. He was a rebel. That is the message you are supposed to take with you, and I assume there are many others.
These stories are great, and I hope they keep coming! Thanks!
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panta rhei
- Posts: 1078
- Joined: September 3rd, 2004, 11:43 am
- Location: black forest, germany
- Contact:
my mother was born in '40, in eastern prussia, which today is the area around the northern polish-russian border.
her father was an orphan who had been a stableboy on farms all his life, until he ran away at the age of 8 to become a pig's herdman, and then, many years later, a dairy master.
her mother was a soul of a woman, daughter of a farm family, and very gifted in tailoring and doing beautiful little drawings.
in '42, when the eastern front came closer, my mother (who was not even 2 at that time), her elder sister and her baby brother had to flee with their mother (my grandfather was missing in action somewhere in russia at that time) in a clandestine and quick departure. they had a suitcase and as much clothes as they could wear. they've been moving westward with the treck of refugees for the next 4 years, always on the road, always hungry, always dirty, always cold, and most of the time, sick.
they ended up in a small village in northern germany in '46, where the four of them shared a small room with a pupeteer and his two sons, and where another baby was born, my grandmother and the pupeteers daughter.
soon after her birth my grandfather, who had been accepted as dead, returned from captivity in siberia. he didn't say much. he was friendly to his daughters and to the little baby girl, but he never forgave my grandmother. he was very hard-working, and during the follwing years, built up his own dairy. my mother says how she remembers having eaten butter like bread and having drunk pure cream til she puked... just because she felt she had to make up for all those years of hunger.
my grandmother has already been very sick at that time. breastcancer. while her siblings desperately needed to run and play to compensate for theri years of lost childhood, my mother stayed home with my grandmother most of the time to help her where she could. she has always felt other's suffering so intensely as if it was her own.
her father refused to pay for her highschool education, so she left home at the age of 15 and went to a diacon's convent to learn nursing and cargiving for children. she worked a lot, and saved enough money to partake at a youth's exchange programme in england for a summer, where she learned english. her mother got sicker and sicker. her father had a girldfriend by now, and was just waiting for his wife to pass.
my mother moved to berlin, worked there as a nurse for a few years. in 61, at the age of 21, she went as an au-pair to america for one year. the idea of au-pair exchange was something completely new back then, and there have been articles all over the american local newspapers about it. she says it was a pure culture shock for her. the family she lived with was wonderful and loving, yet so different from all that she had experienced before. they wanted her to wear make-up, to flirt and date, to dance and make a driver's licence. all those things were very strange to her. she made the driver's licence and she danced, but that was it. still, she learned a lot. (i might have never really gotten introduced to the beats if she hadn't been there ,btw.... when i was a teenager, i found a book she had brought back with her from her time in the states: the beat generation and the angry young man. on the first page, there was a pencil note from my mother's: 'have the courage to be different'.).
she returned and subscribed to a "fachhochschule" (something between university and a specialized school) to study social pedagogics and become a social worker. back then, this was possible even without having attended the gymnasium (the highschool) - it isn't anymore. she studied for three years, and during this time, practically lived on stock cubes and oat flakes... not because she had spent her moeny otherwise, but because she didn't have any.
after her studies, she became a social worker, and worked as one. this is where she met my father, in '65 or so. they married two years later. i was born in '69 (and a month after my birth her mother died), '72 was my brother's birth year.
she has always been a wonderful mother... loving, full of humour and creativity. she's always been different than my friend's mothers, though. not that typicall-embracing mothery-type. but she (and my father as well) trusted us more than the average parent did.
she has always been an original thinker... never got stuck in theories, but acted, in unconvential ways. she's still a searcher, a rebel, a wise woman in her own special manner. and she is stronger than most people i've met.
(to be continued)
her father was an orphan who had been a stableboy on farms all his life, until he ran away at the age of 8 to become a pig's herdman, and then, many years later, a dairy master.
her mother was a soul of a woman, daughter of a farm family, and very gifted in tailoring and doing beautiful little drawings.
in '42, when the eastern front came closer, my mother (who was not even 2 at that time), her elder sister and her baby brother had to flee with their mother (my grandfather was missing in action somewhere in russia at that time) in a clandestine and quick departure. they had a suitcase and as much clothes as they could wear. they've been moving westward with the treck of refugees for the next 4 years, always on the road, always hungry, always dirty, always cold, and most of the time, sick.
they ended up in a small village in northern germany in '46, where the four of them shared a small room with a pupeteer and his two sons, and where another baby was born, my grandmother and the pupeteers daughter.
soon after her birth my grandfather, who had been accepted as dead, returned from captivity in siberia. he didn't say much. he was friendly to his daughters and to the little baby girl, but he never forgave my grandmother. he was very hard-working, and during the follwing years, built up his own dairy. my mother says how she remembers having eaten butter like bread and having drunk pure cream til she puked... just because she felt she had to make up for all those years of hunger.
my grandmother has already been very sick at that time. breastcancer. while her siblings desperately needed to run and play to compensate for theri years of lost childhood, my mother stayed home with my grandmother most of the time to help her where she could. she has always felt other's suffering so intensely as if it was her own.
her father refused to pay for her highschool education, so she left home at the age of 15 and went to a diacon's convent to learn nursing and cargiving for children. she worked a lot, and saved enough money to partake at a youth's exchange programme in england for a summer, where she learned english. her mother got sicker and sicker. her father had a girldfriend by now, and was just waiting for his wife to pass.
my mother moved to berlin, worked there as a nurse for a few years. in 61, at the age of 21, she went as an au-pair to america for one year. the idea of au-pair exchange was something completely new back then, and there have been articles all over the american local newspapers about it. she says it was a pure culture shock for her. the family she lived with was wonderful and loving, yet so different from all that she had experienced before. they wanted her to wear make-up, to flirt and date, to dance and make a driver's licence. all those things were very strange to her. she made the driver's licence and she danced, but that was it. still, she learned a lot. (i might have never really gotten introduced to the beats if she hadn't been there ,btw.... when i was a teenager, i found a book she had brought back with her from her time in the states: the beat generation and the angry young man. on the first page, there was a pencil note from my mother's: 'have the courage to be different'.).
she returned and subscribed to a "fachhochschule" (something between university and a specialized school) to study social pedagogics and become a social worker. back then, this was possible even without having attended the gymnasium (the highschool) - it isn't anymore. she studied for three years, and during this time, practically lived on stock cubes and oat flakes... not because she had spent her moeny otherwise, but because she didn't have any.
after her studies, she became a social worker, and worked as one. this is where she met my father, in '65 or so. they married two years later. i was born in '69 (and a month after my birth her mother died), '72 was my brother's birth year.
she has always been a wonderful mother... loving, full of humour and creativity. she's always been different than my friend's mothers, though. not that typicall-embracing mothery-type. but she (and my father as well) trusted us more than the average parent did.
she has always been an original thinker... never got stuck in theories, but acted, in unconvential ways. she's still a searcher, a rebel, a wise woman in her own special manner. and she is stronger than most people i've met.
(to be continued)
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panta rhei
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my father was born in '32 as the youngest of 5 children in mannheim in the southwestern part of germany, and he was born into a very loving and original family.
his mother was the daughter of swiss booksellers at a missionary station in india. she was the youngest of 12 children and was born 1896 on the passage back to europe. she has studied theology and literature, and was a beautiful part of a huge family where all members were very exeptionally gifted in writing poetry, lyrics and stories.
his father was a protestant priest (or do you say minister?), son of the converted daughter of a rabbi, a faithful and humorous man, who, too, was a gifted writer and original thinker.
when hitler came into power, my father was 10 months old - at the end of the war, he was 13 years. he has experienced this time through the eyes of a child, gradually understanding more as he got older.
despite the difficult times, his childhood was a wonderful and sheltered one. food was always scarce, as was fuel and most things of daily life, but the family could keep their lievs and loved ones and home and was lead by their love, their humour, their creativity and their faith.... there was a lot of singing, joking, wordplays and many wonderful family rituals.
the dark shadows of the nazi-regime only gradually seeped into his consciousness, my father says.
the jewish classmates that have vanished. the code-words they had to use in letters and the cushion on the telephone after his father had refused to read in church the propaganda of the reichskriegsministerium at the day of the 4th annual of hitler's seizure of power. the fact that my father had to be careful what to say in public. the fact that he and his siblings weren't accepted in certain functions anymore because of the jewish blood in their veins. the fact that his father lost his allowance to teach in schools in '38 because of his jewish grandfather. the secret visitors in his father's working room. the bombings. the dead. the rumors.
after the war, after having finished school, my father studied theology. he biked from his home to morocco, trekked to finland to wash gold, travelled to italy with youth groups he guided.
he was already in his 30's and had just been confirmed in his function as a protestant priest (minister?)when he met my mother and married her.
he has always had (and still has) a way with people. he is a good listener, and he can express complexe things in a very clear and simple language.
and despite being a highly intellectual thinker, he never gets stuck in sophisticated tangles and theories heavy with thought - he says things simple, using metaphors and examples and has never been afraid of an "i don't know".
he is a wise and humorous man, and he and my mother, despite being so different in their nature, are still together in love and mutual respect after all these years.
i am thankful to be their daughter.
his mother was the daughter of swiss booksellers at a missionary station in india. she was the youngest of 12 children and was born 1896 on the passage back to europe. she has studied theology and literature, and was a beautiful part of a huge family where all members were very exeptionally gifted in writing poetry, lyrics and stories.
his father was a protestant priest (or do you say minister?), son of the converted daughter of a rabbi, a faithful and humorous man, who, too, was a gifted writer and original thinker.
when hitler came into power, my father was 10 months old - at the end of the war, he was 13 years. he has experienced this time through the eyes of a child, gradually understanding more as he got older.
despite the difficult times, his childhood was a wonderful and sheltered one. food was always scarce, as was fuel and most things of daily life, but the family could keep their lievs and loved ones and home and was lead by their love, their humour, their creativity and their faith.... there was a lot of singing, joking, wordplays and many wonderful family rituals.
the dark shadows of the nazi-regime only gradually seeped into his consciousness, my father says.
the jewish classmates that have vanished. the code-words they had to use in letters and the cushion on the telephone after his father had refused to read in church the propaganda of the reichskriegsministerium at the day of the 4th annual of hitler's seizure of power. the fact that my father had to be careful what to say in public. the fact that he and his siblings weren't accepted in certain functions anymore because of the jewish blood in their veins. the fact that his father lost his allowance to teach in schools in '38 because of his jewish grandfather. the secret visitors in his father's working room. the bombings. the dead. the rumors.
after the war, after having finished school, my father studied theology. he biked from his home to morocco, trekked to finland to wash gold, travelled to italy with youth groups he guided.
he was already in his 30's and had just been confirmed in his function as a protestant priest (minister?)when he met my mother and married her.
he has always had (and still has) a way with people. he is a good listener, and he can express complexe things in a very clear and simple language.
and despite being a highly intellectual thinker, he never gets stuck in sophisticated tangles and theories heavy with thought - he says things simple, using metaphors and examples and has never been afraid of an "i don't know".
he is a wise and humorous man, and he and my mother, despite being so different in their nature, are still together in love and mutual respect after all these years.
i am thankful to be their daughter.
heratage
I come from a long line of bomber pilots, rednecks rascists, old militarists, schoolboy cadets, weak women who followed their men, strong women who became bitterly wrapped in their little boxes of "THAT'S THE WAY It WAS."
Crap.
My paps died 6 days short of his 23rd birthday.
His mom my grandma was a bitter old woman when she told me, "The one consolation I have in Jim's early death is that he never had to know you the way you are now."
Swear to god. When she was on her deathbed I drew a copy of Mary Cassatt's "sleepy baby" and posted it on the wall at the foot of her bed.
At her funeral, my uncle baited me about my opinion on Vietnam and another uncle screamed at me about it.
Her distant ancestor came over from Bavaria, 1732, Theobald Gherst (nee Garst, my grandmother's maiden and my middle name).
Crap.
My paps died 6 days short of his 23rd birthday.
His mom my grandma was a bitter old woman when she told me, "The one consolation I have in Jim's early death is that he never had to know you the way you are now."
Swear to god. When she was on her deathbed I drew a copy of Mary Cassatt's "sleepy baby" and posted it on the wall at the foot of her bed.
At her funeral, my uncle baited me about my opinion on Vietnam and another uncle screamed at me about it.
Her distant ancestor came over from Bavaria, 1732, Theobald Gherst (nee Garst, my grandmother's maiden and my middle name).
Last edited by jimboloco on December 1st, 2004, 11:55 am, edited 3 times in total.
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judih
- Site Admin
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i love this thread.
what a bunch we are!
me?
One blacksmith ancestor died on the job at age 112
One grandfather came over on a boat from Russia at the age of 12
One grandmother left school after fourth grade, and then proceeded to perform on Broadway during the Depression (along with my dad - a DeadEnd Kid), invest a few pennies in stocks, put herself through nursing school and continue to work in a nursing home for the Aged when she herself was in her 80s.
My father is a kind and altruistic individual, my mother is an emotional clairvoyant with a heavy dose of insecurity. I have an uncle who is a federal judge and his wife who crusades for senior citizens (she, herself, is 85).
My brother is a superb filmmaker (documentaries of musicians such as Ravel, da Falla, Kurt Weill, and brilliant escapades into Beethoven's Hair and the Red Violin)
My sister is a rehabilitative counselor who has never lost her innocence.
i have children who are phenomenal - musical, theatrical, philosophical tendencies along with math and athletic skills.
The line is an interesting DNA collection.
i simply observe, amazed.
judih
what a bunch we are!
me?
One blacksmith ancestor died on the job at age 112
One grandfather came over on a boat from Russia at the age of 12
One grandmother left school after fourth grade, and then proceeded to perform on Broadway during the Depression (along with my dad - a DeadEnd Kid), invest a few pennies in stocks, put herself through nursing school and continue to work in a nursing home for the Aged when she herself was in her 80s.
My father is a kind and altruistic individual, my mother is an emotional clairvoyant with a heavy dose of insecurity. I have an uncle who is a federal judge and his wife who crusades for senior citizens (she, herself, is 85).
My brother is a superb filmmaker (documentaries of musicians such as Ravel, da Falla, Kurt Weill, and brilliant escapades into Beethoven's Hair and the Red Violin)
My sister is a rehabilitative counselor who has never lost her innocence.
i have children who are phenomenal - musical, theatrical, philosophical tendencies along with math and athletic skills.
The line is an interesting DNA collection.
i simply observe, amazed.
judih
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Dave The Dov
- Posts: 2257
- Joined: September 3rd, 2004, 7:22 pm
- Location: Madison Wisconsin which is right here
- Contact:
Last edited by Dave The Dov on March 3rd, 2009, 2:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Dave The Dov
- Posts: 2257
- Joined: September 3rd, 2004, 7:22 pm
- Location: Madison Wisconsin which is right here
- Contact:
Last edited by Dave The Dov on March 3rd, 2009, 2:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Dave The Dov
- Posts: 2257
- Joined: September 3rd, 2004, 7:22 pm
- Location: Madison Wisconsin which is right here
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Ahh I see he produced the movie "Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould." That one I have seen!!!!
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Last edited by Dave The Dov on March 3rd, 2009, 2:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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judih
- Site Admin
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yes, that's one of them!
here's a link to a few:
http://www.sfjff.org/sfjff20/filmmakers/02D.html
this is a photo. Wild kid mind grown into a large kid adult
here's a link to a few:
http://www.sfjff.org/sfjff20/filmmakers/02D.html
this is a photo. Wild kid mind grown into a large kid adult
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Dave The Dov
- Posts: 2257
- Joined: September 3rd, 2004, 7:22 pm
- Location: Madison Wisconsin which is right here
- Contact:
Last edited by Dave The Dov on March 3rd, 2009, 2:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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