Unearthing a life.....

I think 'Bookworm' believes I'll actually use this site to delve into my wildly exciting past. So here is a gesture in that direction:





THE GRANDMOTHERS
There were two. Grandma Lena (above left) and Grandma Katie (above right). They were probably both in their very early "forties" when I was born in 1934, the first grandchild for either of them. Grandma Lena still had one son at home -- Uncle Don. Grandma Katie was in worse straits. Grandpa John had died the year before, at the age of thirty-nine, and Katie had Mom’s four younger siblings still at home -- Mary, Albert, and Lela.
According to Mom (who went back and finished high school after I was born), there was a great deal of Grandmotherly competition between Lena and Katie. Mom, by her own admission, was not only "not much of a housekeeper," she was no housekeeper whatsoever. The two grandmothers would come in regularly and clean her house and wash up the accumulation of dirty dishes.
Geography gave Grandma Lena the winning edge in this battle. She lived within a hundred feet of us, while Grandma Katie was isolated down on the south side of town -- and did not have an automobile. To the best of my knowledge, neither of these women ever drove a motor vehicle.
Morning and evening, Grandma Lena would line Neil, Norma, and I up on a bench...."like three hungry little birds with your yaps hanging open," Mom recalls....and dose us with a spoonful of cod liver oil with a small glass of orange juice for a chaser. For winter coughs there was Lena’s "onion syrup", a concoction of sugar, water, and sliced onions that "lived" and percolated in a covered bowl atop the heating stove. If a cough got too advanced, one could fall victim to the dread Mustard Plaster.
One afternoon in 1939, Mom was suddenly laid out with "the shrieking pains" in her abdomen. Her appendix had burst. Grandma Lena dispatched Uncle Don to race across town to the railroad yards and fetch Dad home. Dad rushed her in to the hospital at Ellensburg -- which must have been a devilish ride for Mom because the first forty miles was washboard rough dirt and gravel road. So Mom had an emergency appendix operation and within hours my little sister Norma was also admitted with advanced pneumonia. Lena went along to "sit" with Norma.
The doctor’s didn’t expect Norma to live, so no one told Mom that her baby was there in the same hospital. Mom did see Grandma Lena and wondered what she was doing there. Sometime in the middle of the night a doctor came into Norma’s room and told Lena that they’d just gotten hold of a new experimental drug and asked if she’d let them try it out on the dying child. Grandma gave them permission (her’s, not Mom’s or Dad’s) and the Ellensburg hospital saved its first life with the original Wonder Drug, Sulfa.
My favorite story about Grandma Lena happened before I was born. She went out to the barn one day, around noon, to do some chore or other and when she opened the barn door to leave, she found herself face-to-face with a rabid (hydrophobic) coyote. Trapped in the barn with a "mad" coyote camped out near the barn door, she climbed up into the haymow and waited out the afternoon. When she finally saw Grandpa Charlie coming home from work, she hollered out and told him the situation. Charlie fetched his .22 rifle from the house, dispatched the coyote, and set Grandma free.
Food figures heavily in my memories of my grandmothers. Grandma Lena was a Primo chicken-killer (dead chickens subjected to appropriate heat are food). She sometimes provided "fryers" to the Othello meat market. She would haul several crates of these chickens out behind the woodshed -- to the vicinity of the chopping block. To the big pot of boiling water. To the stack of brown paper bags.
Heads flew with startling rapidity. She was so fast with the hatchet that sometimes there’d be a half-dozen headless hens doing flip-flops across the wood yard. Then a dip in the scalding water and feathers flew after heads. As the final touch, Lena would singe off the pinfeathers with a flaming brown paper bag. It was a dreadful spectacle. Headless chickens chased me in my childhood nightmares.
She made dill pickles which started "dilling" in a huge crock with a towel packed into the top. Sometimes she’d lift the towel and let me fish out a dill pickle "in the making". And sometimes when she wasn’t immediately present, I’d sneak a pickle.
And BUTTERMILK! Anytime I caught her churning butter, I’d hang close by for a little glass ("little glasses" came from the grocery filled with cheese-crap and/or jellies) of fresh buttermilk -- with bits of yellow butter still suspended in it. When I got big enough to crank the churn, I struck a bargain with her. I’d churn her butter and I’d be rewarded with a BIG glass of buttermilk. Once in a while nostalgia overwhelms me in grocery store dairy sections. I take home a pint of buttermilk in its little cardboard container. It’s just not the same. Not even in the ballpark.
I don’t have as many "thereby hangs the thread of a tale" memories of Grandma Katie. As I said above, she sort of lost the proximity battle. I do remember her wonderful angel food cakes and her plump succulent egg noodles. And the time Neil and Norma got hold of a bottle of black shoe polish and painted it all along the side of her white house.
About the time we moved permanently to Smyrna (1941), Aunt Lela got married and Uncle Les joined the U.S. Army (as did Uncle Don). With everyone gone, Grandma Katie left Othello and moved in with her mother, Great-Grandma Mary, in Rosalia, Washington. Rosalia is south of Spokane and only a few miles from the wheat farm where Katie grew up.
This does remind of a bit of a tale. Great Uncle Jim told me that his father was not only a wheat farmer, but also a baseball nut. His dad suspended a tire in the barnyard, marked off the distance to a pitcher’s mound, and made the kids spend hours every evening pitching to him through the hole in the tire (the strike zone). Jim went from the barnyard to the Baltimore Orioles in the Major Leagues. His professional career was short. The U.S. got into WWI and he joined the Army. His Division fielded a high-class baseball team that went around playing against other Army teams and did exhibition games with Big League teams. One day he pitched both games of a double- header against the Baltimore Orioles. He won both. But ruined his pitching arm for all time and, as a defunct player, got sent off to France to fight in the trenches.
"All us kids were damn good," Uncle Jim boasted. "I was the only one who ever got anywhere with it. But when we were kids back in school, the best damn ball-player in the family was your Grandma Kate."