The Right Stuff

Of all the things we grandchildren recall about our Grandfather Bill "Golly" Fish, his enormous ears and his missing finger are often mentioned. Not so sure about the ears but it's a documented fact that he lost his finger in his woodworking shop - that dusty old building behind the North Main Street foursquare where he lived.

He wrote:

"This scribe's hobby is working with wood, making coffee tables, floor lamps, table lamps, fruit bowls, sandwich trays, card trays, tie racks, magazine racks, book shelves, candle holders, wall brackets and other thingabobs.

"When he isn't sitting a a desk writing Golly - or something - he is at home, out in his wood-working shop, whittling away and thoroughly enjoying himself. In that shop are a bunch of power tools – a bench saw, jig saw, band saw, jointer, drill press, turning lathe, emery wheel, sanding machine and scores of accessories and hand tools.

There is also a supply of choice Potter County lumber for making things.

Folks who see the product of this labor of love often rave over the beauty of the grain of the wood – most of it cherry and maple –  the grace of design and the smooth finish. Occasionally an article is sold for real money but where one is sold, nine are given away."

Many pieces he created found their way into the homes of his children and later his grandchildren and great grandchildren.

For years, I've looked at estate sales, auctions and local antique markets thinking I may find a piece of my family history.

And thus it was in the very back booth at The Right Stuff on Coudersport on Saturday, I spied this and took it down from the shelf.

and turning it over, this.

It's added to my collection for now, but likely to celebrate its centennial in the home of one of the next generation.

Reading As Memory

Writing practice, the act of practicing writing much like one practices an instrument, is a concept I embraced after enrolling in an online six-week intensive with Natalie Goldberg in the height of pandemic shutdown. "Put into words what you most need to say," she suggests.

As an integral part of this practice, she encourages reading the work of others. "I tell students to read deeply ... Reading is important because when you read, you enter the mind of an author, and so you get to study a practiced mind. How do writers create structure in a book? How do they turn phrases and present facts?" 

Finally I have permission to read as part of my work! I've just finished 'Demon Copperhead," the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by one of my favorite writers, Barbara Kingsolver. Dense, difficult and funny all at the same time, it's told in first person, a tale narrated by a young man looking back at his harrowing childhood in the 1990s. "I understood that his voice would be that narrative engine that would get people into this difficult story, and it will get them through to the other side. It needed to be first person, just to give readers that assurance that he's gonna make it because he's telling you this story." Kingsolver wrote in an interview about her book.

The writer weaves the story with a diverse cast of characters - many named and patterned after those in Dickens' David Copperfield, the novel that inspired Kingsolver to re-imagine this tale in our times.

Orphan Tommy Waddles is introduced early in the story and appears and reappears through the 550 pages, finding his place in a newspaper office. And though I was holding my new purple Kindle propped up in bed, there I was back in the Enterprise office. "He was proud of this one, showing me around: machines, computers, the office with a stale ashtray smell that could knock a man flat."

at work in 1978
'composing' room at The Potter Enterprise

"The pegboard on the wall, the giant mess of border tape rolls and X-acto knives.... Clip-art books that were like giant coloring books on different subjects. .... picked over and cut to shreds." 

"Tommy showed me how to feed print columns through the hot wax rollers and help him stick them on the pages. It was all done on a big slanted table with light inside. They had blue pencil marks showing where to line things up. The whole place smelled like hot wax.

"Little cut ends of waxy paper ended up all over everywhere, sticking to your shoes or the backs of your hands, like a baby eating Cheerios."

 

So Long School Year!

I tend to keep time time by the passing of the school bus on the Dingman Run Road during the 180-day school year.

On winter mornings you hear it climbing the hill in the cold, still air, lights cutting through the darkness as it lumbers past. 

The big yellow and black bus that collects students on this run is still marked with the number 1. Say "Bus 1" to my kids, and you'll hear the stories about the interminably long ride to and from school - one of the first ones on and one of the last ones off.

The one time I rode a school bus up the Dingman Run Road was the second grade end-of-school field trip and picnic to Mrs. Carley's chicken farm. I was so excited to wear shorts to school and had a new outfit from Carey's Dry Goods. 

Outside working in the flower beds early to avoid the heat, I heard the bus on this its final trip of the spring, right on time a little before 7:00 a.m. this morning. I waved cheerily at the bus driver on the return trip this afternoon - early dismissal on the last day of school. 

I share Golly's memories of his school days penned in 1964.

Six or eight big yellow school buses go by and they recall days of a long time ago when Golly was seven or eight years old.

The point is  – there were no school buses.

Our family lived in the country. The school house, a one-room temple of knowledge, was two miles distant. During the school year the road was a sea of mud much of the time. It was difficult to avoid the quagmire even trying to walk at the side of the wagon tracks.

Always there was the dinner pail to carry and some times the primer, a marvelous book that taught us to read and spell "cat," "rat" and "dog."

The cafeteria – a creation not even dreamed. 

The dinner pail toted along might contain a slice or two of bread with a sparing coat of buter, a hard boiled egg, a pickle and a piece of cake. The writer can recall some boys and girls who had only buckwheat pancakes.

The drinking fountain consisted of a tin pail and a tin dipper and they became rusty quick! The toilets were two back houses and what dirty messes they were!

The word "sanitation" was not used frequently in that day, probably not in the vocabulary of many of the parents of the students, and surely not of the youngsters. It is strange but true that many of us survived.

When school was dismissed at 4:00 o'clock there were those very long two miles to walk homeward. November days were short with perhaps a light fall of snow that retarded homeward progress around and through the mud holes. Next morning the routine was repeated.

If the youngster finally had learned to read and write, spell "Mississippi" and repeat the multiplication table, he or she was pretty well equipped to face the world.

Again the big yellow buses roll by, conveying youngsters to school buildings that cost millions of dollars, wonderfully equipped and staffed by scores of well qualified instructors.

But this is 1964, not 1884.

 

Decoration Day

"Golly" shared this poem nearly every May, often beginning with the words "It comes to mind  as Decoration Day approaches."

Month of bees and birds and song,
Summer soon be coming 'long.
If it comes on time we'd say
This is Decoration Day.

This is when we bring the flowers.
Fresh with heaven's dews and showers,
Monstrous big bouquets and grand,
Scatter them with loving hand.

Proper way to keep the day.
Proper, don't you think so, say?

Those lines and many more were written by Oliver Walcott Grimm who long ago went on to his reward. The man was a carpenter by trade who worked at times in Port Allegany, Galeton and Coudersport but he loved to write and he was fond of the smell of printer's ink.

We never did know that Longfellow man, and we missed out on Riley, the one-time itinerant Indiana sign painter, but we have a very pleasant memory of Oliver Walcott Grimm. Grimm would grind out verse as rapidly as Heinz could turn out pickles, and he was possessed of a quaint sense of humor.

"In the springtime, Gentle Annie
Trailing vines and flowers seeks.
Not so with Potter's Annie,
She goes searching after leeks."

Oliver Walcott Grimm was a character we are glad we knew. He was intelligent, sensitive, temperamental and his love of strong drink was probably the downfall which tended to shorten his life, causing death at an early middle age.  Regardless of his faults we admired him and we think of one teaching of the Elks – "The faults of our brother we write on the sands, their virtues on the tablets of love and memory."

If we knew where rested the remains of this one-time friend, it would please us very much to scatter a few flowers "with loving hand" on his resting place. We shall at least think of him, and most kindly, this Decoration Day.

I have accepted this challenge - all these years later - to know where rest the remains of Oliver Walcott Grimm so that I might be the one to remember with a scatter of flowers.

May Baskets

Do youngsters hang May Baskets nowadays?"

was the question my grandfather "Golly" asked in 1964.

Then he told this story:

"Away back about 1885 it was a custom for a lad to make a May basket. Scraps of wallpaper and a little paste, made with flour and water, were the materials used - even the bale of the basket being of paper.

 The flowers to fill the basket were the wild flowers of the woods nearby.

Then on the first night of the month, the young swain would, under cover of darkness, approach stealthily the home of his young girl friend and hang the basket with its hidden endearing message and flowers on the door.

Lucille, blond and pretty, usually got the Golly guy's basket. The sad part of the story was that Lucille was so popular that Golly was not the only admirer who quietly approached the home, hung the basket on the door knob, gave a timid rap and beat a hasty retreat to a safe distance and watched to see who found the basket. The whole experience was dangerous(?) and it was surely thrilling. 

Golly was a bit afraid of blonde Lucille's father. He was Dempster Partello, known as "Demp" to his friends. We thought at the time he was an ogre. 

Only a few years ago Golly had the pleasure of greeting Lucille, now Mrs. Everett Knapp, Corning, N.Y. Her blond hair has turned to silver but her smile was still pleasing."

the fair Lucille?

 

Spring Ephemerals

My mother gave me this slim volume when I was a teenager, perhaps when my Biology teacher, Mr. Garvelli, assigned a flower collection project in the tenth grade. It's small - only five inches by three inches, likely designed to fit into a  pack or pocket. It was her mother's, she explained, and I should appreciate it. 

Already losing some of its pages due to its worn, deteriorating binding, I dismissed the gift with a teen's disdain though I was wise enough to understand I should keep it.

It disappeared for many years, and turning up recently in the bottom of a liquor store box with papers from the 1970s. It had long since been replaced with newer wildflower guides as my children completed their flower projects in Biology class. But in the 21st Century, we've come to rely on a smart phone app to give us the answers.

On an unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon last week, the woods beckoned and we set off on a familiar path - the Commissioner Trail at the foot of Denton Hill. 

Spring Beauties at first caught my eye close to the path.  But on the rocky hillside, their new green sprouts pushed through last year's leaves and the leaves of the years before, their delicate flowers a pale pink blush in all that brown and gray. And far above, the promise of this year's leaves in the trees.

Then I remembered, Spring Beauties were the first  flower I identified from my grandmother's little wildflower book.  That page is one that has been lost from her book. But the page with this flower is still there.

Ill Scented Wake Robin?

Dog-Toothed Violet
Yellow Adder's Tongue
Trout Lily
Fawn Lilly

Perhaps the Downy Yellow Violet
"prefers for its habitat dry, hilly woods, often by the side of rushing brooks,
but not usually where the soil is moist."

Common Dandelion
"Although an immigrant to our land, it has extended its range from
the Atlantic to the Pacific and is as well, or better known,
as any other wild flower that we have. As everyone knows, its green,
jagged leaves form a staple article of food and can be purchased in
markets in spring at so much per peck. "

And here is more food from the forest floor - wild leeks!

"the various species belong to this genus (allium)
are very strongly scented, pungent herbs
growing from a coated bulb."

Though my mother isn't up to a hike on the Commissioner just now, I shared with her my delight of the spring woods as we drove along a country road so she could enjoy the coming of spring from the car.

"Do you still have the wildflower book that was Mother's?" she asked.

"I do ... and I even know where it is," I answered.

"Good, that was precious to her," she said after a moment. 

Silver Carols

My grandfather often wrote of his childhood, especially in his later years. Here's one from 1960.

"When I was a school youngster we used to sing a skating song. The words of the chorus come to mind:

"Off, off to the ice we go, on, on with our skates so bright. 

Off, off to the ice we go, so merry, so happy and light."

There was a song, too, for the springtime and it started with the words:

"Spring is on the mountain, Verdure on the hill;

Springing from the fountain, runs the silver rill.

Modest flowers are blooming on the velvet mead'

All the air perfuming – brother, sow the seed."

The tunes come to mind. Maybe it is good I cannot vocalize through these words.

Well one good result of those songs was learning of two new words – verdure and mead!

For summer there was a seasonal ditty that went:

"Our boat is trimmed with sail and oar, and all prepared to leave the shore;

How pleasantly we'll sail along and listen to the boatman's song.

There may have been an autumn song but if so my memory is faulty and it does not come to mind. We do remember song book title was "Silver Carols.

Kinda wish we had a copy of that old song book. I would take it to Golly's Folly and when alone in the wilds, I might turn loose my vocal organs to make the welkin ring in the picturesque Nine Mile Valley, with only chipmunks to make up the audience."

Though it's 63 years too late and the old man has been gone for nearly 54 of those years, I found a copy of Silver Carols in its entirety in a place he could never imagine in his wildest dreams - this man who began life shortly after the Civil War and lived to see man land on the moon.