Memories - Feb, '02 (?)

Hello "cuz’ns"

Most of the time I marvel at the world in which we live. For instance, the other night my desk was cluttered with two truculent laptops – one for business, one for everything else. At the same time, Sharon’s mini-tower mocked my efforts to render the spore of some spiteful digital camera into recognizable images. Frustration and urgency molded the evening as though dire worldly consequences were hanging in the balance, dependent upon the success of my labors. Actually, that might not have been too far off the mark considering my endeavors involved the disparate realms of sagging 401Ks and photos of our grandson Alex.

Then in a letter, Margaret’s voice reached out beckoning to me from another time, another world; asking me to share my memories of grandpa Ed. While reading Margaret’s story I was carried back to a forgotten and now foreign world, a slower paced and carefree world; to childhood memories of cold windy winters, the aroma of summer cut alfalfa, horse-back riding, green apples in the orchard, visits by cousins, long forgotten faithful dogs, bicycling to school, the summer harvests, huge family get-togethers, one mean Fort Collins attack-cat, musty barns, crawdads getting loose and lost in the house, fourth-of-July fireworks, cows dumber than Jim Carey, and on and on. But having reached an age where I live in fear of forgetting something important (such as my address) and yet not being able to forget my passing birthdays (one of life’s crueler ironies), I am not sure that I am up to the challenge of Margaret’s request, but I will offer what I can.

On January 12, 2000, our son Daryl and his wife Julie delivered Alexander Stanley Olander into this world, our first grandchild - a millennium baby. My in-laws and family will tell you that I did not approach the inevitable state of grandfather-hood gracefully. I was in a state of total, un-apologetic, unrelenting denial – my visions of grandparents and antiquity are nearly synonymous. The reason is simple enough, granddad was 59 years old when I was born, putting him in his mid sixties before I began to develop any real sense of the man. This will also be the case with Alex and myself. My memories of granddad start and end with a vision of an ancient man, male pattern baldness rimmed by snow white hair, deaf, toothless (the false teeth seldom in evidence), bib cover-alls, flannel shirts over long johns, and a deliberate, slow gait. But my memories also include an industrious, helpful, self-reliant and creative individual who we are all proud to have been related to.

But stop for a moment and consider the world that he knew as it spanned from the days of the frontier to man’s first footprints on the surface of the moon. I remember him telling stories once about the "Indian wars", although I am sure that he was a generation removed from them. He knew people who’s lives had been effected by the Pawnee Massacre, only a few miles east of town. I felt the distrust and dislike that he harbored towards Indians. I wonder if he was aware of, or what he thought of, the space-race and man walking on the moon. Despite our laptops and digital cameras, as fast as our world changes, his world had changed more and probably seemed to do so faster. Most of today’s major innovations were conceived during his lifetime – they are just being profoundly modified in ours. He lived a simple life immersed within an incredible era.

From the early forties until the end of the summer of ’53, we lived with granddad, or he lived with us, on at least 3 occasions that I can remember. During the war and just after, we stayed briefly in Grover off and on while dad was in the navy or convalescing from it’s inflicted injuries. The earliest memories I have of Grover are of taking baths in a galvanized tub while mom heated the water on a coal-burning stove and of granddad cutting the corn from the cob with a knife so that he could eat it - mom had to explain that he had not worn his teeth to dinner. Some years later he would proudly tell me his story about earning the money and traveling on his own some distance back east (Chicago I believe) to have all of his teeth pulled in one appointment. This was done while he was still in his teens.

One of the standout memories of Grover during the time that Margaret and Alan were living there was the garden that Granddad always planted and cared for. I remember playing in and around it and having the impression that it was huge. It must have been a big undertaking for a man in his mid 60s. When he lived with us on the ranch he also had a garden – corn and green peas are two of the staples which I recall. During our final stay in Grover at the beginning of the 50s, he had finally stopped planting the garden, it had become too much work.

I have the impression that we visited with Margaret and Allen a lot when they lived in Grover. On one of these long car trips, a couple of our cousins, granddad and I were riding together in the rear seat of the car on our way from Fort Collins to Grover. Granddad was playfully passing the time by teaching us the Swedish alphabet and letting us play a little with his hearing aid. He had a "miniaturized" model which fit in his shirt pocket and had a pair of wires leading up to the earpiece. Considering that this had to be before ’50, he must have had the latest in the state-of-the-art technology for the day. The game was for granddad to hold the earpiece up to one cousin’s ears while the rest of us shouted into the hearing aid. Normally he was careful to make sure the volume was not too high for us. But once he put the earpiece up to my ear without noticing the volume had been turned up - then the other cousins shouted in unison at the top of their lungs into the microphone in granddad’s pocket. Damn that hurt – thanks guys, my ears still ring!

Margaret says that his car was turquoise but I just remember it as being green. I also remember another vehicle with a granddad story attached to it. Once mom was upset because dad and granddad allowed me to drive the old REO pickup around the ranch. She said it was unsafe and that I shouldn’t be driving it. The fact that I was 10 or younger wasn’t bothering her but it seems that granddad had used bailing wire to fix the truck’s steering. I actually climbed under the pickup to check it out, and I did find bailing wire holding one of the tie rods in position – looked OK to me. The REO was no longer being made so parts weren’t available, needless to say it never did get fixed. Sometime later, mom had me drive her down to the end of our property in the REO, so she could walk the rest of the way over to the store. None of us mere mortal males are meant to understand.

He had moved to La Porte to live with us for awhile, I believe that it was to help dad with the running of the farm/ranch. He brought his tools with him and he tried, with very marginal success, to instill a respect for tools within me. He would work patiently with me, showing me the proper way to use a saw or how to adjust the hand-plane. I was too young to grasp the complex versatility of the carpenter’s square but I marveled at his ability to use it to calculate all sorts of geometric angles for framing buildings. But the tools were more than instruments of labor, he also was able to use them to amuse himself. He showed me how the saw could be played as a musical instrument. He didn’t have a fiddler’s bow to use, so he showed me how to play the "musical saw" by tapping it with a small hammer. Mom must have loved him for that. In the long run, his tools would end up being a major source of friction between granddad and myself – I simply failed to learn to clean them and put them away to his satisfaction.

He occasionally delighted in telling stories about the past and about our folks. I have forgotten nearly all of his stories except for one which he told about one of the boys’ secret projects. It seems that one summer our fathers had decided to make a little moonshine. Of course they thought that they had done so in secrecy but granddad and Wynnona had it figured out and found the still. Gleefully he said they decided to keep the discovery secret in order to catch the boys in the act when they went to partake of their brew. Nothing happened until harvest time. Then on one particularly hot day as the boys were working up a sweat, they started to make side trips to retrieve some of the "shine". After each side trip granddad would make them work harder, the harder they worked, the more they sweated and the more they sweated, the more side trips they made – granddad worked them so hard they drank it all and sweated it out, while never showing any effect of the alcohol. When the still was empty, he had foiled their moonshine venture.

We moved to Grover for the last time at the start of my 5^th school year. That winter, granddad left town to live and work as a caretaker on a ranch somewhere to the south-east of town. Mom and Dad would occasionally visit and take supplies to him. After the winter was over, he returned to town and brought back the miniature covered wagon and animals with him. They astounded me – I thought they were exquisite - it is my first memory of his artwork. Although I was occasionally allowed to handle them, I never ever considered them as toys. He had whittled and painted the animals - the wagon was perfect to my eye and I believe that it was all done from his memory. I asked my parents how and why had he created them and was told that he had done it because during the winter he had a lot of time on his hands but that he had to use materials that were available. For instance, the harnesses were made of real leather – that means he would have had to split and strip some larger and thicker leather object to produce the tiny, thin strips which he needed. As Margaret indicated, he continued his craft, producing several more art pieces which were kept on his shelf.

Still being young at the time, I had the impression that granddad’s creativity had spontaneously arisen over one winter’s stay at that ranch. Since then, I have learned that it is not uncommon for art to be produced by isolated individuals – isolation has given rise to a lot of cowboy art and to prisoner’s art. Margaret’s letter gives me a hint that perhaps this late life creativity was not nearly so spontaneous as I thought. As a foreman on the Eubank’s sheep ranch, he probably had the isolation and opportunity to practice the beginnings of his art. Perhaps, he had continued to develop his craft while living with us on the ranch but none-the-less, I was only aware of his final creative explosion.

As the years roll by, most of my memories of granddad have dimmed and/or faded entirely with the exception of that profound awe that I felt for him when I saw the objects that he had crafted that winter. We left Grover for Austin, Texas a few days before the beginning my eighth year of school in 1953 – I never saw granddad again and only received sketchy reports of the last 17 years of his life.

Love to all

Cuz’n Rog