I am not sure that what I say here is “learning” but here are some of my memories of my maternal grandparents. As my mom was their youngest of four girls, my paternal grandparents were always sort of old, I guess. From my earliest memories, they had white hair and the usual ailments of the elderly. My mom’s mother died when I was in my middle teens. I have very vivid memories of her. Her name was Cora. I always loved her name. I thought it was very feminine and pretty. My grandma was very amusing to me. I thought she was, at times, silly but looking back she could have been a little senile too in later years. Can I say that? Or just old enough that she could say what she wanted to maybe.
I will always remember her rolled down hose. Ladies wore dresses—sometimes it was just a house coat—but she always had those hose on; rolled down to her knees or sometimes to her ankles. I guess they didn’t have knee high hose then. She always wore a petticoat. Now, mind you, her petticoat was silk but it did not have the um, support, that ladies are sure to have today. Her hair was pure white and curly. I evidently inherited her curly hair. She was a cook for a living. And she really could cook. She made wonderful food. Some of my favorites were her poached eggs, tomato gravy and her coleslaw. And I don’t mean all at the same time. Those dishes are what I remember the most while spending time in her kitchen. She made her coleslaw, obviously from scratch, of course, but she put that coleslaw together right on the kitchen table. She shredded the cabbage and carrots and mixed it all right there. I do not have the recipe and I have been trying to recreate her coleslaw recipe for a long time now. I come close, but there is just something that is not the same. Maybe it is mixing it on the kitchen table. I really think she did that because making coleslaw is pretty messy I have found out. Or maybe it was just the love of cooking that comes out in the taste of what she put together.
My mom’s dad died when I was 12, I think. He was a big man. He had white hair and he chewed tobacco and it was always there in one side of his mouth with his spittoon right beside him wherever he was sitting whether in his special chair in the kitchen—I called it special because it was not one of the traditional kitchen chairs but a chair that had wooden arms and seemed to fit him just right— his traditional arm chair/recliner in the living room, or his chair on the back porch. That spittoon was always there wherever he was sitting. My pap was always sitting and always spitting. He moved from chair to chair and that’s about all he did. He didn’t have much to say. My youngest brother inherited that from our pap. He reminds me a great deal of him and, in fact, he is named after my pap. When my mom was ready to go to the hospital, he said, if you have more than one, name one after me. She had more than one—a boy and a girl—and James (from my pap) and Elwood (from the doctor that delivered all seven of us) became my younger brother’s name. I was three when the twins were born and I can still remember the day they came home from the hospital. We were living with my grandparents then, and they laid both babies on grandma Cora’s kitchen table and everyone surrounded the table making over those babies. My oldest sister—whom I am very close to—says I became a brat that day. She was 12 and she took care of me (a 3-year-old) as my mom was busy with those babies.
My pap always had the radio on—radios, I should say. He had a large old-style radio that was housed in a wooden cupboard behind doors and another large upright radio that you could see the speakers through the grooves in the carved wood and the knobs and buttons on the top and the usual channel indicators that lit up. He also had transistor radios on—at least two—maybe more. Usually, all these radios were on at the same time, and if he was in his living room, the TV was on too. All channels were tuned into a baseball game—all different games. I don’t remember so much about what games he listened to, but I imagine the Pirates were one of the teams. But he listened to as many as he could at one time. I also remember him watching bowling on TV. He seemed to like that. I found it very boring, I remember, but it was always on. My pap had his Iron City beer delivered once a week on Saturday mornings to the back door. Someone from Loggies would pull up in the alley and deliver bottles of beer that came in a really neat box that opened on the top from the middle out. He would put the empties back in that box (and this box held a lot of them) to be picked up the next Saturday. This was how it was from the time I can remember. He also had a bottle in the ‘icebox’ that was housed in a brown paper bag. We were told never to touch. We never did.
My pap was a nice man and my grandma was a nice lady. My family (nine of us) lived with them when I was very young and then eventually my grandparents lived with my mom’s sister. We stayed overnight there more times than I can count. One or more of the seven of us was always there. We also visited every Sunday after church and had breakfast either downstairs at my grandma’s or upstairs at my aunt’s. They must have really loved us to never tell us to go home. I know we loved them.
My paternal grandparents were from the mother country, Poland. Their first child was born in Poland. The rest of their 11 children were then born here in the United States. I never knew these grandparents as they were gone long before I was born. My grandmother, Marianna, died when my dad was about 13 which would have been in the 30s and my grandfather Thaddeus died only after having been there for the birth of my two older sisters in the early 50s.
Both sets of my grandparents are buried here in Wheeling where I do not often enough visit them. Writing about my maternal grandparents has brought back wonderful memories of my childhood—especially those hot summer months when we were always there with them listening to baseball, bringing pap his bottle of beer, enjoying wonderful food and my grandmother’s abundance of beautiful flowers and homegrown fruits and vegetables from the back yard. The Irises that line my driveway and one side of my house are from my grandmother’s garden that date back to the 60s, at least.
I truly miss them. I think what I learned most from my Grandma Cora and Grandpap James is taking care of family—they cared for us in more ways than I will be able to speak of here—and always provided unconditional love.
