Childhood Memories

Both grandmothers made fried cakes each Saturday. In the morning I walked the block to Grandma Van Brunt’s house, watched her fry the fragrant dough, and secured her offerings in a brown paper bag, which quickly acquired grease stains from the rich pastries inside it. Joe, Grandma Church’s chauffeur, brought a bag of her fried cakes to Mother late in the day. Learning diplomacy at an early age, I carefully never told either grandmother that I preferred the rich, irregular crustiness of Grandma Van Brunt’s fried cakes to the more traditional ones given us by Grandma Church.

 

The only Carlisle relative I remember fondly and well was Grandma Church’s only sister, our Great Aunt Kate Roberts Carlisle. Aunt Kee, as we called her, never married. Mother said that she had been engaged twice; both times her fiancé drowned before they could marry. Aunt Kee eventually decided she was intended to build a life for herself alone.

I have a photo of Aunt Kee, who looks elderly and stern, holding my mother as a young child. However, judging by mother’s age, it must have been taken early in the Twentieth Century. Aunt Kee would have been in her thirties at the most. Her hair would have been blond, not white. As for the glasses she’s wearing, I not only remember her pince-nez, I have it.

Aunt Kee was deeply involved with The League of Women Voters and other interesting civic organizations. She was a Suffragette; along with other young women protesting for voting rights for women, she chained herself to downtown railings during demonstrations.

 

Aunt Kee was usually at Higgins Lake with Grandpa and Grandma Church when my cousins and I stayed with them. Aunt Helen and Uncle Ben Symons’ two oldest children were within a year of my age; I was six months younger than Johnny and nine months older than Helen Anne. As children, the three of us were inseparable.

Aunt Kee, slightly younger and much more mobile than Grandma, took us down to the lake, waded with us (which most of that generation did not do), and was informally in charge of the grandchildren.

 

Aunt Kee was fascinating to us when we knew her as children; Johnny, Helen Anne, and I adored visiting her on Saturdays. My sister Mary and their sister Josephine Symons, both five years younger, were not included in our special play days, so they missed knowing Aunt Kee as wonderfully as the three of us did.

My impression of Aunt Kee is of someone who loved children but did not toady to them. I know we behaved ourselves at her house, but I don’t remember her ever fussing at us. She told stories. She let us help make gingerbread men. She never talked down to us.

A standard pastime on our Saturday visits was sitting in child-size chairs on an open back veranda, blowing soap bubbles. Aunt Kee had a constant supply of small white clay pipes and a master’s touch at putting the right amount of Ivory Liquid in water to make a viscous mixture for the manufacturer of bubbles by enthusiastic children.

 

Aunt Kee lived in the old Carlisle home, a great, tall, rambling Victorian gem with sudden passageways, staircases, and rooms of wildly different sizes.

We adored the enormous, white-tiled master bathroom. It had widely spaced, heavy white porcelain fixtures, including a foot bath—a heavy, low piece about a yard square with hot and cold water faucets. We begged to use it for our baths instead of the gigantic tub.

A smaller bathroom down the hall had our favorite toilet. It was a large white-painted chair with wooden arms and caned back and seat. The seat was lifted. The caned panel between the front legs opened like a door on hinges to reveal a standard commode. After use, the fixture was re-hidden within its discrete painted chair.

 

Aunt Kee traveled! While travel was a favorite occupation for wealthy Americans in the Twenties, it was unusual for a single woman to take off for the far reaches of the globe by herself.

Proof of Aunt Kee’s adventures resided on a mantle in one of the Carlisle’s several parlors. It was a wide, elaborately worked North African silver bracelet, studded with semi-precious stones. We children admired it and always made viewing it a primary stop on our visits to the house, though I don’t remember that any of us ever dared touch it.

 

As I remember, Aunt Kee died suddenly in her fifties, maybe early sixties. When the Carlisle home was broken up after her death, a great trunk of clothes dating to the turn of the Twentieth Century and a bit later, ended up at Grandma’s, and eventually, at our house.

I can remember Helen Anne and I spending ecstatic hours going through the voluminous gowns of burgundy taffeta, pastel plaid sheer silk, and even Grandma’s wedding gown of ivory rep. There were stays, leg-o’-mutton sleeves and billions of tiny buttons, dog-collar necks trimmed with rouches or lace, and skirts with flounces or pleated inserts.

We dressed up, paraded down Grandma’s wide front staircase, and staged “scenes” on the huge landing overlooking the main entrance hall.

One of our most versatile pieces was a hip-length evening cape of stiff black velveteen lined with white satin. We took turns using it.

 

I think I considered my sister Mary a sort of living doll. She was a very pretty child with curly blond hair that Mother fixed in long curls. I loved winding the willing locks around a finger to create those curls.

Mary was the principal in our game of “Princess.” Aunt Kee’s trunk of dresses was now at our house; the velveteen evening cape that Helen Anne and I used play with now made a lavish floor-length robe for Mary when I dressed her as the princess. I seem to remember some sort of crown or tiara, but am not sure about that. We had elaborate dialogue to go along with our playlets. Mary was remarkably patient through my fussing over her, possibly pleased to have some sort of attention from her older sister.

 

Sunday afternoons our family gathered around a card table in the living room for games. This was one family project that welcomed Mary as a full partner, much to her delight. I seem to remember beginning with Parcheesi, a simple, benign game, but suspect we may have gone the Snakes-and-Ladders routes earlier. When it came on the market, Mother bought one of the first Monopoly sets. This may be the point at which I stopped enjoying our games afternoons. From the beginning, I thought that Monopoly gave free rein to the least seemly of players’ personality traits. Mary remembers our Sunday games as a high point of her childhood. I remember them as a weekly obligatory ordeal.

 

When Mary was a suitable age, Mother set up a small nursery school for her with some four or five young children of friends. As I remember, it was not the only small group of toddlers she gathered and taught through the years.

My own experience with Mother’s teaching was in our Episcopal Sunday School. Much to my dismay, Mother promoted herself along with me each year so that I always had her as an exceptionally demanding teacher from whom I could not escape. Fumble-fingered as I was, unlike my artistic mother and sister, I never was free of the burden of doing every project to Mother’s imaginative specifications.

My major recollection of those times is of Mother’s asking the class to carve from soap something related to the church—a font, a candlestick, a chalice, for example. Making one of the wiser decisions of my non-artistic life, I chose to turn a bar of Ivory soap into a Bible. Mother did not applaud the level of my achievement, but admitted that it filled her requirements.

 

My beloved cousin Johnny Symons was killed when a tire blew out on Aunt Helen and Uncle Ben’s car as they were driving home from Higgins Lake one Labor Day. A piece of glass pierced Johnny’s brain. He had just turned 12. It was the year before safety glass was invented. Helen Anne was supposed to drive down with them, but at the last minute it was arranged that she would go on ahead with our grandparents.

 

Mother was not happy when we moved away from her active social life in Saginaw. No one knew them in Grand Rapids and it took time to make new friends. Mother never realized that two of their closest friends, Dorothy and Jerry Ford, were parents of a president-to-be. At the time, their son Jerry was the star of the University of Michigan football team.

Our Grand Rapids house had a nice back yard. Mother, an inveterate gardener, soon had it outlined with flowers. Every winter through my teen years, Dad built dikes of snow at the edges of the gardens. Day after day, he sprayed them and the snow-covered grass with our garden hose till the ice was a useful thickness for a skating rink.

A dozen or more of my junior-high-school friends gathered after school every day to skate. I never was a dedicated athlete and still remember fighting with reluctant ankles, trying to keep them stiff and straight. When the cold became too much for the skaters, the boisterous crowd adjourned to Mother’s kitchen, where she thawed us with hot cocoa and cookies. Dad repaired the rink by sprinkling over skate marks.

 

Mother adored circuses and carnivals and county fairs. How Dad felt about them, I never knew, but he cheerfully drove us to the rutted parking fields and, usually carrying Mary, did his best to keep me within range while he followed his wife on her charge through the milling crowds.

I became the temporary focus of family pride when I won a ham at a fair during the Depression. During the same period, Mother or Dad won a live turkey in a pre-Thanksgiving raffle. I remember going down into our basement and finding my frantic father chasing the terrified bird past the furnace and around the normal basement miscellany. Dad won the race while Mother screamed up in the kitchen. She had a full-blown phobia about birds after having been attacked in childhood by her grandmother’s jealous parrot. Mother was paralyzed with fear that the turkey would fly up the back steps and attack her.

I grew up a circus aficionada. As for fairs, I could tolerate the displays of vegetables as long as I was given ample time to admire the cows, pigs, and horses. I wonder, however, whether my dislike of crowds, almost to the point of claustrophobia, might have originated with the masses of humanity that so enchanted Mother.

Years later in Grand Rapids when I was in my early teens, Mother organized a sleep-over for me, three of my friends spending the night with us so that we all could get up in the dark to be out at the circus grounds in time to welcome the arriving Barnum and Bailey’s circus. Watching the intricately organized erecting of tents, placing of trailers, setting up of the side show, and settling of animals either in tents or in stout cage wagons was a stark panorama in the uneven lighting. Elephants moved silently about their required tasks like great, gray ghosts. By the time the circus was in place, dawn had broken and we tired spectators were ready to return to the warmth of our kitchen and to Mother’s delicious breakfast.

When we returned to the circus to watch it that night, Mother sent a note to the Wild West Show star, former Western movie favorite Tim McCoy. She reminded him that they had known each other years earlier in Saginaw. Mr. McCoy sent back a note asking our family of four to visit him in his dressing room after his performance and enclosing complimentary tickets to his Wild West show.

 

Dad managed the family brick factory, first in Saginaw, and then, when I was 12, in Grand Rapids. The Grand Rapids plant was in trouble and Dad was sent to straighten it out—which he did despite and after the Depression.

During my teenage summers, Dad made the ultimate parental sacrifice and let me substitute for his secretary during her vacation. I loved it and had no idea the degree of chaos in her bookkeeping Paula returned to annually.

 

Mother had a weight problem as long as I knew her. In the mid-Thirties her doctor suggested a new weight loss drug. Tragically, Mother became one of the people in whom the drug caused serious cataracts. She was legally blind for eight years.

Mother could see light and dark and major shapes. She was terrified of cataract surgery, afraid she would lose what little sight she had. Instead of relying on the medical profession, which she felt had betrayed her, she turned to various versions of faith healing—Christian Science, an Episcopal minister in Denver, and another in Los Angeles.

I was away in college when Mother jaunted by herself across the continent to see the minister in California, hoping he could help heal her. How Dad let her do it, I never could imagine. Mother was afraid to fly, so she traveled by train. She had a wonderful time. She told later of meeting a German and speaking his language with him all the way across the country. It was her first long chance to use the German she had studied years earlier in school.

Mother finally had the cataract removed from one eye in 1943. It was the year I graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University. Mother told me that she made the sacrifice so that she would not be a burden to me and interfere with whatever future I planned. Cataract surgery had more dangers at that time, so she never had the second eye done, fearing that it might not track properly with her operated eye.

The cataract operation was a great success. Mother told of her amazement at the world she suddenly could see for the first time in eight years. Dad led her from the hospital toward his car. Mother remonstrated, “Jack, don’t be silly!” thinking he was teasing about which car was his because it was so much grander in style than cars had been when she last could see them.

With a thick lens, Mother regained near-normal sight. Proof of this lay in the mountain of exquisite hand-embroidered baby clothes, dressy aprons, Christmas stockings, and Christmas tree skirts she made in the years following her surgery. The work was surprisingly delicate and accurate, considering that Mother could see from only one eye.

 

Mother and Dad had the trip of their lifetimes after both Mary and I had left home. I never heard how they decided to visit Bermuda. I never knew what tremendous self-discipline it took for Mother to force herself to fly. I only know that they had a wonderful vacation. Their happiness is attested by a tiny tourist spyglass with a minute picture of our beaming mother showing on the lens when it is held up to the light.