Building the Dome - Flooring and Framing - 3

Always on the outlook for bargains, Doyle attended an auction of building materials recovered from the demolition of the LaPorte Elementary School in the early 1970s and came away with many 3"x13"x24' rough sawn floor beams and a large pile of 4" tongue and groove fir flooring. Bob used the beams as his floor joists and set those heavy things in place by himself, cut the angles on the ends with a hand saw. He covered them with 3/4" plywood and later, once the walls were up and sided, he painstakingly pulled all the nails and cut out the worn areas of that much used 4" strip flooring, nailing it in place with a rented nail gun and that became our finished flooring throughout the dome . It still had the marks on it where school desks had been bolted to the floor then washed and waxed around for years. The worn places were testament to the scuffle of school childrens' shoes beneath those desks. We are both sentimental about items like that, beams cut from old growth trees and flooring that has witnessed the passing of generations of children.

Once the subfloor was down it was time to erect the dome. But wait! First we threw a party to celebrate having the floor in place. It was a big open space just right for dancing. Bob put up some temporary pickets to keep folks from falling off the edge. We invited our friends, made some snacks, and waited for the band that never arrived. The band member we knew was a guy we worked with at Union and he assured us they would show up. Later we realized we should have offered to pay them....ooops! So, halfway through the party Bill West brought in a record player or tape player and saved the day, furnishing us with canned rock n' roll, our favorite music. It was fun!

Back to work. Bob took the scale model he and Mike Jones had made out to the jobsite and started cutting the three types of struts that would form the pentagons, and hexagons of the dome. Each strut had specific angle cuts on the ends and had to be marked and sorted accordingly, and holes drilled in the ends to accommodate the lag screws. He made a pile of "A" struts, one of "B" struts, and one of "C" struts, color coding them to match the holes in the hubs. The steel hubs were made of 6" diameter oil well pipe casing. Bob didn't have a saw that would cut them to length, 5-1/2" each, so he hired that done, then he drilled the holes in each hub with his drill press where the 4" lag bolts would attach the wood struts to the hubs. Some hubs had 5 holes and the rest 6 for there are both pentagons and hexegons in our dome. If you find that difficult to picture, think of tinker toys and how the wooden dowels poke into the holes of the round wooden hubs. Ha! If only it had been that easy.

Friends Bill West and Ben Munsel were there to help with the first layer of dome walls. Because the dome is a 5/8 sphere, the first row of triangles leaned out from the floor, were not vertical like normal house walls. To picture that in your mind think of the dome as an orange. If one cuts the orange in half at the center and discards one piece the remaining piece would be a 1/2 dome, but if one cut the orange well below the center and saved the largest piece it would represent a 5/8 dome, and if placed flat on a surface it would be easy to see that from where it sits on the surface it flares outward before it starts to come back in. Interestingly, as each strut was added the entire construct moved a little, seeking its final form as a sphere.

The first row or layer of triangles went together smoothly without a hitch. The next layer was more difficult since the work was done from ladders but the labeled and color coded struts and hubs sped up the assembly. In the beginning Bob's plan was to construct the dome walls so that when they met the walls of the existing house they would stop there but he soon discovered that in order for a dome to have strength and "to work" he needed to make complete circles with each layer. So he cut holes in the walls of the existing house and marched right through those rooms with his struts and hubs and triangles. It was something to behold.

Only when the dome construction was complete did he go back inside the house, nail the struts to the old house and removed the triangles that had been created inside that building. Rome was not built in a day and the dome was not built in a weekend. We were lucky that Colorado summers are dry and we didn't have to deal with rain rotting our flooring like the builders in the Pacific Northwest. Helpers came and helpers went. There were strangers who wandered in to chat or stare or take photographs. One young man sat on the ground in a yoga position and said nothing at all.

And then there was the day we were way up high on the scaffolding when a car drove into the yard, the doors opened, and out poured a family with children and dogs. Their dogs started chasing our dogs and we were helpless to do a thing, so high up in the air. We yelled down to them asking they corral their dogs and kids and realize this was not a good time for socializing.After some delay they left us to our project and went on their way.
Most days Bob worked alone and amazingly never suffered a bad injury. He no longer worked for Union Manufacturing, was self-employed as an architechtural designer and draftsman, drawing house plans for people and building his own home.

Although there were few problems, there was one that seemed disastrous to me. While the second layer was going up a problem arose with the circle not coming together. They tried to force it, not realizing that one strut had been put in the wrong place, a "C" where a "B" should have been, or something like that. So, in trying to force the triangle to come together lag screws started popping loose from struts inside the hubs. Bob stepped back, assessed the situation, and solved problem by borrowing a steel strapping machine from John Burns, a man we both knew from our association at Union Mfg. Bob had to drill holes in the ends of all the struts, located 90 degrees from the lag screw holes, and there he inserted the steel strapping, ran it through the hubs, and when he tightened it up the dome had a new rigidity and strength. That was design modification on the fly.

One day I came home from work at lunch time only to find two men walking around on the floor of the dome. I asked them what they were doing there and they said they were just looking around. I didn't like them being there and told them so, asked them to leave. They got a little surly and said they would leave when they were ready to leave which really got my dander up. I called the Larimer County Sheriff's office and told them the situtation and was asked if the men refused to leave. I said, no, they said they would leave when they were good and ready but not before. That's when I learned that I would get no help from the sheriff unless they refused to leave. So I seethed with anger while they took their sweet time to mosey around and eventually get into their car and drive away. Grrrr...
One day while I was not at home a couple of men drove up and talked to Bob.

They told him they use to live in the house, years ago, and talked about the apple trees which were already old when we bought the place in 1972. If I remember correctly they were the Schwartz men, related to the two boys in the photo Bob found in the wall. There were three apple trees and a seckel pear tree east of the house, planted in a row when we bought the place in 1972. Forty-seven years later they all still live and still bear fruit. I am thinking those trees are all close to 100 years old!

From another visitor we learned that a man named August Gross lived here with his wife Eva and seven children. They all slept upstairs in the two rooms there, Mom and Dad in one room and kids in the other. One of the daughters, Eva Gross, named after her mother, worked at City Drug in Fort Collins and I called her one day and spoke with her. She was very young when they lived here and remembered lightning striking one of the cottonwood trees out back. From census records I discovered they were living here in 1920 when Eva was four years old and may have still been in this house in 1940. It is difficult to tell from the census where rural folks lived.

So, the dome was framed, with the exception of the cupola when the photo at left was taken. That would have been the summer of 1974. 

Building the Dome - Design and Foundation - 2

I remember one of the designs Bob came up with for the remodel of our newly purchased old farm house. His plan was to use the existing 24' x 20' story-and-a-half building as the central core, then add a 12' single story "skirt" around all sides. That would have given us a ranch style home with a tall, central, open great room. Now that I don't climb stairs very easily that idea has its appeal but when we think of giving up living in a dome we're both glad he moved on from that plan and decided to build a dome onto the existing house.

At this time in our lives we were both working for the same lumber and manufactured home builder, Union Manufacturing, a company owned by Robert Everitt. Bob was an architectural draftsman and I was a receptionist. Bob discussed his plans to remodel an old farm house with his friends and co-workers and one day he and Mike Jones created a model of a geodesic dome out of balsa wood and hot glue on our kitchen table, the first concrete steps toward moving forward with that design. Domes were popular in the Pacific Northwest, inexpensive to build, fast to put up, and non-traditional, kinda Buckminster Fuller funky.

In fact, we would not have been given a loan by a local lending institution to build a dome for they were not considered a good investment. Thankfully, Doyle was willing to be our banker. I think he liked having bragging rights for his involvement in such an unconventional house.

The existing house had no foundation under it. Someone had dug a hole beneath it and we found jars of canned goods there but no footings, just stones at the corners. So before any new construction could begin the house had to be blocked up and a foundation put beneath it.

One day, while Bob and I were at work, Doyle and Frances came down to our place hauling long wooden beams, 20"x20"x32' long, which they managed to insert beneath the house as support. We did not know they planned to do this and were shocked they managed to do it alone. We came home to find two well-place heavy beams supporting our house and ready for the excavator to dig the basement. Never again would I underestimate the ingenuity of those "old folks".

It was probably late 1973 or early 1974 when Lee Tucker and his sons came over with a front end loader and later Mr. Beckstead arrived with a crawler tractor. Between the two of them they dug a full basement under the house and excavated an area to the north and east which became the basement for the soon to be built dome.

The dirt they removed, subsoil of heavy clay, was placed in a big pile north of the house. By the time they finished the excavation that hill was huge! We used a little of it for backfill against the foundation but most of it remained a barren hill. Time, wind, and weathering has reduced it to a flattop mound of much less height where we grow vegetables and flowers these days.

As the basement was being excavated Bob built cribbing to support the north end of the house with broken railroad ties. Winter was upon us and that was cold, miserable work. The following spring he rented a rototilller to remove the hard-packed clay those tractors had compressed and formed up the footings for the house and the dome. He mixed the concrete, poured the footings, stripped them, and contracted with Lloyd Vlcek to lay the concrete block walls beneath the rectangular house and the round dome walls. They made a trade. Bob drew up the house plans for Lloyd and Sandy's new home in exchange for Lloyd laying our block. That wasn't the only trade Bob made but it was one of the most crucial and Lloyd's fine skills were and still are much appreciated.

I've lost track of time as to when the block was layed and when the dome construction started. While this was going on we were working forty-hour weeks at Union Manufacturing, raising our son, partying with our friends, celebrating birthdays and holidays with Frances and Doyle, living our lives.

Bob worked on the house when he could, bartering for electrical, plumbing, scrounging lumber, building on the cheap. Our enthusiasm ran high and Bob's youth and conditioning from his UDT Navy days served him well.

After reading and studying Domebook 1 and Domebook 2, three dollar books in the early 70s, both collectors items now, and pouring over tables and charts about struts, angles, and connectors, Bob settled on a design. He would build a 5/8 sphere, 3-frequency geodesic dome about 40' in diameter and 24' in height. He designed 2x6 fir walls with steel hubs and bolt connectors. Instead of covering the dome with plywood he opted for 1x6 pine lumber.

And, the biggest challenge of all resulted from his decision to attach the dome to the old house in such a way as to insert the house into the integrity of the sphere. By the way, I've told this out of order for he had to settle on a dome design and size before he could put in the footings and have Lloyd lay the block walls. Oh, and before he could build the dome he had to put in a floor to set it on.

Only now, in looking back on that time, do I realize what a huge undertaking this was for Bob. I am so proud of him for carrying through with this amazing home he created which we've loved living in these forty-some years.

Building the Dome - The Beginning - 1

Newly married in 1972, living in a rental duplex in a subdivision, Bob and I longed for a place of our own, out in the country, a place to raise our son and have a few animals. Bob's dad offered to help us find one. It was Doyle's goal that all four of his children own their own homes, free and clear, by the end of his life and he achieved that goal when he died in 2000, but this was 1972 and we were just getting started.

Soon enough, Doyle learned of a place along Colorado Highway 1, halfway between Fort Collins and Wellington, about five acres of land with an old house, barn, silo, granery, and chicken house on site. It was abandoned and stood empty for years, most recently used as a migrant workers shack for the families who worked the nearby fields. The owners, Mr. and Mrs. Felix Martinez were hoping to sell the place to someone who would tear down the buildings and build a new house on the property located on the far western edge of their own place, buildings Mrs. Martinez considered an eyesore.

Doyle knew a good deal when he saw it, liked the way the house set up high with good drainage back from the road a ways. From his childhood in northwestern Arkansas he knew the flood danger of locating a house in a low spot or valley, no matter how picturesque.

He quickly signed the papers and had a contract before the place came on the open market. Later, several people told us that if they had known it was for sale they would have scooped it up. Thank you, Doyle, for your quick action. He soon paid off the Martinezes and signed a contract with us but delayed payments until we got the house built. By the way, when the place was surveyed it came up only 2.98 acres, not 5, but there was no point in quibbling about that. What you see is what you get when buying land.

Thus began our love affair with building the dome. Bob might not describe it "a love affair" as he did all the design and construction himself with help from many of his friends, on a tight budget while holding down a full time job. But from my perspective, we launched into a project that was to define our lifestyle, "building our own home."

At first we continued to live in the duplex and work on the place evenings and weekends but Bob's younger sister drove by one day and spotted a couple of guys removing barnwood from our barn out back of the house. That convinced us we needed to move on to the property as soon as possible. We bought a new 14' x 53' mobile home and placed it just east of the old house, hooked it up to electricity and gas, moved in on Halloween Day 1972. No water connected yet, but we moved in!

Backing up just a bit I want to tell about those first few months, before we moved on to the property, the work Bob did and the changes we made. There were two small additions that had been made to the original 20' x 24' story-and-a-half house, shed style rooms, one on the east that served as a kitchen and one on the north, a bedroom. There was also a porch along the south side. Bob decided to tear them off and keep only the main house. Yes, we went against Mrs. Martinez's wishes and kept the old house. It had so much history! And I loved the wood floors, fir planks, not oak.

One day while he was removing the roof of the north room Bob uncovered a nest of newly hatched hawks, small sparrow hawks. He quickly protected the nest from the elements and stopped work on the house for the day, hoping the parent hawk would take care of the situation.

However, when he returned the next day the babies had fallen into a space in the exposed wall so he had to retrieve them. We brought them home to the duplex and attempted to raise them ourselves. Bob diligently shot doves and chopped up the breast meat to feed the baby hawks and at first they seemed to thrive, eating heartily each time he showed up with fresh meat. But soon we realized their legs were not strong, they wobbled instead of walked. Because it is illegal to raise hawks without a permit (as it should be) we didn't take them to a veterinarian. Instead, we enlisted the advice of a young man who was a wildlife biology major at CSU. He knew right away that our hawks had rickets and explained that we should have fed them the entire dove, guts, bones, feathers and all, just like their parent would have done, that by selecting just the breast meat we had deprived them of the necessary vitamins and minerals for bone formation. Our little hawks didn't make it but we learned a lifelong lesson, painful though it was.

Long before the new construction could begin, the removal of those two additions, the concrete porch, and the plaster and lath on the inside would occupy Bob's efforts for months. Inside those old walls were few treasures, mostly dead mice. However, one day he came home with a small photograph he had found inside an upstairs wall. It showed a young man on a horse with another young man standing beside them. Our barn and silo were in the background. On the back of the photo was scribbled "Billy and Jack Schwartz". It took years for me to figure out who Billy and Jack Schwartz were (no Google back then) but I now know they were renters who lived here for a short while and still have family in Fort Collins. I love old photographs so this found treasure was better than a piece of jewelry.

By the time we moved into the new trailer house in October of 1972 there was a huge pile of old lumber and plaster forming on the west side of the house and Bob was spending his nights designing our new home while incorporating the old one in his designs. I'm not sure when it was he settled on his final plan, to build a geodesic dome, but that's what he did. The photo on the left was taken by my dad (and labelled by him too) and shows Bob at his drawing board up in the upper level of the old house.

My Mother-in-Law Frances, On Mother's Day

My mother-in-law, Frances Russell, came into my life when I was twenty-four years old, and for the next twenty years she was a strong influence in my life. I was here in Colorado where Frances lived, married to her younger son, while my own mother was two thousand miles away in Illinois. No cell phones then and long distance calls were expensive so my mother and I communicated with handwritten letters and saved phone calls for emergencies. Once a year Mom and my step-father came out to visit us, and then, with no warning, my mother died when I was twenty-nine. I was heart broken.

No one can replace your mother. Frances knew that. She lost her own mother when she was just six weeks old and lived with her grandparents until her grandpa was murdered out in the harsh, desolate country of northwestern Colorado where her family was desperately trying to homestead and prove up on their claim. After that tragedy Frances’s grandmother was in no shape to raise a little granddaughter. Fortunately, at three years of age Frances was blessed with a step-mother, Cloe Callender Jones, a gentle, kind woman who married Tom Smith and stepped in to mother his four high-spirited children, while bringing into the marriage a son of her own. With the patience of Job, Cloe mothered those children, taught them, fed them, and loved them. Her influence on Frances was life-changing.

Frances Russell was very different from my own mother. Whereas Mom was quiet and passive Frances was theatrical and lively. She was already fifty-three years old when I met her but I’ve read several of her diaries written in the 40s and 50s and know Frances has always been full of energy, accomplishing more each day than I get done in a week. She was a dryland farmer’s wife with four children, living in a drafty house with no electricity or running water. She worked in the fields, cooked three meals each day, sewed clothes for her children, and helped raise the livestock.  Late in life she went back to school to get her GED diploma because she regretted not graduating from high school. She also enrolled in beauty school and became a licensed beautician.

By the time I came on the scene Frances was quilting, gardening, giving hair cuts and permanents in her kitchen, raising chickens, baking wedding cakes for brides in the Wellington area, and so much more. For every holiday and birthday she invited us all up to her small home and graced us with large, delicious meals and sent us home with extra pie. When a local family experienced a hardship or tragedy Frances took them a batch of homemade donuts and shared their sorrow. When I married her son Bobby in 1972 she made my wedding dress. Frances belonged to the Rebekah’s Lodge, worked as a cook at the Y-Knot Café in Wellington, and traveled back to Boston once a year to spend time with her older son and his two boys. She wrote her autobiography by hand, and when her older son complained that she “left out the good stuff”, she sat down and wrote it again! She never slowed down.

One thing Frances and I had in common was our love of family photographs. She had a little box camera most of her married life and because film and developing were expensive she mostly photographed special occasions, grouping as many people into a photo as possible. I treasure her photographs.

We both loved quilts and quilting too. She kept a quilting frame set up in her living room most of the time and made dozens of lovely, full-sized quilts which she generously gave away to each member of her family and many of her friends too.

Frances’s heart started to fail her in 1989 when she was the age I am now, seventy-one. We didn’t realize what was happening to her. On a trip back east, visiting her older son, she had an attack of angina but blamed it on the onions she had eaten with dinner. And when she returned home and experienced congestion in her lungs she blamed it on the soot in the house caused by they wood-burning stove in the living room. Her fatal heart attack occurred in the hospital but it was severe and they couldn’t save her.

Frances was the heart of our family. She was the energy that encouraged our gathering together to celebrate birthdays and holidays. She was the glue that kept us communicating with one another. Her loss was dramatic and frightful. Doyle seemed smaller, like a balloon that has lost most of its air. Her home was too quiet. There were no warm smells of chicken and noodles coming from the kitchen. Only after she left us did each of us realize how much she meant to us.

My mother-in-law, Jennie Frances Smith Russell, was an authentic Colorado woman…colorful, irreverent, energetic and theatrical. She was my son’s grandmother, the only one he really remembers. I am very fortunate that she took me under her wing, like a setting hen who finds a stray chick and pulls it close. I love you, Frances, and I wish I had told you so.

Memories of Muddy for Johnnie Jo

There is a little town in Southern Illinois, just a remnant of a town nowadays, named Muddy. It doesn’t take much imagination to conclude it probably wasn’t named for a Mr. Muddy. Back in the 1930s it was a coal mining town, one of several along a stretch of road in Saline County, just outside of Harrisburg on U. S. Highway 45… first Muddy, then Wasson, Eldorado, Raleigh. I suppose the mines came first, then the road, and soon the railroad, needed to haul the coal away. Today Muddy is mostly gone, a few small houses, grassy fields, and broken concrete, bordered on the east by the highway and railroad. A person can google this town and learn about its past but I’d like to tell you how it was from the eyes of a child in the 1950s.

My mother’s parents lived in Muddy in the early 1950s even though Grandpa no longer worked in the mines. Their seven children were grown and gone, but just a few houses away lived Grandpa’s mother and his old maid aunt, Mammie and Til. And one row over lived a cousin, Vol Rich, with his family, and closer to the mine, another of Grandpa’s sisters, Mary Adeline, nicknamed Mice. It was a Smith family community. I believe the mine shut down about 1937 so this must have been a place where housing was affordable and available, once company housing now little houses for rent.

In my four-year-old mind, Muddy was a summer vacation world with soft green grass, pretty yellow dandelions, and cousins! The little wood framed house Grandma and Grandpa lived in was big enough for two people but when our family of five dropped in, and some of our aunts, uncles, and cousins arrived we spilled out into the yard and beyond. Walking barefoot along a dusty road, avoiding cinders and clinkers, kicking up powdery dirt, us kids explored the area as children will, always warned “don’t go near the mine.” 

We walked up to the little grocery store, the post office, past the church, down the next row of houses, looking for adventure. The air was humid and hot, with bees and flies everywhere. But wait. That’s my seventy-one year old self describing Muddy. My four-year-old self would be taking it in through all senses, simultaneously! Yes, I remember…the droning of the flies and bees attracted to the sweat on my face and hair, the slippery feel of the powdery dirt on the soles of my feet, squirting between my toes, the smell of the mine tailings, a sulphurous, swampy smell, not offensive for I associated it with my grandparents and their clothing. And there was more. The taste of well water sipped from a metal dipper, the talk of adults in the house with their Kentucky accents and southern cadence, a comforting presence. As night came on there were lightning bugs and mosquitoes, the sweet smell of DDT sprayed through a hand-held pump, a change in the adult voices inside the house as my Grandpa got drunk and argumentative while his adult daughters conspired to pour out his whiskey and replace it with water. And night brought on another sense, too, that unnamed danger of the nearby mine with its spooky tipple, dark against the fading light in the sky. Then the sound of the train rumbling and shaking the ground as it approached, accompanied by the whistle, mournful and fading as the train continued on its way, never stopping in Muddy.

I don’t remember if the house had electricity in 1951…probably not. There was no running water, no indoor plumbing. But Grandma kept a chamber pot inside at night so we didn’t have to venture out to the outhouse, and that had its own unique odor. Grandpa smoked and chewed and Grandma dipped snuff. They were Kentuckians, after all. They drank coffee too. Their home was soaked with the odors of living, heating with coal, cleaning with lye soap, cooking great northern beans, frying bacon, drinking coffee and whiskey, and smoking cigarettes. If I could capture those smells and save them in a bottle to be uncorked for a quick sniff when I am feeling low or homesick I would do it. I know my sense of smell is connected to a primeval, visceral place in my brain where emotions live and wait to be awakened. For me an unexpected whiff of the smell of cigarette smoke, once so common but now rare in my life, takes me back to a time and place when life was simpler, when I was four. And when I talk on the phone with one of my cousins who still carries that southern lilt in her voice I feel a clenching in my chest and tears come to my eyes.

Muddy, Illinois. Just a spot along the road….and a spot in my heart where my mother is still alive, my grandmother laughs and her belly shakes, and me and my cousins are young and skinny and starting our lives. Dear cousin, Johnnie Jo, this story is for you, thirteen years old that summer I was four. Happy 80^th birthday, love, Peemo.

Grandma Annie's May Birthday

I was born in May, the month of spring flowers and sweet strawberries, wild asparagus and soft winds. I wouldn’t have it any other way. And I share this birthday month with two of my closest cousins, Judi and Johnnie, and my niece Rachel. But today I am thinking of my Grandmother, Annie Jane Devine Uknavage, a woman I never knew.

Born on May 11, 1900, in southern Indiana, Annie’s life was hard. Her father died when she was twelve, leaving her mother, Gertie Mae, with five children to raise by herself. Perhaps that’s why Annie married when she was just fourteen, to Joe Uknavage, a Lithuanian coal miner immigrant. Joe was fourteen years older than Annie and provided a haven to a fourteen year old girl who had just lost her father. Or maybe Joe was smitten with this sprightly waif and wooed her away. The life he offered her was nothing glamorous, living in the drafty little wooden house in a coal camp, Royalton, Illinois. And Joe was a drinker.

Annie gave birth to her first child, a girl, in July of 1915 and they named her Petrona, a slightly americanized Lithuanian name, after her grandmother Petronele. Their next child, a daughter born in 1918 named Gertrude after Annie’s mother, died at birth. My father, Joseph Uknavage Jr. was born in August of 1920, followed by his only brother, William born in 1924.

I’m told that Annie’s doctor warned her that she should not have any more babies, that her health was at risk. And for the next thirteen years she managed that, not an easy thing to do before the days of birth control pills. 

Then, in 1937, she became ill, probably pregnant again, although I have no proof of that, and Joe “dropped her off” at her mother’s home in nearby Wasson, Illinois. I would like to think that he believed she would get the best care there but her family tells it this way, “He left her there to die.” And she did die, December 1^st, 1937. My father was away in the CCC’s at that time and they called him home in time to see his mother one last time and to pray for her. When his prayers were unanswered, he left, an angry young man, angry with God, angry with the world.

On February 6, 1940, Annie’s husband, Joe, died in Royalton, a month shy of his 45^th birthday. His daughter Petrona was married with a child of her own by then and both of his sons joined the Navy. Many years before my birth my grandparents, Joe and Annie, were gone and all I know about them I’ve learned from the sad stories I’ve been told, first by my father, and later by relatives.

Dad told me his mother had a terrible temper and once chased him around the yard wielding a butcher knife with every intent of using it on him. Annie’s sister told me she was a small woman who worked hard all her life. I knew two of her brothers but never once asked them to tell me about my grandmother. That opportunity is lost. So, I am trying to learn about Grandma Annie, bring her to life in my mind, imagine her living with Joe and raising those three children in that little house. I have a few photographs that capture moments in her life. For those I am thankful. And I know that she lives in me, in my genetic makeup. To quote one of my favorite songs, “Grandma’s Song”, by Gail Davies, “and I pray that there is a little of her in me”. I’m pretty sure I got her temper. I’m glad we were both born in May. I’ll bet there’s more…how else to explain that our husbands wear the same overalls and hat?

That one Christmas they were together

As Christmas nears I know that I am not alone in feeling that Christmas is frought with mixed emotions, bringing back memories that are both bittersweet and precious. One of my favorite writers, Lewis Grizzard, wrote a story in 1981 about a memorable Christmas of his. I can relate. Maybe you can too. (My illustration is from my friend's family, not Grizzard's.)

That one Christmas they were together

by Lewis Grizzard

We had only one real Christmas together, my mother, my father and me. We had only one Christmas when we were actually in our own house with a tree, with coffee and cake left out for Santa, with an excited 5-year-old awakening to a pair of plastic cowboy pistols, a straw cowboy hat and an autographed picture of Hopalong Cassidy.

I was heavy into cowboys when I was 5. A man never forgets when he scores big at a Western Christmas.

My first Christmas I was barely 2 months old. That doesn’t count as a real Christmas. Then, we were traveling around for a couple of years. The Army does that to you.

Then, there was Korea. My father went off to Korea and was captured, but then he escaped, and then we had that one Christmas together before whatever demons he brought back from Korea sent him roaming for good.

We were living in Columbus, Ga. My father was stationed at Fort Benning, which had been my birthplace. Army brat. War baby. That’s me.

We lived in a tiny frame house with a screen door that had a flamingo, or some sort of large bird, in the middle of it. You remember those doors. They were big in the ‘50s.

My father, despite what was going on inside him, was a man who found laughter easy, who provoked it from others at every chance, a man easily moved to sentimental tears.

The year after he came back from Korea, I used to climb in his lap and feel the back of his head. There were always lumps on the back of his head.

“What’s these lumps, Daddy?” I would ask.

“Shrapnel,” he would answer.

“What’s this shrapnel?”

He would attempt to explain. It all sounded rather exciting and heroic to a 5-year-old boy. He, my father, never complained about the pain but my mother said he used to get awful headaches, and maybe that’s why he couldn’t get off the booze.

But that one and only Christmas, my father had duty until noon on Christmas Eve. I waited for him at that screen door, peering out from behind that godawful bird.

Finally, he drove up. We had a blue Hudson, the ugliest car ever made. My father called our car “the Blue Goose.”

I ran out and I jumped into his arms. “Ready for Santa?” he asked me.

“I’ve been ready since August.”

My father, whatever else he was, was a giving man. He couldn’t stand to have when others didn’t.

He’d found this family. I forget their name. It doesn’t matter. The old man was out of work and in need of a shave and a haircut. The woman was crying because her babies were hungry.

“They’re flat on their butts and it’s Christmas,” I heard my daddy say to my mother. “Nobody deserves that.”

My father could work miracles when a miracle was needed. He found a barber willing to leave his home on Christmas Eve and open his shop and give the old man a shave and a haircut. He bought the family groceries. Sacks and sacks of groceries.

He bought toys for the babies. There was a house full of them. The poor, they are usually fruitful.

We didn’t leave them until dusk and the old man and the woman thanked us and the babies looked at us with sad, wondering eyes. As we drove away in the Blue Goose, my father broke down and cried. My mother cried, too. I cried because they were crying. We all slept together that night and cried ourselves to sleep.

Next morning, I had my pistols and my hat and my picture of Hopalong Cassidy and maybe the three of us only had that one real Christmas together – the old man had split by the time the next one rolled around – but it was a Christmas a man can carry around for a lifetime.

On the occasion of my 35^th Christmas, my father long in his grave, I thank God it’s mine to remember.

The Register and Tribune Syndicate