Once - The Story of Me

By Marily Simon

Marily's memoirs. Nonfiction. 3 parts. Growing up. Living in postwar Germany. Raising a family, as told by the house.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312175402

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Once - The Story of Me

ONCE -

THE STORY OF ME

Marily Simon

Copyright © 2014, Marily Simon

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

CHAPTER ONE

GRANDMA - IN MY GRANDMA'S HOUSE  

The story of me begins, just as yours does, when my parents met.  The stage was set by the Great Depression, which changed my father's life (and many others) from riches to rags, and by World War Two, which sent American wives into the workplace.

Be sure to ask how your parents met; I didn't, so I am taking a guess.  I know that my dad's father was a chemist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  He became a millionaire when he invented and patented a non-toxic paint that could take the heat of on oven, and they used it to cover lots of roasting pots.  It cooked up blue with white spots; you may have seen it.  I know my mom's parents owned a paint company in Toledo, Ohio. So both of my grandparents and both of my parents were chemists, and your uncle Philip is, too.   There were also a lot of doctors in the Tallman branch of the family.

I do know the when of their meeting.  Mom was still in high school in Toledo.  She was the oldest of six children, and her mom was expecting the last at the time.  So I am guessing Dad came along on a business trip with his family, and fell in love. Since his parents did not approve of the match (probably because they were both so young) he was sent on the grand tour of the world.  I saw a history program on TV lately which tells where he probably went, and what he saw.  I know two of the souvenirs he brought back, because I grew up with them.  One was a shrunken head, a real human shrunken head.  I was probably twelve years old before I got over the horror enough to even look at it.  I eventually picked it up and looked carefully, but it is the stuff nightmares are made of.  I am so glad they invented the souvenir T- shirt for my generation.  The other memento of this trip was a hollow lace- like ball of carved ivory, which had another hollow ball carved inside it, and then a third hollow ball inside the second one.  I never could figure how a person could carve something so intricate.  In this day and time, carved ivory has gone from being politically incorrect to being illegal.  The head, I assume, would not be legal to start with.  But back then I guess it was no big deal.

The old saying absence makes the heart grow fonder seemed to be true, and after my dad made his Grand Tour, they married.  The Great Depression, which started in 1929, was in full swing.  It hadn't seemed to matter at first.  They went on a yacht trip in the Bahamas on their honeymoon, and then settled into a penthouse in New York City.  They were members of the yacht club there.

But by the time I came along, July 6, 1935, the family fortune had dwindled from millionaire to thousandaire.  I was the third child born to my parents.  My father had always been a party kind of person, and drank a lot; he even named his first two sons Tom and Jerry, supposedly after a popular mixed drink of the time.  But Jerry died in a freak accident.  He strangled in his crib while my parents were out partying.  The sitter said she heard him crying, but after awhile he stopped crying, so she didn't check on him.  This is why your mom is in the habit of coming in to check on you even after you are sleeping.

Mother came back to Toledo.  My first memories of home were the house at 1234 Harvard Boulevard, where we lived with my grandparents.  I barely remember Grandpa; he died when I was around three years old.  But I do remember sitting in his lap while he read me a story; and then climbing up on a chair to look in a mirror to see if there really was a girl in there. There was only me.  I suppose he had been reading Alice in Wonderland to me.  Grandpa smoked a pipe, and I still think pipe smoke smells good.

In the same room where we sat to read, I remember sitting under the grand piano and looking at all the feet of people who were at my house for a party.  There were lots of feet.  No one took their shoes off except me.  There was an oil painting in that room which a grandparent had done; this famous artist grandparent also had painted a portrait of Commodore Allen Palmer Tallman (Grandpa) which hung at the Toledo yacht club, and some other paintings which had made it into a museum.  My mom, by the way, did oil painting and sculpture.  And she did it well.  She made a clay bust of me at four years of age, about half life size.  She made the mold of it, and we had the plaster head sitting around for years.  That is one of the few things I wish I could find from that time.  Either it was a beautiful piece of art, or I was a beautiful child, or both.

The first Christmas I remember happened in that reading room.  It is funny how the big things, like the tree and the presents, did not stay in my memory, but one little thing did stay.  I got a little red Santa boot.  There may have been candy in it to start with- I don't remember that, just the boot.  I knew Santa was magic, and I thought he was small, like the pictures in my book. And I thought he had left his boot behind, this little three inch tall boot of shiny, shiny red.  So when Christmas was over, I would not let my mother pack it up (or throw it out if she meant to).  I even resorted to crying, until she gave in.  She did not understand that I needed to keep that boot in case Santa needed it and came back to get it.  But she gave in to my tears and put it up on the mantle of the fireplace where I could see it, and I was happy.  At least, until that beautiful warm day when the sun shining through the window fell on the shiny red boot and melted it. Plastic had not been invented yet - wasn't, until I got grown up.  Santa's boot had been made of wax.

I loved that house, my grandparent’s house.  Later, I was to cry for it, and dream about it, and from then until I was married and settled into my own place, it was the only spot I ever called home. 

Upstairs, there was a big room called The Dormitory, where all the uncles and my brother slept.  Because I was little, the room seemed huge, but it was actually not.  When I went to see the house as an adult (my brother did the same thing) it was an ordinary size.  Next to The Dormitory was a walk in closet, with an old steamer trunk.  I got in that trunk once, playing hide and seek with my brother, and could not get out.  There was a crack where I could see light, and I could breathe.  I cried myself to sleep, and eventually someone found me.  Not my brother, though.  He had given up looking and gone off to play something else.  So I won.

Also upstairs was a special room with silver sailboats in the wallpaper, and even wallpaper on the ceiling, with silver stars.  It was, at that time, Aunt Jean's room.  Aunt Jean did not have a happy life, but she did have that special place.  I suppose I slept in one of the upstairs rooms, but sleeping is not something a two or three year old remembers.  My dolls were in a box under the bathroom sink.  Some of them had their heads broken off.  I must have been hard on them.  I got in trouble for leaving an expensive porcelain doll from Paris out in the rain.   Her face got all soft and mushy.  Plastic really is a useful invention.

There was an attic with windows, where mother went sometimes to sort through things.  The air there was sunny, and filled with shiny dancing things.  Now I call it dust, then, I called it angels.  Now and then the pink wings man came by.  He was a grizzled black man with a horse drawn cart, and he collected junk in it. I loved the sound his horse made clopping down the street.  And he also sold pink wings - he called out as he went, Pink wings, Pink wings.  I could imagine the sensation of those pink wings sprouting from my shoulder blades.  I knew how beautiful they would spread when I stretched them out, and how I would soar up higher in the sky than even the attic window, and see the whole world.  I would even fly over the lions at the zoo, and they could not get me.  When I grew up, I told my mother about the pink wings man, and she said he was just an old trash man and he collected Paper and Rags.  I wish she had never enlightened me.  I told your mother about it once, but I am not sure she quite understands the glorious possibilities that come from a promise of pink wings.  Your mother is a practical person, which is good. 

Downstairs, in my childhood home, was a runaround.  That, of course, is what a builder designs into a house so that a child can run around.  It started in the kitchen, where the cook showed me once how to bake bread. My own grandma didn't do that. She played the mysterious game called bridge that had nothing to do with London Bridge or any bridge I ever knew about, then or now.  Since a woman was supposed to have dinner cooking when her husband arrived home in the evening, she passed on this family trick, put a pan of water on the stove to boil when he is coming home, and he will think that dinner is started.

The runaround went through the pantry. Our dog Bilgewater had a sack of dog bones there and I thought they were rather nice to chew on.  Next I would run through the dining room, with its big wooden table where we ate dinner, and where Dr. Delzell sewed up my brother's head the time he cut it open on the fins of the silver radiator in the library.  I was so afraid my brother would die, but the doctor came, put him on the table and sewed him right up, just like he was a toy, Amazing. We ate dinner again at that same table that night, just as though nothing had happened.  Next stop on the runaround was the hall, past the grandfather clock that really did stop, like the song says; Stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died.  Actually I think it stopped one Thanksgiving when one of the big uncles, home from college, crashed into it.  They all played football on Thanksgiving, just like the Kennedy family did in the nineties.  Nobody watched football on TV Thanksgiving Day because home TV hadn't been invented.

The runaround continued past the living room, then past the cellar door. The cellar doors lead to steep, open backed stairs that go down, down, down into the dark.  Monsters live under the stairs.  My mother went down there to wash clothes in big tubs, and she stayed so long one day I thought the monsters had gotten her.  Actually, she had come out the other way - the stairs that led up to the back yard and were covered by a wooden door.  You could run on this door, it was like a little hill leaning against the house.  I finally found my mommy, hanging clothes outside.  There is an old song about sliding down a cellar door with a playmate; I have done that. Then past the library- I loved that room too- and back to the kitchen where it started.  Genevieve's house has a runaround; Haley will have to go visit her cousin and try it out.  Be careful on the steps it has which leads into what is called a sunken living room, weird, but interesting.  

During this time, I guess my father was there.  I don't remember him in the picture, though.  I have a newspaper article which reports how my parents were rescued from an overturned sailboat on Lake Erie after a twenty-four hour ordeal, and I know my mother got a scar on her face from a car accident because my father was driving drunk.  She tells me I was in the accident, too, unhurt because I was in a basket behind the driver's seat.

There is a family joke about how I told my mother she should quit school and get married - a phrase I had picked up from somewhere.  I was too little to understand what married meant, and big enough to be upset when my mother went out without me.  Everyone just laughed and I did not know why.   I suppose at this time she was living at home with Tom, who is four years older than I, her parents, and Aunt Jean, who would have been about twelve, and her baby brother Jim, who was four when Tom was born. (Peter, my younger brother, was born when I was four.)  1939 was about the time the world ended.  At least, the world as I knew it.

Grandpa died of a heart attack, and six months later, grandma died too.  They said her heart was broken.  So my mother became guardian for her youngest brothers and sister.  The baby, my Uncle Jim, was six.  A sign went up in the yard.  They told me it said FOR SALE, and I didn't know what that meant either.  I continued to play on the porch, using Jim's old wooden playpen turned upside down for a house.  And I played under the big cedar tree with my dolls and my invisible friend. I have forgotten her name, but my mother remembered it.  And I followed my brother when he ran away, over the fence, making crashing noises on a big piece of tin that lay upon the fence.  My brother was always running after my uncles, and I would try to keep up with them until my little legs gave out.  Once, I got so far that I was lost, and I kept walking, and I found a popcorn man.  He brought me home.

One day, many months later, the FOR SALE sign came down - the house was sold.  My first clue that life was changing was when Mama took the cook into the library and gave her money, and she didn't come back. Then the furniture all went away and whenever you ran a lap of the runaround there were strange echoes in the house.  The old playpen on the front porch, which had become my playhouse, was sold to the junk man. And Bilgewater died, they told me.  My home was gone.  

SECOND VERSE:  SECOND CHAPTER

Oh, the railroad runs through the middle of the house, the middle of the house, yes, the middle of the house. Oh, the railroad runs through the middle of the house and the trains come through on time.  And here comes number nine.  WHOOOOO   part of an old song I remembered.

We are now living in an abandoned hotel in Sandusky, Ohio.  Right next to the railroad tracks.  Trains sure are noisy.  These are the old fashioned kind that goes choo-choo and whooo-whooo.  The engineer and the man in the red caboose will both wave at you if you do not go too near the track.  It is winter, early 1939.  I figured out the date because, before we move from this place, I see a person faint for the first time.  The person is my mother, and it scares me.  The reason she faints is because she is pregnant with my little brother Peter, who will be born in December of 1939.  My little brother grew up to be over six feet tall, but he is still little brother.

This hotel is a really neat place; there is a ballroom with a dance floor where we can run and play.  So it does not matter that it’s cold and snowy outside.  The hotel had been a speakeasy during prohibition, which means beer and liquor were served, although it was illegal.  So there is a trapdoor in the ballroom, covered by a rug.  Customers of a speakeasy had to escape if the police came in the door and shouted Raid.  When you open the trapdoor, there is a slide that goes into the basement, and it is a lot of fun to slide down and hard to get back up.  I am not afraid of the basement here, because that is where the stove is, and Mother cooks down there, on a restaurant stove.  The pots and pans are big, and I like to sit in them and pretend I am in a boat.  When summer comes and the weather is hot, Mom fills the biggest pan with water and lets me slide down and splash into it.

There is a dumbwaiter that goes to the main floor - that is like a little box that is big enough to crawl into, and one person pulls the rope and it takes the rider up to the main floor.  My brother and his friends do that; I am now afraid of little dark places, and I am afraid that my older brother, Tom, might tease me by leaving me stuck half way up. Older brothers are bad about teasing; they think it is fun, but I don't.  So I never play in the dumbwaiter, only the slide.

There are lots of bedrooms in the hotel, but we never go up past the second floor.  There are bats on third.  Sometimes they come down the stairwell, or into the second floor bedrooms, so I am afraid at night, especially because there are no lights, no electricity.  So mother takes me upstairs at night leading the way with a candle, and lets me choose which room I want to sleep in.  I think the one with the star on the door is best.  She will sit with me a little while, but when she goes she has to blow the candle out, because she does not want anything to catch on fire. Now that I have grown old, I am not afraid of dark nights anymore, but I still always leave a light on anyway.

The hotel gets very cold sometimes, because there is no money to buy coal for the furnace.  The stove in the basement helps, and we wear our coats indoors and cover up with lots of blankets at night.  We are very glad when winter is over.

In spring we get to go outside and explore.  Along the train tracks, there are blackberry bushes, and although the brambles scratch our legs and make them bleed, the taste of those big, juicy, sun-warmed berries is still worth it.  My brother likes to go under the front porch and hunt snakes, but I am not overly fond of snakes, so I peek in through the broken lattices, but I don't crawl in.  I learn to walk the wall, and get brave enough after a while to jump off the end.  The wall is there as a retaining wall for the front yard, which is level until near the street, then has stairs.  The sidewalk and street at the side (we are on a corner) go downhill.  So this wall starts in the grass, but as you walk on it toward the street, it is further and further from the sidewalk next to it.  The jump at the end is about as high as I am tall, so the day I get brave enough to jump is a big day for me. 

I am four years old now, so Mother takes me to the library and I sign my name and get a card.  Now I can get library books, and I am figuring out how to read.  My dad helps me.  And so does Cappy.  He is a homeless drunk that comes into the hotel now and then for a place to sleep.  My Dad lets him stay and he is very nice.

Once I know the way to the library, I get brave enough to go by myself sometimes, but I don't think my mother knows about it.  The library lady seems worried if she thinks I am alone, so I let her think mother is there someplace.  I think I am big enough, at four, to take care of myself, so I go where I like.  I even go into the funeral home across the street and look at the beautiful flowers. 

That made people there very angry.  I tried to explain that I just liked the flowers, but they said I was a dirty brat and I should stay on my own side of the street.  So mostly, I did, but I would sometimes sneak flowers from their trash and pretend I was making a garden.  The flowers always died, even though I planted them carefully.

It didn't cost us any money to stay at the abandoned hotel, but when fall came, Tom needed to go to school and Mother needed a warmer place for the expected baby. My dad made arrangements to send us (Mom, Tom and I) to his parents in Pittsburgh until the baby was born.

CHAPTER THREE - PITTSBURGH

You met your great grandparents, Duane Palmer Tallman and his wife Adele, in Chapter One.  Now you will meet the other set, Walter and Mollie Skiff. Because they do not want to be called grandparents (too aging) I am supposed to call them by the French Mere and Pere.  Since French is definitely a foreign language to my little ears, they end up being Meemuh (I'll spell it Mima) and Popeye.  I had apparently heard of him before, even though he wasn't on TV.  (Nothing was on TV until I was a teenager- and then they only had three stations and the programs were on from six to ten at night only, no daytime TV.)

Mima did not like me getting into things, so while mother was sleeping or taking care of the baby, Popeye took care of me.  He knew all sorts of things.  The most interesting was that he could call birds, and if you stayed still, they would come.

I was used to going where I pleased, so I got into trouble several times.  Once I followed my brother to school, and spent several happy hours on the playground and also with a kindergarten class. The teacher did not notice me at first, then she could not figure out who I was or where I belonged, so I got to stay in school long enough to decide I really liked it.  After that I went back a couple of times, but someone always showed up to claim me right away.

I also tried to go someplace in the car all by myself.  I put