The Dash Between

By Richard Colyer

When Mr. Colyer taught literature, he often told personal stories that had some bearing on what his students were studying. His students loved these stories as he often heard “Mr. Colyer, tell us another story!” So when he retired, he decided to record these stories so his progeny would know more about him than what was on a tombstone—name, birthdate, death date, and the dash between. This book is his dash between. 1942–? Richard Colyer had three goals as a teacher: to entertain, to educate, and to inspire. He figured that if he entertained his students, he would get their attention; and if he got their attention, he could educate them; and if he educated them, perhaps he could inspire them as well. Those same three goals are attempted in this story-telling autobiography—to entertain, educate, and inspire the reader. Much twentieth-century history is revealed in this book, and Mr. Colyer has provided some commentary on the significance of some of these events as he has interpreted them. It is his hope that as people read this, they will be inspired to write their own “dash between.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781635684629

Book preview

Why I Am Writing This

On every Memorial Day when we were little, our mother motored my older sister Betsy and me to the two local village cemeteries where all the ancestors on our maternal grandmother’s side were buried. This was a ritual. My mother called it a duty. At the time, I interpreted the word duty to mean obedience, so off I went. My mother packed the car with flowers, a watering can, gardening tools, and little American flags that I got to insert into the DAR thing that was stuck in the ground behind a grandmother’s headstone. My mother was a proud Daughter of the American Revolution, and I attribute these annual cemetery visits with flags in tiny hand as the beginning of what would later become a profound love of American history. However, I do not recall profoundly loving these early annual treks to tombstones. I found them boring! As my mother meticulously administered to each gravesite muttering tidbits of family history (which I now wish I could recall), I was entertaining myself by jumping from Grandpa to Grandma Bergh’s headstone, where I got to stick a flag into her DAR thingy.

When I got a little older—perhaps when two numbers were needed to denote my age—these annual visits became much more meaningful. It had to do with an increasing awareness of what death meant. Whoa! Time-out! Yeah, a permanent time-out! That realization changed things. And then it hit me: for the most part, all I knew about these dead ancestors were their names, when they lived, whom they married, and who their children were. One of my ancestral gravesites is located directly behind a massive pre-Revolutionary stone church that during the revolution was used as a fort to defend the local farmers from the pro-British, Joseph Brant-led Indian attacks. The Schoharie Valley farmers provided what became known as the breadbasket of the Revolution, and the British and their Indian allies were hell-bent on preventing Washington’s troops from receiving this food. Today that old church is a museum called the Old Stone Fort. If you look up at the back of the church from our ancestral gravesite, you can see a hole left in the cornice by a British cannonball that failed to explode, thank God. One of my ancestors—perhaps Colonel Peter S. Bergh—could have fought in that battle. But I don’t know for sure. All that his tombstone tells me is his name at the top and, below that, his birth date and his death date with a dash between. That’s sad.

We also had a bunch of ancestors buried in the other cemetery, located behind the village of Schoharie, called the Lutheran Cemetery. Most of the Bergh lines were interred in the Old Stone Fort Cemetery, but a few—the oldest ancestral settlers—were buried here because when they died, the Old Stone Fort was a church, not a museum/cemetery. At any rate, inscribed on one of the tombstones in this cemetery is an epitaph to a young girl who died at the age of thirteen in 1872. The beginning says, Pause, stranger, when you pass me by; as you are now, so once was I. As were all my ancestors who were alive once with hopes, dreams, friends, loves, experiences from which entertaining stories could be spun, etc. All lost, except for what was on the tombstone. The next line reads, As I am now, so you will be. Dead.

I don’t want my progeny looking down on my tombstone someday in the late twenty-first century and, upon seeing my name and the two dates, wonder what the dash between was all about. I don’t want the only additional information forthcoming from their parents to be, Oh, he was your great-grandfather. For one thing, I was a teacher, an English teacher, and for most of the thirty-three years I taught, I assigned my freshmen an autobiography. I told these students to do the best possible job they could because their audience was to be their own children someday, just as I’m doing here. I’m also influenced to write this because whenever I told my students personal stories that illustrated a point in the literature we were studying, my students loved them. I was always hearing, Mr. Colyer, tell us another story. Obviously, my stories were far different from the ones they might someday tell. So here I go, and remember that the background is the rather fascinating and event-filled twentieth century. The year is now 2016 and I’m seventy-four years old. You know what? Life is a dash between.

My Grandparents

Richard Cheney Colyer

This guy is my paternal grandfather, and I’m named after him. He was a prosperous and highly respected farmer in Woodbury (Long Island), New York. He owned a lot of land, which is now the site of a private and very exclusive golf club and an upscale housing development thirty minutes from New York City (sigh!). Around the tum of the twentieth century, his first wife died, leaving him three grown sons and a daughter. In 1901, he married again. His second wife, my grandmother, was his oldest son’s girlfriend. Yeah, you read that right. He married his son’s sweetheart. Society was patriarchal back then, and the patriarch ruled the roost, especially when there was no matriarch around. He took a liking to this young woman, told his son to step aside, and married her. She was young compared to him, but she was actually old by turn-of-the-century (and before) standards. She was twenty-seven. Her father, Ely Piguet, was probably getting worried that she’d remain a spinster inasmuch as daughters became eligible for marriage arrangements shortly after acquiring what was labeled back then as the curse. So old Ely was probably delighted that his aging daughter, Leonia, was married to the well-to-do fifty-six-year-old Richard C. Colyer. I’m sure Richard was! I, Richard W. Colyer, am now—as I write this (1998)—roughly his age.

This union produced three sons, the second of whom was my father, Everett, born in 1908; his older brother, Theodore, born in 1906; and his younger brother, Ralph, born in 1909. My father and his two brothers grew up on a farm, worked their tails off, and managed not to seriously maim each other, thanks mostly to the timely interventions of my grandmother, or so I’ve been told. I’ve also been told that all three learned to drive an automobile by age ten, but that story comes later. By 1928, all three sons were enrolled at Cornell University. When they weren’t studying females, they were studying law, engineering, and architecture respectively. Hence, at age eighty-three, with no sons interested in taking over the farm, my grandfather sold it for a large sum of money by 1928 standards and invested most of it in the stock market. The Colyer family was rich—for one year. What happened in 1929 was catastrophic, and the event shaped most of the history of the remaining twentieth century. The Wall Street stock market crashed, and the world’s industrial economies plummeted with it into a huge depression. Now what this means is that throughout the decade of the thirties, there wasn’t much to buy (because it wasn’t being made), and neither was there much money to buy whatever was being sold because most people had lost their jobs. Read about it. It certainly changed our lives. Grandpa Colyer lost most of his money in that crash. From what I can determine, the name Colyer and the commodity called money were not compatible. Get this—the original Colyer in the late 1600s was given a land title to what is now most of Brooklyn! And one of my very early grandmothers was the first white woman born on Long Island. So what happened to the property? See what I mean? Isn’t that a kick in the backside? But that’s all right. If the crash hadn’t crashed, chances are I wouldn’t have been born, and had I not been born . . . well, you get the picture? Actually, my progeny wouldn’t get the picture because they wouldn’t be! That’s the picture. (I wonder if we would have been someone else. Who knows? He does. I’ll have to ask Him when I get up there—if I get up there. How did I get off on that tangent?)

Speaking of up there, Richard Cheney Colyer died in 1932 at the age of eighty-seven. He was a very religious man, an ardent churchgoer who loved to sing in the choir. He wasn’t afraid of death. On the contrary, he was afraid he would become a burden if he continued living. During his last visit to his father, Uncle Teddy disclosed that his father leaned forward in his high-back wooden chair and whispered, I think you’ll have to shoot me.

Leonia Piquet Colyer

I have a few old photographs of my grandparents taken in the early 1900s. (Let me record this aside while I’m still thinking about it. Here it is: every photo I looked at until I was around age ten was in black and white. Hence, I used to think that the world did not have color until I was born. Is that weird or what?) These old photos were similar to other period photos of couples and families back then in that nobody smiled, not even the children. These were the most austere, stiff-backed people I’ve ever seen. I naturally thought that they were all unhappy for some reason. They looked like they belonged on one of those old Wanted, Dead or Alive posters. What might be true is that photographers back then were an unhappy lot. You know, flash powder blowing up in their faces or at the wrong time—that sort of thing. At any rate, these people were just like us, and some of them were quite jovial. Grandma Colyer was one of the jovial ones. According to her sons, it was her nature. She was always affable, even when she was disciplining them. Uncle Ralph tells the story of being chased by the oldest brother Teddy. Hearing the commotion, Grandma Colyer came to the back porch and yelled, Theodore, why are you chasing your little brother? His response was, I’m gonna catch’m and when I do, I’m gonna kill the little son of a bitch! Instead of being shocked or attempting to rescue her youngest and reprimanding her oldest, she laughed. This so distracted Teddy that he forgot about terminating Ralph. She then followed that up with a little lesson on why she knew her youngest wasn’t a son of a bitch, and Uncle Ted got an early sex-education/ vocabulary lesson. She would have made a great teacher.

When I was born, Grandpa Colyer was long dead and Grandma was sixty-seven. The Japanese had recently attacked Pearl Harbor, and America was at war. My two unmarried uncles enlisted, but my father was rejected because he had a family, was too blind, and had a war-related job with General Electric. During the war years, vital commodities such as food and fuel were rationed, so my mother and father would save their gas stamps in order to make the annual week-long vacation trip from upstate New York (Schoharie) to Huntington, Long Island, where my grandmother lived in a nice house with her older, Alzheimer’s-afflicted sister Eugenia. I remember that she sat in her chair all day with her eyes focused inward and made a ch-ch-ch-ch sound. I was fascinated.

It didn’t occur to me at the time that being Aunt Eugenia’s caregiver must have been a terrible burden for Grandma. It didn’t occur to a five-year-old because I never, never heard her complain—about anything. Again, it was her nature. When I picture her in my mind now, I see a perfect Mrs. Santa Claus. She was short, round, and giggled a lot. I don’t recall that she was a great cook like my other grandma was, although she might have been. What I fondly and vividly recall is not the evening food but the conversation that followed it. After supper, we would sit and visit well into the evening. Grandmother Colyer was a great storyteller, and I would sit in rapt attention as she would spin tales about my grandfather, my father, and my uncles and their family adventures—mostly misadventures actually. The misadventures were, of course, the funniest to hear, and she would get giggling about halfway through the story, and as the story neared its climax, tears of laughter would roll down her cheeks. Of course, we would all be laughing uproariously right along with her—and she hadn’t reached the funny part yet. When she did, everyone at the table had tears running down their cheeks. God, how I loved those stories and the laughter and goodwill that accompanied them. With each passing year, we asked for the same stories to be told and retold, and we all laughed just as hard, no matter how often we heard them.

Most of the misadventures centered on why an aging father of three rambunctious little boys would frequently become disposed to kill the little bastards. Either that or they were centered on Grandpa’s willingness—but inability—to master that new contraption called the automobile. Remember, he was fifty-six in 1901 when he married Grandma. In 1903, Henry Ford built his first car, and a few years later, they were being mass-produced on assembly lines. Well, Grandpa just had to have one, but not a tin lizzie, as Ford’s Model T was called. Not him. He had to have the best, so just before the Great War broke out in Europe and about the time the Titanic sank, Grandpa bought a 1913 Dodge grand touring car. Somewhere in the family archives is a photo of the entire family sitting in that car, and nobody is smiling, probably because Grandpa is behind the wheel. Let me explain. For the first seventy years of his life, Grandpa’s means of transportation was either to saddle up his horse or to hitch one to a carriage. One steers a horse by a combination of verbal commands—git-up and whoa—and use of the rein—pulling back on the left rein to go left, right to go right, and both to slow down and stop. Unfortunately, Grandpa thought the same principles applied to the horseless carriage, especially when in a panic, and he was frequently in a panic, according to Grandma. He would yell Whoa! and pull back on the steering wheel to stop. That didn’t work. He would pull left or right on the wheel to turn. That didn’t work. This was the era of white picket fences. Not many remained intact around Woodbury, Long Island, when Grandpa motored into town or went to church. He insisted on parking the touring car in the main barn, which had large wooden doors both in the front and back so that the horses pulling hay wagons wouldn’t have to back out. He demolished both doors only once. After they were rebuilt, they were left open whenever Grandpa was touring. Consequently, the three boys, feeling the need to continue living, learned how to drive that car as soon as their legs were long enough to reach the pedals. Ralph claims he was ten when he started driving. My dad said he was thirteen, but he was shorter than Ralph. Imagine a preteen driving a very large, very manually driven car. But this was before states required licensing.

My earliest memory occurred on a visit to Grandma in August of 1945. I was three years old, and the reason I remember this event was the incredible sights and sounds that I experienced there. Hundreds of fighters and bombers returning from the European theater were landing at a Long Island Army Air Field called Mitchell Field, named after General Billy Mitchell, who correctly predicted back in the twenties that air power could be used to successfully attack American warships. When he was scoffingly asked who and where, he said the Japanese and Pearl Harbor. Everyone was celebrating the end of World War II in Europe and the subsequent return of the troops. We were at Mitchell Field not only to regale in the huge air show but also to celebrate the return of my mother’s cousin Ed, who had survived being a bombardier on a B-25. Boy, what a show! Hundreds of fighters and bombers were constantly flying overhead. Preceding their landing, the fighters would buzz the field in close squadron formation, their pistons roaring. The crowd roared right back. The sights and sounds were incredibly exhilarating to a three-year-old country boy. I was probably perched atop my father’s shoulders, screaming and clapping like everyone else there.

A final memory I have of Grandma is the Duggan man. He was the second man to arrive at Grandma’s house each morning. The first was the milkman, who also provided eggs, but he was a familiar figure throughout American mornings at that time. I lived in rural upstate New York, and even we had a milkman, but we didn’t have a Duggan man. The Duggan man delivered baked goods—breads, cakes, cookies, and pies—and he arrived by horse and buggy. Every morning, I got up early and anxiously awaited the clomp, clomp, snort, snort of the Duggan man—or rather, his horse, of course. I followed Grandma to the back door and watched the Duggan man descend from the carriage, and I especially watched the horse do his or her thing—snort, sneeze, shake, and the other thing, which I usually had to clean up. When she greeted the Duggan man, it was obvious they were buddies. Her face lit up from 75 to 100 watts, and so did his. I’m not sure what she usually ordered, but when we were there, she bought cakes and pies and cookies. Yum!

When I was around eight, my family began staying with Uncle Ralph, Aunt Betty, and their three adopted children, Wendy, Barry, and Jody, all younger than I. Ralph had just bought a house near Cold Spring Harbor, a quaint town right next to Huntington and Grandma. However, I didn’t see her that much anymore and the Duggan man not at all. I missed staying with Grandma. I really did. I even missed the odor that I later associated with older people and nursing homes. I’ve never minded that odor. You can’t when it’s associated with someone you loved. When we stayed at Uncle Ralph’s house, the adults constantly commiserated, and my job was to entertain my younger cousins. My sixteen-year-old sister thought of herself as an adult, so she was no help. She commiserated. I got to sleep in the same bedroom with my four-year-old cousin Barry, a cute little guy, but he had the habit of getting up at the crack of dawn and then outperforming a rooster. He could not sit quietly in his bed until some adult woke up—he had to talk and sing and talk and sing. The only thing that prevented me from wringing his neck was that he always had a smile on his face.

As I got older, I saw even less of my Grandmother Colyer. She began to deteriorate mentally—probably Alzheimer’s—and I don’t think my father wanted me to see that. He was right. He once said to me about the aging process that Once an adult, twice a child. Right again. My last visit with my beloved Grandma occurred in a nursing home shortly before her death. As I recall, all the adults were there, and as I was around twenty, I was included. The room was as depressing as the conversation. I can remember my father crying only twice in his life. This was one of them. My grandmother didn’t recognize her son, my father. She didn’t recognize anyone. I cried too. She thought she recognized Uncle Ralph; she called him Richard, as he looked the most like her husband.

Grandma died on April 8, 1964, in that nursing home. I was a senior at Syracuse University at the time, and it was decided that I should forego the funeral because of the logistics and missing too many classes. Sad. I needed to grieve and seek closure for this wonderful woman, my Grandmother Colyer, but I think I did. I inherited her optimism and her good nature. I became a teacher.

Margaret Anna Bergh Webb

Whenever I think of my Grandmother Webb, the following picture comes to mind. It’s 1948, I’m six years old, and I’ve just gotten off the school bus in front of her country farmhouse as I did every day. On this particular day, my mind took a snapshot, and I would carry it affectionately with me for the rest of my life. As I opened the front door, there she was, at the top of the stairs in the center hallway—never any other spot—and she greeted me, as she always did, with the phrase, Howdy doody! She died in 1951, when I was nine, so I only knew her a few short years, but those years were indelibly imprinted on my mind.

I would like to communicate to you what some of the imprints were. Her house smelled delicious. She was a phenomenal cook. Whenever I opened that front door after getting off the school bus, the other greeting I received, one you can’t take a picture of, was the smell of whatever she was cooking for me—pies, cakes, pastries, cookies, etc.— and then later, whatever she was cooking for supper. You might get the impression that she pampered and spoiled me—I don’t know about spoiled, but yep. I loved it and her. My second favorite room in her house was her kitchen. (I’ll tell you about my favorite room later.) A huge iron beast dominated her kitchen. It was her wood stove, and she was as skilled in making this monster create wonderful food as a concertmaster is in making a violin create beautiful music. It was the wood. Hickory, ash, any kind of fruitwood—anything cooked over these burning embers was scrumptious. If you’ve never had a steak or chicken cooked over a wood fire, you haven’t lived. First, there is the smell of wood burning over an open fire, then there is the salivating odor of the meat sizzling as it cooks, and finally, there is the taste as it is masticated and swallowed.

It is my intent throughout this autobiography to give you as much historical perspective as I can, so get used to it. Here’s some history. Both my grandmothers were raised on working farms where the division of labor was firmly established and necessary for survival. The day began with the rooster, and as the men trudged out