Happy Birthday Grampa Jim

Posted on 07/08/2011 by Grumpa Joe

Today marks the one hundred and thirty-fifth anniversary of the birth of one Imre (James) Wigh. I call him Grandpa. He is the character I have

chronicled in a series of childhood memories under the category of Biography-Grandpa Jim.

       I am suffering through a period of melancholy the past few weeks, and today is no different. The fact that today is his birthday has nothing to do with my dilemma, but it adds to my sadness. The man was the only grandparent I knew. The father of my mother, he came to this country from Hungary to make a better life for himself. He landed a job in a coal mine in Southern Illinois near the town of West Frankfort. While mining coal, he was seriously injured and placed on disability. He received a pension of twenty-six dollars a month for the rest of his life; he managed to survive.

Grandpa Jim lived a solitary life on his farm in Michigan. As I have related before, he spent winters in Chicago by the command of my mother. She felt he needed to live a little easier than he did on the farm. When winter passed, and the weather got a bit warmer, Grandpa Jim disappeared. He found a way back to his humble little farm-house in Covert Township.

Happy Birthday Gramps!  Where ever you are.

Filed under: Biography, Characters I knew, family, Grampa Jim, Memories | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Still In Shock

Posted on 20/03/2011 by Grumpa Joe

The latest offering of my Steppenwolf Theater subscription is a play titled “Sex With Strangers.” I am still in shock over this play. First of all, it is very current. The characters and the content of the play is now. I thought I was hip, but after viewing this story I am not sure.

Sex With Strangers has two characters: Ethan and Olivia. He is twenty four, she is thirty something. Ethan is a Blogger who writes about his sexual conquests. He has writen a book about the one hundred or more sexual different encounters he has within a single  year. While he is writing, he blogs about his encounters. Olivia is a serious novelist who has no knowledge of the internet and of Blogging for fame.

I had serious problems with the story within the first act. The play opens with Olivia reading a book while sitting in a modestly outfitted home. There is a knock on the door. She ignores it. The knock turns into a pounding and shouting. A man’s voice is shouting let me in. This is where  I have a problem. She goes to the door and lets the guy, a complete stranger, in.

They talk to each other like they know each other, but in fact, are complete strangers. The place turns out to be in Michigan during the winter. Olivia is there to write. Ethan went there to do the same. He is totally disappointed however, because there is no internet service. He is suddenly lost. No phone, no computer connection, he is stuck with Olivia and the old fashioned method of communicating via conversation.

Within the first act and only after a short time of getting to know each other two complete strangers have sex. The only thing they have in common is that they write. The sex scene is portrayed by the set going dark. In the first half of the play before before the intermission, the lights go dark four times.

Although I was totally shocked by the content and the culture portrayed by these characters, this play was totally enjoyable, and understandable.

Stephen Louis Grush who played Ethan only had one flaw. He was tattooed over much of his body. The ‘toos, although current and contemporary, left me wondering about the guys sexuality. He also resembled a man I knew on my job. I kept seeing Chris not Ethan.

Olivia played by Sally Murphy was totally hot.  I only hope she has mopre sense in real life than her character had.

Both actors gave very convincing performances. All in all, this story was among the very best I have seen at Steppenwolf.

Five stars * * * * *

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Lazy Summer Days Spent Lolling On Custom Lawn Furniture

Posted on 22/01/2011 by Grumpa Joe

This post is excerpted from “Jun-e-or” a book of my “Recollections of Life in the 1940’s and 50’s,” available from Amazon.com

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There is something about winter that sets me into recalling times from the past. In early 2010 I posted several stories about my Grampa Jim.  This year, I will do the same. Here is the first of a series.

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Lazy Summer Days Spent Lolling On Custom Lawn Furniture

Every summer, Dad packed us up and took us to the farm in Michigan to live with Mom’s dad Grampa. That twenty-acre spread like seemed a vast wilderness at the time. Gramps’s house was set back from the road and trees lined each side of the drive giving the feel of going through a tunnel. Three tall cedar trees stood in a row with two pear trees next to the ditch. They hid the house from the road.

The front door faced the road, and served to let a breeze flow through the house. Gramps never did finish building the front steps. The main entrance was from the side door facing the yard at the end of the drive. A huge willow tree, opposite the living room window, filled the side yard with shade. The weeping boughs nearly touched the ground, and my arms reached less than half way around its trunk. A few feet away stood a very mature mulberry tree that appeared tiny next to the willow

In early summer, the birds came to eat mulberries.  I climbed the low branches and sat in the tree with them. Mom knew what I was doing because my lips and hands were purple. The low branches were easy to climb, not like the tall willow whose first branch was many feet above my head. Dad used a ladder to climb up to that branch to make us a swing from a recycled tire from his 1929 Buick

The outhouse stood across the yard from the mulberry. Grampa Jim didn’t have running water, nor a bathtub or toilet. The outhouse was the third point on a trapezoidal yard formed by the side door, and the two trees.

Grampa Jim had a unique set of lawn furniture sliced from the trunk of a huge tree.  The Table was twenty-four inches in diameter, and just as tall.  The chairs were slightly smaller in diameter and were cut to form a seat with a backrest. The set was old, and gray with no signs of bark on the wood.

I spent endless hours playing on, and around that furniture. Sometimes, I sat on a chair and watched the big black ants run crazy patterns all over the table. Often, I tried counting the rings, but got lost in the weathered and worn grooves of the cut surface.

On the very hot listless days of summer, Grampa Jim, and his buddy Mr. Toth sat on the tree furniture in the shade drinking a beer. They chatted and smoked; Grampa dragged a hand rolled cigarette of Bull Durham while his friend puffed a corncob pipe filled with Prince Albert. Often, I sat with them and listened. They spoke in Hungarian, and I did not recognize many of their words, but I understood the gist of their thoughts.

I wondered then, and I still do now, if the table and chairs all came from one tree.  If they did, the tree had to be magnificent. I asked myself, how tall was that tree? How old was it? Why was it cut down? Did it fall down, or did it die of natural causes? All I know is that I loved sitting and playing on that furniture.

Filed under: Biography, Cartoons, Characters I knew, family, Grampa Jim, Jun-e-or, Memories, Warm and Fuzzy | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Choo-Choo Hosta

Posted on 19/01/2011 by Grumpa Joe

My friends know that I am into gardens. I have a page dedicated to my Garden hobby. I often show photos of flowers and my garden in my posts. During the winter, I write about my indoor garden.

This weekend, I had occasion to scour through a couple of thousand old photos. I came across some that I had forgotten about. They are of my first real garden adventure. Prestwick is the neighborhood I lived in during another lifetime. The properties were large and there was room to make some nice things happen. There were trees, shrubs, lawn, and flower beds too. Previous to Prestwick, I didn’t really get into gardening, but Barb did. She was the master planter and color coordinator. I helped her with shovel work. When we moved to Prestwick, I got the bug, not for the horticultural aspect but for an aqua-scape. I fell in love with the idea of a pond. I told people that I always wanted to own lakefront property, but couldn’t afford it, so I built my own lake in the back yard. The idea became a reality and the rest developed from there.

I told a fellow engineer at work about my ideas for the pond while we were on a twenty hour flight to Singapore. A few months later he asked me  when I would get started. “Soon,”I replied.

“How soon?”  he asked.

He basically chided me to “s_ _ _  or get off the pot.”

“I can be there tonight with a backhoe.”

“Okay.”

I got home from work at my usual six-thirty and had supper with Barb. In the middle of our dinner the dishes began to shake on the table. “What is that?” she asked.

“It is probably Delmar coming to dig the hole.”  Just as I finished those words a blue tractor with a back hoe stopped at the end of our drive.

“What is going on?”

“We are digging the hole for the pond.”

“When were you going to tell me?”

“Now.”

That was the beginning of my love affair with the garden. It took several years to develop a pond and the surrounding landscape. Each year, we changed it to make it look better. I had a new vision of what it should look like after I finished the last one. Of course, each vision built on the last.

During the first five years I installed a little pond with a waterfall spilling into the big pond,. That wasn’t enough, I added a second  waterfall to spill into the little pond. After that, I was unhappy with the water clarity, so I designed a filter. A pump moved pond-water underground to the filter-aerator.  Clean oxygenated water returned  via a stream to the big pond. A little complicated, but it all worked pretty good, and it looked okay too. The fish were very happy and growing along with a variety of bog, and water plants. There was the sound of trickling,and splashing water to soothe the soul.

All the time I was playing hydro-engineer, Barb continued to plant a variety of perennials. She mixed annuals in between to add color and textures. The garden was shady, so she learned to plant only those things that grew well in shade like hosta and Impatiens.

We went to the Farmer’s market in town and discovered a vendor who specialized in hostas. He gave me a history of all the possibilities and varieties of hosta plants. Before long there was a collection of sixty different hosta varieties.

One year we were on a vacation trip to Michigan, We loved to stop in small towns and look at the shops. Out of a hundred shops, maybe one turned me on. This time, we found a shop that sold G-Scale Trains made by the Kalamazoo Toy Train Factory. These trains are commonly used in garden railways.  I never heard of a garden railroad before, but the idea was intriguing. Barb let me buy an 1850’s steam locomotive with a tender, a passenger car and a flatbed. It was on display around our christmas tree for the first few years before I got the bug to add a new feature to the pond;  add the train as an item of interest in the garden. What that translates into is track, and a train. No buildings, or people, just track, plants, and trains. The garden became animated.

It took a complete year to develop the 100 foot road bed with trestle, a bridge, and a tunnel.  The effort was worth it.

Here are some of the photos that started this long-winded piece of personal history.

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Filed under: Biography, Garden, Gardening, Memories, Pond, Warm and Fuzzy | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Jackin Up The “A”

Posted on 28/01/2010 by Grumpa Joe

One of Grampa Jim’s closest friends was Mr Toth, a Hungarian farmer from down the road. His friend worked in the pickle canning factory in Coloma, and he farmed too. Mr. Toth was a character who excited easily, and cursed incessantly in Hungarian. I never understood what he was saying, but I knew he was swearing. He ranted and raved and called people names.  The crowd at Fish Corners knew him well. They often played tricks on him just to see him get excited.

I remember watching a prank played on him.  Grampa Jim and his buddy arrived at Fish Corners in Mr. Toth’s Model A: a daily ritual for the two of them.  He pulled up next to the gas pump, ran a gallon of gas into the tank, and went in the store to pay. Of course they had to have a beer too.

Fish Corners was a 1950’s version of today’s Gas City.  This family run business consisted of a small grocery store, an auto service station, and a tavern. Grampa walked through the store into the tavern, and sat at his favorite table on the edge of the dance floor. They nursed a beer, and cajoled with friends.

While they talked, the pranksters went to work. Two older boys put a jack under the rear axle of the Model-A. They lifted it  just enough so the wheels would spin without grabbing. Everyone, at the store, saw what was happening, and many of them waited around to see the outcome.

They came out and got into car; started it up, put it in gear, and let out the clutch.  The car didn’t move. Mr. Toth got out swearing to himself. He looked around. Everything seemed okay so he tried again. The swearing got stronger. The motor was running, but the car didn’t move.  Mr. Toth sent Grampa Jim  to watch the wheels. He put the car in gear again. Gramps bent over to watch. He saw the wheels turning. The swearing got really loud. A very red-faced, Mr. Toth jumped out of the car ranting, and kicking the gravel.  I picked out Hungarian words like Jesus, God, mother, saint, and heaven. All were mixed with words I heard often, but didn’t understand. This time, he found the jack. He raised his arm and shook his fist as he ran toward the store. All the while he ranted in Hungarian. His face was purple, and the veins in his jugular stuck out; boy was he mad. Everyone at Fish Corners laughed hysterically. Grampa Jim stood back and laughed too.

Filed under: Biography, Characters I knew, family, Grampa Jim, Memories, Warm and Fuzzy | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

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