wooden furniture and appointments for the railroad cars known as “Pullman cars."7
George Shuck was born in 1845 and died in Sandusky in 1917. Mary Virginia
Marks was born in 1842 to Edward and Lula (Garry) Marks in Somerset,
Pennsylvania, and died in Cleveland, Ohio in 1923. Both were buried in Sandusky.
I don’t remember much about my grandmother, Claribel, during my early
years at 216. Her daughter Jeanette was the dominant female, the one who ran the
house and looked after me while my mother was at work. I do not remember her
going to church or shopping or to a movie. She did take me once or twice to a band
concert at Riverside Park. While I was never in her church, the First Baptist on
Bedford Street, she did accompany me on rare occasions to my church, Sts. Peter and
Paul’s, but she found the pews uncomfortable. I took her to Rose Hill Cemetery once
and helped her care for the Shuck lot. I liked to browse through one of her books,
The World’s Best Authors - Their Works and Photographs, and when I was in my early
teens she gave me the book to keep. Ma liked to read, what and to what extent I
cannot say; but I do recall how delighted she was with my gift to her of Gone With
the Wind in 1936. Strangely, despite the paucity of my recollections of her, thinking
of her brings feelings of warmth and affection.
From the early twenties, my grandmother’s life had not been an easy one. Her
husband’s defection, the deprivations of the Depression and a heart condition did not
make for great happiness. After Baltimore Avenue, each successive apartment she
shared with Jeanette was a little more meager. I visited Ma as often as possible during
her declining years. These were my high school years and I was very busy, but I
managed to visit on Sundays. I was doing well in school and, in my senior year
especially, got into the newspaper rather often in connection with some event or other,
so we had much to talk about. When I graduated from high school in June 1939, she
could not attend the exercises, but I went to see her afterward and she was proud.
Not long after that, Ma’s heart gave out and in January 1940 she died. At her
burial in Rose Hill Cemetery, I was touched to see my grandfather Wallace serve as
a pallbearer although his daughter and Claribel’s son had been divorced. Although
not socially close, the two families had always been friendly, each respecting the other.
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7Charles William Rohrer, biographical sketches, George Schuck (Johann Georg Schuch), Joseph Schuck, and
Thomas Shuck, all September 1989.
