house to manage, the mother needed all the help she could get.
Life’s pleasures in my grandmother’s youth were simple. She told me more
than once about her delight when the yearly butchering, presumably a neighborhood
affair, was done on the Geatz property. The kids tied strings to pieces of a slaughtered
animal’s “lights" - lungs, that is - and dangled them to cook in the vats of boiling
water in the yard. I would make a face and Grandma would emphatically assure me,
Oh, they was delicious!
In her young womanhood, Mary (going by a photograph) was a petite, dark-
haired girl, with a sweet round face accentuated by large dark eyes. She and Katie,
and later half-sister Maggie, liked to dance and tried to keep up with the current dance
styles. (Grandma demonstrated for me how they did the schottische, which was like
a polka, I later learned.) Then, unexpectedly, came the shattering loss of Katie, dead
of pneumonia at 24. Mary was only 20.
I knew Grandma as a rather mild-mannered lady. But one of her daughters told
me that she was quite assertive when it came to keeping her young children in line and
knew when a healthy smack was the best discipline. While she was soft-spoken as a
rule, she could raise her voice when it was called for - such as to jolt unruly kids into
submission or to tell her husband off when he was clearly out of line in her view.
From my earliest recollections of Grandma, she looked like I thought a
grandmother (in those days) should look: She combed her black hair back softly and
fixed it into a bun on her neck. (She never had more than a few grey hairs.) She used
no makeup. At home she wore a plain housedress of neutral shade; in public, a dress,
coat and hat of black or navy. I remember her as a rather short woman, not fat but
somewhat pear-shaped.
Grandma’s meals were robust and plentiful - German-influenced American, or
maybe the other way round. She learned about specialty meats when she was a girl
and saw no reason why her family should not enjoy something different now and
then: beef heart, liver, calf brains (mixed with eggs and scrambled), pickled beef
tongue. One of her German specialties was ponhaus, a congealed loaf made of corn
meal, finely ground meat and spices, sliced and fried and eaten with butter and syrup
- something like scrapple, available even today in the deli section. My grandmother’s
most respected accomplishment was her bread. No smell on earth is as delightful as
that which waked me up on a Saturday morning - that of good white bread baking in
Grandma’s oven. It was a bread with substance. On the rare occasions when we had
to eat store-bought bread, my grandfather complained that it was nothing but a puff
of wind. Who needed dessert when you could have a thick slice of homemade bread
with butter and homemade preserves?!
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