Funny stuff my dad did.

FUNNY STUFF MY DAD DID: The lawn looked really sad in front of the house he had just convinced the bank could be paid off within thirty years. Job? Sign Painter. Regular? Well—pretty regular. Other income? Occasionally artistic commissions- ( he did not list poker and crap games).

Children? Three and a baby.

Just sheer force of personality and luck or prayer-who knows what made this careful institution trust an itinerate sign painter/ artist with a thirty year mortgage.

The house needed work. He could do work. He had plans: lots of brightening with paint and modernizing the Victorian era rooms. The outside looked fairly elegant . Large white pillars graced a sizeable front porch. Landscaping seemed to be the most immediate need if patrons were going to knock on h is door. The entry yard areas were kind of beaten down before he dug, raked and seeded the soil.

The victory garden he had worked so hard on at the rental house had been a success in lettuce, onions and beans but a huge disappointment in watermelon. Watermelon was his summer obsession. This spring he would be practical with a special effort toward attracting business.

Transplant hardy bushes from the farm where he was raised. Find some easy, cheap fertilizer and add a white painted wooden bench. This bench would be circular and fit around the tree directly in front of the screened in portion of the porch. Everything was good except for the faint fringe of grass that seemed to need stronger fertilization . Isn’t this what they did on the farm?

A guy up at The Buffalo Inn ( now Rex’s Rendezvous ) said he had lots of chicken manure that needed moving out of his chicken houses. This was free for the taking. Just spread it on and let it work its magic. A lush lawn should appear very soon. Perfect!

“What is that horrible smell”, she said. A clean and sweet smelling house had always been her pride and joy. Now her eyes were watering from the fumes rising off the quickly browning front yard area .Among many others this was one of the memorable funny things my father did as I was growing up. He messed up the kitchen when he cooked., washed the car in Pike lake, had great parties where he would dance like .Rudolph Valentino . When he was making Vinegar Bend he popped a wheelie on his tractor. You could expect just about anything.

How he lived into his eighties was a wonder to all of us He was a great father.

D-Day -2009

D-Day 2009
I was very moved by the ceremony just concluded at Colleville-sur-Mer, France for the 65th anniversary of D-day. It is now available through C-Span for streaming over the internet.(www.c-span.org)

Summer is here?

Chicago weather says we are now in their summer schedule. I will take their word for it and think summer fun.
Mornings have been misty but the swans, geese, ducks and great blue heron are loving it.
Here is a summer remembrance from my childhood involving Rapps.

I Remember: A childhood memory of 1942

We moved to a rental house on Center street. It was one half block from the library. Big brother K. was ten and I was nine. Our little brother, Hap, was pre-school.

The nearest neighbor was Ignota Roberts. She had social functions where ladies came in hats and gloves to play bridge. Our parents had poker parties with loud friends and late nights. I may have been slightly prudish because I wanted to be like Ignota.

January 26^th that year, things got serious because the U S landed in Europe to help stop Hitler. Dad was 4F but two of his brothers went. One did not come back.

The biggest song that year was “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition”.

Well before the Bond sales and scrap drives , victory gardens and rationing our family was feeling the pinch and my brother and I thought we were sugar deprived. We search the sofa cushions and watched for any dropped change (from the loud friends), so we could run up to Annie’s or the News Stand to buy candy.

One weekend that summer our seven and eight year old Rapp (Jim and Tom) cousins came to visit. I chanced upon a small box of chocolate in the back of the frig. I shared equally with the boys and threw away the flat little blue box.. Hopefully no one would notice. They did when we all started having stomach pains punctuated with spontaneous evacuations and had to borrow our little brother’s old diapers.
I probably sounded out the words but did not read the fine print on that Ex-lax box. Any cautionary feelings I may have had were overcome by CHOCOLATE.Thank heaven the box was only half full and I thought I had to share or I might have been a very sick little girl.