ForeverMissed
Large image
His Life

As I Remember It

August 23, 2013

by Dorothy Christiansen (Gene Grapes' Younger Sister)

Well – here we go – at last to put down on paper that which someday someone is interested enough to read.

Mom – Ah yes, I suspect Mom had a good deal of interest in her life to talk about.  But she rarely did.  Or at least, I couldn’t sit still long enough to listen.  So one day I was able to get from big brother George, a more or less accurate accounting of how Mom went from George, Ted, and Gertrude’s father (Mr. Stanmore) to mine, Ira Grapes.  Mom was not what I would call beautiful back then, but she surely was attractive.

Somehow, this lady among ladies (Mom always for instance, never left the house without being fully dressed – silk stockings and hat, to go across the street for groceries) and George Earl Stanmore met, married, and somehow were able to acquire a large enough house to take in boarders.  I believe George Stanmore Sr. came from a very English, somewhat well off, background.  The house they purchased was way out on Long Island.  It was either East Quaque or Port Jefferson.  I remember Mom talking about the sailing she did.  I’m not sure whether this was before or after she met Mr. Stanmore.

Anyway – boarders!  One of which was Ira Grapes, my father.  Now it seems this boarding house was not enough to support Mom, Mr. Stanmore and three children.  So “Mr. Stanmore” as Mom always called him, travelled all the way into New York City to work.  After some time of commuting this way each day, Mr. Stanmore returned home less frequently and finally not at all.  (This from Mom.)  I assume this is where my father entered the picture.  Their marriage license states that Ira Grapes, a blacksmith, married Jesse Oliva Hodge.

Mom was very independent and probably defied any rules of the day.  So Mom and Pa (father) went to the place where they thought life would be better and where Pa’s brothers and mother lived, Massachusetts.   Now Pa was a good looking man and worked hard to support his family.  Born in Vermont, Canada, he was one of four boys.  David, Ira, Ernest & Frank in that order.  They were the son’s of Phillipe de La Vigne, born in Quebec.  Pa was very tall, very trim and, to me always seemed to have grey hair and a full mustache.  Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic.

However as Mom put it, “Mr. Grapes was a very good man when he wasn’t drinking.”

For whatever reason, I’m surely glad they made the move to Mass.  My memory of my first eight years is only the most exciting, the most fun, the most character building of any youth I have known.  But Lordy, I guess we were pretty poor.  We moved several times so that Pa could find work.  Three children by Mr. Stanmore, and four by Mr. Grapes.  Bending over a wash tub scrubbing clothes and being over protective is the way I remember Mom at the time.  Times were hard for most women back in the “20’s”. 

Mom sitting in the sun, swimming in Long Pond, sledding down that tremendous hill on George’s back.  Watching the boys climb the birch trees to the very tip top and by the sheer weight of their bodies, bending the tree over to the next tree.

My playmates were my brothers when once in awhile they would let me be with them.  One time they even let me climb the rope ladder up to their tree house.  And oh what excitement when the huge cave the boys and friends dug out of the embankment alongside of Long Pond, collapsed.  It was high enough for a man to stand up in and maybe six feet side by twelve feet deep.  There had been a heavy rain which most naturally loosened the earth.  OF course having a huge tree directly above the cave didn’t help any.  My brother Ted was nearest the entrance and able to dig his way out and run to town for the constable and help.  All the boys escaped unharmed.

George was quite a character.  He was probably all of fourteen years when it was his responsibility to janitor the 7th and 8th Grade Schoolhouse that was across the road from our house.  Ted and Gene helped him.  He paid 10¢ and Ted paid Gene a nickel to sweep the main basement room.  Gene was 7 years old.  I especially remember the two boats he built.  One was a canoe shape and one a small row boat. Both were very sound.  I, once again, was allowed to be in one or the other, out on the water dangling my legs over the side.  But then I had to pull off those awful clinging blood suckers which were forever present in that part of Long Pond.

Generally, Mom and Pa seemed to get along pretty well.  Often Mom talked of the dancing they both enjoyed at the village green in a nearby town.  The dancers waltzed around the bandstand in the center.  Mom and Pa must have been pretty good because the won a prize once.

Our hometown, West Rutland, consisted of no more than 10 or 12 homes which were well separated.  I did have one little friend, from the Woods family, who lived a bit of a walk away.  We did not see much of each other.

I remember skunks playing in front of our house – the large brook which was almost right behind our house – the very long snake George and his friends caught up in the grape vines.

We did our swimming and bathing in Long Pond.  Once, Gene and his friend were going to swim across to the other side.  They had a square wood box on which to rest.  This was a large lake but, heck, if they could do it, so could I.  Maybe I was five or six years old.  I found a plank of wood which I pushed ahead of me.  All I could ever do anyway was the “dog paddle”.  I would stand on the board until it sank in order to rest.  Now, when we all three of us finally reached the other side, it was too scary to spend any time there – a deep, dark forest – so we turned around and came right back.

A couple of weeks later when Gene and his friend were going to so t again – so was I.   However, Gertrude saw me when I was about 50 yards out, came after me and when she got me on shore – spanked my bottom.  Gertrude was seven years my senior and I was her responsibility.  At this time George was fourteen, Gert was twelve, Ted was ten, Gene was seven, and I was five.

Mom inherited some money from her father (Mr. Hodge) when he died, and left West Rutland taking with her the three oldest children, (George, Ted, and Gertrude) to take up a new life in New York City.

I was about six years old, Gene was eight, Richard was five, and David was three.  So Mom was gone.  I can only assume that my father would not let Mom take his four children with her at that time.

Mom left in mid-Summer but came back to Worcester, before school started, to buy clothes for us – she was there for one day only, and I remember her telling a teary-eyed Gene that she would come back to get us.  But when? She put us on a bus back to Rutland.

Can I honestly say I missed her?  No.  I think we were too busy having fun.  We played school and generally ran wild.  Finally a housekeeper arrived.  She didn’t last too long as I remember.  We had at different times, about three housekeepers.  One I especially remember was young and pretty, who left us to get married. 

And then there was an older lady, Mrs. Pierce, who kept close by her side a very small dog.  We kids knew how to hide inside the eaves and would “spy” on her through a small hole.  She was funny to us – the way she always talked to her dog.  Mrs. Pierce lasted the longest because she simply did not care what we kids did.  We were on our own and, of course, we did not go to school, for one whole year.  We were just too much for anyone to take care of for very long.

Whenever we saw a strange man in the yard we would run and hide.  This was or could have been the truant officer.  However, in later years we found out that Mom had someone always checking up on us…  One time, and who know how we hot out of this one, we set the field on fire that was across from our house and next to the school.  All I remember is the four of us trying to beat out the flames. 

Many a night we fell asleep at the table waiting for our father to come home.  Do I remember being hungry? No!  So it couldn’t have been all that bad.

Then as my father was leaving the house one time, he gave very positive instructions to Gene that we were not to leave the house.  We, or at least the boys, did anyway.  They went next door to the empty barn to play.  So little Miss Goody Two Shoes, me, went to get them reminding Gene that there were not supposed to leave the house.

One of Gene’s friends threw a bottle down from the hay loft.  It hit the cement floor, breaking, and bounced up into my leg, cutting to the bone a good four inches long.  Gene bandaged up my leg as best he could and I kept that leg hidden from Pa for several days.  Then, when he finally saw it, the bandage was stuck tight.  It was too late for stitches.  So Pa took me to a neighbor lady who gave me a banana to sit still while she soaked it off.

Gene was the one who took the spanking if things weren’t right.  When Pa seemed to be that angry, though he never ever spanked me, I would grab David and hide under a bed. 

Pa finally died around 1949 of Jaundice.  Husband Bill and I were living in the Bronx at the time.  Gary was around three.  Gene, Richard, Nancy, and I drove to Mass. For the funeral.  We stayed with Uncle Frank and Aunt Tillie and were treated royally.  Driving those country roads was quite an experience.  We, for whatever reason, had no headlights and as Gene drove Rich held a flashlight out the window to light our way.  At this point I should point out that we met, for the first time our two stepsisters from Pa’s first marriage.  Didn’t know he had been married before Mom.  We never saw the stepsisters again.

Mom often talked about hitching up the mare and taking out father his mid-day meal. Gene also recalled Mom hitching up a horse named “Prince” to a buggy, putting the reins in his hands and sending him down to the mill with Pa’s lunch.  Gene was four or five years old at the time.  Pa worked in the aqueduct shafts which carried the Wocester, MA water.  That’s why we moved so often.

 Mom worked hard taking care of the seven of us. Baths were once a week in a big galvanized was tub in front of the wood-burning stove.  That is, except in the summer when we all went to Long Pond to bathe.  We had a bathroom upstairs but somehow we never used it.  Maybe it didn’t work.  Anyway, it was the outhouse I remember.  There was the time when the cesspool had to be cleaned out and Barney Google backed his horse drawn wagon into it in the process.

Mom scrubbed the clothes outside in good weather and I enjoyed sitting on a long in the sun just watching.  We moved two or three times before I was six years.  Once we lived in a place called Old Furnace.  All the houses were the same.  Rich and I became lost once and it seemed like a very long time that we wandered about before we found the right house.

When Mom left us with Pa, I don’t think she expected it to be as long as it was.  Two years.  In that wild, wild time Gene, for the most part, took care of us.  When he was chopping wood one time, Rich bent down to pick up some wood and the axe came down on his head.  Fortunately it was too dull to do any damage.

David fell from a bridge going across a stream and was momentarily knocked unconscious.  The bad part was the hole in his cheek from a sharp rock.  God but I’ll never forget the green and yellow puss that oozed out of that cut when it became infected.

Chairs were our cars and pot covers our steering wheel when we played driving.  We were always barefoot, even in mid winter, but somehow I only remember being sick once and that was while Mom was still with us.

When Pa finally took us to a boarding house to live it was like WOW! What a great time we had.  We were asked what we wanted for breakfast.  We played in the hayloft, tried to ride the pigs, let cows run with us hanging onto their tails, and watched as the farmhands did the milking.  We sledded through the woods to a one room schoolhouse and out our ear to the train rails to see if a train was coming.  We played on the train trestle, climbed trees, had snowball fights and ate good.

One night Pa had all of us, Gene, Rich, David, and myself in the car, headed home.  He swerved to avoid something in the road, he said, and the car went off the road rolling down an embankment landing upside down alongside a lake.  Gene said what really happened is that Pa had spent an evening moon-shining with a local hillbilly family and was tipsy or fell asleep while driving home.  He was sober enough to throw the jug of booze out into the lake, however, before help arrived.  (Unfortunately, the jug floated back to the car by the time the tow truck and cops arrived the following morning.)  I remember the hillbillies throwing all their remaining jugs of booze down their well when they heard of the accident and the cops.  (Moonshine was illegal!)

Back then cars were made to withstand this kind of treatment and so we were able to just climb through a window.  Too bad for Pa though.  The police took him off to jail and somehow Mom was notified.  The next thing I remember was that Mom talked to Pa and we were on our way to New York City where they had flying trains.  The year, 1932.

The rooming house that Mom bought with the last of her inheritance was a Brown Stone stoop house on Concord Street.  When she lost it by default because of dead beat boarders, we hit bottom and moved to Gold Street which was near the Navy yard.  By this time Pa was long gone back to Mass.; George got a job as a Wall Street runner (he quit high school) to help support us.  These were the days of cornmeal-mush for breakfast and fried mush with onions for supper.

Pa left when we lived on Concord Street with good riddance, both for Mom and me (he made me scrub walls in a house that he was a janitor for).

Mom left her housekeeping job on Park Avenue, N.Y. and bought a “brown stoop” house in Brooklyn, N. Y.. It was on Gold Street which was near the Navy Yard.  Again she took in boarders.  But evidently they were not good about paying their rent, and therefore, she lost the house.  Meanwhile Pa had also come to New York and tried to get Mom to go back with him.  I remember seeing him twice.  When Mom lost the house we moved again to another part of Brooklyn – State Street.

This is where David fell from the fire escape and was killed.  The only way we could get into the back yard to play was by climbing down a straight ladder fire escape.  David had the whooping cough and we can only assume that he coughed, tried to cover his mouth, let go of the step, and fell at my feet, hitting the corner stone.  David was six years old and I was nine.

George and Ted had to climb the six foot backyard fence and carry David all the way around the block, up three flights of stairs.  Mom put David in the bathtub and tried desperately to revive him with cold water and mouth-to-mouth breathing.  I remember that so well.  How did she know to do that way back then?  I cried for days.  The funeral was so sad.  Everybody loved David and so lots of strangers, poor as they were, sent flowers.

On State Street we lived in a three room apartment.  It was either George or Ted who used the dining room table (which was also the living room) as a bed.  In good weather the boys took to the roof or the fire escape to sleep.  George and Gertrude left home as soon as they could.  Gertrude, or Trudy as she liked to be called, did not get along with Mom.  Mom spent her time between two apartments.  Both on State Street, Brooklyn, one was lived in by Max Omamoy who fathered our brother Bob.  We sometimes ate in both apartments at different times.  We were never hungry partly because we went on something called The Brooklyn Bureau of Charities.

Gene and Richard sold magazines and Cloverine Salve in the subways.  If they weren’t doing that they were out shining shoes.

Jessie Olive Hodge, born in New York City in 1892, raised by a stepmother who was slightly demented.  It seems Mom and brother – Earl – were born out of wedlock.  Mom’s mother was a stage performer and was courted by Mr. Hodge who sired these children and when Mom’s mother died, evidently quite young, Mr. Hodge brought the children to his wife to raise.  I believe there was now also a stepbrother.  Mom worked in a department store and traveled to and from by walking across the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn.  And of course, as was the custom, gave all of her earnings to her stepmother.  Mom did talk of taking care of her stepmother when she became ill enough to attempt suicide a couple of times.

This is my story.  Have I embellished?  No.  In fact I could have gone more into detail on some happenings, like the cave-in.  To the best of my recollection the above is factual, so enjoy.