Granddad Phillips And The Bunk Bed

Fortunately I spent lot of time with my Grandfather Anderson. Unfortunately I didn’t get to spend near as much time with my paternal Grandfather, Charles Albert Phillips, who also was quite an interesting character. He had experienced first hand the American dream, including the hardships of the late 1800’s and early to mid 1900’s in the coal mines, farms and the heart of the Appalachian mountains.

Granddad Phillips lived in the town of Meyersdale, hidden deep in the forests, farmlands and mountains of southern Pennsylvania, about a ninety miles or so south east of Pittsburgh.

Photo: Uncle Bruce (standing) and Granddad Phillips, 1947
When I was a young boy and later as a young man, my father took us to Meyersdale about two or three times a year. To visit Granddad and also to visit my Uncle Bruce Phillips, Bruce’s first wife Peggy and their three sons, Bruce, Joe & Ed.

Then once or twice a year or so, granddad came to visit. To get his rusting old 1952 Packard fixed, see someone on business or visit a doctor. Rarely, but sometimes, he would stay at our house overnight. Fate would have it that I didn’t get to visit with him all that much during the ‘growing up’ years of my own youth.

But in the years to come I would pleasantly get to experience a taste of his character, personality, values and perhaps most importantly his incredibly interesting and wonderful stories of work, life and country living in the horse, mule and wagon days.

Granddad was born in about 1876 in Frostburg, Maryland. He had four brothers, his twin brother Harry, brothers Walter, Milton, Howard and two sisters, Fannie and Olive.

When just a boy, when he was about 10, Granddad took a job in the coal mines and worked there till about 14. That first job was to lead the mules that pulled the coal carts along the rails down in those dark, wet and very dangerous coal mines of southern Pa and Northern W.V. in the 1880’s.

In the 1890’s he worked in the Shaw mines, as a farm hand, clerking in Truxall's store and as a delivery person hauling groceries and supplies. He also started several business ventures, some of which succeeded and some that didn’t.

Photo: Bill Habel And C.A.Phillips in front of their Grocery Store, Meyersdale, Pa. – Early 1900’s
By the early 1900’s Granddad Phillips hard work was paying off.

He had a business partner named Wm. Habel, a general store and grocery business (the largest in Somerset County) , a feed mill, a house in Meyersdale, and two farms in the Meyersdale and Somerset county areas (Sand Patch and Brush Creek).

He married my grandmother, Nevada C Dickens, about 1906, and they had 4 boys, James, John, Bruce, & Bill.

Granddad sometimes took his boys and Grandma by mule across the mountain trails to visit relatives in West Virginia. Trudging rugged dirt paths that could hardly be called roads. Even in deep snow in the winter.

My father told me that they hung a side of beef and a pig in the attic of their home in the winter and when they needed meat, they went upstairs and cut off a piece. This was long before electric refrigerators and because of the harsh winters and heavy snow in the mountains in those times, it wasn’t always easy to go out.

Unfortunately Grandma Phillips died of breast cancer in December of 1929, so I never had the opportunity of meeting her.

I was fortunate enough to meet and even visit with, most of my great aunts and uncles (including Grandma’s brothers and two of her sisters) on both the Dickens and the Phillips side of the family.

I also got to meet my Great Grandma Lucy Jenkins Phillips when I was a small child and she was in her 90’s. So I knew or at least met many of granddad’s and grandma’s extended families.

Granddad taught his four boys the value of hard work by having them work on his farms and feed mill. Like their dad, they all did well in life. My father had grown up carrying 100 pound sacks of feed at Granddad’s mill and store and he also had to work very long hours on the family farm. When my dad got in a bit of trouble in high school, Granddad promptly sent him off to Staunton Military Academy to learn some discipline.

Granddad was raised back when children were expected to work at an early age and you didn’t spare the rod and spoil the child, you used the rod sparingly and never ever spoiled the child.

By the time I first got to visit Granddad he was getting older and in his late 60’s. By then he was partially retired and lived in a moderate sized apartment building, which he owned, in the heart of the town.

He still had some farms and acreage, but we rarely journeyed there. Instead we’d timidly tiptoe past his ever growling, seemingly angry, bulldog and share a country home cooked dinner with Granddad at his apartment.

The meals were very nicely prepared by his 2nd wife, Gertrude Lintz. Gertrude was a quiet soft spoken and reserved person, always with a smile in her bright blue grey eyes, and always with a lot of patience for us kids.

Other times we’d just visit Granddad and Gertrude at their apartment for an hour or so then have our meal at Uncle Bruce’s place graciously prepared by Peggy, Bruce’s first wife.

Aunt Peggy was of German American descent and could really cook up a meal in the Pennsylvania Dutch fashion. Her meals were fit for kings and she showed it. Bruce and Peggy were warm, welcoming, smiling and happy people.

Food back then, especially in smaller towns, was generally home raised and home grown. And of course there was real maple syrup, real butter, real buttermilk, the beef or pork or lamb was fresh from the local farms and Sunday dinner lasted for 2 hours or so. I can’t explain in words the wonderful flavor, subtle tastes, aromas and scents from the kitchen and on the dinner table.

In fact most everything was fresh as few folks had freezers in the 1940’s. Supermarkets as we know them hadn’t been invented and would not have been in a small town then even if they did exist. There were no pre prepared foods like pancake mix or pre packaged dinners.

The women knew how to cook, loved to cook, and took a great deal of pride in cooking. And cook they did! Meal time was family time.

Like my other granddad and many men of his generation, granddad was in pretty good health but not very tall. He stood at about 5’ 6”. Thin, with a smaller frame, he didn’t have to worry too much about how much he ate, and like my other Granddad Anderson, he seemed to eat quite a bit!

Photo: Granddad lived in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains near Mt Davis, the highest peak in Pennsylvania.
After visiting both Granddad and Bruce and family we’d pack the trunk, always including some Somerset County maple syrup in 1 gallon cans, and head for home.

It was a long drive back on winding two lane roads across the mountains. Often the roads were snow and ice covered or slippery from the rain and slush. Sometimes we had to stop and put chains on the tires.

After they built the Pennsylvania turnpike and cut the tunnels through the mountains, we went to see Granddad and Bruce a little more often.

Like my other granddad, granddad Phillips was a self educated, very hard working, highly disciplined, self made and very successful man.

To survive, to educate and to support himself and his family granddad told of working 12 to 15 hours a day or more, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with an hour or two off for church on Sundays.

It wasn’t so easy in those days. Although he became fairly well off, granddad never showed it. He never lived high or fancy or flaunted his success in any way.

Just a plain hard working church going Methodist dressed in plain clothes, driving a plain car and living an ordinary life.

For a man whose childhood was spent working in coal mines instead of an elementary school, he sent his four sons to the best colleges (and two of them on to medical school), was well read and accomplished quite a bit in his home spun but extraordinary life of nearly 100 years.

When about 80 years old or so he started complaining that the cold air was making his bones creak and joints ache. His solution was to buy an airline ticket to Tucson, park his old Packard in our driveway and climb on a DC3.
He was off to Arizona. In one of those new fangled airplane things no less.

There two of his sons, my Uncles, John and Bill, both MD’s, and their families lived. His twin brother Harry, my great aunt Florence and her two daughters, Gladys and Florence also lived there. Later granddad bought a 2nd home in Arizona and from then until his mid 90’s spent part of each winter in Arizona.

When Granddad was about 87 and when my youngest child was an infant, I was pleasantly surprised to hear he was coming to visit us. To see his latest great grand children, our newborn and her almost 2 year old sister. We lived near Conneaut Lake so his journey would be nearly 200 miles each way.

Then one warm spring day, there he was.
Banging on our door with his cane, then leaning on that old wooden cane.

Shirt sticking out very slightly from under his faded and patched unevenly buttoned sweater, fingers grasping tightly on to the pipe in his free hand. A wrinkled shirt and not so carefully creased slightly baggy well worn wool pants. Shoes polished and shining. A gold colored watch chain draped to his pocket.

He claimed he had given up smoking that pipe, noting the Dr’s (who he didn’t think much of) said he wouldn’t live to be 100 if he smoked. But he’d put the pipe in his mouth and chew on it a bit, as if he might smoke it. And I suspect that sometimes he did.

There were happy grins, bright smiles, hugs and handshakes all around.

My oldest daughter, not even two yet, stepped forward and hugged his leg. He couldn’t reach and pick her up because without his cane, he might fall. Tough as granddad was, I think he had tears in his eyes. I know I did.

Growing ever shorter with each year, now about 5’5”, by then Granddad was beginning to look more than a bit frail. Like a character out of an old Charlie Chaplin movie.

But that image and the fading clothing was just an illusion, kind of a mirage. It didn’t reflect the real man at all.

In reality, as I would soon find out, he was about as spunky and as alive as anyone, of any age, could be.

We lived in a smaller house at the time, with no guest bedrooms. I told Granddad he’d have to sleep in the bottom bunk, noting my oldest daughter who normally slept there, could share my and my wife’s bed for a few nights.

“No, No!” He said.

You didn’t argue with Granddad who at nearly 90 years was about as stubborn as the mules he had led through the coal mines as a child.

“I’ll sleep in the top bunk. I won’t hear of anything more about it”.
And no more was said.

Our bunk bed had been built in the bed room. It was too large and much too high to go through any door. The room had a ceiling about 12 feet high and the top bunk was just feet from the ceiling. The ladder to get up there had to be about 7 or 8 feet long.
That first evening of his visit, my wife and children already in bed, we chatted long into the night in the living room of that wonderful little house.

Granddad railing with stories and tales of his early life in the mountains of Maryland, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. At the time, I wished I had a recorder to capture the tone, the excitement and his unfading memories of an age and time long before my own. An age and time of surviving in the western Pennsylvania and adjoining mountains I had little knowledge of so long ago.

The night of granddad’s visit, when the stories of life in the mountains faded, I was suddenly filled with anxiety and apprehension. I fearfully watched as granddad climbed, ever so slowly, fumbling a bit, a step at a time, up that wooden bunk bed ladder.

Then he seemed to struggle some and somehow climbed over the top of the ladder and plopped onto the mattress. Grinning from ear to ear, the only words I heard were

“Goodnight Son”.

I kissed my daughter, sleeping in the bottom bunk, and my other daughter sleeping in her baby bed, goodnight, and went to bed.

I couldn’t sleep. What would I do if he fell? Not just on or getting off the ladder in the middle of the night, but what if he fell right out of bed? It was a long drop to the yellow pine floor. Fretful and fearing the worst, I tossed and turned all night.

Early the next morning, when I got up and peeked into the bedroom, granddad was gone, there was no one in the bunk!

It was quite a relief to find him already dressed and outside, poking the trunk of the apple tree with his cane, then carefully inspecting the apple buds. Soon he was giving me some advice on how to better care for the apple trees and how to better plant my garden.
After lunch, he took me aside saying he needed to speak to me “alone”.

Away from my family’s ears, he emphasized that even though I seemed to be doing fairly well, that I should consider going back and continuing my ‘schooling’. He noted that I had a growing family to support and that in this ‘modern and changing world’, ‘schooling was one of the keys to success’. He carefully reminded me that he didn’t have that kind of opportunity as a young man.

A few days, many stories and much advice later, I gently put my arm around his shoulder and hugged him goodbye.

My older daughter in tow, we walked over to the pine tree I planted when she was born to show it to him. Then on up the driveway and to the car.

My daughter and I waved goodbye to her great granddad.

Something not too many great grandchildren and not enough Grandson’s get to do.

Partly on his advice, I decided to return to school. Later that same year, I moved my reluctant wife and family to Texas and enrolled in a University there to continue the schooling Granddad felt was so important.

As a young adult, I appreciated getting to visit with and to know Granddad Phillips in a totally different way than I had as a child and as a boy.

Granddad passed away some ten years later at age 96+. His twin brother Harry lived 6 more years to 101 or 102.

Working two jobs and attending school a thousand miles away, I’d hadn’t had the opportunity to see Granddad again during those intervening years.

But if I close my eyes I can still see him in my mind as I remember him and recall his tales of that almost forgotten world of so long ago.

I see him climbing the ladder to the top bunk, and looking at me with the wry grin of success reflecting brightly in his eyes and on his brow.
And sometimes, when drifting off to sleep, I imagine I faintly hear his voice and a tapping sound, like sound of a cane knocking softly on my door.

Footnote: In later years after tape recorders became available, my father told me that he did tape Granddad telling his stories.

But somehow after my fathers death in 1983, the tapes Dad so carefully recorded seemed to have become lost or so my older brother claimed.

And Granddad’s stories were lost forever. Or were they?