American Family Heritage

http://www.mundia.com/ca/Person/62028547/44079572179Granddad 1906 at Conneaut Lake

He was born in Lancaster, Keokuk County, Iowa in 1872.

He was my Granddad, my friend, my mentor, and with Grandma, they were the most important people'http://www.mundia.com/ca/Person/62028547/44079572179' in my life. 

Grandma hugged a lot but she

didn't say too much, instead setting an example of how a grandma should be. 

Granddad didn't hug as much but had a lot of incredibly important things to say and even more to teach his grandchildren.

In a quiet, respectful, loving and very special way, they taught me about life, about our country, about our wonderful world. Most importantly, they taught something intangible called values and honor and respect and dignity. And they taught me the incredible values of religion.

Among other things, Granddad showed me (and many of his 39 other grand kids) how to plant corn and prune an apple tree or even pluck chicken feathers.  How to shoot, hunt and fish, tend a garden, scythe a field and hundreds of related skills. 

And perhaps more importantly, how to work, how to pray, and the importance of family and respect for others. Grandma, how to hug, love, care, cry and many ways of life.

When with Granddad or Grandma, I was showered in respect, dignity, courage, love and all the other great attributes they had learned growing up in Iowa, visiting family in Trinidad Colorado and then finally moving east around 1895.

Granddad was a self educated, self made, serenely quiet man.  In his city house he had over 1000 books in his library, and they were not there for show.  He had read them all and could quote many. 

He loved poetry, billiards, hunting, fishing, drawing, flowers, gardening and most of all his wife and family.  He was soft spoken, very stern, but also very warm.  His concepts of responsibility and wisdom and hard work brought him to the world of both financial and personal success. The N.Y. Times described him as a "Pittsburgh Industrialist" but to me he was just Granddad.

Truth is, he didn't seem to be interested in money or financial success, or it least he never showed it.  He usually wore a somewhat wrinkled white cotton shirt like shown in the photo above but skipped the tie when working in his garden or tending his flowers and dozens of fruit trees. 

He taught me practical things like how to sharpen a scythe and tend the garden, trim a mulberry tree and shoot at the blackbirds and crows that raided our corn.  Where else could a city kid like me get an education like that?
And he taught me something called values. Values I’ve cherished and carried with me through a lifetime of over seven decades.

Like Granddad, Grandma was quiet, warm and loving. Most of the time she had one of her Grand kids or Great Grand kids in her arms and her knitting on her lap.  In my mind I can still see her sitting in her rocking chair on the front porch with the latest grandchild on her lap*.  Enjoying the breeze and overlooking the lake at their summer house with a sparkling glint in her eyes and a graceful, and very soft smile.  If she was not there, she was upstairs sewing on her treadle powered Singer sewing machine.  

An old fashioned woman living an old fashioned good life.  In my entire life, I never heard her complain or say anything bad about anyone or anything.

When I was little I also visited Granddad and Grandma almost every weekend at their "City House" in Ben Avon, Pa.   I'd climb the first flight of stairs past the stained glass windows on the landing and on up to the library.  

Sometimes up another flight of stairs to granddad's billiard room where across from the cue rack and spittoon was a very large play area for kids.

Opposite the door to the billiard room was Uncle Ave's room.  Ave worked  Granddad's factory and wholesale business and had been wounded and badly scarred by mustard gas in world war I.  

Ave was artistic, quiet and shied away from obnoxious people.  Like Granddad he painted beautiful pictures, mostly oils and many in the style and appearance of Frederick Remington.  

 

Shortly after Ave came home from the first World War, his wife took their kids and took off with one of her unscarred boyfriends.  I never heard Ave speak of his family or even acknowledge his family.  The wife took the children and abandoned Ave. 

I met and spoke with Ave’s children, my cousins, in later years but heard no good words and many inappropriate words about their father.  Cousins who really only knew or seemed to remember memories  embedded by a self righteous mother rationalizing some or most of her own behavior.  Although living only a few miles from Granddad’s summer home, tragically those cousins never chose to associate with the rest of the family.  Even though they were invited and even long after Ave’s untimely death. 

But fortunately I did get to share my life and growing up experiences with dozens of other first cousins at Granddad's summer place at Conneaut Lake. 

But today I was still a child standing  in the billiard room where there were large window seats.  And when you lifted the lids of the window seats there were hundreds of children's building blocks and toys galore.  

Giant block towers were waiting to be built and come crashing down, only to be built again in a newer and better way. 

There were exquisitely detailed pen and ink drawings on the wall that Granddad had drawn and some of Ave's western paintings. 

There was a huge blackboard showing diagrams of Willie Hoppe's best angles for 3 cushion billiards.  A blackboard that we grand kids couldn't touch but boxes and boxes of toys that we could, should and did touch and enjoy.  

The fine billiard table and a rack of tweve fine cues meant Granddad took his game of 3 cushion billiards very seriously and the heaps of toys meant that he took his grand kids just as seriously.

In those long winters of my childhood, I spent many a weekend snuggled upstairs in Granddad’s library pouring though almost a thousand books. That was long before TV and there was plenty of time for Granddad's stories and rocking slowly in his giant dark stained mahogany rocking chair.


Granddad in July 1899 at a family reunion in Trinidad Colorado.  I looked just like him at a similar age!
Stories of covered wagons and how the Indians had scalped an older relative in Colorado. Of growing up in the years after Abe Lincoln. Of children that had perished when Grandma and Granddad had moved east. 

Of men great and small.  And of their hopes and dreams. 

Of cherishing but not too much.  Of religions and Mose,  Lot and Abraham.  Of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John and Peter and all the rest. 

Of the lessons and philosophies of other major religions and world history.  Archimedes, Socrates and Plato. Science, Philosophy, Poetry and Music. Of John James Audubon, Luther Burbank and Charles Schweitzer.  

Of slowly and patiently turing 4 separate dials on an old floor model crystal radio that had 2 giant tubes and even a speaker.  Of joy, happiness and later sorrow and weeping.  Sadness and tears when a cousin died in the war and silent weeping when Grandma died a few years after the war ended.

I wept too, not just when family or friends died, but when winter weekends (or the summer season) ended and I had to go back to my parents home and the terrible fear and trauma of their sadistic world of abuse and greed, hate and anger. That was a far different world than the peaceful security of my Grandparents home.

In later years I would come to realize that Granddad and Grandma knew the abuse was going on in my parents home and that they both tried to keep me away from my own family as much as possible.  In those days there were no social service agencies. 
And in those days of old, families tried to take care of their own problems.

I grew up to be an engineer, teacher, college professor and a businessman.  And for every day of the more than 75 years I have been here sharing God's good earth, I appreciate more and more the memories and wonderful experiences and philosophies given so gently and gracefully to me by Granddad and Grandma.

So in a way, this short story and this blog are a way of thanking my Grandparents and those wonderful friends and relatives that have stood by me over the years since.  

A very special thanks to those wonderful Grandparents who took time out of their lives for me and 39 other grand kids.

It would take much more than a Blog or even a book to tell all they taught me, all they did for me.

Footnotes:

 << Photo of Granddads city house in Ben Avon as it looks in 2008.

He bought it in 1906 and sold it shortly before his death in 1954.

Not much has changed on the exterior except the back porch was replaced with a newer modern one and some updates to the patio.

In the old days the lot next door was also granddads and had a large gazebo and incredible flower gardens.

When his sons went off to war, Granddad got discouraged and sold off some of his West Side and East Side property at Conneaut Lake. 

The photo to the left is an ad he placed in the Pittsburgh Press in 1918.

Later, living on the west side of the lake, Granddad sold a 100’ of Lakefront beside his dock to the Rockwell family from Meadville, then in about 1949 sold about a half mile of lakefront (now the beginning of Aldina Drive) to some investors who wanted to fill and develop the lakefront.

In about 1953 he sold his summer house, which we called the “big house” overlooking the dock and lake to Art Britton who claimed he wanted it for his crippled daughter.  Art promptly re sold the house to the Wiley family, who years later resold it to Cyril Mead who added the swimming pool where beautiful gardens once stood and my Aunt Katharine and Uncle John Dearing were married .

Of his original 40 acres or so on the west side of the lake, Granddad kept about 18 acres for his heirs.  And they still use some of that land, including the dock with the willow tree he planted in 1938, to this day.

As a teenager Granddad (Cecil Robert Anderson) began working for Martin Hardsocg near Ottumwa Iowa not too far from where he was born.

Later he invested in Martin Hardsocg’s company (the company was named Martin Hardsocg for its original founder in Iowa).   Granddad eventually became Secretary Treasurer of the company and later President and sole owner.

During those years Granddad got many patents and sold some of  them to mining tool manufacturing companies including Martin Hardsocg.

At the bottom of this page are clips from newspapers and other documents mentioning Granddad between 1880 and 1930.  Some of the clips can be clicked for more information.

With many friends help I’ve constructed a family tree and made the family tree public on Ancestry.com.  It now has over 2000 family members and hundreds of photos and as I am able, I try to keep expanding its scope.  

For  family branches such as the Wray family it dates back to about 1050 (England/Wales). 

For privacy however names and photos of living relatives are not shown to the general public but are available to bloodline cousins on written request if they provide their email address to me.

* The last grandchild she rocked in that front porch rocker was cousin Alan Wray.

Uncle Howard And The Grubs

Sometimes in the early spring bad storms and even tornados would sweep across our fields, yard and on out over the lake. 

It was just that way one spring night a few years after World War II ended.

A fierce ground hugging tornado sped across Granddad's land including the waterfront, toppling several yellow pine, decorative pine and weeping willow trees and even ripping the porch clear off my parents small cottage.

The pines laying nearly on their side sprouted branches growing skyward.  About a year later my father righted some of the yellow pine trees with a huge block and tackle tied to Granddad's 1947 Dodge using a very long one inch diameter manila hemp rope.  Today some of the pines still stand, one with a loop in its trunk where it grew skyward.

But three of the tall decorative spruce by the boathouse were gone forever as well as the peach and plum trees at the base of the steps that led down to our family dock.

Also some other trees were far far too big to be righted.  Among those were several weeping willows along the waterfront just north of our dock. 

These water fed giant willows had been planted 25 or so years before and two of them had toppled over into the lake.  One beside our neighbor Rockwell's house and their dock, the other stretching outward into the lake along our dock.

Luckily the willow that stood at the end of our dock was somewhat smaller (Granddad had trans planted it there in 1938) and it wasn’t so severely damaged.

Over the months and years with saws and axes we slowly hacked, chopped and slowly cut away portions of the 2 giant willows extending out into the water. Meantime the bases of the two fallen willow trees had or were rotting near their roots, some of which were exposed and pointing upward.

One hot August day my Uncle Howard Haller showed us kids how to dig the grubs out of the rotting wood, telling us they could be used as great fishing bait. 

Uncle Howard had been the target of my mothers and some of my Aunts unending gossip and criticism for years. 

Somehow in their one time affluent pampered sadly spoiled perception Howard was too lazy and didn't work nearly hard enough.  Somehow, to them at least, he was simply not ‘good enough’ for my Aunt Hazel (who I never ever heard complain). 

In reality Howard had an illness called narcolepsy and tended to occasionally drowse off.

But to us kids he was the greatest.  In fact, he was one of the only two uncles that ever took me (and my cousins fishing) and showed us how to really catch fish.  When I think about it, not even my own father took me fishing although he spent a great deal of time fishing.

So with our tin cans full of squirming grubs and our homemade twelve foot long bamboo fishing poles, we climbed in the boat and Howard slowly rowed out to 'his favorite fishing spot’ repeatedly warning us 'not to tell anyone about this secret location'.

Photo: Looking north from our Dock about 1952. The white boat in the foreground is parked about where Howard found all the fish. 

Sure enough, as fast as we adjusted the corks and splashed the grub baited hooks into the lake we had a perch or rock bass hooked and flying into the boat. We happily threw lines and yanked those poles for hours.

I don’t know if there was a limit on fish caught by kids in those days, but if there was, I bet we were over it.  But then, ours was a large family, and the fish would be gone in one meal.

Howard entertained us by teasing us and telling humorous stories as we pulled in more and more and more fish.  Then he helped us clean them on Granddad’s old fish cleaning log next to the chicken coop in the apple orchard.   

Never had so much fun fishing in my life as those days with Uncle Howard.  An incredibly kind and patient man with us kids, languishing in a not yet understood illness, condemned by his sisters in law's as the 'laziest man on earth' but very much loved and appreciated by us kids. 

Howard had married Hazel, my Grandfather's oldest daughter (of five daughters) in 1930, but they rarely came to the lake after the war ended.  But when he did we'd run to meet him and his old black La Salle which he bought used from Granddad in 1947.

Uncle Howard & Aunt Hazel with 2 of their children Tom & Andy about 1936

Hazel and Howard had a somewhat hard time but they did a really great job raising three fine kids.  

Combined, on both sides of my family, I had eleven uncles, not including great uncles.  Howard was one of my favorites. 

The fallen willow trees are completely gone now but I'll always remember Uncle Howard with a special fondness .

His warmth, kindness and patience with all of us kids stands

very strong and has a special place in my memories.