Tell me a story

It was just the kind of day for one of Mama’s stories, for it was cold and wintry with a forecast of rain, though the dark clouds seemed reluctant to release their burden. On opening the front door the warmth of the house felt inviting and the odor of syrup aroused my hunger. Walking across the living room I stopped only a few seconds to warm my hands at the large Heatrolla standing in front of the no longer used fireplace. I could hear my brothers talking in the dining room. They had beaten me home from school on their bikes. I didn’t ride mine as fast as they did, but that didn’t bother me. There was always plenty of time within the hour to get the five blocks from school to home and also to have a leisurely lunch and get back to school for the afternoon session.

Mama called to me, “Come on in and sit down, Barbara Your fried mush is already on your plate.” Mama was Helen Stanford Grimes.

I sat down across from Phil and Doug as mama brought in her plate of the cream of wheat cereal we had had for breakfast. It had been molded into small slabs about half an inch thick and allowed to cool in the ice box. For lunch it was browned on either side in the frying pan, and then eaten with butter and syrup.

After I finished my first mouthful and everyone else was still swallowing theirs I broke the momentary silence and said, “This is a good day to tell a story, Mama.”

My words were echoed by both Phil and Doug, for they loved Mama’s stories of the “olden days,” as much as I did. And I think Mama loved to tell them, too.

“What would you like today?” she asked, laying her fork down and turning to look at each one of us.

“Tell about the San Francisco earthquake,” Phil suggested. That was one of our very favorite stories, so there was no qulibilling about what story to tell this time. Through the years she would tell and retell the stories of when she was growing up in San Francisco so that they magically seemed to become a part of our own lives.

She began, “It was still dark when I woke up and felt my bed shaking. It began shaking harder and harder and I heard things falling off the mantle onto the tile in front of the fireplace. I tried to get out of bed and found even the floor was moving. I was very frightened, then I saw Mama in the doorway. She was holding Leland and calling to me to stand in the doorway with her.” The earthquake story always began the same. But from time to time she would embroider on an incident or remember new things so that she held our interest every time she told the story.

There were many lunches through the years that we were introduced to Mama’s friends and especially to family members, those whom we knew as our relatives. There was Leland, my mother’s younger brother, Grandpa and Grandma whom Helen called “Marna and Papa.” Papa (Grandpa) was Jerome Bonaparte Stanford. There were also Jerome’s daughters by an earlier marriage, who were our aunts, Maud and Mable and included in the relatives was Mable’s husband, Charlie Nouges. Helen’s “Mama” was Grandma Clara Douglass Stanford.

Sometimes Mama would tell us a little about our great grandmother, Margaret Conner Douglass and grandfather William Featherstone Douglass. However, they had died when Mama was little, so she didn’t really know them very well, nor had her mother told her much about them.

It was in the evenings of those same years between 1926 and 1931 that Dad, Peter Warneke Grimes, told us about his home, a small cottage in which he lived with his mother, father, younger brother and sister, in Ironton Ohio. His stories were always top heavy with life on his Granddad’s farm in Pedro, about 17 miles from Ironton.

The descriptions and incidents that my parents told us about were fascinating windows into yesterday. Those stories became the motivation that led me through doors into the deeper past of people with short and long stories, which I have recorded the names, places and dates of people whose genes my brothers and I have inherited.

Just to get a clearer picture of the gene dilution and addition I’ll list by name the lineal families who have contributed to the gene pool found in myself and Phil and Doug.

Arbaugh, Miller, Nelson, Warneke, Jones, Caudil, Grimes, Stanford, Green, Morse, Cozzens, Roberts, Leland, Whitney, Douglass, Connor. All this seems to be a blend of English, Irish, Welsh, Scotch and German and then there is the name Da Fleck, introduced by a French Huguenot grandmother.

Phil, Doug and I each married first generation Americans, thus introducing some new nationalities into the gene pool.

Barbara’s children add Greek and Norwegian and the grandchildren add Lithuanian.

Phil’s children add Italian.

Doug’s children add Polish and Hungarian and his grandchildren add Swedish. In the following pages w will enter the lives of some of the people who have shared in your gene pool, i.e. your collateral relatives, and the lives of those, your lineal relatives, who have passed down genes to you, the descendants of Barbara, Philip and Douglas.

[INSERT IMAGE titled “Here we are!” Photo taken byb Mirriam Johnson, at the Yacht Harbor in Palo Alto. The four of them were in Palo Alto for their High School reunion. They had spent this day together, touring old haunts from childhood. “It was great fun,” said Mirriam Johnson Jones. December 3, 1997]