Help Me! I Opened THAT BOX Again!

I opened that box again.  The one with all of the letters that Grandma L kept all those years.  The one with envelope after envelope of pictures.  The one (shudder) with the eleven diaries. 

I am pomising myself, now, that I will repack the box into a smaller box before I go to bed.  I will not leave this spread all over my desk and stacked on the floor around my chair.

On the up side, I filled a wastebasket with pictures that I won't be keeping.  And I filled the recycling wastebasket with envelopes, clippings, a handful of letters (that I read to make sure there isn't anything in it that I'd want to keep), and a bunck of the smaller boxes that were inside the big box.

I feel pretty good about that.  I still have a stack of photos to sort and scan.  And I still don't have a working scanner.  They can go into the nifty card-sorting boxes that I bought recently.  The rest can go into a smaller box.  That will fit on a shelf in my closet, rather than out in the garage. So I can keep picking at it. 

So.  A little guilt for spreading this stuff around again.  A little pride that I've gotten better at culling photos.  It doesn't hurt that Grandma L had a habit of multiple copies.  A lot of the snapshots that got tossed tonight are copies of views I already have scanned, sorted, and indexed in the box file.  That helped. 

The diaries will be dealt with last.  If I wanted to feel really virtuous, I'd take out the wastebaskets before I went to bed.  We'll see. 

Things I've learned about the Grandfather I never met

I'm also going to list things that I probably knew, but hadn't thought about for awhile. 

1. He was in the Navy.  He was assigned to the U.S.S Colorado according to the letters sent from 1930 to 1932.  About every sixth letter he talks about needing to get out of the Navy to be home with the people he misses.
2. He was a fiend for run-on sentences.  They read fine, because I read them as if they were broken up. So I didn't really notice until I typed a couple of them into my notes.  I'd have added paragraph breaks to some of those sentences.
3. He uses the words gee, keen, and swell a lot.  He often starts sentences (or clauses, in his run-ons) with gee, well, or heck.  He used sure as an intensifier, as in 'you're sure swell' or "it's sure keen." 
4. He always writes 'to' instead of 'too.'  (Yes, I do get paid for technical editing.  Why do you ask?)
5. He leaves the apostophes out of most of his contractions and the few he includes tend to end up before the N rather than after it.
6. "I sure have got those blues again . . ." ; ". . .well I should hope to smile."; ". . . well it all counts on twenty."; "I'm an honest square shooting man. . ."; ". . . desperately in love. . .".
7. More than a few people called him Red.
8. His ship was berthed in Seattle when his son (my Dad) was born in Bensenville, Illinois.  He didn't see him until he was 4 to 6 months old. 
9. He and Grandma called my Dad "Little Pal" (with the quotes) before he was born and for about half a year after.
10. In 1931 he usually started his letters to Grandma with:  My Honey Bunny Boo. 
11. I can't send money this week because - things will just be perfect when we finally get together - you're nearly perfect - you're an angel - I almost never leave the ship so I won't be tempted - I get crazy jealous when your letters mention other men. 

This is from Grandma's letters.  I remember other bits and pieces from Aunt D's things, but I'm not going to open that box now.

Does anyone say "got my dander up" any more?

I'm hearing dead people.  I'm still going through Grandma L's letters and tossing those that don't apply to descendants.  I stopped the night before last (yesterday was Thanksgiving and therefore a day off) when I hit packets of what looks like three or four servicemen that she was writing to in '44/'45.  It was late and I didn't want to get into anything that would make the think too much.  Or at all.

When I started again, I set them to the side and continued with letters from relatives.  Then I found what looked to be a stack of letters from friends.  One friend, named Bernice, is a hoot.  I put all of hers aside to read through later.  The rest seemed to be women that she met during her stay in a sanitarium to get over TB.  She cut a lot of sentences out, here and there, and cut the address of the sanitarium off of all the envelopes. 

She got letters from relatives, and possibly friends, who were looking after my dad, aunt, and uncle for her while she was away.  I could tell because the kids would include letters, too.  Dad was about 15 and wrote on his own.  It felt really strange to read letters from my Dad that started, Dear Mommy. 

One set of letters outlined a little drama.  I couldn't tell at first if Chris and Marie were sanitarium friends or neighborhood friends.  Joe was apparently married to or living with Marie and was writing to Grandma about an argument between her, Chris and Marie over money owed or paid and a sewing machine.  Joe was going to talk to the Singer people in the morning to see who had been lying to him about the matter.  If it is Marie, he swears that he'll leave her.  It's Joe that has "got his dander up." 

Dad always said that life with Grandma was like living in a soap opera, and that he could never watch soaps because being reminded was too painful.  But this is the first hard evidence of it that I've seen.  One complication for me is that Chris is the name of one of Grandma's brothers and and also name on a letter that seems to be from a woman who met her in Olive View, the sanitarium.  Joe's letter called Chris a he, though, and Grandma had been in a women's ward.  Per Joe, Marie has always liked Grandma, "She says aside from breaking into her home and taking the sewing machine, she always felt you were a very nice person, and have been helpful in many ways. . . "

I wonder if I'll ever know the end of the saga of the Singer.  Oops, it seems that five years of free rent in an apartment is also part of the argument.  Also Chris and Marie were married, but have split and she has custody of the kids.  The money would have been owed while Grandma was married to Woody, and Chris claims that the rent was swapped for roofing work.  Joe is going to check with Woody through the Veteran's Bureau.  Chris and Marie also owe Joe money.  I don't know who Joe is, but he feels a responsibility to look out for the interests of Chris and Marie's kids.  Go Joe. 

Aha!  In an earlier letter, Joe talks about a divorce and about how neither Chris's family nor Marie's family are qualified to take sides.  (Although Marie was hard done by and robbed.)  So I'm pretty sure that this is Great Uncle Chris they're talking about.  There always was bad blood between Chris and, well, any other relative that I've ever heard talk about him. 

Joe first wrote to Grandma to ask about a sewing machine.  It and some war bonds were things that Joe feels that Chris is trying to keep away from Marie unfairly.  Chris said that the war bonds went to pay for lawyers.  And the story of the sewing machine sounds like something that Grandma could spin out sadly in a letter detailing her woes and Chris never bought the machine, they were only renting it from me by making a few payments, oh woe.  Seems she told Joe that she didn't know where Red was, which may have been true but I haven't seen any other evidence of that. 

Now I'm going to have to check the "Grandma L" sewing machine that Uncle L brought me to see if it's a Singer. 

Unpacking Grandma

If the pile of Christmas stuff didn't look like enough to make a full van load, this is the reason why. Along with bins and boxes of Christmas stuff, Aunt D was storing Grandma L's "paperwork".

While Aunt D had saved, among other things, the bible that her ex-husband had given to his Grandmother in 1965 and every bill she had ever paid, still in the envelope with all inserts; Grandma L had saved every piece of paper that anyone had ever sent her and then some.

The years of Aunt D's back bills and banks statements I dealt with before she was released from the hospital to hospice care. They had been neatly arranged in rows in her dresser drawers. A few things were in boxes in closets. I didn't throw away anything that was needed. Once a utility has acknowledged your payment on the next bill, I don't see any point in keeping back copies.

The bundles on the top are letters, cards, and postcards.  Underneath are diaries.  Some of the entries were in handwriting that was perhaps 3 points tall.  (Check that out with your computer font.) 

The diaries scare me a little.

I'll share an email that I sent to my sister while my desk was looking like the top picture. Can't see my keyboard? Well, I did have to move that maroon box to reach it. Or the burgundy box if it's necessary to be picky. (Skin Horse is a cool webcomic, but it's best to start at the beginning. Immerse yourself in the archives.)

So many ways to start this email . . .

1 - I have strange relatives all over my desk . . . and under it.

2 - The urge to light a match has been mollified by finding a clipping of The Mob. (No, there will be no explanation.)

3 - OMG she never threw any piece of paper out.

Aunt D was a pale echo of the original. Although I didn't find any bills beside the 1939 water bills and doctor bills. Either she didn't keep those or she only kept things that were evidence (they were from when she was married to Woody, if that's pertinent) or Aunt D tossed the rest of the bills. My recycling bin is grateful, whatever spared it.

As it is, every diary and photo album is filled with random clippings and bits and pieces. I can't just toss them because maybe one in six is related to a relative. The rest are poems, advice columns, editorial essays, etc. (Etc. includes a clipping of the birth of a 16lb 4oz girl at General Hospital by caesarian section, with speculation that it may be a record.) ((It also includes a little notebook with hand-written risqué jokes from someone named Ted Storm.))

I am evil because I threw out all of the negatives. I blame new technology. I collected the pictures and threw out a couple of those sticky page albums - minus the sticky. I am evil because I'm going to throw out the disintegrating "family" bible after I'm sure I got the information out of it. It was started by Grandma L some time after she married Woody, so it probably doesn't have anything I haven't already logged.

I am evil because I keep saying "Who are these people?" instead of thinking of it as a treasure hunt. She did label some of the older pictures and the newer ones that came pre-inserted into album pages. But some of the old ones were kicked around a bit, then glued into one of those old black paper albums, then ripped off and put into a sticky page album. So the writing is often half covered with adhered black paper splotches.

I'm evil because I keep thinking "Why did you people write to each other in pencil so often?" Smudgy handwriting on darkened paper is not fun to read. Saving letters may have been a generational thing. She not only has the letters her kids sent her when they were away, she has her letters to them. That means they brought them back to her. Or maybe they were just trained.

I’m also evil because I’m only going to keep so many pictures of Cousin R. For some of them I had a set and then I inherited Aunt Linda’s and now I have Grandma’s too. I like R and all, but I have to assume that he and Uncle L have copies of these, too.

Found another copy of the RCH will, with his step sister listed has having tenancy of the Sunland house for her lifetime and then it going back to JH (Grandma's first husband and RCH's son). Also some correspondence, which petered out about the time that a lawyer said that they'd need to have the wife that was married to JH when he died petition for it. And that it had to be done before someone legally bought it. (Which may or may not have been true. The lawyers weren't estate lawyers, they were helping Grandma out for free because they knew her.)

I think that's were the adventure of The House That Was Meant To Be Ours ended. Aunt Linda never mentioned the surviving wife bit (it would have been his third one), and may not have known. She certainly latched onto the story. It was one of the big tragedies of her life and proof that she could never catch a break. She was determined that it would never happen again. Not determined enough to, you know, make a will, but determined enough to give me marching orders. See previous post.

Well, I'm going to be more evil and try to identify enough letters as tossable to make the rest fit into one bin and one box for stuff to keep. Did S take up the harmonica? Because it looks like I have Grandma's now. Also an embossing stamp with her name and address. And diaries. I mentioned that the diaries scare me, and not just because I found another set of cheesecake photos . . . taken outside.

I'd better get back to it. May your desk be emptier than mine.