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MY GRANDMA -
BORN IN SEPIA... DIED IN LIVING COLOR
by Bettina Bradbury
"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there."
-- L.P. Hartley
-- L.P. Hartley
"Grow up and be somebody." My grandma's mantra. Life was a serious matter. The proof is revealed in a stark, sepia-toned photo of my grandma (top row on right) taken with her sisters circa 1912. The girls are posed before a shutterbox camera, facing the photographer, who in those days would have been holding aloft a tray filled with some kind of fiery powder, and at the same time, coaxing them to "smile for the birdie.” The sisters ranged from thirteen to nineteen years in age, and smiling was not the fashion. Even with the Houdini powder, the exposure takes almost a minute. Time enough for the sisters to reflect on how hard life in this sepia-colored world is for them and their family. For all the families they know.
Their father's arms are leaded, paralyzed, from years of back-breaking labor in a coke mine. His tiny pension didn't pay the rent, the bills, or put enough food on the table. With this Dickensian scene playing out as Grandma described it, I wasn't surprised when she stated: "We didn't know we were poor. Everyone was poor. That's the lot of a miner's family."
My maternal grandmother, Anna Sevic, was born in Pueblo, Colorado in 1898. She died Anna McClure in Los Angeles, California, in 1998. She traveled an amazing time line that ran parallel to the March of Progress. One hundred years that saw rocket ships riding on the wings and dreams of the Wright Brothers. Decades marked by too much poverty. A first generation American of Slovakian parentage, Anna came of age during the 1920's - a contemporary of Al Jolson, Wyatt Earp, Babe Ruth and Bonnie and Clyde. She lived through two wars and two conflicts. But Anna's world revolved around her husband, Lon, her daughter, Marguerite, and Jesus.
My sons were fortunate to have been cradled in their great-grandma's arms, and after she had passed, they loved sifting through a Buster Brown shoebox that originally came with my mom's tap shoes in them, and stayed on to become the treasure box that held photographs of that foreign country my sisters and my sons still love to visit. I showed my boys a picture of my grandma posing in front of a palm tree with her sisters taken in the early nineteen sixties. They are all wide-hipped, wearing floral prints dresses that look as if they sprung from a Johnson Seed Catalog, #24 ("and they all sprung up!"). It seems that they shopped at an outlet for white patent leather sandals, all except Aunt Helen (seen cut off in the photo, probably because she was the only one wearing sensible shoes). Anna, Catherine, Mary, Mae, Betty and Helen. For some reason, they are posed sideways, hands on the sister in front of them, Betty always the caboose, both because she was the youngest and because "she didn't have the sense God gave a jay bird." (I'm quoting my grandmother here). Aunt Catherine was the steam engine by virtue of being both a championship bowler AND ballroom dancer! These smiling women, all widows by this time, smiling because for the first time, they are in charge of their own lives. They are living out their golden years in the Golden Age of everything: television, cars, movies filmed in Todd A-O, theaters with "refrigerated" cooling, not to mention smoking on the left side of the theater and in the balcony. These were the sisters who shed their memories of the Great Depression at the drop of a luxury or modern day anything.
Yet my grandma loved telling us stories about the olden days with not a hint of wistfulness or nostalgia, but every story had a moral attached. Something from Anna's youth that reinforced her orders for us to grown up and be somebody. One horrifying memory was indelibly scarred on my grandma's back. A huge brown splatter, that marked a lesson learned painfully and permanently. Grandma was supposed to be minding baby Betty, who was forever getting into mischief. This one day, while Grandma's back was turned, Betty fell into a chute that delivered coal to the house basement. Fortunately, she wasn't hurt, but she ran crying to her mama. Grandma was summoned by her mother who was cooking a large cauldron of soup for that day's lunch. She ordered Anna to remove her blouse, turn around, while Mama raised the boiling hot ladle from the soup pot and brought it down hard across Anna's back. The first time we saw it, we cried while Grandma, calmly, told us what she'd done to deserve such cruel and merciless punishment. "Didn't you hate her?" we sobbed. "No," came the quick and honest reply. "I was supposed to be minding the baby, and I didn't. Betty could have been killed. Mama had already lost one child. So great was her fear of losing another, she had to make sure deadly mistakes weren't made under any excuse." I still thought the punishment barbaric, but when my toddler son Danny hid from me in a Target store, my panic was so great that when he reappeared laughing, I knew the paradox of relief and rage having lived one endless minute thinking I'd never see my son again.
Each of the eight surviving McClure children, two sons, the rest daughters, leave school after eighth grade and leave home as soon as an apple and some cornbread can be packed into a paper sack, which will also include a dime tied up in one of Mama's handkerchiefs. The ten cents is for carfare that will take these stoic children to the next town. Children filing out the front door of the clap-board houses built by the mine owner, who lives in the stately mansion on top of the hill. Only the ninth child, brother John, stays behind, buried in a small plot in a smaller coffin in the chapel graveyard. Scarlet fever took his life at the tender age of five and delivered him into the arms of Jesus. In a few years, WWI, the War to End all Wars will begin, and little John will be joined in the ground by his brothers Tom and Jimmy. The great flu epidemic of 1918 will take more babies from their mothers' arms. Almost no family is spared. Crepe hangs on doorways. Their pictures will be taken in the christening gowns that will also serve as burial shrouds. Dead babies, eyes closed, posed like dolls for posterity, firming my grandma's resolve to "grow up and be somebody."
Toward this goal, Anna finds work in a diner in the industrial section of Los Angeles, where she meets Lon McClure, the short-order cook and her future husband. The honeymoon is put on hold when my granddad enlists in the army. He is sent to Armentieres, serving both as a doughboy and a cook. The boys nickname him "Cookie," which Granddad hates. My mother, their only child, insisted that during that time he also studied to be a Cordon Bleu Chef. Gun in one hand and cookbook in the other? Only in her dreams. And perhaps his.
Granddad came home with a musket and enough money to open the L and A Diner. Lon and Anna. Brisk breakfast and lunch trade. The "Cordon Bleu Chef" dishes up hash on a shingle and Grandma lines five loaded plates up one arm and five down the other as she serves the hungry men at the twenty-stool counter. In every photo of my granddad, the ones in color, his face is as red as a painted devil. My mom claimed it was Cherokee blood. Maybe. Or maybe it's the face of a man cooked medium-rare from years hunched under a grease trap. Or maybe it's anger, as he watches the Jazz Age dance past him. His three joys: my mom, beer, and rolling his own cigarettes. On his ropey left arm, an inky tattoo spells MAMA.
When I was three, I'd slide into the breakfast booth in his kitchen. Sometimes he'd take a small mug used to measure out penny candy and fill it with beer, mostly foam, and slide it down my way. He had the hatchet-carved face of a wooden Indian, the maudlin humor of an Irishman, and the love of drink that ran through his heritage and his veins. When he died, I was four -- and furious! I stalked over to my grandma, put my hands on my hips, and shouted: "Granddad'll have to go to Heaven to drink his angel beer!" Grandma grabbed a balsa wood yardstick, a free gift from Eddie Mann Chevrolet, and swatted me across the behind. The stick broke, my Grandma stared at me, then collapsed on the floor laughing. I think she knew even then I would take her advice to grow up and be somebody.
By the time Granddad's life was over, life in general was getting better, and for most folks, not just for some. A good life was affordable, and Grandma (below, behind Aunt Helen in the black shoes) had her fair share. Luxury items were found in most every middle class home. The sisters were re-united and loved taking bus trips to places called The Winchester House and Busch Gardens.
My maternal grandmother, Anna Sevic, was born in Pueblo, Colorado in 1898. She died Anna McClure in Los Angeles, California, in 1998. She traveled an amazing time line that ran parallel to the March of Progress. One hundred years that saw rocket ships riding on the wings and dreams of the Wright Brothers. Decades marked by too much poverty. A first generation American of Slovakian parentage, Anna came of age during the 1920's - a contemporary of Al Jolson, Wyatt Earp, Babe Ruth and Bonnie and Clyde. She lived through two wars and two conflicts. But Anna's world revolved around her husband, Lon, her daughter, Marguerite, and Jesus.
My sons were fortunate to have been cradled in their great-grandma's arms, and after she had passed, they loved sifting through a Buster Brown shoebox that originally came with my mom's tap shoes in them, and stayed on to become the treasure box that held photographs of that foreign country my sisters and my sons still love to visit. I showed my boys a picture of my grandma posing in front of a palm tree with her sisters taken in the early nineteen sixties. They are all wide-hipped, wearing floral prints dresses that look as if they sprung from a Johnson Seed Catalog, #24 ("and they all sprung up!"). It seems that they shopped at an outlet for white patent leather sandals, all except Aunt Helen (seen cut off in the photo, probably because she was the only one wearing sensible shoes). Anna, Catherine, Mary, Mae, Betty and Helen. For some reason, they are posed sideways, hands on the sister in front of them, Betty always the caboose, both because she was the youngest and because "she didn't have the sense God gave a jay bird." (I'm quoting my grandmother here). Aunt Catherine was the steam engine by virtue of being both a championship bowler AND ballroom dancer! These smiling women, all widows by this time, smiling because for the first time, they are in charge of their own lives. They are living out their golden years in the Golden Age of everything: television, cars, movies filmed in Todd A-O, theaters with "refrigerated" cooling, not to mention smoking on the left side of the theater and in the balcony. These were the sisters who shed their memories of the Great Depression at the drop of a luxury or modern day anything.
Yet my grandma loved telling us stories about the olden days with not a hint of wistfulness or nostalgia, but every story had a moral attached. Something from Anna's youth that reinforced her orders for us to grown up and be somebody. One horrifying memory was indelibly scarred on my grandma's back. A huge brown splatter, that marked a lesson learned painfully and permanently. Grandma was supposed to be minding baby Betty, who was forever getting into mischief. This one day, while Grandma's back was turned, Betty fell into a chute that delivered coal to the house basement. Fortunately, she wasn't hurt, but she ran crying to her mama. Grandma was summoned by her mother who was cooking a large cauldron of soup for that day's lunch. She ordered Anna to remove her blouse, turn around, while Mama raised the boiling hot ladle from the soup pot and brought it down hard across Anna's back. The first time we saw it, we cried while Grandma, calmly, told us what she'd done to deserve such cruel and merciless punishment. "Didn't you hate her?" we sobbed. "No," came the quick and honest reply. "I was supposed to be minding the baby, and I didn't. Betty could have been killed. Mama had already lost one child. So great was her fear of losing another, she had to make sure deadly mistakes weren't made under any excuse." I still thought the punishment barbaric, but when my toddler son Danny hid from me in a Target store, my panic was so great that when he reappeared laughing, I knew the paradox of relief and rage having lived one endless minute thinking I'd never see my son again.
Each of the eight surviving McClure children, two sons, the rest daughters, leave school after eighth grade and leave home as soon as an apple and some cornbread can be packed into a paper sack, which will also include a dime tied up in one of Mama's handkerchiefs. The ten cents is for carfare that will take these stoic children to the next town. Children filing out the front door of the clap-board houses built by the mine owner, who lives in the stately mansion on top of the hill. Only the ninth child, brother John, stays behind, buried in a small plot in a smaller coffin in the chapel graveyard. Scarlet fever took his life at the tender age of five and delivered him into the arms of Jesus. In a few years, WWI, the War to End all Wars will begin, and little John will be joined in the ground by his brothers Tom and Jimmy. The great flu epidemic of 1918 will take more babies from their mothers' arms. Almost no family is spared. Crepe hangs on doorways. Their pictures will be taken in the christening gowns that will also serve as burial shrouds. Dead babies, eyes closed, posed like dolls for posterity, firming my grandma's resolve to "grow up and be somebody."
Toward this goal, Anna finds work in a diner in the industrial section of Los Angeles, where she meets Lon McClure, the short-order cook and her future husband. The honeymoon is put on hold when my granddad enlists in the army. He is sent to Armentieres, serving both as a doughboy and a cook. The boys nickname him "Cookie," which Granddad hates. My mother, their only child, insisted that during that time he also studied to be a Cordon Bleu Chef. Gun in one hand and cookbook in the other? Only in her dreams. And perhaps his.
Granddad came home with a musket and enough money to open the L and A Diner. Lon and Anna. Brisk breakfast and lunch trade. The "Cordon Bleu Chef" dishes up hash on a shingle and Grandma lines five loaded plates up one arm and five down the other as she serves the hungry men at the twenty-stool counter. In every photo of my granddad, the ones in color, his face is as red as a painted devil. My mom claimed it was Cherokee blood. Maybe. Or maybe it's the face of a man cooked medium-rare from years hunched under a grease trap. Or maybe it's anger, as he watches the Jazz Age dance past him. His three joys: my mom, beer, and rolling his own cigarettes. On his ropey left arm, an inky tattoo spells MAMA.
When I was three, I'd slide into the breakfast booth in his kitchen. Sometimes he'd take a small mug used to measure out penny candy and fill it with beer, mostly foam, and slide it down my way. He had the hatchet-carved face of a wooden Indian, the maudlin humor of an Irishman, and the love of drink that ran through his heritage and his veins. When he died, I was four -- and furious! I stalked over to my grandma, put my hands on my hips, and shouted: "Granddad'll have to go to Heaven to drink his angel beer!" Grandma grabbed a balsa wood yardstick, a free gift from Eddie Mann Chevrolet, and swatted me across the behind. The stick broke, my Grandma stared at me, then collapsed on the floor laughing. I think she knew even then I would take her advice to grow up and be somebody.
By the time Granddad's life was over, life in general was getting better, and for most folks, not just for some. A good life was affordable, and Grandma (below, behind Aunt Helen in the black shoes) had her fair share. Luxury items were found in most every middle class home. The sisters were re-united and loved taking bus trips to places called The Winchester House and Busch Gardens.
At home, Grandma whistled like a song bird, waltzed herself across the kitchen and served us hot chocolate in the old diner mugs. If we whined, we were reminded: "You don't know what trouble is." And she was right. We didn't. Not measured by the Eddie Mann yardstick we didn't. Up until the end of her life, Grandma kept a plastic bottle of lava powdered soap on her kitchen window sill. The same rough pumice that scraped embedded coal dust from blackened arms and faces, along with the first layer of epidermis. Her hands were red and rough, the hands of a hard worker who counted her blessings on rosary beads and fell into deep restful sleep the moment her soft white hair hit the pillow.
When we granddaughters grew up, every week or so we'd take Grandma to the Carnation Restaurant on Wilshire Blvd, around the corner from where she lived. No way were we allowed to treat. Grandma was always the host. And on the walk home, she'd try to give us money for movies, books, and smokes. We protested, she won. The dime given her when she left home had grown in interest -- in life, in her dear grandchildren and great-grandchildren. One hundred years, being somebody. When I get to Heaven, I hope I will have earned a place in line with Grandma and her sisters. In fact, I'd consider it a privilege just to be the caboose.
End
