Galen's Postcard #6: Introduction to Phoebe . . .

Galen’s Postcard #6: Introduction to Phoebe Evans McCall of Richmond



Galen Green
8606 Chestnut Circle #3
Kansas City, MO 64131
(816) 807-4957

Friday
September 12, 2008
(H.L. Mencken’s
128th Birthday)




Dear Richmond Community Museum Friends –


Phoebe Evans McCall, who, like H.L. Mencken, would have turned 128 years old this year, was the youngest of my four grandparents, which pretty much explains why it was that I was so much closer to her than I was to any of the other three. And when I say that Phoebe was “younger” than my other three grandparents, I don’t’ mean just a few years younger. To begin with, she was born in the same year that the ill-fated James Garfield was elected President (i.e. November of 1880). That made her 13 years younger than her husband, W.K. McCall, who was born in 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War, during the ill-fated Andrew Johnson Presidency. Just to put into perspective the ages of these, my mother’s parents, with the ages of my father’s parents: Ira Green, who’d been born a few years before the Civil War, in 1858, during the Buchanan Administration, was all of 22 years old when Phoebe came along; and Etta, my dad’s mother was only three years younger than her husband, entering upon the world’s stage just a few weeks prior to Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration and commencement of the Civil War in 1861.

Phoebe’s being by far the youngest of my parents’ parents notwithstanding, she had, like them, already lived the greater part of her life by the time it was time for me to be born. To be precise, I was born in 1949, the year Phoebe turned 70. Only in recent years have I come to realize how extraordinary it is for anyone of my (and my younger brother, Kevin’s) generation (“baby-boomers,” if you will – a term I dislike intensely) to have had grandparents who were that old, which translates within the context of my special fields of interest as having had grandparents who’d lived the bulk of their lives as Victorians, Edwardians and frontier settlers whose early lives reached so far back into the 19th century as to have been touched by cultural dynamics which I, for one, have mostly only read about in books and seen portrayed in the movies and on television.

Before I head off down that road, however, sporting my historical anthropologist’s jaunty white pith helmet, I suppose that I ought to remind myself of my main focus here and of my main audience. My main focus is a randomnality of boyhood reminiscences of Richmond, Kansas; and my main audience for said reminiscences is, of course, you, my friends there at the Richmond Community Museum. For that reason, I hope to impose sufficient mental discipline on myself, for the space of this telling (difficult as it may be for me), so as to talk about both my mother’s mother, Phoebe Evans McCall, and the little town on the Kansas plains where she lived when I first got to know her.

My Grandmother Phoebe was “straight out of Central Casting,” as they say. What I mean by this, of course, is that, if some big-time movie producer were to pick up the phone on his desk in Hollywood and bark something like this: “Hello? Central Casting? I need for you to send me over the all-American grandmother, and make it snappy! She’s gotta smell good, feel good and look like the very soul of patience, gentleness and love. Also, she’s gotta be a tiny wisp of a thing, no more than 5’1,” certainly under 100 lbs., but wiry – you know, petite, but tough as nails, able to hogtie a Kansas twister with one hand and rock the baby with the other. On top of that, she’s gotta be thoroughly grounded in her community – belong to the DAR, the GAR, the WCTU, etc. etc, and attend the Methodist Church every Sunday, even if she has to sit in the front row and crank her hearing aid up all the way just to follow the sermon. And most importantly, she’s gotta dress the part. You know what I mean? Nothin’ fancy – not even fashionable. Mostly cotton or polyester ankle-length dresses left over from the 1930’s & ‘40’s, somethin’ with lots of flowers – or maybe polka dots – except on Sundays, once in a while. And only wire-rimmed glasses, naturally, and lots of shawls and sweaters – the more conservative and plain the better. But they’ve gotta smell as good as she does; that’s a must. You know the smell I mean: sorta like a baby that’s just been bathed and powdered and wrapped in its soft little baby blanket, fresh from the clothesline . . . ‘cause the all-American grandmother I need to play this part never breaks a sweat – not even on the hottest day of the year . . . . . “

Anyway . . . if some big-time movie producer were to bark something like that at Central Casting . . . what they’d send him would be my Grandma Phoebe – or a reasonable facsimile. My sketching for you here this quick profile of her, however, is not intended to diminish in any way her uniqueness. Even the most abbreviated resume of Phoebe’s myriad uniquenesses would have to include her keen intellect, her uncommon resilience, and her all-encompassing democratic spirit, that magnificent quality which nowadays (long after her passing from the scene) we often hear referred to as “respect for diversity.” Indeed, it would not be overstating the case to say that Phoebe embodied – at least within the framework of my time together with her (i.e. 1949-1982) – that noble ideal of America’s founders that all human beings are created equal – meaning deserving of equal regard and treatment by everyone else. In this sense, she truly “walked the walk” of a Daughter of the American Revolution (not the war, but the vision behind the war – that vision which survives within each of us today). If Phoebe instilled in me one lesson above all the rest, it would surely have to have been that everybody can teach you something.

But I promised us both (you & me) that I’d strive mightily here today to limit my adulation of my Grandmother Phoebe (1880-1982) to contextualizing her into the hamlet of Richmond, Kansas. So let me see if I can summon up from the depths of my memory a story or two or three which might sketch her into that context.

On page 14 of The History of Richmond, Kansas, published in 2003, we find a snapshot entitled “Richmond telephone office,” which was, back then, of course, a modest little wooden cottage. Across the page, we find a sizable list of the names of some of the many people who worked at the Richmond switchboard, among them, my beloved Phoebe. I can recall her mentioning on several occasions throughout my boyhood that she had, at one time, been what she herself always referred to as “a hello girl.” This subject usually came up whenever my brother or I would express our city-boy curiosity toward the old-fashioned “crank” telephone box which hung on my grandparents’ dining room wall above the ancient doily-shrouded treadle-style sewing machine.

Having grown up in Wichita with its up-to-date black rotary dial desk model phones, my only previous points of reference for such an antiquated device as a 1920’s-style wooden wall phone were, of course, the ones I’d seen on TV shows such as the very earliest episodes of Lassie, and maybe, now and then, an episode of The Roy Rogers Show or The Andy Griffith Show. As with so much else about my grandparents’ world in Richmond in the 1950’s (e.g. the hand pump at the kitchen sink, the terrifying outhouse out beyond the garden, the rusty iron coal stove with its belly filled with glowing embers, etc.), the huge telephonic set, inside its mounted cabinet, that had to be cranked to be brought to life (and whose mouthpiece and earpiece seemed to me as clunky as frozen orange juice concentrate cans) . . . impressed me, at the age of 5, as being unutterably exotic.

It wasn’t until I was perhaps 6 or 7 years old, however, that I finally gained entrance to that enchanted little cottage just across the alley, where the telephonic magic actually took place – the Richmond telephone office. What made my initiation into the realm of the elect all the more memorable were the circumstances whereby it came about. More’s the pity that there’s no way for me to tell you about it here today without its coming across as pathetically mundane; and yet, at the time, given the atmospherics that were given, that snowy November night has continued to twinkle in my memory like the snowflakes inside that snowstorm paperweight which slips from Orson Welles’ fingers and rolls across the bedroom floor at the beginning of the epic 1941 motion picture, Citizen Kane.

Nearly every Thanksgiving, throughout my childhood, my (adoptive) immediate family (Harry & Margaret & Kevin & sometimes Lois) and I would drive in that old Hudson Hornet from Wichita, up through Emporia and then through Lebo (to fill up on its strangely more affordable gasoline), to my grandparents’ house in Richmond. Let’s say that the year was 1956 and that I was 7 years old and in the 2nd grade. Back then, we actually had school on the day before Thanksgiving, which made traveling “over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house” a bit of a rush-job. My father, who worked as a toolmaker at Boeing Aircraft, would have arrived home from work at around 5 o’clock on that Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving of 1956, so that we’d have been backing the Hudson out the driveway and pointing it toward Richmond by no later than 6:00, just as a light snow was beginning to fall.

To add to the giddiness of the moment, instead of taking time to prepare supper, sit down to eat it, and then to wash the dishes, we stopped at one of those pre-fast-food “hamburger stands” to pick up a crackling brown paper sack full of hot greasy burgers and fries wrapped in wax paper. This was an unimaginable treat for my brother and me, since it was probably only the third time our little family had ever “eaten out,” when Kevin and I were kids. Watching in horror from the back seat, as Mom steered the car from over in the passenger’s seat while Dad employed both hands to wrangle his burger, served as yet another unexpected thrill.

Following this, my very first fast-food experience ever, and about the time the shades of night began to fall and the slanted wave of snowflakes flashing in front of the Hudson’s headlights began to thicken, Dad pulled over just long enough for my brother and me to pee at one of those rustic roadside rest areas and then for Mom to take a few minutes to tuck us in to the makeshift backseat bed the folks had rigged up by laying a couple of suitcases on the floor of the backseat, on either side of what was, on a ’51 Hudson Hornet, a sizable hump in the floor where the car’s driveshaft and exhaust conduit were housed. Extra padding was then spread out on top of these suitcases so that a cozy little nest was fashioned for two little boys to doze quietly until we reached Richmond.

Then . . . back out onto the highway, my little brother and I lying head-to-foot, quietly beneath a shared quilt, with the vibration of the tires on the snowy concrete beneath us. Looking up at the night sky flowing by beyond the car’s upholstered beige ceiling, through the little bit of backseat passenger window and the more expansive rear window, I was able to enjoy the white blur of the gathering snowstorm as our little family flew through it.

All this was in the days (and nights) just before the opening of the Kansas Turnpike, so that nearly our entire journey from Wichita to Richmond was on those aging two-lane highways, those “blue highways,” on which a miscalculation by the driver while passing slow-moving traffic could easily result in a premature one-way trip to Heaven for a little 7-year-old boy rocking snuggly in the speeding metal cradle of a ’51 Hudson. My unshakable mindfulness of this fact, even at such a tender age, made so much as the lightest dozing, that evening before Thanksgiving 1956, an iffy proposition at best. Thus did I spend much of the next couple of hours watching the headlights of oncoming cars, trucks and buses glide ghostlike across our family car’s ceiling above me, while I lay there trying to eavesdrop on my parents’ soft back and forth murmurs from up in the front seat – though they were mostly drowned out by the music playing softly on the car radio . . . something like the 1956 version of “Your Hit Parade” from 1946.

Finally, exhausted after my grueling day in the 2nd grade and by the unrelenting worry about dying hideously in a fiery crash on the snowy highway, I fell asleep . . . only minutes before we were slowing down for a pit stop in Emporia. “Are we in Richmond?” I inquired, raising my head to try to see out.

“Nope. This is Emporia,” Dad replied. “Do you need to get out for a minute?” Of course I did. I always have, and still do – any chance I get. Count me in on getting out!

Anyway, I did. And was glad I did. Then . . . back into the car and on to our invariable fuel stop at that ancient little service station in Lebo. (Sometime, before the years have slipped completely away beneath our boat, I’d love to run across some extremely senior citizen who could explain to me the story behind Lebo, Kansas and its mysteriously cheap gasoline. If anyone reading this knows anyone who knows anyone who might be able to help me out with this, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me at your earliest convenience.)

On the final leg of our Thanksgiving trek, my fears of dying engulfed in flames and mangled beyond recognition were completely overtaken by sleep, so that only the slowing of the car on the (then) unpaved gravel streets of Richmond brought me gently back into the world of waking, in the snowy darkness beneath the snow-covered catalpa limbs overhanging my grandparents’ front lawn.

But no! This was not Will & Phoebe’s house! Instead, as I raised my head up from its little pillow, I was astonished to discover that we’d pulled over in front of the Richmond telephone office. “What’d we stop here for?” I asked.

“I thought we’d run in for a minute to say ‘hi’ to Grama.”

“You mean she’s in the telephone office? Why’s she in there?” I persisted.

“They couldn’t get anybody else to work tonight, so she told them she’d fill in,” Mom replied.

“When did Grama learn how to run the telephone office?” I had to know.

Mom gave a little chuckle. “A long time ago. Back during the Depression, that was what she did for a living. But then, she retired, after the war.”

This, then, was how family history was most generally presented to me – piecemeal, in tiny fragmented shards with ragged edges, which never quite fit together . . . and probably never will. Thus it was that I scrambled out from under the quilt and followed my folks (Kevin in Dad’s arms) up the dark, snow-dusted walk, into the telephone office. And, lo and behold, there sat my sweet little grandmother, Phoebe Evans McCall, only days before her 77th birthday, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, a switchboard operator’s headset fastened around her head, and a tea kettle “on the boil.” Perhaps it was the profound incongruity of seeing her in a setting – a context, if you will – so utterly other than the one in which I’d always seen her, during the seven years I’d known her, which has impressed that childhood moment so indelibly into my mind.

As I said before, there’s no way for me to tell you here today about my brief but memorable visit to that enchanted telephonic cottage across the alley from my grandparents’ house on that hypnagogically snowy night before Thanksgiving Day of (let’s say) 1956, without its coming across as pathetically mundane; and yet . . . and yet, I seem to find myself determined to try. I’d be kidding myself (and you, as well), however, were I to attempt to pretend to attempt to recount, capture or recreate the audiovisuals of that memorable, brief visit. To be perfectly honest with you, I’m not even absolutely certain that the Richmond telephone office where my grandmother was filling in that Thanksgiving Eve so long ago – a half-century ago – was the same one that’s pictured in the photograph on page 14 of the spiral-bound 2003 Richmond, Kansas history. The main reason I say this is that one of the few things I seem to recall Phoebe saying to me that bleary, twinkling night in 1956 was that that particular office in which we found ourselves huddled together was, in fact, nothing more than a good-sized spare bedroom at the back of someone’s (occupied) house.

[Furthermore, at the risk of stretching my memory’s muscles beyond the point of credible accuracy: I seem to recall attending a sort of estate auction on the lawn of that very same house (Or was it the house immediately to the south?), the week of the Richmond Free Fair, in the summer of 1963, when I’d have been 14. That house would have been on Kallock, between Ruth and Central – and may still be, for all I know.]

So there I sat, in a chair next to my grandmother Phoebe, up way past my bedtime, listening to her explaining to me how the switchboard worked; and as she explained how each of the little holes on the big board in front of her was directly connected to a household’s telephone there in the Richmond, Kansas vicinity, the hypnagogic trance I was in at the time had me envisioning all 500 or so men, women and children of Richmond divided up symmetrically into tidy tiny households, each neatly sequestered deep deep inside one of the little holes on the switchboard in front of us. But I didn’t say so; for, even at the age of 7, I was thought by my adoptive family (both the McCalls and the Greens) to be a bit overly imaginative for my own good. Instead, I asked Phoebe how she was able to connect one household with another. It was then that she grabbed one of the “male” connective plugs, which stood at the ready on the counter perpendicular to the upright board full of holes, and explained how the process of connection and disconnection was accomplished. Needless to say, the majestic simplicity of this goddess-like power in the gentle, loving, arthritic fingers of my sweet little grandmother found a receptive spot in my impressionable little psyche and burrowed comfortably in for . . . the duration.

____________


Let’s “fast-forward,” now, to the summer of 1963. That was the summer before I entered the 9th grade – the summer before President Kennedy was assassinated. I had just turned 14, and Phoebe had just turned 82. It was the summer that Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Phoebe’s husband, my maternal grandfather, W.K. McCall, had died of a heart attack at the age of 94, while working in their yard, in the spring of ’62; so Phoebe had been a widow for a little over a year. During much of that time, she’d visited her adult children and their families – Cecil in Kansas City, Myron in Ottawa, and Margaret (my mother) in Wichita.

But whenever the weather was nice, she seemed to prefer “keeping” her own house, there on the southwest corner of Ruth & Rigdon in Richmond. Naturally, Cecil, Myron or Margaret (and/or their children) would stop by to look in on her, from time to time; but generally speaking, Phoebe was determined to adapt to widowhood – and to remain living alone in her little house, for as much of the year as the weather would permit and for as long as her health and her doting adult offspring would let her.

I can remember sharing, at the time, the family’s ambivalence toward Phoebe’s farm-girl grit. On the one hand, we all seemed to feel a certain pride in her stubborn sense of independence, her “pioneer spirit.” On the other hand, however, we all seemed to be experiencing an understandable anxiety concerning her physical welfare. Back in 1963, before the advent of cellular phones, the Internet, “911,” and other such 21st century communications and medical advances, the wellbeing of an 83-year-old woman living alone for the first time, in a rapidly deteriorating house in a tiny farm town like Richmond, Kansas, was not nearly as secure as it is today.

The family, therefore, conspired to reinforce the monitor efforts of my mother and her brothers (and their respective spouses) by arranging to drop off a grandchild or two at a time, for as long as was feasible, throughout the summers of ’62 and ’63, to “visit Grama” – i.e. to keep an eye on Phoebe, lest she need medical attention in the middle of the night or burn herself while cooking and neglect to telephone for assistance or twist her ankle while walking out to the garden . . . or . . . in case she decided to take it upon herself to lean the aluminum extension ladder up against the south eaves of the house – just outside the back door – then climb up it while carrying a putty-knife covered with roofing tar . . . all the way up to the base of the chimney, to slather the black sticky stuff into a hairline crack where the rain had been leaking in.

This last contingency – involving the ladder, the tar and the roof – was, of course, not one which any of us in the family would ever have imagined in our worst nightmares, and was, therefore, not one for which any of us was entirely prepared when it came to pass, in the late spring of ’63. Needless to say, this particular feat of spectacular folly was not something to which Phoebe candidly confessed, but rather to which she rather reluctantly admitted, after her neighbors “ratted her out” – probably to Cecil, as he’d taken the most conspicuous “pater familias” role since the passing of W.K. the year before.

In retrospect, it seems likely to me today that we of the 21st century would diagnose Phoebe’s behavior involving the ladder, the tar and the roof, as being “a cry for help.” At the time, however, (45 years ago) it struck most members of the family as either a brazen misophallistic guilt-trip (though such terminology existed, back then, only in the preconscious mind) . . . or a symptom of the onset of dementia . . . or a little of both. Again in retrospect, it would seem that Phoebe, too, was more than a little bit ambivalent as to the nature and degree of any “independence” to which she might aspire – or aspire to aspire. Looking back now, from a half century later, I’m led to believe the obvious – that what Phoebe wanted most in life was for W.K. not to have died.

But he did. Her soul-mate had gone away forever and left her all alone. Or so it must have felt. But Phoebe was not all alone. She was surrounded by (and propped up by) as loving, attentive and caring a “social support network” (as we’d call it nowadays) as any 83-year-old widow could have hoped for. Moreover, she had her health – and then some. As her story turned out, she was to live another 18 years beyond that summer of ’63, free from any serious illness or injury: no cancer, no tumors, no heart disease nor diabetes nor hypertension nor obesity nor mental illness nor dementia nor lengthy bouts of pneumonia, influenza, etc. Much like W.K., Phoebe was to live what most of us today would consider a somewhat “charmed life,” passing from this world in her sleep on the night of October 27/28, 1981 at the age of 100.

Months prior to the incident with the ladder, the tar and the roof, it had already been decided among the tribal elders that it was young Galen’s turn to spend the entire week of the Richmond Free Fair with Grama. That’s how I came to the good fortune of having all to myself that comfy, elegant converted “front parlor” of a guest bedroom with its lace curtains, its once-fashionable flowered wallpaper, its white enamel-framed four-poster bed, its Edwardian reading table, graced with Phoebe’s much-coveted ornate red cut-glass kerosene lamp, and its armoire-sized music-box of stained glass and polished maple, which played the same perforated paper music rolls as a honky-tonk player piano, but without the piano keyboard.

Because my Uncle Myron and Aunt Maxine lived with their brood in nearby Ottawa, and my Uncle Cecil and Aunt Elsie lived with their brood in nearby Kansas City, my own parents were the only couple I’d ever observed occupying that front bedroom which I’d always heard referred to as “the parlor.” It was, therefore, the aura of my father & mother, Harry Green & Margaret McCall Green, which infused the very air in that lovely old parlor where they’d been married by a Methodist minister in June of 1941 and where they must have slept hundreds of nights before I – their first child – came into their lives in April of 1949.

If my memory serves me well, the summer of 1963 – like the summer of 2008, in which I find myself writing as much of this down today as my crazy “grownup” schedule will allow me to write down – was one of those summers of unusually cool nights and mornings. At least that’s how I remember the week of the fair, when I had the parlor all to myself. Sleeping with both windows wide open all night for cross-ventilation, I can recall needing to pull two quilts and the bedspread over me, along towards daybreak, because of the chill which crept into the room, through the window screens and the dusty lace curtains, from out beyond the moonlit shadows of my grandparents’ ancient catalpa trees which surrounded our sleep there – Phoebe’s and mine – she in her half-empty widow’s bed at the other end of the house, me in that white enamel-painted four-poster so thoroughly imbued with my parents’ thoroughly human aura.

In the morning, with the little house nestled in the shade of those big floppy catalpa leaves, blocking out the warming sun until around 9 a.m., I had to slip into my late grandfather’s old gardening jacket to sit down at the table with Phoebe to eat my dry breakfast cereal and milk, before starting my day off by walking downtown for the mail and to pick up an item or two from Dietrich’s general store.

After delivering these to Phoebe, back at the house, I’d generally head back downtown again to take a stroll around the fairgrounds to see and hear and smell what there was to see and hear and smell. I especially enjoyed visiting the livestock tents – the pigs, chickens, sheep, etc. – and then to simply hanging around on the outer edges of the clusters of crude banter among the carnival workers sitting or lying around in the shade of their tents and trailers. As I’m sure you can imagine, a 14-year-old choirboy from the “big city” of Wichita could pick up quite an earful of education about carnie life, if he were as curious as I was – and could make himself as virtually invisible as I could.

From the gradually stirring fairground, I might saunter across the way to the old high school gymnasium to check out the pies and quilts and flowers and sundry 4-H projects competing for that year’s ribbons. Come to think of it: 1963 was probably the year my humble little coin collection was awarded a third-place ribbon – most likely in the “Miscellaneous” category. From the high school, I’d usually make my way back to Dietrich’s to peruse that irresistible little table of candies, chewing guns and whatnots that George and Marguerite always kept there between the front door and the cash register . . . as well as that rack of black & white postcards of local points of interest. (What I wouldn’t give now for a complete set of those locally produced postcards!)

Finally, after wearing out my welcome at Dietrich’s, then taking a turn past the farmers’ co-op and the old train depot, pausing to climb up onto that weather-beaten old handcar that was always parked outside on the side-track (just in case, I guess) . . . and fantasizing about gliding across the 1890’s prairie on shining steel rails . . . , I’d invariably end up at the Richmond Public Library. As we all remember well (and as is nicely documented on page 19 of the aforementioned history of our town), the library, back in 1963, consisted of several shelves of books along the walls of Clive Bastain’s barbershop. After much deliberating, page thumbing and consultation with Clive, I decided to check out a hardcover book for young men, published in the 1950’s, entitled Blonds Prefer Gentlemen. As the title suggests, it was one of those “dating etiquette” books, intended to instruct a 14-year-old wannabe Cary Grant from Wichita, Kansas in the finer points of getting along with “the fairer sex” (as they were called in those days) . . . opening doors, not spitting on the floor, and so forth.

With my library book tucked under one arm, I walked back to the house, only to discover that, for lunch, Phoebe had prepared tongue. That’s right: tongue. It turned out that the long, loaf-shaped package George Dietrich had handed me earlier that morning, all neatly taped up in white butcher paper, and which Marguerite had rung up with the price of only 10 cents, turned out to contain a fresh beef tongue. Looking back now from a half century later, knowing what I’ve learned in that time about some the major factors in our equation, I’m going to venture a guess that that 10-cent beef tongue which, I’m sorry to say, lasted the two of us – Phoebe and me – the better part of that memorable week, represented the Dietrichs’ Christian charity toward W.K. McCall’s widow – just as their letting W.K. himself drop by their general store for a dozen or so hours every week to “help out” in whatever ways he was able, there in the ninth and final decade of life, represented that same mitzvah.

While the “harassed penury” to which I referred in an earlier chapter (an earlier “postcard”) was a reality unknown to me personally at the time (my being one of the newer grandchildren on the scene), I now realize that its cloud, which hung over Will & Phoebe’s later years, must surely have been an object of common knowledge among the grownups throughout the Richmond community. Furthermore, I now realize that George & Marguerite Dietrich had most likely been “paying” my grandfather Will (whom I earlier dubbed “the world’s oldest stockboy”) in trade, i.e. in groceries and dry goods . . . and that they were now extending that same goodwill – that same mitzvah – to Will’s widow.

This would explain the somewhat overcooked “10-cent” beef tongue which lay on the chipped and faded antique serving platter on the table in front of Phoebe and me, that summer noontime in 1963. I shan’t disturb you with the details of my frame of mind, as I watched my dear old grandmother slice that tongue loaf with her antique carving knife and serve it up to us in the quiet chapel of our mid-day meal. Suffice it to say that, after that otherwise delightful week with Grama, I never ate tongue again – nor will I ever, if I can avoid it.

But I’ve strayed from the intended focus of my Phoebe anecdote. (Forgive me.) Despite the burnt tongue, Phoebe and I enjoyed a pleasant, lively conversation over lunch that day. I’m sure we did, because we always did. We always had. Phoebe and I shared an almost magical rapport – and had for as far back as I can remember. This is a subject about which I could go on and on – and may, someday, if Time and the world were ever to let me.

After lunch, I helped my grandmother clear the table and do the dishes. After that, we spontaneously retired to our separate “corners” to rest and to read. So it was that I left her rocking in the rocking chair next to the china cabinet, there in the dining room, with the afternoon sunshine pouring in through the lace curtains at that west window which looked out onto the remnants of W.K.’s garden patch – pouring in on my grandmother, still in her apron, and on the folded front section of The Ottawa Herald, which would soon drop gently into her lap as she drifted into her afternoon nap. And so it was that I retired to my temporary miniature kingdom at the opposite end of the house, propped up in the four-poster in the front parlor, reading the opening pages of Blonds Prefer Gentlemen.

I must have fallen asleep reading, because the next thing I can remember was my attention being directed toward a vaguely familiar sound coming from the opposite end of the house, from just outside the back screen door. It was, of course, the bumping, scraping and rattling of an aluminum extension ladder being leaned up against the south eaves of the roof.

I’m not going to lie to you by saying that my sole concern was for Phoebe’s welfare – that she might be hurt or killed – though that was exactly half of my concern. The other half of my sense of nap-dazed astonishment at that moment was, of course, for my own welfare – for how I’d be regarded by the rest of the family if she were, indeed, hurt or killed. (How could I allow such a thing to happen, when I was supposed to be monitoring her for just such thick-headed behavior?)

Thus shaken awake by this double dread, I raced through the house to the back door. Even before I pushed the screen door open, I could see where she’d leaned the ladder against the eaves. And, sure enough, through the grid of the screen, there was Phoebe, about three or four rungs off the ground, still wearing her apron, a putty knife slathered with a generous dollop of canned roofing repair tar in one hand . . . and looking none too steady for a woman of nearly 83 who’d pulled this same stunt only weeks earlier.

I shan’t bore you here with the details of the conversation which ensured at that point between my grandmother and me. Suffice it to say that I found myself resorting to many of the very same “guilt-tripping” techniques which she herself (and every other grownup in the family) had used on me for as long as I could remember – the primary text for my sermon having been taken from the book of: “Please have a little consideration for what the family is going to think of me, if you fall!”

It was my very first extemporaneous “guilt trip,” and I’m proud to say that I laid it on pretty thick. The downside of my successfully talking Phoebe down off the ladder was, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, Phoebe’s negotiating the painful price of my then being the one who had to climb the ladder (firmly steadied by a diminutive lady octogenarian), onto the steep roof, then on up to the base of the chimney to where some supposed microscopic crack had been allowing in a trickle of moisture which had supposedly been running down the flue to the ancient coal stove in one corner of the dining room.

Needless to say, when I reached the base of the chimney, I’ll be switched if I could see any such crack. My only thought was getting back on that ladder and off of that burning roof, which the afternoon sun had heated to a temperature suitable for frying eggs (so to speak). Moreover, it seems that sizable family of mud-daubers had built its nest just inside the mouth of that chimney and was none too happy about my proximity to their home. For these reasons – and a couple dozen more, which I’ll leave it to the reader to guess at – I yelled down to Phoebe something like: “Oh, here it is! I found the leak! Here, let me seal it up real quick with this glob of tar!” I then smeared said big glob of tar onto some arbitrary spot at the chimney’s excessively tarred base and gingerly made my exit.

Later that evening, after returning from a fun time at the real fair (the one with the big crowd, the bright lights, the calliope music, the carnival atmosphere, the rides, the hot beef sandwiches under the wooden awning, the cotton candy, the dunking tank, the shooting gallery, the ring toss, etc. etc. etc.) . . . walking back to the house, carrying my brightly-painted hollow plaster kewpie doll, I waited for Phoebe to put her dentures in their cup to soak overnight, to turn out all the lights at her end of the house and to say “goodnight” . . . then waited until I was sure that she was sound asleep . . . before tip-toeing to the telephone (now a “black rotary dial”) and (per instructions) calling my mother down in Wichita to report that day’s roof-related incident. I felt like a spy for the FBI, but I knew that it was the right thing to do, and so did my mother. She extended her affirmation, approval and blessing, then rang off so as to immediately phone her older brother Cecil up in Kansas City.

Within that twelve-month, the house in Richmond (which probably had actually belonged to Cecil all along) was sold, and Phoebe was installed in a very pleasant and spacious second-floor apartment in a private residence on a tree-lined brick street in Ottawa. The owner of that good-sized house was a middle-aged widow who lived downstairs.

That previous paragraph may have unintentionally left the reader with the impression of a false dynamic of cause and effect. My “ratting Phoebe out,” as the tribal elders had strictly instructed me to do, was by no means the deciding factor in the culmination encapsulated in the previous paragraph’s final sentence. The excellent reasons for the family’s selling the house on the corner of Ruth & Rigdon there in Richmond and moving Phoebe to the spacious apartment in Ottawa were legion. Moreover, that dramatic transition, amounting to a kind of paradigm shift in many lives – including my own – had (I now realize in retrospect) been a foregone conclusion – a “done deal,” if you will – from the moment W.K. McCall’s heart stopped beating, on April 17, 1962. Looking back from the 21st century, it’s easy for any of us to see that there was no other logical dénouement.

I’d like to come back to Phoebe’s apartment years in Ottawa, but first, I’d like to skip beyond them momentarily – not so much for the reader’s edification as to do a bit of “thinking out loud,” so as to try to remember the overall course of events throughout the remaining years of my mother’s mother’s long life. As I’ve already suggested, 1964 must have been the year Phoebe moved from Richmond to Ottawa. One of the very last times I recall visiting her Ottawa apartment was on the occasion of the funeral of her sister, Bess (Evans) Martin in Ottawa. Somehow, it seems to me that that would have been sometime during my Wichita State University years. I remember that when Aunt Bess died, my dad couldn’t get time off from work, so that I volunteered to drive with Mom up to Ottawa for a couple of days – just the two of us. We stayed with Phoebe, of course. Aunt Bess (a darling in her own right) was buried in the Princeton Cemetery, there along Hwy. 59, half-way between Ottawa and Richmond, at the profoundly symbolic intersection of the John Brown Road and the (reputed) Quantrill Trail. This past summer, I made a feeble attempt to locate her grave, but it was too late in the afternoon and beginning to rain. (I remember that it also rained on the day we buried her.) Had I succeeded in finding Aunt Bess’s grave, I could tell you the year she died, which, in turn, would clarify for us the timeframe of Phoebe’s apartment years.

By 1971, it had become abundantly clear to the tribal elders (Cecil, Myron & Margaret – and their respective spice) that Phoebe could no longer live alone in a second-floor walk-up. Murphy’s Law, combined with Newton’s Laws of Gravity & Motion, combined with the dictates of common sense told us all that my grandmother would need to move in with . . . some-body. While no ideal solution presented itself, my parents’ home in Wichita provided the least objectionable alternative. Mitigating factors sweetened the deal. I moved out in March of 1970 and would be getting married in June of ’71. My younger brother Kevin cinched the deal by graduating from high school, joining the Air Force and getting married, all within a few months’ time in 1971.

Since I’m writing today’s reminiscence with specific attention to Richmond, Kansas as I remember it – from the 1950’s & ‘60’s – I’m going to skip over Phoebe’s Wichita years, which were less and less and less eventful, as the 1970’s crept apace. Besides that, I must confess that I can’t recall with much accuracy the precise timeframe surrounding Phoebe’s tenure in the home of Harry & Margaret . . . perhaps 1971 thru 1975; but that’s just a guesstimate. And, as we’ve already established, she spent her final few years in the nursing home back there in Richmond.

Perhaps it was because Phoebe’s first career – and in many ways, her first love – was teaching school in those little one-room schoolhouses over around Peoria, Imes, Berea, and Rantoul, in and around the time of the Spanish-American War, that my memories of my grandmother – both visual and verbal – tend to involve her chosen role as a teacher in my own process of becoming the guy who’s doing all this reminiscing here today. Along with my Uncle Cecil’s wife, Elsie (Atwood) McCall, Phoebe seems to have recognized in Little Galen fairly early on the child whom Destiny had ordained to set down a good deal of our family’s story. It was presumably for this reason that both Elsie & Phoebe went to considerable pains, throughout my early years, to fill my little brain up with their own impressions of what had been going on in the house where Life’s big party goes on and on and on, in the years immediately prior to my walking in on that party in progress. Many of the impressions they imparted had little or nothing to do with Richmond, Kansas; but some of them did. And that’s why it is that such a disproportionate quantity of what I know about life in Richmond before my birth is based on Elsie’s and Phoebe’s impressions.

Along with these impressions, however, there are the things, the material objects, the artifacts. Some of these I’ve already mentioned in passing: the armoire-sized music box in the front parlor, the old-fashioned “crank” telephone box which hung on my grandparents’ dining room wall above the ancient doily-shrouded treadle-style sewing machine, etc. As you know, the things of this world contain stories. They also contain ideas. In our family, storytelling was all too often left up to the artifacts. Perhaps this has been just as well, in the long run.

Somebody quotable has said that one can never truly “know” a place until one has left it. Certainly, Phoebe’s being relocated, along with the most precious of her things, in 1964, from the house in Richmond to the apartment in Ottawa, lent dazzling perspective to my understanding of Phoebe’s life in Richmond – and to my understanding of what Richmond had meant to all of us . . . and will mean to me for the rest of my life.

All my life, up until my sophomore year at East High School in Wichita, I’d been lulled by the sameness of knowing my grandparents and their artifacts in the admittedly lovely, though culturally monochromatic, “light” of their home in Richmond. Beginning in 1964, with W.K. cold in the ground and Phoebe gradually acclimating to her widowhood – and with her and her things installed in her Ottawa apartment – the other members of my generation of grandchildren and I were given the opportunity to see for the first time in our young lives the things of Phoebe’s world, literally, “in a new light.” This is part of what I was alluding to earlier, when I said that that dramatic transition in the mid-1960’s amounted to a kind of paradigm shift in many of our live.

When I say that Phoebe brought along with her to the Ottawa apartment “the most precious of her things,” it’s worth mentioning in passing that a whole lot of . . . stuff . . . got left behind, or, to put it more precisely, a great many of her things either got distributed to family members or were simply tossed out. Thus it was that the stories contained within the molecules of those precious remaining artifacts could be heard all the more loudly and clearly by those of us with ears to hear them. Let me relate to you here briefly the very shortest versions of the stories contained in just three of the objects Phoebe brought with her from Richmond to Ottawa. Those three eloquent artifacts would be her Edison Victrola, her simple hand-held stereoscope, and her tall glass bookcases filled with books representing nearly every stage of her and W.K.’s intellectual development.

Among the stories contained within Phoebe’s Edison Victrola, with its dark-stained wooden cabinet standing faithfully on its four sturdy legs, with its crank sticking out to one side, and with its built-in “horn” concealed inside its cubular belly beneath its simple, sturdy, pre-electric turntable mechanism . . . was the bittersweet story of a young family living in Richmond, Kansas in those giddy, glittering years following what they themselves would have referred to as “The World War” (having, at that time, no way of guessing just how much more omnivorous a “World War” could be). Playing its half-inch-thick hard black plastic grooved disks (as all of us grandkids did as children), back during the 1950’s, when Phoebe’s Victrola stood in the front parlor in Richmond, somehow told me far less of that artifact’s story (or stories) than did the process of seeing it removed from what my child’s mind mistook to be its place of origin – its mythical “home,” if you will – and transplanted in the guest bedroom of Phoebe’s Ottawa apartment. In that new light, which streamed in upon that antique wind-up phonograph from off the enchanted screen-in sleeping porch, I began to hear it tell its fascinating story – not merely about an especially music-loving young family living in an idyllic Kansas hamlet in the 1920’s, but of an entire culture which (in my personal mythworld) gathered in to surround it like an electromagnetic force field.

The music, too, which unwound from out of the black plastic grooves and on out through the built-in belly horn, took on a new significance for me, in that new light. Most telling, perhaps, of Phoebe’s Edison Victrola’s stories was, for me, echoed in my personal favorite of the songs it played – a song entitled “Bring Back the Kaiser to Me.”

And what of the stereoscope? For those of us old enough to remember the Korean War, both the Edison Victrola and simple wooden hand-held stereoscope which followed Phoebe from Richmond to Ottawa would have been commonplace objects – not so much thought of as “artifacts” as “heirlooms.” For my purpose here today, however, Phoebe’s stereoscope – along with the hundred or so double-imaged “3-D” postcard-sized sepia-tone and b/w picture cards which accompanied it in their shoebox wherever it went – constitute(s) an artifact. The story which it/they had told to me when I’d been a small boy playing with it/them in the haunted upstairs bedroom in the house in Richmond came into astonishingly sharper focus, once they/it had been transplanted to the Ottawa apartment.

It would be perfectly understandable if the reader were to pause at this juncture to interject a thought that might go something like this: “Yes, Galen! Of course your perception of those objects and of the stories they were telling you was radically altered in the “new light” you mention, but that was because you yourself were growing so rapidly at that age, as was your understanding of the world around you and of the stories and ideas being articulated to you the things of the world.”

I’ll grant you that, but . . . there was simply more to it than that. Because stereoscopes – in one form or another – have been around for at least a generation longer than gramophones, the molecules of the one in question tended to speak to my young receptors about several aspects of life on the Kansas prairie, far back on the other side of The World War, back on the other side of the Spanish-American War, to when those double-imaged pictures in their shoebox were taken. When I was very small, and the concept of the stereoscope was first explained to me by the grownups, my initial fascination was with the revelation that, even before the advent of television and motion pictures, people took pleasure in manipulating images of nature and of each other so as to make them appear more vibrant and life-like than could be accomplished with the single-lens camera. It was not until after the 1964 paradigm shift, the transplantation of Phoebe’s artifacts, and my opportunity to re-examine her things in the aforementioned new light, that I began to comprehend Phoebe’s stereoscope’s molecules’ message relating to the deeper nature of the culture and the world for whose uses it had originally been fashioned. Once I’d had a chance to re-examine it in its new surroundings – its new context – I began to tune into much more of what it had to tell me about who Phoebe was (and who Phoebe had been) and, hence, by logical extension, who I was, and how it was that Phoebe and I, each in our very special semi-connected ways, fit semi-comfortably into her stereoscope’s story.

As I finish telling you as much as I have time to tell you here about my wonderful Grandmother Phoebe, it occurs to me that the rather remarkable happenstance of my having been raised by parents who were old enough to be my grandparents and who, in turn, were raised by parents old enough to be their grandparents has blessed me with an interest in historical anthropology which I most likely would otherwise never have acquired. Another way of saying this might be that it has been for the most personal of reasons that I care as deeply as I do about what was going on at Civilization’s Big Tragicomic Party in the decades prior to my happening in upon it.

I first began to become aware of this interest stirring within me when, at the age of 20, in the summer of 1969, I was sitting alone with Phoebe in front of the television set in my parents’ living room in Wichita, watching two of our fellow human beings walking on the surface of the moon. A sudden chill came over me – a kind of palpable epiphany. All in an instant, I realized that I’d known all along but had never amassed into one big thought, just how far our species had come, within the lifetime of this tiny lady sitting next to me. I suppose we could say that it was there, in that “aha!” moment, that I began to catch this “bug,” this addiction to what I keep calling, in an admitted oversimplification, “historical anthropology.”

When Phoebe Evans was born in 1880, there were no airplanes. You already knew that, of course, but I just wanted to hear myself say it. So, part of what I was thinking as I sat with her in 1969, watching men on TV walk on the moon, was that Phoebe had just turned 23 when human beings first achieved what might be called “sustained flight.” Perhaps it’s because I myself am becoming a relic, a museum piece, to the young men and women with whom I work nowadays that I find myself growing more and more comfortable with honoring my departed ancestors partly for the years they were able to carry and the history they were able to contain. It seems to me now that loving them in part for what they endured has made perfect sense all along.

The third and final of the most memorable of the numerous “eloquent artifacts” which traveled with Phoebe in 1964 from Richmond to Ottawa was her tall glass bookcase, filled, as I suggested earlier, with books representing nearly every stage of her and W.K.’s intellectual development. When I say that these books “contained stories” or “contained ideas” or “spoke to me,” I’m not talking, of course, about the words printed inside of them. Rather, I’m referring to their speaking to me animistically, anthropomorphically – in that . . . way . . . which the things of this world have of speaking to us. In this respect, the mere fact of Phoebe’s tall glass bookcase (and I mean here, of course, Phoebe’s and W.K.’s) spoke volumes to me about Phoebe & W.K. Apart from its function, the fact of it announced to me, back when I was a preliterate shaver (“knee-high to a pig,” as ‘twere), that my mother’s aging parents were remarkably well-read.

Over the years, of course, I began to pay closer and closer attention to their books as books. And as I did, I gradually came to identify more and more with my mother’s parents’ interests – in 19th century American poetry, in Shakespeare, in the law, in the sciences, etc. Perhaps a better way of saying it might be that my grandparents’ interests in any number of relatively unfashionable (“uncool”) areas of reading played a significant role in my own growing interest in these same subjects by giving me permission to pursue the uncool, if that seemed to be where the Spirit led me.

__________

I’m guessing that a good many of my friends there at the Richmond Community Museum knew Phoebe. And, of those who did, I’m guessing that a good many had the opportunity to get to know her in important ways that a young grandson never could. It would be a source of immeasurable delight to me, if even one of the folks whose lives brushed up against Phoebe’s – whether at church or at the telephone office or simply in the course of daily living – would share one or two of their memories of her. I’m painfully aware that I haven’t done her just here today. But then, how could I have. She was 68 on the day I was born; she’d already lived most of her life without me.

For lack of a truly profound conclusion, I guess I’ll leave you with a brief description of my very favorite photograph of Phoebe. It was taken around the year 1900. In it, she’s wearing what I’m guessing was her best outfit – her “Sunday-go-t’-meetin’” outfit, as we used to say – and is seated side-saddle on her pony. I know that it was her pony because she told me so herself. Phoebe could talk endlessly about this particular snapshot; perhaps it was her favorite as well. It was taken in the schoolyard of the iconic little one-room schoolhouse outside . . . I believe she said Peoria, Kansas, where she was the schoolmarm at the time. As I’ve mentioned somewhere in my earlier writings, Phoebe liked to tell us grandkids how she’d ride her pony side-saddle to school back then. It made a good story, the way she told it – even if it was only sometimes true.

Myself, I’ve tried to be as accurate here today as I felt I could afford to be. It hurt a little, but I felt that I owed it to everyone involved. Even so, I’m sure that I’ve fallen short of most professional historians’ standards. Certainly, if anyone reading this remembers any of it differently, I won’t be the least bit offended (and, indeed, will be exceedingly grateful) if they’d care to correct me. Better to set the record as straight as possible now, rather than to wait for the next generation to do it after we’re gone. They’ll have their own story to tell, and you and I will be mere footnotes to it.


All the Best to Everyone,

Galen Green

Sunday
November 2, 2008
msmith2210@aol.com
816.807.4957
0r 523-1813
KCMO

__________________


Postscript

As you see, I began putting this shamefully incomplete remembrance of my Grama Phoebe together more than six weeks ago. I never dreamt that it would take this long to complete (not that it is complete, because it’s not). Let me just say that I ran into a million interruptions – and leave it at that.

I’m finishing up on November 2nd, which, as we all know, is the Sunday before the 2008 American Presidential Election. But in Mexico, today is celebrated as “Dia de los Muertos” or “Dia de los Difuntos” (Day of the Dead). Evidently, many people treat it much as many Americans (my people included) treat Memorial Day (which Phoebe & W.K. always referred to as “Decoration Day”). I mention this here because, according to the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia’s entry: “Many people believe that during the Day of the Dead, it is easier for the souls of the departed to visit the living.” I find in this factoid an inspiring metaphor. To write about our ancestors, we must think about them. And, for me, the process of writing and thinking about Phoebe as much as I’ve been doing for the past couple of months has required that I invite her to visit me.

“Acquiescence” was one of the more useful “big words” Phoebe taught me when I was a boy. I personally have found that inviting the departed to visit me nowadays requires a special type of acquiescence on my part. When I first began putting together my memoir, The Toolmaker’s Other Son, of which these “Postcards” to my friends at the Richmond Community Museum are intended to constitute one section, my guiding principle might have been most handily summed up in the title of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1967 memoir, Speak, Memory. In recent months, however, I’ve begun to sense that Memory does not so much need to be commanded to speak as it needs to be . . . acquiesced to.

At Phoebe’s funeral in 1981, which I was unable to attend, being tied down with obligations in Philadelphia at the time, the presiding pastor read a little eulogy I’d composed in loose verse form. It was dashed off within a few hours time of my mother’s telephoning me with the news of my grandmother’s passing, so that stylistically I’m afraid that it’s merely so-so. (Still, I was later told by reliable family sources that it evoked considerable outpouring on the part of the mourners present there in Richmond’s United Methodist Church that day.) I didn’t feel that it belonged in the body of today’s “postcard,” but I did want to share it with you, nonetheless. As has been the case with the “postcard,” my little eulogy for Phoebe was largely the product of an acquiescence to her spirit – which nowadays visits me often:


A Hundred Autumns

by Galen Green



On my grandmother’s 96th birthday I asked her what memories

Stood out most vividly in her mind, and she replied,

“There have been so many deaths”.

So many tragedies.

And she began naming them to me one by one

From her own grandmother to her baby son

And the man with the mustache who had loved her all those years.

She’s with them now on the other side of the door.

Yet we who are still on this side, each of us hears

Her voice inside of us and can not ignore

The fact that we will someday join her on the other side

In that great beyond that God’s mercy will provide.



Those tough and tender hands that most of us can remember

Only as old and knotted from touching a hundred Novembers,

Those hands once washed a baby who became a great-grandfather

And a patriarch in his own right.

How often do any of us ever pause and bother to

Consider that those hands – that were – when Sitting Bull was killed

At Standing Rock – already ten years old

And strong enough and innocent but skilled

Enough to trip the wire to seed the stony earth

Into a world that passed this week with her

Into the forever past. It is like a blur

For me to look at her hundred autumns, her years

That witnessed a world turned upside down by depressions and wars

In 1914 when she was already thirty-four

And again in ’29 and ’41,

And even today the insanity goes on.



Where does a loved one find the words to say

That the last leaf to fall from the tree has blown away

And that that last leaf was a living history

Our last link with a world that’s blown

Into the dark of the past, the mystery

That we shall someday come to know again,

When the door has opened for each of us and then

We shall be again as we once were and she

To whom we pay tribute here today

Shall greet us each with open arms and say

That she had watched each of us make our way

Through our heartaches, losses and regrets

Until we, too, became the leaves that fell

Into the wind and towards our Father who forgets

Our wrongs and leads His children home.



10/28/81


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