Daddy's living room chair had a couple of bookcases behind it, including bestsellers like USA Confidential and matching volumes of Hugo, Maupassant, Chekhov, Twain and Poe. Growing up, I always found books in the house. "Rog," he asked me, "did you ever wonder why a PhD candidate and an electrician would spend so much time talking? It was because your dad was the smartest man I ever met." In the 1980s, the Fairweathers came up to visit. Night after night, the voices of Bill and Walter and drifted in from the front porch, as they talked late and smoked cigarettes. He'd been a bomber pilot, and later became famous in his field. He apprenticed as an electrician at McClellan Electric on Main Street in Urbana, and then "got on" at the University of Illinois, where he worked for the rest of his life.Īfter the war, Bill and Betty Fairweather moved to Urbana, where Bill, the son of my father's partner in the florist business, would study psychology. They lost the shop in the Depression and he had to move home to live. There was a photo of him, trim and natty, standing beneath palm trees with a cigarette in his fingers. "We delivered a lot of flowers to the Kennedys in their mansion," he said, when Jack was elected President. My father as a young man moved to West Palm Beach, Florida, and opened a florist shop with a man named Fairweather. "Your father's initials are still carved in the concrete on the curb in front of the old house," she told me. When I was a child she had seemed tall, spare and distant. I enjoyed, and was a little surprised by, her warmth and humor. The last time I saw her was in the 1970s, after she moved to a nursing home. Willis store in downtown Champaign, and we'd visit her there, my father always buying something. She worked most of her life as a saleswoman for the big G. I regret I never knew Wanda as well as I did my uncles and aunts on my mother's side. I was allowed to approach her, and regarded her solemnly. She died, and the body was laid out in the living room. Hulda contracted TB, and I heard, "She has to go live in the sanitarium up on Cunningham." This was spoken like a death sentence. We sat around the kitchen table covered with oil cloth and ate beef and cabbage soup. They had an old ice box, and I got to put out the sign so the iceman could see from his wagon how much ice they needed. I spent hours with coloring books on their floor or at their kitchen table, and tiptoeing up and running down the scary staircase. Uncle Ben drove a heating oil truck, and would sometimes drive past our house and wave. It was always comfortable and warm, and I loved to visit.
This was not considered living in poverty, but simply their home. Aunt Maud and Uncle Ben lived north of Champaign in a house made of tar paper, heated by a stove. Then they had three more children: Hulda, Wanda, and Walter. His parents believed they couldn't conceive, and adopted a daughter, Maud. My father was raised in a two-story frame house with a big porch, on West Clark Street. The waiter asked, "Do you want anything on top? The man replied, "coffee!" Before a man left Germany for America, the school master taught him to say "apple pie" and "coffee." When he got off the boat, this man was hungry, and went into a restaurant. There is a story he told many times, always with great laughter. Earlier than that, he was taken out of the Lutheran school and sent to public school, "to learn to speak American." He spoke no German, apart from a few words. They spoke German at home until the United States entered World War One. What have I inherited from those Germans who came to the new land? A group of sayings, often repeated by my father: If the job is worth doing, it's worth doing right. I realized consciously for the first time, although I must have been told, that my grandfather was named Joseph. Once when I was visiting my parents' graves, I wandered over to my grandparents' graves, where we'd often left flowers on Memorial Day. I never met my grandparents, and that knife is the only thing of theirs I own.
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