RelativesRelativesThis is a list of the relatives as I know or remember them. ‘Remember them’ is the operative phrase since memory warps with time and a lot of time has elapsed. Hopefully none of the living will take umbrage for themselves or others being described here. Mostly I have had so little contact with the family that, like teachers and friends, I do not have the spelling correct. Talk to my mother about this as I think she is the official recorder of the family tree.
Remember my original caveat. Everything on this page is opinion and not necessary a current opinion. Opinions bear no relationship to facts or truth.
I have little ego and am intimidated by almost anyone. My father taught me that there is no excuse for me. I was taught to never defend myself physically or orally. I was told repetitively that "You don't think" and that I behaved stupidly. That I survived him is only by pure luck and the love of God. Counseling has helped but some things go very deep. Read "Toxic Parents". We do not spend much time here but if I omitted him, someone might think I had just forgotten. Not a chance. Maybe there was a whole generation of abused boys. Steinbeck reads that way. Sometimes I think so. I spent years figuring out how abusive my father was. I visited my father's sister, my mother's family, even his co-workers. My father was worse than even I remembered.
He thought he was a good father as he was a good provider of a good house and things.
As described elsewhere, he bought a nice cabin in the woods in northern Wisconsin. Envision the cabin on a like in the Fonda movie: :On Golden Pond”. They got it right down to the loons wailing. In any case, the cabin had basic furnishings. This included a clock that ran so fast that the second hand was a blue and the minute hand ran as fast as the second hand should have. The clock also ran backwards. We showed my father that the clock was also magic. The hands on a clock cross once per hour. On this clock they only crossed eleven times in a day. Somewhere between 8 and 7 o’clock, the clock lost an hour. Try it, it works. If you can find such a clock. We left him with the clock and went out for a canoe ride. When we returned, he came running down to the pier. He had solved the problem. He also saw the look on our faces as we suppressed laughter. He knew he had been had. He did not speak to us the remainder of the trip. My father was never wrong, it if appeared he was wrong, someone just did not understand the problem. He was wrong this time and he knew it.
Once in New Jersey when he was angry with my sister Kathie, she commented that when a person relies on physical argument, they have lost the argument. He commented that that was very astute for someone her age. She said that she had learned it from her brother. He moped off. He knew then how I had escaped.
Kathie put is in a nutshell: “Our father hated children and we took it personally”.
I heard a right-wing newscaster from the GWB News Network
(Fox News) describe his father and it sounded like we shared the same:
this
fellow had the better perspective. He said that his father had no
idea what being a parent was all about;
that was the mother’s job. He
provided a good house, good meals, good discipline, and a good
education. That was what he thought being a good
father was. Under this definition, my father was a successful
father.
You can see what he did by typing "Physicists Research Co" or
"Micrometrical Manufacturing" in Google.
It is sons like myself that create unbreakable mothers. By the age of 5 I had cut or broken myself enough times that the local emergency room knew us by name -- and she never broke stride. Except for unfailing faith in my father, she was always there from Cub Scout Den Mother to when I fainted on the kitchen floor after cutting my finger. On the other hand, she read my mail. She tries really hard to be a good grandmother.
When I was young there was a school shuffle when we moved several times. Jeanne and Kathie got the school shuffle while in high school: Longfellow Junior, ‘Tosa West, Dedham, West Essex. This is rough on your social life but Jeanne is very sociable so I think she made out OK. Jeanne started at Colorado State, which is on the same professional-level Playboy party-school list as the University of Wisconsin. She got a skeg scar in Mazatlan and transferred to Michigan State. She went to Nigeria only to be flown out during the Biafra revolution. She finished her degree at Michigan State in Physics. After stints in Los Angeles Beach suburbs and one in San Francisco, she moved to the jungles of Kauai. Before then while in Venice beach, she had better jobs than I had in my entire career.
Jeanne has married a Hawaiian doctor; lives in a beach house on the North Shore and can probably still give anyone a run for their money on the waves. She has at least 4 kids, some grown and away now. The kids have Hawaiian names that I can hardly remember.
In addition to the high schools listed for Jeanne, Kathie also went to the East Grand Rapids High and the Grand Rapids Junior College. On to UCLA and then Berkeley where she found her home in the ‘60s.
One of the most academically intelligent people I have ever known or known of. She was active at Berkeley in the 60's. While out of school she became California's first fully apprenticed woman auto mechanic. She never let me forget that the description of a person does not include either sex or race.
After Berkeley with her physics degree, she entered Scripps for her Ph.D. in Oceanography -- I have no idea what she does but whatever it is, I am sure is beyond my abilities.
I have made guesses. I think her Ph.D. thesis was on alterations of ocean current flow due to surface projections (jetties, etc.). She tells me that NOAA is a Department of Defense - Department of the Navy - Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) division. I also know that people working in the same area can measure the trail of a whale for a week based upon infrared heat trails measured by satellite. While at Scripps, Kathie could use a Cray computer smashing numbers from a satellite for the entire night. People who I have met from the Oceanography department at UW think of the APL lab as a black hole: people, go in, people come out, nothing else does.
A world-renowned oceanographer -- at least in my world. Sometimes when you are too smart, you begin to believe too much in your own intelligence. If so, that is not a good thing.
One day my best friend, Gary Leive, told me he was getting married in Panama, wanted me to be his best man, and that I should show up in Panama about the 22nd of August of 1970 with a rented tuxedo for him. This was great and I asked the girl I was dating to go with me. I figured that I could drive to Miami with someone and fly the two of us to Panama for about the same price as flying myself from Chicago to Panama. I would enjoy the company and see more of the country. Rita could not go. She had a girlfriend with her when I asked so I turned to the friend, Carole, who also could not go but she would find a way. This started eleven years of an unhappy marriage. Carole was obviously more unhappy than myself but it was not good for either of us. I, however, had invested more love and emotion into the marriage than had my wife. When we got divorced, I was devastated. She married the guy with whom she had had an on and off again affair for the previous four years. Now she lives in a nice house overlooking the Phoenix Valley. I guess she was right: I worked to hard for what I earned.
This is a story yet to be told. Right now I have other things to do. Maybe someday.
This story will never be told as it is strictly between her and me. I shall tell parts of it because Megan is so much like me that I wonder if even God can tell the difference. Like me, things happen to Megan. Mostly not nice things. Some day, the world will recognize the genius of Megan and appreciate her as I do.
Megan was ill a lot when she was born, she almost died on one occasion and that changed our lives. I quit my job and spent the next six months with my family. At three she was already able to understand her own and others motivations. She did not like the Popeye movie because there was too much hitting. She has a vocabulary that exceeds anyone I know. She received an International Baccalaureate Diploma of which I think I am more proud than she is. She graduated as a Bio Engineer from UC Berkeley in the first year that the university had such a graduating class.
Her last years in high school were spent commuting between San Jose High, San Jose, City College, and San Jose State University. She graduated number one in her high school class and was active in everything: swimming team, Key Club, model UN, and mock trials.
None of this describes the dear, sweet, loving person that she really is.
I do not know the history of my mother’s family. It is a good
German, Catholic
family. I always wondered if any
of them knew the German language. In any case for as long as I
knew them, they lived on Market Street in
Hudson, Michigan. Hudson is not
big. It had one traffic light in
town and another light down where the highway avoided town.
Oh. My mother tells me that they knew German and would speak
it to each other. They spoke only English in public because in
the European-American tradition, you only spoke English in
America. To get on my pulpit here: this tradition has caused the
USA many problems and I think it would have been better had more
Europeans brought their language and culture with them. A large
portion of the USA population think that English is God's language and
other languages belong to the other guy. As a result the USA has
rejected foreign cultures and thereby has no culture at all. The
recent waves of Mexican and Asian immigrants who understand and do not
want to lose their cultural values are making a dent in this
armor. Americans cry out for "Family Values" but reject the
cultures that have them. This will change -- and will
change in my lifetime.
Next door to grandma’s house was the nuns’ home and across the street from that was the Catholic Church. Next to the nuns’ house was the Catholic School that all of her family attended.
I think grandpa did maintenance at the church. His name was Ernie. I do not remember Grandma’s name. She had a sister that lived in Ohio. Probably Maumee. We visited her once. She had Sears and Penney’s and Wards catalogs for doorstops. She would fold each page, one at a time, over to the binding. This made a nice, soft, round, doorstop of many colors.
Behind the church ran the train tracks. Freight train tracks. Behind and next to the church lived the Camps. Their home could properly be called a shanty. We shall hear about the Camps later.
Further from town and up the hill on Market Street were bad
people. I never understood bad
people. I always feared awful
things happening outside of grandma’s house at night. Animals or
people. I was never sure which. My mother encouraged such
fear but I never understood it.
My mother tells stories of her childhood living in a tent in someone’s back yard during the depression. When we were small, my mother and grandma would go to the feedlot store and buy the bags to make clothes for the girls. No one remembers any more today the grain sacks made out of varied colored materials. My mother and her mother both sewed. They had those old Singer sewing machines with the foot pedal that rocked and the standard table with a drawer set on each side and a hinged plate for permitting the machine to fold under the table so the table extension could fold over the top and look like a nice place for a flower vase on top of the crocheted place mat.
The house had a vineyard in the back yard and the grapes were good. When there were grapes. I think they were not well maintained and died. There was a little house in the back yard where the renters stayed. Uncle Bill and Aunt Jean stayed there for a while.
I think the house was built in sections. There was the main front of the house. The porch ran along one side of it. The nuns’ side. You entered at the rear of this section and at the far end of the living room. In front of you as you entered was the office space. To the left was the living room and at the front of the living room to the far side was grandma’s bedroom. Directly in front as you entered was the stairway to the second floor. This had two bedrooms and a stair to the closed attic. The main bedroom had a storage space behind it. It smelled musty and had a giant hard-sided trunk in it. Blue, if I remember correctly. With a big, round chrome, latch with a slot for a key. The basement under this had a coal furnace. The basement was very small and very dirty. But then coal is known for that. The upstairs was heated by vents in the floor/ceiling. We would drop things down these vents to watch them land on the downstairs floor. The furnace basically heated the house through a big vent in the office floor.
The second part of the house was the dining room. To the left of the dining room was a little room with the basement stair entrance and cloth curtains enveloping its entrance, green flowered. This was Grandpa's workshop. Opposite the stairway door in the workshop was the bathroom door and another storage room. The bathtub was one of those big iron tubs with the claw feet. In the dining room at the back before Grandpa's room was the entrance to the kitchen. The kitchen floor slanted to the rear of the house. There was no second floor to the kitchen. There was a back porch. The sink was on the wall facing the dining room. Grandma was always at the sink, cooking, washing, always kitchen things. She was a great cook. My father always told my mother that. There was a door to the dining room from the front porch. We never used that door.
The milkman would deliver milk into the icebox. The iceman would deliver ice into the icebox. Most of the time I remember she had an icebox and not a refrigerator. The world was more honest in those days: you could leave the door unlatched. But then the world was always more honest among poor people.
Grandma was a friend with the nuns. There was a bb gun. And old pump that barely shot anything. I would ping the nuns windows with it and hide. I hope I did not harm the windows. I got to see the nuns that way. This activity was discouraged.
Grandpa's radio repair shop was downtown. It later moved to the corner up from the church and next to the movie theatre when Bill and Jean took it over. I remember a bowling alley but I do not remember if it succeeded the theatre or was next door to it.
My mother told stories of how her father bought this giant blue jig saw and cut yard figures with it. She would paint them and they were sold to pay for her education. The saw was in storage. They do not make them that way any more.
I think it was a strict family but I think there was love in that family that I never saw in ours. I think my mother was the strictest. I got that idea from two of her brothers.
Grandpa bought a 1960, 3-speed, Chevrolet Biscayne. This car was his pride and joy. He used it to commute to Adrian for some sort of machinist job there after Bill and Jean had the store. He drove it to Wauwatosa at least once to visit us. The Chevrolet dealer replaced a universal joint. Drive shafts had these in those days.
The second year at UW-M, I escaped to Hudson for a week or so. Grandma told me that I should not go back to my parents in New Jersey. I cashed the airfare ticket (you could do that in those days) and used it as a loan to start my own life. Grandma did not give details, just that I would be better off on my own. I could have stayed with her but I am not a small town person.
When grandma died, I went to the funeral in my new car and my Bendix suit. She was a great loss to a large number of people. God must have wept that day. The church service was normal. The cemetery service was normal. When they threw the first shovel of dirt on her grave, everyone broke down. I held my mother while my father held grandpa. We all decided that part of an funeral was unnecessary.
I did not go to my grandpa's funeral. By then I lived in Arizona and it would have been a long way. I think I still would have gone had I known. After Grandma died, he had a lot of problems and my cousin, Diane, moved in and took care of him. Diane, like Grandpa, has a heart of gold.
I have to relate a story here (make sure to read the links) about
grandpa because in a way he was
very important to my life. From the rest of these pages you can
see that I thought my family was dysfunctional. My mother's
family except for our side was very close. The three brothers
were very different from each other. Grandma was special and a
book could be written about her love
for her family.
But grandpa was also special. I always had a jaded view of my
mother's family because my father hated anyone poor. I can
remember my father repeating to me: "if you're so smart, whey aren't
you rich". Grandpa was never rich. My sisters would sit on
his lap and he would tickle them. He had little formal
education. He was a physically small man. Grandma was
pretty big. Bigger than grandpa. But this is all beside the
point.: grandpa had a vision of the future that even my father did
not have.
Grandpa opened up a store in downtown Hudson to sell and repair
radios. Emerson radios. He had given me one (my little red
radio that lasted into high school). Grandpa
had no education to repair radios. In those days a radio had 5
vacuum tubes: 50c5, 35w4 -- foo, you don't care. Grandpa would
test tubes and replace the one that was bad and be happy that he could
help. He had his little shop in the house where he could take
things home to fix. If the problem were more than a tube or a
visibly burned resister, he could not fix it. But what he did
helped carry Hudson into new age of electronics. In 1948-49 he
expanded his business to carry TV sets.
Like his understanding that his daughter would need a good education,
he understood that TV would become a necessary part of everyone's
future.
As a present, he gave our family a 12", black and white, Emerson
console TV. There was no color in those days. In fact,
there were no TVs and no TV channels. But he gave
us one. He gave a beautiful, valuable gift to a man who had no
respect for him. No TVs? In 1952, we were one of two
families in my grade school class who had a TV. The other was
Susan O. I
know becauseof the time our TV was broken (read
this too). But I am ahead of
myself here.
When we got the TV, we also got an antenna for mounting on the
roof. Our Brighton house
is still there -- you can see it -- you can read about the antenna at Our Emerson
Television. At the time I thought grandpa was just a silly
old geezer -- now that I am a silly old geezer I have had time to think
about the world as it was.
My respect for grandpa is great knowing what he did for his
family. It would be greater if could remember more of him.
Frank was the tough brother. He worked hard for what he had and looked like he worked in a machine shop or lumberyard. I mean he looked the part. Somewhere along the line he lost his thumb. I only lost the very tip of mine. Seeing him made me feel very lucky. He was married to a stern-looking woman, Mac. They had several kids. A good Catholic family.
Frank bought a schoolhouse and turned it into a wonderful
home. He made rooms, installed
plumbing, anything else to make it home for his growing family. I
remember the water pump in the
kitchen when the kitchen was just one end of the big room. I
remember they had an outhouse. He fixed all that. It took
years but he did it. Mac refused to move into the house until the
kitchen sink had water.
One Saturday the men sat around in lawn chairs and shot birds out of the birdhouse. These birds had taken over the birdhouse from another species of bird. I forget which were the bad birds and which were the good and if shooting them made any difference.
Frank liked guns. He liked the outdoors and liked to hunt. When my father died, my mother gave Frank the guns.
The oldest daughter was Diane. She was the third grandkid for grandma. I was the first and Carol was the second. Diane had bright red hair and I teased her about her looks. I shall never live that down. She grew up to be very, very, beautiful. Last I saw, she and her husband lived in a house upstairs with it fixed up very well. She was happy. She reminded me of the teasing.
I remember David but I lost track after that.
A great policeman in Adrian, Michigan. Deceased. During the 60's, I would visit Ernie to keep from believing all cops were evil. When a Madison cop beat me up for just walking to work, a visit to Ernie let me know that all cops were not images of my father. Both Ernie and my grandmother tried to adopt me. I did not understand Ernie: how could a man have so many kids and they all love their father?
They write books about people like Ernie. Or at least they should. He married Marie early on. They had six kids and have family all over Adrian, Michigan. When I went to Adrian last summer to find Marie, I went to the first hospital that I saw and asked the receptionist where Marie Rupley lived. She knew.
The last time I saw Ernie was when Megan and I went to their Devil's Lake home. He had been through dialysis and was trying a new process in its place. It was experimental. We talked of many things. He told me that life was too short to not make peace with my family. He spoke of things about my childhood and his. He knew his time was coming. He was at peace with the world. I was very happy that we had the time together. Even still, when he died, a large hole was left in my world.
I shall also die before I learn what it takes to make a family all love each other.
Carol now lives in Little Rock. My kids and I visited her there while Bill Clinton was governor and running for President. We did not get to see him. Carol was next in line after me in the cousin race. She is a nice person and I think is happy where she is. She and Judy Camp were very close as they grew up.
I remember little of Jimmy as a kid. I do not know him now. He worked for the Adrian Chevrolet dealer and probably owns it by now.
Bill was still living at home as I first remember him. He took
me fishing down by the
river. I fell in and we went
home. No fish. The bank was very slippery with
mud. As mentioned above, he
married Jean, and soon after I had a new cousin, Billy. Then
Michael, then others that I do not
remember. I remember Jean and the
boys had very strong glasses. Billy was the first kid I ever saw
with glasses. They were made with plastic
lenses. This was a very new
concept.
Mike died the other day. Diane sent me the obituary.
WHen my younger cousins start dying, it is time to enjoy what time is
left.
The Camps were not direct relatives. Mac was the sister of Marie, Ernie’s wife. They had six girls all named with a ‘J’. They lived in a shanty down behind the church next to the train tracks. Walter and Mac were always nice to me when I would visit them. My father did not let me do this often. I think he was afraid I might like girls. I am sure he did not like poor.
When passing through Hudson on my motorcycle in 1965, Walter opened his door and let me spend the night when I looked like something out of a James Dean movie covered with road grime. Walter had Alzheimer's when I last saw him. Then they had a nicer house up the hill from Grandma’s old house.
I never knew them well but there are some families in this world that seem to be model families to me. Maybe it is because I do not know them well enough. I never met a Camp I did not like.
I loved Judy. I think she is the same age as Carol. I did not know that she returned the favor until a few years ago. If I had known then, I would have gone down to Hudson, carried her away, and we would have lived happily ever after. She was my fairy tale princess.
In high school, I visited grandma for a couple of weeks. I spent all of the time possible with Judy. I hitched rides on the freights when I was bored. I went in and out of the room down the big TV antenna boom. Grandma was not happy about the last two and told my mother. The boys in town did not like me infringing on their territory (Judy). They were all tough guys. Any one of them could have beaten me to a pulp. One day on the bus to Baubee Lake, I stopped a fight over a seat in the back of the bus. The biggest decided to beat me up. I told him to find someone his own size, and he did. Before this guy beat me up, the driver suggested we wait until we got to the lake to finish the problem. When we arrived, my uncle (and Judy's uncle) met us at the bus. As I said above, Ernie was a policeman and everyone knew it. I got away lucky but those guys chased me every chance they got while I was in Hudson. I got so sunburned on so many days at the beach that I never thought the scars would heal.
I think Judy had other things going when I visited at the end of my Sophomore year in college. I do not remember, as I was too involved with other problems.
Jenny took care of her mother and father, as they got older. I have a lot of respect for the son or daughter that moves back with the parents and loves them as they were loved.
I remember Jane because she could find middle C on the piano, first time, every time, by the time she could walk. Yes, Camps had a piano. I do not know how many could play. I hope all of them.
I only remember him as a silver-haired old man. His last home was a small house with an orange orchard in the back yard. He had a Belgian Shepherd that you had to fend off with a large stick. It was neither friendly nor housebroken. He told us that our Great-Great-Great-Great grandfather, James Corrial (Sp.?), died at the Alamo. I checked at the Alamo and they never heard of him but they gave me permission to prove them wrong. I guess I was not that interested. Grandpa was very proud of his Civil War knowledge. He gave me his book collection of which I was very proud both for the fact that he thought enough of me to do that and proud of the knowledge base of the collection.
My father later stole the more valuable of the books and sold them. The remaining books I have given my daughter, Bree, as her husband has an interest in the Civil War.
I only remember her as a silver-haired old woman. The last I saw her was in a hospital bed in Lakeland, Florida after several strokes. Before that she and Grandpa lived at 303 Marshall Street in Syracuse, New York. This was just a little downhill from the University. My dad graduated from Syracuse U with a double major of Math and Science. Mostly I remember the stained glass window in the main stairway, the blue-glass candy jar with the stale lemon drops, and that after she left, my father inherited the house.
I heard from Syracuse students (the student community is really very small) that the University finally bought the house from my father as an attempt to reduce prostitution on campus.
I heard from others that many years ago the family had had cabins for rent up by the 1000 Islands. My father did the maid service, more or less, along with his sisters. I have heard unsubstantiated reports that grandpa was a drunk who beat my father and that is why my father treated me as he did. I may not have been the best father but beating my kids was always out of the question because I remembered it as abuse. I think this made me the smarter of us.
She lived in Syracuse and I think she was my Grandma's sister. She loved us kids, promised us her money. That was the only time I remember seeing her. There was a sofa with a flowered pillow in a glassed-in room or at least one with serious windows. The last I heard 40 years ago was that she had an argument with my father and gave all her money to a charity.
Dewitt was never mentioned much. I understand he was mentally ill and a ward of the state of New York. I know of no visits to him by any member of our family.
Janice died at the age of 12 of polio. I think my father remembered her fondly although she was never spoken of except to say she died of polio.
Lived in San Francisco. I was told always that she was quite a character. I also heard that she had alcohol problems. I lived near San Francisco but had no interest in seeing her. Knowing the rest of the family made sure that I would cross the street to avoid her.
Married to John and had two kids. One a daughter named Janice who I thought when I was a pre-teen to be very beautiful. And a son, I think also named John who disappeared because of some problems with the law or gangsters or something. We did not see him much but I thought of him as sort of a distant uncle Bill (Rupley).
Ginnie and John had a farm in New York. I remember also that they had a Pontiac, one of those in the early 1950’s with a hood ornament of an Indian. It lit up. The farm was a dairy farm and I went once with John to milk the cows.
When my grandmother took ill, John and Ginnie gave up the farm and moved to Florida to take care of Grandma and Grandpa.
After grandma died, grandpa became unmanageable and they wanted to place him in a home. We took a vacation trip in 1960 in our new Oldsmobile and travel trailer to investigate. I think my father agreed with Ginnie and grandpa ended up in a convalescent home.
After John died, Ginnie moved to Orlando. In 1977 Carole and I took the new Datsun station wagon to Florida and we stayed at the Juniper Springs Campground near Ocala. We visited Ginnie. She spent some time explaining the family relationships and encouraging me to not hate my father for the abuse as his father abused him worse. She did not give specifics but said that it was horrible.
On our 1979 motor home trip, we went to visit her. We never made it. We turned off the main road into her neighborhood. As we did so, another car passed us and stopped. Two men got out, the driver carried a pistol. I had Carole take the kids to the back making sure the door was locked. The men approached each side and the one waved the pistol at me. I sunk way down in the seat, put the RV in gear and drove into their car. You must remember that a 1977 Southwind motor home had a dump truck chassis and a 440 cubic inch engine. It easily pushed their car up the street with its tires losing rubber to the road. They hopped back in their car and drove away. I figured that if I pushed it far enough it would run into another car and cause someone to pay attention. I could not back up because some stupid person was tailgating me. We were too shook up to visit Ginnie after that and returned to the campground.
At my father’s funeral Ginnie grabbed me by the neck and pushed my face into my fathers face in the casket. I decided that I would never see her again and decided that the family all had serious issues.
She later moved to San Francisco where I also did not visit her.