My grandfather was always an old man to me. He was nearly seventy when I was born, thirty five years older than my father. Grandpa smoked a pipe and cigars and always smelled of strong tobacco.

We would spend many hours on the back porch cracking hickory nuts and walnuts with a hammer. He and I ate raw hamburger on crackers together followed by thick slices of limburger cheese.

Grandpa played the fiddle well at one time, but arthritis slowed his movements in his later years. The fiddle sounded pretty squeaky to me, but the tunes he played stayed with me forever.

Grandpa told me tales about his turbulent school days. He related these stories with a crooked smile that exposed his tobacco-stained teeth below his bushy white mustache.

In those days, school ended for most rural folk in the eighth grade. With an eight-year education, students could take a teacher’s examination and become a teacher themselves. Some of the students were as old as the teacher.

One of his male teachers had a bad habit of tossing a knife at his students for any infraction of his rules. One day Grandpa turned around to say something to a classmate seated behind him and that teacher threw the knife at him. It stuck in his desk. Grandpa got out of his seat and attacked the teacher.

The pot belly stove was red hot and blazing. Over it went, stove pipe and all, along with the teacher’s desk and several stools.The fight boiled over to the outdoors and ended with the knife-tossing teacher being taught a lesson by one of his older pupils.

Grandpa told me a story about one lady teacher about his age who was “soft” on him. Evidently, this crush was a one-way street, as Grandpa didn’t give a whit. He had made a sled which consisted of a thick plank with a bevel on the front end. That day there was a heavy snow on the ground with a thick crust. Grandpa and some of his friends went out to slide down the hill. The teacher wanted a ride, so Grandpa agreed to let her take a ride. He headed her in the direction of a small stump that barely showed above the thick crust. When she hit the stump, the teacher rolled head over heels. Her skirt billowed up over her head and showed more than she wanted her students to see. When Grandpa sheepishly helped her back up she told him: “I’ve seen enough of you to know that you’re no gentleman.”

Grandpa replied, “And I’ve seen enough of you to know that you’re no gentleman either.”

He told me these stories with a crooked smile that exposed his tobacco stained teeth below his large white mustache.

* * *

In October of 1960, I saw Grandpa alive for the last time. I had graduated from high school and spent the summer remodeling the house. Dad never seemed to have enough time of energy to work on the house. He was busy with his historical research and tracing genealogies. Gradually, I learned some basic skills and did all the handiwork at home.

Grandpa had been in a sanitarium for several years after suffering a series of strokes. In his late eighties, he was a dimmed shadow of the man he used to be. He was unable to speak. His eyes were barely visible through slits in his fleshy eyelids. His abdomen seemed puffed. He tried to speak, but only a squeaky whimper came forth. His hands twitched like the paws of a dreaming dog. He tried to move from one side to another, but he was like a car stuck in the mud. His mouth looked like it was bound with wire. Death, I realized, would be a blessing to him. Finally, he passed on and we buried him in the family plot in early November of 1960. He looked peaceful and at rest, more like the man I had known most of my life.

My father was somewhat of a mystery to me. He was bright and literate. He supported me in most everything I wanted to do. He played his vast collection of sound recordings often, so I became well versed in music from the time that recorded music was invented. Dad has a booming bass baritone voice and often sang along, or showed me songs of his own making. Everything he did made lasting impressions on me.

My father had missed his calling somehow. He was the type that needed to love his work, but he had settled for working for others in a factory setting for a wage. He had tried self employment often, but he could not make enough money for the family in an independent workplace. Some might say it was his own fault for not trying hard enough, but I knew better. He loved his family first and foremost. The all-consuming drive that is necessary for great success eluded him by personal choice. It was his lot to put home and family before personal satisfaction and work.

I think I summed everything up in a poem I wrote about Dad twenty years after he died.

Holding A Mirror to the Sun

© 1993 Kenneth Harper Finton

Is it the ghost of him I see

in the restless dreamscapes of a hollow night?

The ghost of him … or my own flawed impressions?

Twenty years ago my world quaked violently

when he passed so suddenly

from our lives, so quickly there was barely time for tears.

A sudden shock … a stunning loss …

and life moved on without him.

With childhood’s end, the world could never be the same.

Twenty years … so long ago I barely recognize

that younger, wandering self.

Yet, in those silent dreamscapes of the night

he comes to visit still.

A near sighted old neighbor said

he saw him walking through the tall grasses

of the abandoned yard years after we left

the old Ohio homestead.

“Bunk,” I said, not prone to thoughts of spirits,

yet encounters of a kind have occurred

in the darkness of many a restless night since.

I remember those long evenings in the family home,

the easy chair whose arms

held up a crude wood shelf,

flowing over with papers and notes,

my father seated behind this rude table

in his oily green work suit,

lost from the present in the remote past of other peoples lives.

The black and white TV that connected us

with the world blared endlessly,

while mother ironed the clothes

and I shook my head in wonder.

How bored I liked to be on those

hot and muggy summer days when Dad’s idea

of a good time was to walk through silent graveyards,

writing the names from time-worn stones on yellow legal pads.

Yet, caught up in his enthusiasm,

I learned to hold a mirror to the sun,

reflecting shadows upon those faded letters.

Quite often we were rewarded

with a touch of heartfelt sentiment

inscribed upon the crumbling stone.

Often Saturday would find us in

some distant library, digging through

piles of dry old books of facts that smelled of yesteryear,

but all was not studious and dull escape.

All was not the dark, outmoded past,

as I feared in the leafy green and anxious days of youth…

the family trips brought new, inviting places we ran to once a year,

croquet with friends in the evening breezes of the green Ohio grass.

Is it the ghost of him I see

in the restless dreamscapes of a hollow night?

The ghost of him … or my own flawed impressions?

His choice in music bubbles through my mind.

His choice in pastime rumbles

through my mature years like the distant drone of a passing freight.

Through the years I’ve come to know him

more than yesterday, when I was but his child.

And most of all, I learned to hold a mirror to the sun.

© 1993 Kenneth Harper Finton

© 1993 Kenneth Harper Finton

We lived in the country about two miles from town. Dad had purchased an old brick one-room schoolhouse in 1948 from the county when they built a new school for the country folk consolidated all the one-room schools. He and Grandpa immediately went about the business of ruining it as an historic landmark. They broke up the large one room into four square rooms 15×15 with a ten foot hall between the sections. Two of the squares served as bedrooms, one served as the kitchen and one the living room.

They took out the lovely front door and cut a hole for a back door, bricked up a few of the long church style windows and lowered the ceilings from sixteen feet to eight feet. Dad wanted it to look like a normal home with a columned porch and a horseshoe drive, but this never happened. After he put the wiring in and ran the water from the false well, he drywalled everything and taped it. He ran out of steam very quickly. The rooms did not get paint for seven to eight years. By this time the drywall was brown with age and nicotine. The taped joints and the spackled nail holes stood in tasteless contrast to the tanned gypsum board.

Dad smoked unfiltered Old Gold cigarettes until they came out with Winston filters, then he switched. Sometimes he would smoke a pipe. I loved the smell of a pipe and could not wait until I had my own pipe and tobacco. Dad smoked Carter Hall tobacco when he smoked the pipe.

Mom always hated the schoolhouse. She had been used to a more traditional housing and thought that camping out in a unfinished home was not dignified enough. She has a dour attitude all the time she lived there and moved out as soon as Dad died.

A quarter mile north of our place was the Children’s Home. When I was a small boy, I often went there to play with the kids. They has a stout playground with a tall steel slide, that burned your skin in the hot summer sun, swings made with thick chains and seats of steel, and a small old carousel that always squeaked. The older boys did farm work and were called “barn boys”. I was not really old enough to play with them, but they let me hang out with them anyway. I first learned to ride a horse in the pasture between our house and the Children’s Home

REMEMBERING MAXINE

DORIS MAXINE HARPER FINTON SACK

born October 18, 1919, died January 20, 2009

It occurs to me that when you are talking about the life of a person and the meaning of the time they spend on earth, you are entering a gray area—a scary place that not many people like to go. You are talking about the evolution of a spirit—the changes that a lifetime makes in a soul. At the same time, you are being judgmental, revealing your own values, beliefs and patterns of thought in your words and praises— judging how the other person stood up to your own peculiar beliefs and evaluations.

Maxine was one of those rare species of human beings that took pleasure from being in the service of others. Not that she was totally selfless, as few of us are. Not that she was a saint, as none of us have perfect love, perfect lives or perfect morals. Only the long dead folks are made saints—and even then, it is only after the life they really lived has been selectively forgotten.

Born in Salem, Oregon, October 1919 and living into January 2009 mathematically made Maxine 89 years old when she died, but the view outside the window of her person was truly remarkable. She never knew her father, Clinton Byron Harper. He died of Spanish Influenza before she saw the first light of day. She was raised by her mother, Cora Mae Gilmour, a descendant of European royal families that never had the slightest taste or knowledge of the diluted bluish blood that flowed in her veins. Cora took in washing and did people’s laundry during the Great Depression. She struggled hard to raise her three daughters, Florence, Ruth, and Maxine. Cora left Oregon shortly after Maxine’s birth to live in the middle of the Kansas prairie with her father, Hedron Walker Gilmour, a short, thin and dapper man who loved the arts and entertainment. Hedron was an amateur magician and painter who became another big influence in Maxine’s early years.

After Maxine graduated from the Minneapolis Kansas High School, she moved to Denver, Colorado to live with her older sister Florence. She went to beauty school, though she rarely practiced the trade, just as her mother had gone through optometry school and never practiced that trade. Instead, Maxine waited tables on roller skates and went dancing with her friends as much as she could. It was at one of these dances that she met Ken Finton, an indisputably handsome man with Titian gold hair and a baritone voice to match those golden locks. He would become her husband of over 30 years and the father of her children: Kenny, Billy, and Jean Marie.

Ken would move her to Ohio where they would spend their life together near his family. They were married November 15, 1941. Just a few short weeks later, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. This act changed the lives of every American forever.

Maxine did not follow in the footsteps of Rosy the Riveter and go out into the workplace to replace the missing men in the American factories during the war. Instead, she had a baby —namely me—and sat out the war on the sidelines, staying sometimes in small apartments in Cleveland and Greenville, Ohio and sometimes with Ken’s parents. For a while in 1944 and 1945, she lived in Gainesville, Florida while Ken was stationed in Fort Blanding. They returned to Greenville where Ken first found work delivering fuel oil for the space heaters of Darke County’s many farm houses. Afterward, Ken opened a small gas station with his Flying Red Horse Mobil Oil Company contacts.

Ken’s attempt at the independent life did not last very long. He was forced to take refuge in factory work when a new baby decided to come into the family. The money was not great, but the job was steady and not overly demanding. He worked in quality control inspecting taps and dies for a branch of the Detroit Tap and Tool company called Sater Products. This work lasted he until he retired at 64.

Around 1950, the schools in Darke County consolidated and left quite a few one-room brick school houses vacant. Ken was able to buy one of these abandoned schools and had the idea that he could remodel it into an ideal two story home with the help of his father and family. However, Ken was not a talented builder. The schoolhouse was divided into four 15×15 rooms with a bath and a hallway, but that is about as far as it went. This was much to Maxine’s dismay. She never liked the dwelling. It remains a schoolhouse on the exterior and a two bedroom home on the interior to this very day.

Maxine spent the 50’s raising her two boys. There were plenty of instruction manuals on how to do this. Dr. Benjamin Spock had written his famous book that took the world by storm. In 1946, Spock was given the chance to publish his iconoclastic views in The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Along with everyone else, Maxine and Ken read it, of course.

In the 50’s strange new gadgets appeared on the roofs of American houses as television became a household necessity. Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, and The Nelson family’s The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet did not hesitate to show how child rearing in the 50’s ought to be.

None of these shows were much like our own personal lives, but that did not matter much. With TV in most homes, everyone had a living model of the way things should be. A woman’s place was definitely in the home for everyone but school teachers and nurses. Thus, Maxine stayed home to raise the kids most of the fifties, though she secretly would have preferred to be out in the workplace. Despite the social norm, Maxine did take temporary work as a cashier at some grocery stores and the five and ten cent store now and then. But in 1956, a new daughter that we named Jean Marie came as complete surprise to the everyone—fifteen years after the first baby—and once again life was changed for all.

As to religious views, the family was for the most part not serious about churches and religions. This changed a bit in the late fifties when Ken and Maxine started studying the Bible with John Timmons and his wife who were Jehovah’s Witnesses. I am not sure what swept them up into this strange, cultish group. It was probably the strong personality of John Timmons more than anything else, but I was young and impressionable and was swept up into this myself at the time. By the time I graduated high school, I had moved well beyond fundamentalist viewpoints, and developed interests in sciences, as well as philosophy, eastern religions, archeology, history, and music.

Ken died suddenly of a severe stroke in 1972. A few years later, Maxine sold off many of her Ohio possessions and moved to 1289 Clayton Street in Denver where she lived in a house that originally belonged to the Muckle family. Maxine’s sister Florence had married Paul Muckle. His parents had both passed away and the big old turn-of-the-century home sat empty at the time. Once again, like the time after Maxine’s’ graduation, her older sister Florence was there for her in her time of need and confusion.

Florence had come to Ohio when my brother Billy was born and we had visited her several times in Colorado—once by train when I was around six and several times by auto when Ken took his vacation.