An old woman's family album - part 4

An Old Woman's Family Album - 4

Grandpa, part 1
Mom always said her father was like a big kid - he loved his "toys" so much, and he enjoyed the tourist spots that other New Yorkers never seemed to get around to visiting. He took me to the Bronx Zoo and to Central Park where we fed the squirrels. He took me to the top of the Empire State Building (before they glassed it in so people couldn't commit suicide by jumping off) and we climbed the steps inside the Statue of Liberty as high as people were allowed to go. I remember a narrow, winding staircase, so maybe we traveled up her arm. Somewhere there's a photo of me sitting on - or at the feet of - one of the stone lions at the New York Public Library. He took me to the Museum of Natural History many times, and even to Grant's Tomb.

Saturday afternoons Grandpa would often take me to the movies - especially if the Marx Brothers or Charlie Chaplin were playing. And there were the serials before the show: the Perils of Pauline, where she would always wind up tied to railroad tracks with a train coming (continued next week!) or something like that. I remember the movie where Charlie Chaplin did a parody of Hitler, complete with uniform and that stupid mustache. And there were the newsreels, which at that age I didn't understand.

After the movie we'd always stop at the candy store for ice cream cones to eat on the way home. Mine would be vanilla with sprinkles made of real chocolate (not that brown waxy stuff they use now), in a sugar cone, and Grandpa would get plain vanilla or chocolate. And when we got home, just finishing the last bits of our cones, Grandma would scold Grandpa for "ruining the child's dinner with sweets." My appetite for dinner was just fine, but the scolding was expected, and if Grandma hadn't scolded Grandpa something would have been not quite right about the day.

My grandfather collected guns, which he kept in a locked cabinet. He had set up a target range in the cellar, and he taught me how to dismantle, clean and reassemble a revolver. He also taught me how to shoot one, at a target, but he never shot at anything alive and neither did I.

Grandpa loved trains, so our excursions into the city always included a subway ride, mostly with bus transfers. Back then you could ride underneath the whole city for hardly any money, and the subways were clean and safe. Later on, after my mother remarried and we moved out to the New Jersey shore, my grandparents would come to visit often, and Grandpa and I would ride the railroad from Asbury Park north to Matawan (over a very narrow, very high bridge) and back again, just for fun. Once we took the round trip south to the end of the line, at Bay Head Junction, to me a really big deal.

Speaking of subways -- did any of you ever watch NYPD Blue, and if you did, do you happen to remember the lead-in music, the drum solo with a high-pitched, tuneless string or woodwind passage above it? That was exactly the way I remember the sound of the subway. How I loved that subway music!

Grandpa was a talented man. He was an accomplished photographer with his own darkroom. Most of the photos I'm posting with this series were taken and developed by him. He earned his living as a clerk at the Post Office, but his "real" life came after hours and on weekends. He did calligraphy, and taught me to do Old English lettering with India ink and a Speedball pen.

He taught me to read, and once I had learned how, he very solemnly showed me where he kept the key to the glass-fronted bookcase, and told me I could read his books whenever I wanted, provided I washed my hands beforehand and put the book back where it was when I finished. I acquired my love of books from him.

He was a woodworker. He had a shop set up in the basement and his projects generally turned out really well. But he built a boat once, way before I was born, and in one of his very rare lapses he made the boat too wide to fit through the cellar door, so the boat stayed in the basement and was used to store coal for the furnace.

One day I happened to notice that this big wooden thing was shaped like a boat, and I said, "What's that? It looks like a boat."

And he said, "It is a boat."
 
And I said, "Did you make it?"

And he said "Yes."

And I said, "Why is it down here in the cellar full of coal?"
 
And he said, "Let's go out and get some ice cream."

So we did.