Wellsville

Grampa died in 2001. I haven't been back to Wellsville since his funeral. I'm afraid to go. I've heard that Uncle Wes has changed it quite a bit. Mom and Aunt Terry went a couple months after Grampa died and they said that it just felt different and they don't ever care to go back. I'm afraid to go because about eighty percent of my memorable childhood memories took place at his house in that Mayberry-ish town outside Logan, Utah.

For twenty years of my life Wellsville hardly changed. The town cut down a tree here or there that was overhanging the road. About a block away from Grampa’s house the city put a sidewalk down. The majority of the town still doesn’t have them. The kind of news in this town has to do with the middle school principle’s prize-winning pumpkin being stolen from his garden. He turned it into a lesson and had the students write about it. The Associated Press covered that big story. This is the Wellsville news in 2007. Currently, there are only 3-registered sex offenders living in that town with a population of roughly 5,000. Nearly 89% of households are families, only 5% of them are below the poverty level, with the average house having 7.5 rooms. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s the news was a little more mild, mainly obituaries, wedding announcements and travel warnings for Sardine Canyon, a dangerous drive in the winter snow. For years the construction on Sardine Canyon was the big news, with the finish dates constantly being pushed pack and businessmen commuting to Ogden having a 2-hour drive instead of the usual 45 minutes.

For me the only things that seemed to change were the changes Grampa made to his house. The electric fence that kept the horses in the feeding pasture was turned into a wrought iron fence that Grampa and Uncle Rick welded together and painted forest green. When the fence was electric we grandkids would hold hands and then the kid on the end would touch the fence sending a shock through all of us. When the fence turned into iron we would always swing on the gate that let the horses out of the huge pasture and into that one. The gate was bout ten feet long and we could cram about ten cousins on it. More often than not while we were swinging on it, the horses would get into the feeding pasture and Grampa would always get frustrated with us. The feeding pasture was next to the road and full of the greenest grass. Grampa would grow that lawn and only let the horses into it on certain days. The horses served as a lawn mower I guess.

Grampa and Gramma lived on a corner and neighbors lived in both directions; two house were on each street were his immediate neighbors. Typically the 10-acre blocks in Wellsville were separated in to 1¼ acre lots, that’s how the settlers set it up in 1856. However, Grampa owned most of the land in the middle, so his lot was bigger than most. All four of the neighbor’s back yards ended where one of Grampa's pastures started, basically, he had all that land in the middle of the block for his horses. Grampa's horse pastures were huge. The main one, the one the horses spent most of their time in, could have easily fit two family-size houses with decent yards. We would often see the horses running around the pasture, and even they seemed to get winded before they made it around the circumference. Often it would seem that they would race against each other. There was plenty of room for them to pick up and maintain speed. They were beautiful horses, and I'm sure the neighbors were appreciative of the view. There were neighbors on the other side of the block that also shared the view, but for some reason those houses were so far off and are now vague in my memory.

Sometimes I would see the horses tied up in the feeding pasture. Grampa would be feeding the horses or combing them and getting them ready for this grandboys to saddle. Four horses, each with their own personality. Riley was the lead horse. He was the most even-tempered and no one was ever afraid to ride Riley. We all fought over him. Rocky was the old, ugly brown and white one who didn't fit in with the other red haired horses. He was mellow, but stubborn and a pain to ride. My mom and I fell off of him when I was seven. We turned him toward home and he got excited and started to run, even though Mom told him not to; Mom had a hard time staying on him and off the back we slid. Then there was Rebel. He was a bucking horse. Grampa made me ride him once and I remember crying the whole time because I was afraid but Grampa said I had to learn to ride all of them. Robbie was the young Paint that Grampa bought for Gramma. She rarely rode Robbie, but it she was very possessive of him, and proud that he was the most beautiful of the bunch.

There was a ditch that went along the north side of the feeding pasture. It was only about a foot deep. Sometimes there was a steam going through it and other times it was dried up. When we were young we would find things to float down the stream and try to keep up with them all they way down the street. That ditch went on for what seemed like forever, under roads, under sidewalks. Along the part of the ditch that ran along Grampa’s house were six poplar trees that were about forty feet tall. Wes, my older brother, and his favorite cousin, Joey, had climbed to the top of all of them. One winter they somehow climbed to the top of the highest tree fully loaded with snowballs. I remember they got in trouble when someone knocked on our Grampa’s front door. The gentlemen told the adults that snowballs were coming from the top of Grampa's trees and hitting his car. Wes and Joey were in big trouble.

Grampa's yard was full of fun. There was the apple tree in the back yard that we were actually allowed to climb. After Heidi fell 35 feet from one of the poplars and landed in the ditch we weren't allowed to climb those anymore. The apple tree was still fair game as long as the apples weren't little and green and you didn't bother Gramma's bird feeder. It was a beautifully shaped tree, almost perfect. The kind kids draw in elementary school, nearly symmetrical and full of bright green leaves. In the winter, when it snowed, the beauty of their apple tree was one of Grampa and Gramma’s favorite thing to point out to anyone who would listen. It was especially beautiful with the mountains in the background. Next to the apple tree was the swing set where we made up countless games. It was one of those swing sets that were made from metal and painted red at the top. The swings hung from a sort of "T" made out of metal tubing at one end and at the other, were the slide was, was another "T" where the "Tweety bird" bar and metal rings hung. We would play Tweety bird and Sylvester for hours. One kid would sit and swing on the little bar and the other would swing on the regular swing playing Sylvester and try to touch Tweety with their feet, then you got to switch positions. Grampa had also welded metal bars going from the ends of the opposing T's. Wes and Joey thought it would be cool to swing high and jump off the swings to those bars and then drop back onto the swinging swing. It wasn't long until all of the cousins, young and old could do that. Grampa welded on those bars to make the swing set safer and sturdier. No one was ever seriously injured from those bars, but there definitely were injuries. Far more than had he not tried to make it safer. He did make it more fun, however.

The green painted tetherball-pole was cemented into the patch of concrete behind the swing set. There would be tournaments that went on for years around that pole, aunts, uncles, in laws, cousins. Everyone loved tetherball. Grampa actually put a tetherball pole in the backyard of every one of his married children's homes.

My heart would always get excited when my family would pull into the Grampa's drive way. Most exciting, would the Mazzarelli cousins be there? Aunt Terry's suburban in the driveway meant that California cousins were in fact in town and good times were sure to be had for all. What mischief could we find? Would we sneak down to the forbidden tree houses made out of rope down the street? Ride the bikes that Grampa kept stored under the garage stairs down to the “secret sidewalk” on the other side of town that we were sure only we knew about? Earn a quarter or two by washing the huge sliding glass doors that looked out over the back yard and into the pastures and then use that money for penny candies at Wellsville Market? It only took seconds to unbuckle my seatbelt, run up the curvy sidewalk that was lined with rose bushes planted in black dirt that always looked freshly watered and into the house, but those seconds seemed so wasteful when I could be doing any number of things with my cousins Heidi and Kristy.

Grampa’s house was a split-level. The front door was solid oak with a little window at eye level. On either side of the door was that orange textured glass from the seventies that you weren’t able to see through. Once in the house our biggest decision was always, “Do I go down stairs to the pool/ping pong table or upstairs first to sneak candy out of the glass dish on the China hutch?” The basement usually won out. There was so much to do and see down there. Two guest bedrooms were filled with old knick-knacks, like the possessed looking monkey that had symbols on his hands and sat on top of the dresser next to the clock that wasn’t digital but didn’t have hands either. The numbers slowly turned on some sort of a dial and it never kept time correctly. The orange backlight from that clock would glow on the monkey during the night giving a scare to whoever happened to be sleeping in that room. However, that room was the coveted room. It had the most comfortable bed. The parent’s always stayed in that room. We cousins ended up in the pool table room on the pullout sofas. This room had a stuffed moose head, a stuffed bear head with its stuffed paws holding a rifle, and about four stuffed dear heads hanging on the walls. These were the heads of the animals Grampa was most proud of shooting. Although those were horribly uncomfortable sofa beds, and the animal heads scared us in the dark, many memories were made in that room. Wes and Joey always were on one pullout and then Heidi, Kristy, and I were on the other. We were always tired in the morning because we stayed up until all hours talking, or playing cards under the pool table, or telling stories, or sneaking up to the kitchen and stealing cookies.

Upstairs the family always congregated in the living room. Aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, and sometimes friends always crowded the couches and covered the floor. There was coffee table that was always at one point the topic of conversation, all the parents wanted Grampa to get rid of it because it was such a hazard and quite a few grandchildren had gotten stitches or a butterfly bandage (Grampa’s favorite method of closing a gaping wound) somewhere on their head because of it. It was made of tree trunk and the edges of it were jagged. There was no safe part of that table. Grampa loved it for some reason that no one could ever figure out.

Then there was the garage. This garage what every garage aspired to be. One wall was lined with tools: gardening tools, welding tools, hammers, drills, axes, picks, air compressor attachments, etc. Grampa had painted the outline of each tool where it was supposed to hang on the wall. The purpose of this was two fold. One, it kept the tools organized and in good shape. Two, it was very obvious which tools were missing. He had a sign out sheet, where neighbors could “check out” tools, and this sheet, along with the painted outlines, ensured he never lost a tool.

Another wall had well over 50 pairs of deer antlers mounted and hung. This was the wall that had stairs going up into the kitchen as well. This was another one of Grampa’s unsafe loves of art. Grampa had shot all those deer and this was his bragging wall. One had to be very careful headed up those stairs into the kitchen. At the top of the stairs was also the hidden food storage room. This was sort of like an attic catwalk that lined the top of the garage. It was filled with Gramma’s canned goods, buckets of flour, all the booster seats and high chairs, and the majority of Grampa’s camping gear. Grampa had built this room himself and it always smelled so strongly of wood, for years that smell never lessened.

Hanging in the middle of the garage was a camper. This made it difficult to get into but not impossible. It was the kind that sits right on top of the bed of a pickup truck. It was off limits, but we had sneaked in there many times. It was always dark inside and the tiny cupboards were filled with miniature matches, plates, salt and peppershakers, etc. It also had fun games in the overhead compartments that we liked better than the games in the house. There was Rummy and decks of cards. We cousins would sneak in there and play, BS, Spit, and any other game we could think of.

Nothing ever really drastically changed at Grampa’s house. If a house and a piece of land can be immortal, Grampa’s house surely was. The fence went from electric to iron, and Grampa put a swing set up where there previously had been none, but that was it. The house stayed the same color, the furniture never switched places, except the trees getting bigger, the landscape never changed. At least this is how it remains in my mind. I don’t have any desire to see what it looks like now, and I don’t want the pictures and memories I have to be replaced. The memories made there seem fairy tale and dream like to me, and those mental pictures and memories are priceless.

What Got Me Thinking...

DAD
by Fressia Whitehead

My father and I were driving in San Clemente, California. I had just finished my third straight semester as a full-time student. I was also working full-time and since I had two weeks off from school I decided I needed a vacation from work as well. My father had flown in from Texas and I had driven over from Arizona. Most summers he met up with some old firefighting buddies at the beach. They would surf and boogie board like they were still sixteen instead of the retired firemen that they are now. As we were driving down Pacific Coast Highway my father pointed out a part of beach to me.

"Right there was where I got hit by that car. You can't tell now that they've moved the highway back, but the highway used to be a lot closer to that cliff. When that lady hit me I had to drag myself with my hands over to the cliff and yell for help." I asked him more about what happened. He was eighteen and had just graduated from high school. That day he had been surfing and was later sitting on the back end of his mother's car taking off his wetsuit. He had his left leg dangling down with his foot resting on the bumper and the other was pulled up near his chest as he was pulling the wetsuit off. There was a car parked right behind him and as he was taking off his wetsuit another car rear-ended the one behind my grandmother's. It pushed the parked car into my dad's leg, crushing it badly. He later found out that the woman driving the car had been high on drugs. He got a settlement that he later used to take my grandmother and himself to Germany. He had multiple surgeries to repair his leg.

My dad's life had always been somewhat of a mystery to me. I knew his mother was from Germany, that my father was a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, that he was born in Canada and that he didn't know who his father was, his mother had died when he was 19, and his brother had died when I was one or two. I had always been curious about my dad's life, but what little I did know of it, seemed horribly sad and bleak and kept me from digging deeper. My dad was a generally happy guy. Growing up it seemed like everyone I met would tell me how great of a guy my father was. To my young mind there was no way that the dad I knew could be a result of the few stories that I had heard. By contrast, I felt I knew everything about my mother's life. She came from a strong family, I knew both my grandparents on my mother's side, especially my grandfather, so I got a very good sense of how she grew up. I also knew all of my aunt's and uncles as well as 28 of my 29 cousins by name (the one I did not know died before I was born) and felt fairly close to all of them. Family get-togethers on the Gleason side were always filled with stories, some I'd heard before, and many I had not. There was a sense of continuity in my mother's life that made me feel connected to her history. My dad's history was just a story that maybe I had read in a book somewhere and attributed to him. So driving down PCH I decided to find out as much about my dad's life as I could in those few days. After all, we were right were he grew up and we were going to spend an evening visiting with his family in Pico Rivera, the town that was my parent's home, so I would have more sources than just him. His history was my history and since I didn't know much about his, I felt like I didn't know much about my own.

On the way to my dad's cousin's home we went by the house where he grew up. As we pulled into the cul-de-sac I asked him if he remembered his address. "Of course I do. 9043 Canford Street." He pointed two doors down where his friend John Becomo lived. This was a name that was very familiar to me. He and his father had come to visit my dad when I was younger and I remembered it. I remember my mom took pictures out in the front yard of all of them. I remembered how excited she was that dad's friends had come to visit. "This neighborhood raised me," my dad said as we stopped in the middle of the cul-de-sac. I didn't know if he was actually informing me of this or just reminiscing. It was such a quaint neighborhood I felt nostalgia for a place I had never lived but seemed to hold so much information on who my father is and was. Later my dad told me more about growing up. "My parents, to put it legal and without painful detail, were irreconcilable."

Summer vacations were often spent with his Aunt Neda in Los Angeles, or with his Uncle Fritz in Mexico. "My Uncle Fritz in Mexico has always been my favorite. I remember a fishing trip in the Gulf of Mexico or Baja California, exactly which place, I can’t say, but we went out to sea in a 20 foot open boat with a small motor. A bucket was fastened to a bench with a piece of rope. Five of us were in the boat, all adults except myself. I was about ten years old. Too late to change boats and well out to sea, we discovered the boat to have a hole in its bottom. Water flowed into the hull at a steady rate, and everyone now realized the purpose of the bucket. I spent the day bailing water as the others fished. Returning to shore Uncle Fritz forgot to point the boat’s bow into the breakers. He remembered when a wave smashed into the transom and washed a few of us into the surf. Often our trips together were mired with small misfortunes that added to the adventure but revealed a lack of planning that I think has pervaded my thinking and followed me throughout my life." I didn't really see that "lack of planning" in my father. But I had known for years that he felt that way about himself. I looked at my father and saw a man with a very well planned life. He had a beautiful wife, five beautiful, respectable children who were all one another's best friends, and had always had a steady job that left his family wanting nothing. I think his "lack of planning" feeling came from the "small misfortunes" in his life. But like he said, these, "added to the adventure."

As a child, my father’s cul-de-sac consisted of the children of parents that planted roots in one area and then lived the rest of their lives there, usually never moving. His friends were more like siblings than friends. How otherwise could 12 families live in homes within speaking distance, where the goings and comings rarely go unnoticed and the names of people are associated by the familiar sounds of their cars coming home from the store and work. Everyone in the “sac” knew where the fathers worked or where the kids went to school--some public, some religious, some private. They were all different colors, religions, nationalities, but those things always went unnoticed. When they played games, teams were picked by consensus until it worked out to everyone’s pleasure. When baseball was the game and Johnny or Nicki hit the ball and it struck the Nuner’s home (the Nuners were mean, snobby outcasts) or worse their car in the driveway, not one of the children had to yell, “Run!” The teams exploded like fireworks into backyards and behind trees waiting for the “coast to clear.” The bravest of the children, often the most reckless and prone for trouble, always emerged first.

When Ruben, one of the oldest kids, tried to steal a car and was shot by a cop in the process, the younger children were told the shooting was an accident and Ruben hadn’t done anything wrong. That had to be the story or something similar to it, so the older kids would remain high on the pedestal where the younger kids had placed them.

When a family did move away, it was usually because they did not seem to fit, and their departure must have occurred in the dark of night because it went unnoticed. Their replacements were quickly evaluated, if they had too many toys, then they probably had too much money to fit in.

Mike Schramm, the father of Susan, would drink with the rest of the parents and then fall into a deep sleep usually on an aluminum recliner, the type found around swimming pools. He was a fun and loud Irishman, but when he slept, it was deep and still, which made it easy for the dad’s to pick up the recliner with him in it and carry it to the center of the sac where he’d eventually wake up to all of the kids standing around in silence impatiently waiting for the gag to unfold so they could have their baseball diamond back. The circle of the sac belonged to the kids, and if you parked your car in it, or worse your drinking buddy, you were guilty of infringement (the kids probably called it something else with fewer syllables).

They all grew up, of course, went separate directions, but the memories still hold forever binding them as something more than friends and not less than siblings. Even Ruben managed to stay on the pedestal. Now, he owns a large trucking company in California and never had another spat with the law. But then he never did really; it was just an accident.

We pulled onto cousin Sharon's street and I recognized her house one the corner. I had only been there once before, and it was odd to remember it and feel a connection. There were five or six children playing out in the front yard and three men standing out front talking. My dad and I got out of the car and one of the men said, "Well if it isn't Pauly!" Everyone who knew my dad when he was younger called him "Pauly" and sometimes my mom still called him that. This was Sharon's husband, and he and my dad chatted for a while and then we went to the door where Sharon was pulling my eighty-three year old Great Aunt Erna and the woman my dad called "Aunt Nida" to the door in order to see us. "Oh Pauly! It's my little Pauly!" Aunt Erna yelled my dad's name in her thick German accent and covered my dad in hugs and kisses. Then my dad asked if she remembered me. "Oh, yes, beautiful Fressia. So beautiful." Aunt Erna began to hug and kiss me and hold my hand and wouldn't let go. She was so short, I was a good three inches taller than she was, and I realized that I ought to be grateful that I got as tall as I was.
They all began reminiscing and I started to talk to my Great Aunt Erna about my Grandmother. I had heard growing up, that my grandmother just adored my dad. He was the oldest of her three children and she seemed to favor him. My grandmother died when my dad was 20 years old. He was serving an LDS mission in Canada at the time she suffered a stroke. I remember hearing stories about how many people showed up for her funeral and how many people loved her.

"Igrid," (with Aunt Erna's thick German accent my grandmother's name seemed to have three syllables, ING-A-RID), " and me lived with our grandparents. They ran a hotel. Men would come over for dinner and they would say, 'Dance for us Ingrid!' And she would get up on the table and dance and make them laugh. She was so funny. And smart." Aunt Erna would emphatically tell me this over and over again throughout the evening. "Ingrid was the smart one. She always got good grades and the teachers would say, 'Erna why can't you be more like Ingrid?' But I could paint. She was smart and I could paint." Her stories all melded together she began to tell me how my grandmother had scared away people that had been picking on her. "Ingrid didn't take shit from nobody! No! She protected me all the time." I asked her about World War II and Hitler. "I loved Hitler. Hitler was good for Germany. He did some bad things, and I was sad to hear about it. But Hitler was a good man. I was a Hitler Youth. My grandmothers friend was Jewish and we hid him in our kitchen. The Nazi's came to the door and my grandmother said, 'We have no Jews here,' and they left."

I learned that my grandmother had left Germany for Canada when she was about 30 years old. She was the first one of her family to come to the American continent. This is where my dad comes into the story as well as where the story becomes vague. There isn't a lot known about my father's paternal ancestry. The dad my father knew was not his biological father, and his siblings were both from different fathers.

Home-life for my father wasn’t all that kids hope for. There was no structure; my grandmother wasn’t concerned with his grades, or even whether he attended school. He had no rules, chores or responsibilities. Though his mother loved him greatly, it was the neighborhood and aunts and uncles that brought him up.

I read something my dad wrote in a sort of personal history of his. "The weekends I stayed home were dark affairs that I block from my consciousness. I hated Sundays. Friends that served as security often left with their parents to visit family, leaving me without safe harbor, so I waited for Monday, taking long walks without purpose other than to put distance between me and what I feared. Actually it sounds worse than it was. Much of it was created by my own insecurities as a child, no one to blame, really. All of us go for long walks." I remember thinking, "Isn't that just like my dad? He wants no one to feel sorry for him or pity him." But the truth is that he had a really rough life. Driving through that cul-de-sac and listening to my father talk about his neighbors, and the people who "raised" him saddened me. I wished that I could have been there, hung out with my dad and his friends. I wished I were there to be his friend when all his friends were gone on Sundays.