Berlin

Today I'm doing a "how to use the library" session for a group of students who are learning about the history of Berlin.  Since it happens to be nearly exactly 30 years since I was in that great metropolis, I dug out some of the photographs from that trip to remind myself of my visit.  It was a long weekend visit during a longer exchange visit I made to Germany that summer.  My host family had aunt/cousins in West Berlin, so off we went.

I can only imagine how different it is today, and I look forward to seeing it again at some point.  These are a few of the shots that I thought would be most representative of showing what Berlin was like in 1983 from a young man's point of view.

Mostly I remember a vague feeling of being scared.  We drove to the city through East Germany, and the border crossings were tense- for me at least.

Yours truly, taking a photo of the Berlin Wall and Brandenburg Gate, from the western side.  The Reichstag is directly behind me.

And for a meta-moment, here is the photo I was taking when the one above was taken by my host mother.

Another memory of that day- and the importance of paying attention in history class- my host Aunt spent a good hour quizzing me on the history of the American Civil War.  Which I had to explain.  In German.

The Brandenburg Gate from the East Berlin side, Unter den Linden.  Me looking nervous.

At the bus stop, my host brother and me, yet again sporting a CWRU sweatshirt.

Campus Legacy

No, that's not Sam.  That's the humble author with his grandfather, William Searl Hoffman, in 1969.

A week or so ago, I was looking through a collection of books I have at home.  I call this particular section of the library the Hoffman Memorial Collection- books that belonged to my mother and her parents and are inscribed with their names.  Most of Mom's are from her college years.  There are several that belonged to my grandfather, and one- his copy of Don Quixote- has in pencil, below his name, "Carnegie Technical Inst".  I had a vague memory that he'd gone there for schooling.  Part of what now is Carnegie Mellon University, it was a trade school and was where he went after graduating from West Tech High School in Cleveland to learn to be a printer.

I did some Googling to see if I could find anything about his time at Carnegie Tech.  Nothing came up, but I *did* find his name in a document housed at CWRU's own digital repository, Digital Case.  Not once but three times does his name appear in commencement bulletins for Western Reserve University: in 1932 when he was awarded a certificate for teaching industrial arts, in 1936 when he earned a B.S. in education and again in 1942 when he earned a M.A. in Education- all of these while he was employed as a teacher in the Cleveland Public School system as an instructor of printing.  And all of them occurred after he became a family man.

Why his education at WRU wasn't celebrated family lore is beyond me.  My sister Jane has a memory of Grandpa's graduate degree, but nothing beyond the fact of it.

I'd always dated my family's connection with CWRU (and all of its past incarnations) with my mother's graduate education in Library Science in 1957-58.  Dad came to campus almost exactly a decade later and completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics in 1970.  A decade and a half after that, I arrived as an undergraduate on campus earning my B.A. in English in 1988 and M.A. in English in 1993.  But it turns out our connection goes back a further 25 years with my grandfather's education.  So not a bad set of sheepskins for one family from one university.

I just wish Grandpa had stayed with us longer:  he died at the age of 62, in 1971.

Weekend update

It has been a busy weekend of fun and chores. Photographic evidence:

We've got other plans for Memorial Day weekend, so geranium planting came early. I wrote about why we plant geraniums last year.

Here we are weeding. It was a very wet spring here (to say the least) so the daffodils did very well. Usually they are dried out by now.

Sam wasn't sure how to respond to the grass on his feet. He'd hold them up to keep them from being tickled. He didn't mind crawling in it though.

At Alger, the lad got his first taste of dirt. It may look like chocolate, but it is definitely not chocolate.

It was hot work, so we soothed our bellies and memories with a trip to Malley's.

This is not dirt, it is chocolate.

Sunday morning, video chat to France wasn't working, but Sam was happy to see the sun after morning rain showers.

Rainy morning meant time for me in the shop. This is my current project, a glass-door bookcase in cherry. The top-to-sides dovetails are done!

Christmas, part deux

Christmas number two for the household began on Monday morning. It was supposed to include the Grandma Pam, Grandpa Doug and Aunt Dorothy who were to arrive from Maine on Sunday night, but Mother Nature had other plans. After a nightmare of flight logistics (first flight out is not until FRIDAY?) they've found other means of travel and should arrive today. Just means there will be not one, not two, but THREE Christmases for us. No problem!

There were cookies as far as the eyes could see.

Sam FINALLY got to open some presents. He loved it so much he wanted to eat the wrapping paper.

Maggie loves being fashionable. Thank you to Aunt Jane and cousin Gabi.

It was all so much fun that Sammy was bathing in it!

Tuesday we had a day out. "Let's go bowling" for us means more than bowling. It is in fact code for "let's eat Indian food at Udupi, buy some groceries at the Indian grocery store, and then bowl." Sometimes we fit even more into this outing. We bowled at Bradnan's Recreation, a real throwback of a place (in the basement of a strip mall in Middleburg Heights) and one that is full of memories for me. This is where we usually bowled when I was a kid.

The rolling was good. Anna got a strike! YUSSSSS!

Maggie showed rare form while Sam looked on. He did NOT want to roll that pink ball.

Here are the kids showing off their Aunt Jane hats.

Stay tuned for Xmasx3!

Remembrance

This photograph is of an uncle I never knew.

Arthur Ohman, my maternal grandmother's big brother, grew up the older son in a large family of Swedish immigrants in the cold northern reaches of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, along the shore of Lake Superior. He came in the middle of a pack of 8 siblings. Born in 1894, ten years before my grandmother, he was of age to register for service when the United States entered World War I in 1917. Though he did not die in the war, I thought today, the eleventh day of the eleventh month, would be a fitting time to honor him with a few remembrances of who he was.

Despite his service away from his small village home of Skanee, he returned there and remained there his whole life, and seemed satisfied to do so. He never spoke much about his service during the war- at least not to his young nieces. Perhaps not surprising, and also perhaps typical of his generation. But the result is, I don't know how he served. He could have been driving an ambulance in France or filing papers in Chicago. He could have been like Hemingway's Nick Adams, returning to Michigan to find something within himself.

He was a smart man, and good with figures. He became the manager of a bank in the nearby town of L'Anse. Somehow he managed to commute the 15 miles between home and L'Anse, even through the deep snows of winter.

He liked quiet pursuits. He was a fly fisherman, and owned a small cabin on the banks of the Huron River near his home. He preferred the quiet contemplation of trout fishing to his brother Walter's hunting. He also ran a sugar camp in the late winter. Drawing sap from the maple trees, he spent his spare time in February and March making syrup which he would share with friends and neighbors. This photo shows him fishing on the East Branch of the Huron River near his camp.

Uncle Art, as my mother and her cousins knew him, also enjoyed singing, and particularly liked humorous songs, many of them in Swedish, which he would sing to amuse the youngsters at holiday gatherings. He also recited poetry, and my mother's earliest memories of Robert Service's "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" were from her uncle.

We still have Harry & David boxes that Uncle Art sent for Christmas to my parents when they were first married. He was thoughtful like that, and had a quiet sense of humor.

This final photo was taken within a year of his death in 1960. He died while on a fishing trip in Canada, drowned in a canoeing accident which I think was brought on by a heart attack or aneurysm. My grandmother kept very few paper documents in her life, but among her collection is a small bundle of letters- condolences sent to her after her brother died, from people who knew Arthur Ohman.

Gast in Bayern

Thirty years ago this fall, in the autumn of 1980, my family had an adventure that made a lasting impact on all of us. I thought I'd share a little of the story of our months in Bavaria. And what would a blog post be without a few pictures?

My dad met a fellow scientist at a conference he attended in Ames, Iowa during the 1979-1980 school year. The two of them had research interests in common, Dad had an upcoming sabbatical, and Herr Professor Busse, being a welcoming and generous man, suggested Dad come to the Hochschule der Bundeswehr in Munich during his leave. My dad was always up for an adventure (a few years earlier, he had consulted with a new university in Algiers and helped them set up their engineering program.) In short order the arrangements were made. Mom had just begun a new job and had to arrange an extended absence.

The three of us kids had mixed reactions to the announcement. I don't remember what I thought about it. Jane was supposed to start college that fall, so she must have been nervous. Ellen, in her senior year of high school, did NOT want to go. She figured it all out- she would stay in Cleveland and live with Grandma. Didn't happen. All of us went.

Dad left before we did and arranged for a rented flat in Ottobrunn, a neighborhood just south and west of Munich, near the university where he would be working. The government-run university loaned us dormitory furniture. It was rustic but comfortable. Ellen and I were enrolled in the Munich International School, which is even further south near the town of Starnberg. Jane went off to Murnau, just about as far south in Germany as you can get, where she spent two months studying German at the Goethe Institut.

We lived there from August through New Years. The adventure changed us as a family and individually. It's hard to believe it was 30 years ago!

And now, pictures!

The signature spires of Munich's Frauenkirche

Our new home town.

Inside our Spartan apartment. I brought a cassette tape deck and Army surplus headphones.

Mom in her kitchen.

The driveway of MIS.

The upper school, then housed in converted stable buildings of Schloss Buchhof. The campus is a little fancier now!



In a Regensburg alleyway, with Herr Busse.

Autumn in Munich means Octoberfest! Here is our favorite tent.

They make pretzels big.

They make beer glasses even bigger. Prost!



We took many weekend trips. Here is a view from the wine growing hills near Heilbronn.

We took an extended trip into Italy- Venice and Florence.



In Salzburg, at the house in which Mozart was born.

Charlie Brown Christmas tree in our apartment.

Redux, CLE blast from the past

In an earlier post, I shared two panoramic pictures from the 1930s featuring my grandparents. In digging through the family vaults, I found one more that I thought I would share.

This is another of the faculty of the Edison School, a school in the Cleveland Public School District where my grandfather Hoffman taught printing. This one is taken three years after the one featured in my earlier post. In addition to my grandfather, some of the faculty are recognizable in both photos, particularly the glowering face in the front row of the right hand grouping here. Surely he was in charge of discipline at this school for "incorrigible boys".

After scanning this photo, I was curious why there were two distinct groupings of the teachers. Closer inspection revealed a "seam" in the middle of the image, where two photos had been joined. My best guess is that the photo was taken during the school day, and the staff didn't want to leave the incorrigible boys on their own while the photo was being taken, so it was done in two sittings.

Here's a crop of Grandpa Hoffman, who stands near the center in the back row. He looks more like a father now than he did in the photo from 1932, now that he has a baby daughter waiting at home for him.

Like the other two originals, this one will go to the Cleveland Memory Project.

Paper

Back in the spring of this year my sisters and I were contacted by the U.S. Department of Labor, regarding our father's employment with Harshaw Chemical back in the 1960s. The government is owning up to radiation exposure for employees of defense and energy contractor companies, including Harshaw, which provided uranium for the government from the 1940s through 1959. Dad worked there in the mid-60s, just after his career in the military, and before returning to graduate school to earn his PhD. He died three and a half years ago, six years after being diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood-borne cancer that attacks bone.

The Department of Labor program, the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, tracks down employees of these companies, performs an audit of their employment, and if probability of cause of illness is found to be more than 50% likely to have been due to their work, compensation is paid in a lump sum.

We've long been curious as to how Dad might have gotten his cancer. It does not appear to have been genetic. Could it have been caused by his two years working at Harshaw? It would not be such a surprise: ten years ago, the site of the Harshaw company was designated a "superfund" cleanup site under the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. So we filed our claim through the EEOICP.

Part of their requirements included providing medical evidence of Dad's diagnosis of cancer. After jumping through a bewildering number of hoops put up by the legal department of the Cleveland Clinic, I was able to obtain my father's medical records. Since I wasn't exactly sure what I would need, I asked for nearly all of the records kept on him for the period from his diagnosis through his death.

The box that arrived with these records contained over 1,300 pages: physician notes, lab reports, radiology reports, discharge summaries. I've dealt with a lot of this kind of paperwork surrounding my parents lives and deaths. I was the executor of their estate and am their trustee. I thought I'd become immune to the emotion behind legal and medical paperwork like this, but somehow, looking through these reports hit me pretty hard. There were all of the faces of the talented physicians, physicians assistants, nurses and technicians who helped Dad over those six years. And here was what they had said about him, or more succinctly, what they said about his illness and treatment. Most of it is strictly scientific, something my dad always appreciated. But peppered throughout the papers, particularly the physicians reports, are indications of who my dad was.

"Spent 45-60 minutes with patient, who had researched the treatment."

"Patient is a pleasant 65 year old former professor."

"Discussed treatment options with patient, his wife and son."

Some of the comments, particularly towards the end of his life, were more disheartening.

Our claim with the EEOICP is pending, and it's not clear how likely our case will be awarded compensation. But one of the things Dad was crazy about was following up on programs like this, so we'll continue to go through the steps. Dad would approve.

Cleveland Blast from the Past

In the process of streamlining our personal belongings (also known as getting rid of stuff) I've come across two panoramic photos that have come down through the family. Both show a bit of Cleveland history as well as family history.

The first is of the Union Printers International Golf Association's summer outing in Cleveland, in August of 1935. The tournament was held at Ridgewood Golf Club in Parma. In the photograph at the front right are my paternal grandparents, Clarence and Blanche Claspy.

Here is a zoomed crop of Blanche and Shorty- she is standing behind him with a brimmed white hat. I'm totally digging Shorty's bow tie and navy blazer with white bucks. I'm pretty sure he's got seersucker trousers on as well. Nice. I wonder who was baby sitting their 9 month old son that day?

And here is a scan of the Plain Dealer, announcing the winner of the tournament. The association also held a baseball tournament at the same time.

The other photograph is of the faculty at the Thomas A. Edison School in Cleveland. As this article relates, the Edison school was for "incorrigible children" and offered them vocational training in a strongly structured atmosphere. My maternal grandfather is pictured here. William S. Hoffman was a printer (like Grandpa Claspy!) but also an educator. He taught printing in the Cleveland Public School system for many years, at Edison, West Tech and other schools.

Here is the crop and zoom of Grandpa Hoffman. This is is about 2 and a half years before my mother was born. He was 23 years old when this photo was taken and looks quite natty in his three piece suit and pomaded hair.

I plan on donating the original photographs to the Cleveland Memory Project.

Planting Geraniums

"Why do we plant red geraniums at the cemetery every year?"

For the past 10 years or so my kids have accompanied me to the Alger Cemetery on Cleveland's west side to plant geraniums at the Hoffman family plot. Before that, my mother and/or I would accompany my grandmother to do the same. We pull any weeds that need pulling (though lately they've been spraying a wide swath around each stone with extra strength weed killer so they are ringed with brown earth) then dig spots for each potted flower. The stones have shifted over the years. This year, my great-grandmother Vinnie Hoffman's stone was a full 90 degrees rotated, but was free enough that I was able to heave it back into position. We dug our holes and planted the flowers, then made the slow walk across the grass to the water spigot to fill our watering can. Some of the graves are familiar from our annual visits- the lamb marker for a child, now so worn the sandstone is hard to distinguish, the writing illegible, the Civil War veteran. With our flowers soaked in, I tell a story about Grandma and try to remember something about Grandpa (who died when I was 5), and explain the Mason's symbol on Great-Grandpa's stone.

We drove past the house on Valley View on our way out. It's really nice to see it- someone clearly loves living there. The front porch has hanging baskets of flowers, and a porch swing. I tell them about the porch glider that Grandpa moved from the basement to the porch each spring, and back again in the fall. He would also plant red geraniums in front of the garage, and along the side of the driveway each year. The picture above is Grandma, probably in the late 1950s, standing alongside the flowers she loved so well. The back yard was reserved for his prized roses. After he died, the roses died too (Grandma wasn't a gardener!) but she stuck with the geraniums.

Done with Alger, we drove south to Woodvale Cemetery, where my parents are buried. For the last three years, they've gotten geraniums too. The stalks from the spring daffodils were still there, though pretty brown. We trimmed things up, planted the geraniums and watered them well.

I guess we plant them every year because we've planted them every year before now. Routines, like celebrating Memorial Day or making sure we have red geraniums to plant every May, gives us a marker to remember those things too important to forget.

Family Quilts

Both of my grandmothers were quilters. For years- easily twenty years- they met every Tuesday with a group of ladies from their church (Christ United Methodist on Lorain Road at West 138th Street) to work on a quilt. Usually they were projects for other church members. The quilters charged very little for the work and all of the proceeds, of course, went right back into the collection plate. The Grandmas were funny about that Tuesday group- none of the other women worked fast enough, or at a high enough standard for either of them. "All they want to do is talk!" they'd say.

Naturally, the Grandmas quilted on their own time as well. Grandma Hoffman stitched lovely, ornate applique floral patterns. Grandma Claspy, always much more frugal, used up scraps from her "regular" sewing projects. But her eye for colors and patterns was uncanny, and some of these patch quilts are true delights. My sisters and I each have several of these, plus the "big kid" quilts Grandma Claspy made for our children, timed to arrive when they moved from crib to bed.

The Grandmas are gone now. Grandma Hoffman died in 1997, 94 years old. Grandma Claspy wasn't going to get the short end of *any* stick, and as such lived 102 years, when she died in the fall of 2006.

So where will the quilts come from now? The answer: Aunt Jane. Here's Sam on the quilt she made for him.

Old Red

Yesterday I said goodbye to an old friend. Old Red saw me through nearly fifteen winters of dark and cold times. Early mornings of wet snow, nights of blistering cold winds and deep drifts, days when I asked for his help not once but two or three times between sun up and sun down- in all of these cases Old Red would cheerily rise to the occasion and help me with my work.

Sure, there were times when Red would complain. The 10 degree mornings when I'd have to open up his bonnet and replace shear pins. Or the major surgery of replacing drive belts. But in each case, he responded with the ability to roar through knee-deep snow, leaving neatly carved paths in his wake.

And it wasn't just my own paths and driveways that Red helped with. He did equal work on the aprons, sidewalks, and driveways of neighbors in three different neighborhoods, earning the unsung praise of schoolchildren and postal carriers alike.

Yesterday, Old Red moved on to his next call of duty, the driveway and sidewalks of my friend Roger. I'm sure Red will prove equally skillful, industrious, and tireless in his new home.

Red, a tip of my toque to you!

Mending Wall

Kim and I are busy preparing the house for the imminent arrival of baby Gustave Flaubert Claspy and so this past weekend I was boxing up some books to store temporarily while we are shuffling the rooms in the house. One book I lingered over is an anthology of English and American literature that was given to my mother by the English department of her high school, John Marshall High here in Cleveland, for being their outstanding student. Tucked inside this volume were two pieces of paper, one a church bulletin from 1976 from my older sister Jane's confirmation service. The other was a small piece of folded note paper, punctuated by quite a few thumb-tack holes, with the first line of "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost, and what is surely the poet's signature in slightly faded blue fountain pen ink.

Frost told the audience that if they could write down from memory a line from one of his poems, he would autograph the paper for them. My mother had a wealth of poetry memorized, so this was surely no problem for her, and she went away with the poet's name inscribed below her handwriting, and clearly had affixed this piece of paper to many cork boards during her life.

I contacted Denise Monbarren, head of Special Collections at the College of Wooster's beautiful Andrews Library and asked if she could confirm the poet's reading at the college, and not only did she confirm that he spoke there in November of 1955 (my mother's junior year at Wooster), but also sent me a copy of the Wooster Alumni Bulletin of December 1955 with a report of the event. Many thanks to Denise!