If These Wall Could Talk

An older couple has a fellowship dinner at their house. They have been married for over 50 years. She looks feeble and he looks tired and weathered. You have enjoyed getting to know them. They are really sweet people, but you don’t really give them credit for having done a lot in their lives because you don’t know much about them outside of what you see now.

You excuse yourself from the table and walk down the hall toward the guest bathroom. (The hallway is adorned with pictures of their children and grandchildren.) Then you notice an older picture, you know, where the color is off because it is so aged. It is a young soldier in uniform from WWll. He is a very handsome young man. Anyone would have taken a second look at that guy if they had passed him, especially handsome in a uniform! Next to his picture is a young woman. You can tell the era it was taken in because they wore their hair in those waves. (dark lipstick and rouge; she’s a beauty). She looks about 22 years old and is full of life and dreams for the two of them. They married quickly before he had to leave for his next post.

He came home from the war and took a job to support his family

She wrote him letters every day and sent him thoughts from home. He did his best to do his duty to his country and to come home safely to her. Their love was fraught with the uncertainties of a world at war.

As a new wife, she may have had a baby that he had not yet seen. Raising children without a dad at home is rough, just like it is for single moms now. He saw things that he never wanted her to know about and he took risks that would have kept her up at night if he had told her. He saw parts of the world that he would never have seen had it not been for the time in service. He had stories to tell his children about what life was like in Germany or Japan. Trinkets and souvenirs line his dresser drawer.

He came home from the war and took a job to support his family. He went to work every day to fulfill his duty to them. Mom was able to stay at home even when money was tight. It was very important for them to have Mom home with the kids. Kids grew up in neighborhoods with other families around them. Parents were just parents. We never thought of Mom and Dad as being madly in love or as being such a cute couple. The kids say, “Ewe” when they see Mom and Dad kissing. They didn’t see their parents dressing up and going to parties or dancing into the night as that was all before their time. In fact, they may have considered their parents to be old fuddy-duddies with sensible shoes and regular bedtimes. How could their parents ever have led exciting lives? No, not them. Just the run of the mill, middle-aged parents in the neighborhood.

One such example was the couple that lived next door to me. My parents bought a newly built suburban tract home in 1953. (I was only a year old and too young to have a clue about what other grownups surrounded our home.) I grew up having a vague awareness of them.

They had an older daughter the same age as my big brother. She was too old for us to be friends. We were acquaintances and said hello to each other, as it was with the rest of the family. I remember when her mom would make her clean her bedroom which meant cleaning out the closet also. I could hear the mother-daughter fights which meant soon there would be the annual throwing out (giving away) of her neat junk. From an old swimsuit to her brownie camera, and her old pom-poms - it was a delightful time for me. That was about the most time she and I spent together.

I don’t remember the Thrapps being in my house

Their son, Ricky, was about 4 to 6 years older than I was. I remember him coming home from school and up the sidewalk. We always said a polite hello, but I don’t think we ever had a meaningful conversation. He was younger than Linda and my brother, so he didn’t hang with their crowd and he was too old for any of my friends. He was a nice-looking boy with good grades. I believe he might have been in the school band. He was quiet and somewhat nerdy. I really don’t know because I wasn’t paying attention to him. When I was in 3rd grade, why didn’t I adore him? I don’t know, just no interest whatsoever. Makes me think he was more than 4 years older as I never considered him for the Girls League Formal and he never considered me for the Senior Prom. Just polite people in the passing. It turns out that in my latter years, I found out that he had become an Air Force Colonel. Wow! Why did I pass up on him? When you are kids, you never know who you will become. You never know who will end up living next door to another family like the adult Ricky without them having an inkling of his responsibilities and the success he has become. He will eventually become just another parent, like me. Just regular parents in a regular neighborhood. Oh, how boring the next generation of children must think we are. They have NO idea!

I knew Ricky’s parents because they often spoke to my parents. They were both from the Chicago area as were many of the neighbors in that generation. The adults in Southern California had a lot in common. Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York, all from cold weather states coming out to get away from the cold and slushy snow. They raised my generation who never got to see the snow. So many of us moved to Idaho and Flagstaff when we grew up. Of course, the snow is beautiful in Flagstaff. Maybe not so much on the streets of Chicago. The population of Flagstaff is 95% in my age range and coming from Southern California - now living in the snow on purpose. So here I am in North Dakota. Grew up with Santa wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses. Our parents were thrilled, but my age group wanted to have that Christmas snow experience.

I don’t remember the Thrapps being in my house, but there were those conversations in the driveways. They were the go-to neighbor when we needed to borrow a cup of sugar or some ketchup. She was the choir director at the uptown Methodist church. She invited me to sing in the children’s choir and took me with her to the rehearsals. After all, it was uptown! I still remember the inside of their church; awesome and holy-looking. We would go as a family to their Christmas Eve Candlelight Services. O Holy Night took on new meaning for me.

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There was a sense of thoughtful quietness when I went into the Thrapp’s home

Margaret Thrapp became my piano teacher when I was about 10 years old. She was very musically talented. I was quite fortunate to have her as my teacher. At that point in my life, I was able to go into their house and see more than just their kitchen or Linda’s room. Every time I had ever knocked at their front door, I noticed a cuckoo clock hung in the hallway. I thought every real home should have a cuckoo clock. I finally got my first one when I was in my thirties. For some reason, I couldn’t get it to keep working, but their clock worked every day for most of my years as their neighbor. Amazing.

I began coming into their home every week for lessons. They added to their house and put in a large library with a black baby grand piano. It had a bust of Nefertiti on it. The full length of the room was filled to the ceiling with important books. My family had National Geographic as did many families back then. Our TV was usually playing Bozo or Felix the Cat. There was a sense of thoughtful quietness when I went into the Thrapp’s home. On the other side of the room, it was all glass sliding doors facing a sanctuary of green in their backyard. Nobody running around like wild Indians out there. 

In the very back was a tiny room that Mr. Thrapp used as an office. I can still remember hearing the keys on his typewriter. He was the religious editor for the L.A. Times. It was an important job, but I still just thought of him as another dad in the neighborhood. The home addition was built very close to the wall that separated our two yards. Besides that, their cat would sit at the very top in a slender window above the bookcase and look down into our yard. My dog would sit at the fence looking up at their cat and expressing his ongoing obsession with it in a very loud way.

I am sure Mr. Thrapp just loved that! It was Southern California, so we played outside all year round. Chasing our dog and playing army or cowboys and Indians. I would bet that we drove that man crazy. As an adult and a homeowner, I now look back and feel somewhat ashamed about how little I cared for what the neighbors thought. Dear Lord, I used to ride my bicycle straight across his yard instead of going directly out of my driveway. It was a shortcut. Once, my girlfriend and I tore off every petal on his rose bushes to try to make our own perfume. I have asked God’s forgiveness for all my thoughtlessness. If Mr. Thrapp knew it was us, he never let on.

He had written a book, “Al Sieber: Chief of Scouts”

Dan Thrapp had a dog named Pepi. He and Pepi went for a walk every afternoon. In my younger years, I watched Pepi running ahead of Dan. As I grew older, I watched Pepi walk alongside him. As a teenager, I watched Dan walking and Pepi lagging behind him. This is the longest I ever lived at one address, and watching Dan and Pepi take their walks is probably my bellwether of stability. That is about all I knew about Mr. Thrapp. Mrs. Thrapp died of cancer while I was still young. Someone sent him a box of See’s Candy and I believe a lily plant each year. He would bring it over to my mom, knowing that we would enjoy them. He stayed at that house until I was about 18.

He had written a book, “Al Sieber: Chief of Scouts” during my junior high years. It looked like one of those important books he would have had in his library. You know, hardcover and all. I had heard a story that he had ridden over the Andes Mountains by mule. He and a buddy were in Argentina and had to get back to the military post for the war. It was their only choice at the time. I had no idea of the adventures this man had.

The New York Times May 4, 1994:

Dan L. Thrapp, 80, Chronicler of the Old West (1913-1994)

“A native of West Chicago, Mr. Thrapp began his travels as a paleontologist for the New York Museum of Natural History in the 1930's. At one point the museum ordered an aerial search for Mr. Thrapp when it feared he had been lost in a solo exploration of cliff-dweller ruins in an unmapped canyon region of southern Utah.

"In World War II, he served with the Army in Burma and China, became a captain, and won four battle stars. After the war, he was a foreign correspondent for United Press in England, Greece, Italy, and Africa. He joined The Los Angeles Times as religion editor in 1951 and retired from that position in 1975. Mr. Thrapp was an authority on the Apache wars in Arizona and New Mexico in the second half of the 19th century and wrote six books on the subject. They included "Al Sieber, Chief of Scouts" in 1964 and "The Conquest of Apacheria" in 1967.

"He also wrote a four-volume "Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography," published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1991.”

The Dan L. Thrapp Collection is at the Haley Memorial Library and Research Center for “serious research and study.” My gosh, I had no idea who I had been living next to for all those years.

My gosh! Who is this man in my life that I would consider him just ordinary?

The Los Angeles Times May 1, 1994:

“For two decades he covered religion for this newspaper; his Sermon of the Week became one of its more popular features. From the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, he sat in pews in Southern California cathedrals, synagogues, and storefront churches, working without notes to report the messages of Buddhist and Catholic priests, Presbyterian pastors, rabbis, and Muslim ministers.”

“His daughter said his most scholarly work, and the one for which he will best be remembered, was his four-volume Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography, in which he researched the lives of more than 5,000 men and women who had an impact on the settling of the West.” 

My gosh! Who is this man in my life that I would consider him just ordinary? If I had ever known that I would have an interest in writing, I would have been interested in him for his grammatical knowledge alone!

Many of those fuddy-duddy parents who work every day to maintain a safe home and never seem interested in going places (are probably tired. Ha!) Seriously, we don’t have any idea of the travel and struggles they have been through. Just sitting and watching the grass grow can be a wonderful way to live if you have already been on the road a lot. My husband and I have both been vagabonds living all over the country. When we finally settled into home ownership, he asked me if I felt bad that we didn’t take vacations. Oh, no. Just being at home IS the vacation!

So, when you are in that older couple's home and you see those pictures in their hallway, don’t think of them as old and feeble. You don’t know how amazing they are. You never know what their history is. Vets from WWll were heroic men and women with strength and vitality – even if you have not personally seen it. God bless them all!

This article is my tribute to a man I knew but didn’t know. It is too late for me to share my respect and to honor him personally. How I wish I had appreciated him during his lifetime.

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