Reverence For the Past, or The Wonders of an Attic

Sometimes it’s a struggle to understand why everyone doesn’t have a reverence for the past. How could it be? Things weren’t always as easy as they are now, at least that’s the way I look at it. Knowing what life was like way back when helps us understand our own times better.

My family was a study in contrasts in the same small town in the Heartland. One side had come from Tennessee coal mines and had struggled during the depression of the 1930s. From 1932 until the end of their lives they were staunch Democrats, but couldn’t really tell anyone why, except to say that Hoover had made their little girls starve. They worshipped FDR. They looked at the world cynically and with much pessimism. After war work brought them out of their depression gloom and into the prosperity of the 1950s, they remained self-centered, with a bitter edge. They didn’t like to talk about the tough times they had survived, and they didn’t want to recall it. There was nothing old in their house. Every couple of years there was new furniture and a new decorating scheme. The latest appliances always gleamed white in the kitchen and in the basement laundry area. There were new cars on a regular basis. They enjoyed an active social life at the lodge and the lodge auxiliary. They dressed well. They traveled occasionally and always had season tickets to the local high school basketball games. I was one of their twelve grandkids, but never felt welcome there.

The other side had come from tiny farms in Kentucky and had found a way to weather the depression of the 1930s with hard work and optimism. From the time of the Civil War to the end of their lives members of their side of the family were firm Republicans. They didn’t trust Democrats and they certainly didn’t like the arrogant FDR, nor did they like all the New Deal spending and make-work programs. In the 1930s and afterward they provided for themselves with what we might today call homesteading. On six acres they had chickens, rabbits, and a milk cow. They lived in a house my grandfather built from materials salvaged from an old school building. They gardened and farmed and lived frugally. He worked as a foreman in an auto plant. They often talked of their lives in the 1930s, remembering it fondly. There were very few new things in their home. They still had the furniture they had gradually acquired during the 1920s. There were pink and green depression glass dishes and old pattern plates and serving bowls. Later on there was a modest set of proper china, but it was only for special occasions. There was a Hoosier cabinet in the pantry and a coal furnace in the basement. Until the 1950s my grandmother cooked on a wood cooking range. Until she died in the 1960s she still used the wringer washer. They had little or no social life, preferring to stay home or visit with family. I was one of their three grandkids, and it was there I learned the meaning of unconditional love. I never wanted to visit anywhere else. But there was something else they had, and that was an attic. In this remarkable space I began to acquire my reverence for the past.

No one told me the attic was special, and no one told me to spend time there. It was unheated, so it was bitter cold in the winter time, and in the summers it was quite hot. The attic was just a feature of their house. It was part of their lives and it spoke volumes about them. No one told me to notice it. It was just there.

Stairs went up from the dining room toward the west side of the house to a landing. From there one could turn left up one step to a small storage space on the left or turn right up one step to the main attic space that ran the length of the house to the east. There was a window at the top of the steps and a window on the east end opposite.

There wasn’t much in the space to the left, but there was a pane of glass that leaned against that west wall. The first time I remember going up, my brother and I noticed that there was something behind it. When he tipped the glass away from the wall, the bat that was clinging to it spread its wings but did not fly away. He put the glass back and we let well enough alone after that.

The other side was the real attic. All kinds of curious objects stood against the north wall, in boxes, or on tables. More lined the south wall on the other side. There was a doorway into a small room on the east end. A single bulb offered a little light if one must go up after dark.

One of the first things on the north wall after attaining the top of the steps was a rattan baby stroller. It had a pivoting rattan cover that could be moved back and forth depending on the sun’s angle, along with large wire wheels with thin solid rubber tires. A curved handle made for convenient pushing along urban sidewalks. But there were no sidewalks outside this house. After a visit or two I began to make some connections. I asked about the baby stroller. Had it been my dad’s? That struck me as funny. Yes, I was told, it had been. The baby had used it, too. Baby? You mean my dad when he was a baby? Yes, but Hazel had used it too. There’s a picture somewhere. That seemed odd. I didn’t recall anyone speaking of this baby before. If my dad had a sister I had never seen her. Wouldn’t she be my aunt? All the aunts in the family were my mother’s sisters. I had met all of them. But I had never heard mention of this baby before. I kept quiet about it, and eventually learned more. There had, indeed, been a baby sister to my dad. Hazel May had died when she was just a week past her first birthday, and there were no more children after that. My grandparents never got over this loss, and they didn’t speak of it. My dad had grown up an only child, precious to my grandparents beyond comprehension, the center of their world. It took longer still to unravel it, but eventually I began to understand the impact on their lives when the war came along and this boy of theirs had been drafted and sent to Europe for the duration. He was all they had and all they cared about, and they did not know whether he would come back home to them. My dad and his sister had both been in that stroller as babies. Here was the very same stroller in front of me. I could touch the handle and see where they had slept. Later on I saw the photo of my dad touching the side and Hazel May sitting inside, looking sleepy and content. Thinking of it now sends a shiver down my back.

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There were many other things up there, including stacks of old magazines and newspapers. We boys found something really interesting in one of the stacks. There was a series of pullout newspaper sections like the rotogravure, probably from the Chicago Herald-American, from 1926. They were horrible photos, black and white, of course, of scenes from the Great War, of a place called Verdun. I had never heard of it, but the photos were ghastly. There was pockmarked landscape that looked like the moon, torn by shellfire. There was a French fort, barely recognizable from all the shelling. Other pictures showed French soldiers in their pale uniforms attacking or firing 75mm guns. It got worse. There were photos of piles of bones and skulls, many feet tall, extending for what seemed like hundreds of yards in the distance, in what they called an ossuary. Cemeteries with what looked like thousands of headstones stood outside a massive building somewhere in France. I saw devastated landscape with trees and foliage all blasted away, stretching to the horizon. The photo sections were from the 10th anniversary of the battle of Verdun in 1916. The grandparents had saved them because my grandfather had gone over there during the war.

My brothers must have told me that we now called it the First World War, because there had been another one later. Grandpa was there. Sure enough, there was a brass plaque for his service, with General Foch’s name and victory message on it, inscribed A Tribute to Those Who Served. It had the American, French, and British flags on it. I was stunned. And here was his helmet and mess kit!

It was my first awareness of this terrible war. My grandfather had seen service there as a doughboy with the American army in France in three grim campaigns in 1918, just forty or so years before. He didn’t talk much about that, either.

There was much more in the attic. There were copies of Workbasket magazine my grandmother saved, and fabric for quilting. The magazines from the 1920s looked so different from the later ones I knew. There were great ads in them for cars like Essex, Stutz, Desoto, Pierce-Arrow, and Packard featuring great square bodies and long hoods. We boys liked those. Who knew there used to be so many different car brands?

There were Arrow collar ads with paintings by J.C. Leyendecker that showed what the sophisticates looked like back in the 1920s with their golf clubs and racehorses. They looked a little bored, but oh, so elegant in their finery. People looked so different then. And look! They also must have eaten Quaker Oats and Kellogg’s breakfast cereals, but from boxes with writing but no pictures of crowing roosters or athletes. Interesting!

There was no end to the attic wonders. There were piano rolls for the player piano downstairs. An instrument called a Ukelin was there in its original box, complete with bow and instructions. That must have been the result of a wildly successful sales campaign in the Heartland if my grandparents had bought one. I plucked the strings a bit, but how to use that horsehair bow on a flat instrument has always been a mystery.

There was an iron baby bed with clothing piled in it, along with an antique ironing board, and a portrait of my dad as a small child. There was an ancient electric 35mm projector that my brothers got working a time or two to project equally old celluloid films of Mickey Mouse on the bare plaster wall. We watched the frayed brown cord carefully to make sure the place didn’t catch fire.

In the little room at the east end of the attic there was some furniture, including a short double bed with coil springs, made up with a thin old mattress, fluffy feather comforter, and feather pillows, all sheathed in ironed cotton sheets covered with an old looking bedspread. When I sat on it I almost disappeared into the middle. Also in the room was an upright oak secretary, very dark, with a small mirror and a fold-down door with cubbyholes behind it and shelves on the left side behind the glass.

On a small dresser sat a family heirloom prized to this day. It was a Sessions mantel clock, black, with a gilded face holding black Roman numerals and fancy black hands. In later years I took it downstairs and got it running, learning to set the hands to match the soft chiming hours. It was a gift to my grandmother’s parents for their wedding in 1899. I had met her father, my Grandad Lewis, on several occasions, but her mother Effie had died of tuberculosis in 1907 when my grandmother was five, so I had only seen her sweet face in a couple of photos. Here was a working clock that they had both heard as newlyweds at the end of the 19^th Century. The sound came from a padded hammer striking a steel coil in the back. That sound plays in my mind just now, as it played for them one hundred and twenty years before, over the muffled slow ticking.

These grandparents and my own parents spoke of growing up and living in different times. In that way I learned firsthand something of what it was like to live in bygone times. From their memories and stories I always thought I had been able to grow up vicariously in the years before the Great War, in the 1920s and 1930s, and during the Second World War. I had my own memories of the 1950s and 1960s and beyond.

How lucky we were. That attic was my own little historical museum, with free admission for all. It makes me very sad to think of kids then and now who never had that experience in a real attic filled with random memorabilia of their own ancestors. How rich it made our imaginations and our lives!

What has been lost to young people without this cultural wealth to draw upon? How can they possibly appreciate it as I came to appreciate it, spending weeks in the summer with loving people born in 1893 and 1902? We never lived further than 32 miles from them until I graduated from high school. They were such a stable, solid influence for my brothers and me, setting an example in their quiet way on the little farm in Henry County, Indiana.

Years later when I needed to pick an undergraduate major for my freshman year at Indiana University, the choice was easy. I took a history major on day one and never thought of anything else. To this day that old stuff has never lost its fascination!

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