Close to Home

Close to Home 

I finally learned how to decently parallel park in front of the house. Years had passed since the last time I had to leave the car in middle of the street while I ran in the house to get Ray to come out and park my car. Those cramped spaces just a few inches longer than your vehicle had always scared me.

How long had it been since I’d even lived on a street with no driveways, where cars parked on both sides of inner-city streets?  Just one of the things I’d left behind when I left Cincinnati.  Like my family, including the ones I'd just said goodbye to back at the funeral in Delhi. I missed them already and I hadn’t even pointed my car toward Tennessee yet.

I wanted to take a detour to Clifton and visit the last home I shared with my parents, 236 Klotter Avenue. The tall, narrow, three-story, white sided home with the black iron gate stood in the east block of Klotter, off of lower Clifton Avenue.

The above layout is one I created for one of my guest blogs online, “A Sense of Place,” at Women's Memoirs, which shows the front of the Klotter Avenue house taken from sidewalk level. I loved that the solarium windows were open. They never were when we lived there. After a time, we never opened the door to the sunroom, our special holding place for junk. 

The picture of the empty lot next to Murphy’s Pub is where the first house I remember stood,  the tall, narrow, white-sided building where my Grandma lived in the second-floor apartment with my aunts and uncles, my Dad’s family.  Murphy’s Pub was then the Prosit Café, next door to us.  Lots of memories come from the Prosit, most of them involving family members going next door to get my father to come home. 

Another photo on the layout depicts the McMillan Street apartment building that Grandma moved to next, the third-floor walkup flat where I lived off and on all during my school years.  I could always walk to my Grandma’s from wherever we lived.  We never got farther than a mile from that first house at 2223 Clifton Avenue next to the Prosit.  

Never more than a mile from Over-the-Rhine.

The last picture in the "Sense of Place" layout is of Hughes High School, across the street from Grandma’s attic apartment, the school I graduated from after transferring from Our Lady of Angels Catholic in St. Bernard.  Every afternoon after school, I could stop in Dino’s Pizza and hang out with friends for a while and then walk around the corner to Grandma’s and hang out some more. 

It took my staunch Catholic grandmother a while to forgive the switch to public school, but she enjoyed me being right across the street every day in school, and she liked hearing the stories I had to tell about my friends, the classes, my favorite teachers, my not favorite teachers.

That February day after my aunt’s funeral, I was retracing steps and memories of my hometown, even though it was too cold for my thin jacket, and mushy snow remained in grayish piles in the gutters.  I walked down the block, away from Clifton Avenue, turning the corner and taking a few steps up to Emming, the street my mother wanted to live on instead of Klotter.

Here, at the end of Emming, old concrete steps led down to Ravine Street.  I never counted them, but the rise up to Emming and Klotter from Ravine Street is dizzying, especially when climbing those steps. 

Ravine Street Steps from CityKin Blog

Recent Photo I took, looking down from first landing onto Ravine Street.

I remembered when my sister Phyllis and I, in middle of the night after a fun time dancing and drinking at one of the clubs, made the climb from her broken down car parked on Ravine.  We laughed, in between wheezing and catching our breath, over the mere fact that we were having to do this.  What a place for her car to quit.  And those steps, unfortunately, were the shortest route back to Klotter.  

We remembered Mom had left-over potato salad in the frig, and that drove our weak legs on. 

I miss my sister.  I miss her almost every day now, some 20 years after she left.

Aunt Dot’s death started in me a melancholy sense of loss. So much was gone, and now so much more was going away. I couldn’t stop the progression.

Standing in front of the big white Klotter Avenue house, I knew everything I’d left in it was gone. It was somebody else’s home now. I never got the chance to look in the closets and attic and basement for things I might want to keep. The house was sold without my knowledge when Dad got diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and was moved to a new neighborhood where for the first time in his life he couldn’t walk back home again.

Dad didn’t drive a car. He’d suffered a neurological disorder as a child, Korea’s disease, or referred to back then as St. Vitas’ Dance,” the only term Grandma ever used when telling me the stories of my father as a boy. 

I remember Dad trying to drive when I was very young and sitting in the back seat of a car,  when my Uncle Norbert tried to help him. Dad got so nervous he vowed he would never try to drive again. And he never did.  He was scared to death he would hit someone and run them over, and kill himself in the process.

My father knew the city like the back of his hand. He’d grown up in Downtown Cincinnati, the West End, Clifton Heights, McMicken in Over-the-Rhine, and he either knew what bus to catch or he walked.

When I was about as tall as Dad’s knees were from the sidewalk, I trotted beside him, holding his hand, when we walked downtown and back again. He crossed the busiest city streets, stepping off the sidewalks and heading into traffic, dodging in between cars, without fear.

Dad taught me enough early on that by the time I was 10 years old I was able to catch a city bus, travel downtown, sign myself up for dance classes, walk to Woolworth’s and go shopping, and walk back home because I spent my return bus fare. It never occurred to me this was unusual.

That was when we lived in Corryville, on Sander Street, 1952, right around the corner from St. George School and Church, and the Georgian Club, where my father worked managing the bowling alley in the school basement. If Uncle Norb was absent from his work as a janitor for the school, Dad would be the one to come into the classroom to spread the green pine sawdust over the spot where one of the students threw up on the floor and then sweep it up, or to change a light bulb for one of the Sisters of Notre Dame. 

I was embarrassed when he did one of these chores in a classroom I sat in. I wish now I hadn’t been embarrassed.

Uncle Norb and Aunt Vera lived in the third floor and attic rooms in the Sander Street house with my cousins, Terry, Linda, Cathy, and Kenny. We lived on the first two floors. When we moved from that house in 1957, I was the oldest of four younger sibs, Phyllis, Donna, Nancy, and Ray. Bobby would be born in 1960, in Mt. Auburn, on Inwood Place.

We had to move from Sander Street because the city needed it for expansion of the University, UC.  My old street turned into Sander Hall.

I’d basically spent the biggest part of my childhood on Sander Street. It was not an easy move for me. After we moved, I  walked through Inwood Park to Hollister Street, across Vine, and up to Calhoun Street to school and church, but my street and my friends were gone. Everything changed.

Now, in 2010, I still missed Sander Street. It was like someone had wiped all the memories of that house out of existence, and I was probably the only person still alive who remembered the stories that took place there.

Before Sander Street, we lived in a small three-room apartment downstairs from Grandma in the house next door to the Prosit.  Just like Sander Street, that first house of memories was torn down, though I don’t know the reason. 

Grandma, my two aunts and a friend in the side yard of 2223 Clifton Avenue.  The steps on the right lead to our three-room apartment, downstairs from Grandma.

The home at 123  Inwood Place, where we lived after Sander Street wasn’t demolished, like almost every other house on the tiny cul-de-sac.  But street had deteriorated to the point that it looked like a war-torn, third-world village. I hardly recognized the street or our old house.  Patches of dirt and rising dust took the place of the missing houses. None of the previous neighbors lived there anymore. Everyone had moved away just like us. More stories without a home.

Remembering my old homes that bleak February day on Klotter Street, my hand rested on top of the heavy iron gate, wanting to pull the latch and walk up the steps to the front door, but I didn’t. I couldn’t walk away either, not just yet. At least this home was still physically here. I felt empty. I needed something to fill the space but didn’t know what it was.

I wanted to be a kid again and play with my cousins at the celebrations, the Baptisms and First Communion parties, where the adults drank beer and laughed and were happy and we kids drank cold bottles of “pop” out of the ice tub, chased each other around and screamed, ate Aunt Vera’s German potato salad and my Mom’s cold fried chicken. I didn’t want to leave my home again.

I wanted Grandma to be alive, in the house next to the Prosit, the "saloon," just around the corner, on Clifton Avenue.

I wanted my mother and father and sister to still be alive. And I wanted to wake up and find out I just dreamt that Aunt Dot died. I wanted to visit her at least one last time and tell her how important she’d been to me when I was little and scared and confused.

I wanted to go back to 1961 when Dad brought me here to see this house and told me he was going to buy it. My father’s eyes shone bright with pride that day. He thought this house was a palace. He said the house cost $12,500, and he was going to buy it for us.

Owning a home was success to my father. Grandma, from the time of her birth to when she died, never owned her own home. She had lived in cramped city apartments all of her life, the earliest ones in poor neighborhoods in downtown Cincinnati, Over-the-Rhine, or somewhere close, like Camp Washington, where my father was born.

The Big Bloody Fight

My last trip to Cincinnati for both research and visiting my family I was reminded by my cousins of "The Fight," as it's always been referred to when gatherings take place.  Indeed, my Uncle Bill recalls that the first time he came calling at Grandma's apartment to court my Aunt Dot, he was educated on The Fight.  Any new person had to know about The Fight.

When I was a little girl, Grandma began telling me about the time my father threw my grandfather out of the house, and I've remembered all these years that she said, "...down the stairs."  She withheld the gory details for my benefit I guess, so all I could see in my mind's eye was my grandfather, dressed in the same suit he wore the only time I remember seeing him, rolling and thumping down the wooden stairs in the 2223 Clifton Avenue house.  My grandfather being tossed down from the second-floor apartment there.

But then I found evidence recently that the Frank Dean family lived at Number 1 West Hollister Street, on the corner of Vine and across from Inwood Park.  What a surprise to find this present-day pretty blue home, just a block or so away from my Catholic school and church.  

No. 1 West Hollister Street present day.

The Hollister Street residence is listed in the 1942 Cincinnati Directory, the same year I was born and Dad left for the army.  The copyright office received the directory in January 1942, the army took my father in August, and I was born the next month in September.  Dad is listed in the directory in a separate apartment from his mother, and my mother's name is not listed.  She may have been taking care of her mother out in Morrow, Ohio, who was dying of breast cancer about that same time and wasn't present when the directory listers came.

Is this where Dad had to force his abusive father to leave the home?

Or was it earlier, maybe when the family lived on Pendleton Street, across from St. Paul's School?  That was in 1930, when my Dad was ten years old.  From the way The Fight story goes, I'm sure he was older than that.

1111 Pendleton Street in the East End

St. "Paulus Schule," where Dad and his sibs must have attended , in the 1930s.

This last visit home, the details of  The Fight were once again relived, how my Dad refused at first to hit his father but rather pushing him away from the house and telling him to leave.  When my grandfather kept coming back at Dad, ravaging his bloody face, something must have snapped inside my father, and he went after Grandfather Frank, beating him so badly that it's said that one of his eyes was hanging out of the socket by the time the police arrived. 

I don't know if Frank tried to come back after that.  Grandma never said.  Dad would not discuss the incident at all with me, and in later years I knew he felt guilty for what he in fact had to do to protect his family.  After all, that's what the oldest son does, as my Grandma so long ago told me.  Also mentioning that my Dad was "a good boy."  

Tripping on Research

I never anticipated a photo of me sitting on a stranger's tombstone looking up facts on my laptop, but here's the proof.

Old St. Joseph German Cemetery in Cincinnati holds my Wehrle ancestors, but finding them was a trip in itself.

Our recent get-away was part "live family" visiting and doing research on the departed.

And eating Cincinnati chili of course.


I'd read up on how to prepare for a research trip so I'd know how to be organized and make the best use of my time.  I thought I'd done a pretty good job getting ready -- until we got to Old St. Joe's.  Yes, the office gave us a map and a diagram of the graves we were seeking, but I found it's almost easier to just walk the rows and read the stones.  The papers we were presented didn't match up.  Then, too, many old graves have the inscriptions worn away, so some of those we figured might be my ancestors.

What we didn't foresee is that some graves have no markers at all.  If they're really old, the grass may have long ago covered any trace of burial.  Repeated trips back to the office finally revealed the grassy site where great great Grandfather Valentine Wehrle was interred.  But not by himself.  Appears a number of other family members share the plot.

Then I remembered my ancestors were poor people.  The costs of buying a plot alone probably was all they could afford.

My husband said we should buy a gravestone and list all of their names.  Once we find out who all exactly is in that grave besides Valentine.

In the empty space on this photo, surrounded by visible monuments, lie some of my ancestors from Germany.

My goal was to see the stones of Valentine and Maria, but I'm not sure great great Grandmother Maria is even buried there with her husband.  She outlived him quite a long time.  Time ran out for us on the trip, and I never found Maria for sure.

I also wanted to find my Grandma Clara Wehrle Dean and put that off until last because I knew that would be easy.  Wrong.

Again, the map made it harder.  Finally browsing the rows in order, I saw Grandma's stone.  I knew my Grandfather Frank Dean, (Grandma's husband) wouldn't be buried with her, since he'd been made to leave the home for abusive behavior and then married a different woman though he never got a divorce.  Grandma would not break the Catholic Church's rules.  So Frank was a bigamist.  

Imagine my shock when I finally found Grandma's stone next to a matching stone inscribed with the name Joseph Wald.  Who is Joseph Wald?  No one in the family knows.

My aunt had Grandma's marker inscribed "Mother."  This Joseph Wald person is labeled "Father."

With family history, there are always surprises.

I think someone bought the small plot next to Grandma and put their father there, even though that person wasn't part of our family.  However, I am of course researching Joseph Wald on Ancestry, so far with no luck.  Planning to try Family Search.org and a few others.

Also scouted out New St. Joseph, which primarily houses Irish and Italian people.  I wanted to find my paternal great grandmother (Frank Dean's mother), Nellie Cramer Dean O'Flaherty.  She must have been buried in one of the spots where the stones' inscriptions are no longer readable, or she has no marker.  Once again, the map and diagrams were of no help.

 I finally looked over the burial grounds and offered up, "Rest in Peace, Great Grandmother Nellie.  I care, and I came."  I just wish I knew more about her.

Next post will describe our jaunt to Orangeburg and Maysville, Kentucky, and the problems encountered there.  Then I've got history and photos of Cincy where my people lived, always "Somewhere Over-the- Rhine."

All together, I call the trip successful.

You Were Born to Tell Yours

Got this from the ProBlogger blog today.

"Get Obsessed with Your Message," guest post by Danielle LaPorte of www.daniellelaporte.com.

Every movement has a story. Every nation has a story. Every community has a story. Every person has a story. You were born to tell yours.

I'm glad I read ProBlogger today, one of my favorite sites...always offers something I can use.  

Now I'm off to work on My Story, Somewhere Over the Rhine.  

To see where I've been these long weeks, click on my main blog, http://journey2f.blogspot.com.

Too much time away from my book writing, but I've got time.  I was born to write it, to tell it.

Research and Writing

The February Family History Writing Challenge, sponsored by the Armchair Genealogist is going well for me, though it's hard work.  You know the saying, "Nothing good comes easy."  I used to tell my kids that whenever they seemed too lazy to reach for a hard goal.


Writing is hard.


Writing that requires research (actually all writing does) is especially hard.


This month-long challenge is intended for us to write the stories, period.  Get that first draft down.  We should mark the spots in our manuscripts where we need to come back to fill in details, etc.


And I was following that advice.  The problem is that when I'm writing, sometimes I "want" that piece of research.  I want it now.  Not later.  Could the information make a difference in my writing the rest of the story ?  Might that information slant my story from there on out?  I'm afraid it might, so here's what I've been doing.


When I need to research something while I'm writing, I go to my minimized web window and see what I can find in as short a time as possible.  Then I copy and paste to my manuscript the facts I want to use.  Sometimes I paste several paragraphs of research findings, which I'll be able to sort out, cut down, and customize to my story  later in rewrite. I also use a red font for this added research.


Then I save the changes and proceed telling the story.  I realize this pasted text adds falsely to my word count, but that's a minor problem, and not really a problem at all, because if I really want to be precise on where I'm at on words, I can block the inserted section, see the word count, and subtract that number from the overall count.  Below is an example of how I added some research on the fly from a website, marked it plainly, including the source, and kept on writing the narrative

Another explanation for the difficulty that German Catholics, in particular, faced in trying to get jobs in the new country was that while many immigrants came with funds to buy land or had technical skills and could work as tradesmen, not all who came to Cincinnati fit into this group.  

"German Catholic immigrants were often denied work at publicly financed construction jobs, and were excluded from joining clubs established by native-born Cincinnatians. German customs clashed with the lifestyle of American-born Protestants who frowned upon the way that German families spent Sundays in theaters, saloons, and various singing societies. Catholic loyalty to the pope in Rome seemed to prohibit the notion that these foreigners could ever become proper American citizens. This anxiety grew, resulting in the formation of the “Know-Nothing” party in the 1850s. A political group of nativists, they were alarmed as immigrants, Catholics, Jews and blacks streamed into “their city.” The panic continued to grow, causing a major riot on Cincinnati streets."  HTTP://WWW.CINCINNATI-CITYOFIMMIGRANTS.COM/CCI/GERMAN.HTM

I've also started typing notes and reminders right into the manuscript at the end of the current story.  For example, as I was writing a few days ago, I thought about how I should insert a photo of my grandmother's old Domestic sewing machine she gave to one of her daughters, my Aunt Clara, who in turn gave it to me when I was a teenager, and which I still have.  At the appropriate place in the book, around the time Grandma would have been using the machine, I'd like to see a picture of it, along with maybe the story of how Aunt Clara taught me to pump the treadle with my foot and sew up a seam, and about all the clothes I made for myself on that old machine.




In a red font I typed ** insert sewing machine photo** a number of spaces down from where my cursor currently resided.  As I typed, of course, the inserted red note moved down as well, to remain at the end of whatever I was typing.


Then another time, I decided I'd been looking back to my notes, or to Ancestry's Family Tree Maker, too many times to check dates of birth, death, or marriage, or which street one ancestor lived on at a particular time, so I inserted, again in red, the information down there with my sewing machine note.  This gave my fingers freedom to fly and not be distracted by small things I shouldn't let hinder me.


Below is an example of a few of my notes at the bottom of my current manuscript page, which move right along behind me.

valentine b: 1828 d: 1899 m: 1855 1933-34 jos and mary W. riddle rd. dates of deaths in order

 I'm seeing now that so many things happen when you follow the advice of all those great writers who say if you want to write, you just have to write, write, write every day.  Not think about writing, but just doing it on a regular schedule.


What happens when you immerse yourself in the writing is you become involved in your story, your book, you begin figuring out things on your own, you remember advice and tips you've stored away in your now hard-working brain.


It's all good!

Challenge Day 3

I'm excited about what I've done so far in the past two days on Somewhere Over the Rhine, my family memoir.  I'm beginning to see this looking like a book.

I decided yesterday to insert a family chart for my grandfather Frank Dean at the beginning of "The Dean of Orangeburg" chapter for my family readers to refer to easily as the various ancestors pop up in the writing.  Likewise, today I plan to put "The Wehrles from Baden" chart on the first page of that chapter.

Big Surprise!!  Discovered on a genealogy forum another Valentine Wehrle descendent who supplied me with the ship's passage info I've been beating my brain out to find for years.  Great, great grandfather Valentine and wife Maria docked at New Orleans in 1852, having sailed from La Havre, France.  Valentine's father's name was Franz Anton Wehrle from Wurttenburg-Baden.  Love it!

I'm happy with the Dean chapter, which I finished yesterday, and when I go back to edit -- hopefully next month -- it'll clean up easily and be what I intended.

This kind of writing is the hardest for me, though I would have thought otherwise.  I mean, I'm writing about what I know, which usually is the easiest, but because of the research, the facts and documents, and the historic timeline, it's tedious work.

I am  relieved to be finishing this project finally and so grateful I heard about this challenge in time to take part.  Back to work now.

Family History Writing Challenge

I'm all signed up and ready for the February month-long Family History Writing Challenge, Orchestrated by Lynn Palermo, the Armchair Genealogist.  You can find her and sign up for the challenge at http://www.thearmchairgenealogist.com/.

This comes, for me, at an incredible time.  I've let family problems detour my brain here lately and need to get re-focused on getting this family memoir finished and published.

The challenge itself is a God-send for me right now, and icing on the cake is all of the top-notch advice and information on planning and writing your book Ms. Palermo gives.  For free!

I'll be posting my progress here during the upcoming month and sharing what I learn.  It's good to be eager and excited for a change.