Clara and Frank

Learning about my father’s family was a huge stride in trying to understand him.  And I did have a big need to understand him. 

Grandma’s stories about Dad’s childhood gave me insight into his early struggles in life.  Spending as much time as I did with my aunts and uncles told me even more about the family I was born into.  But something was missing.

I’d never seen my grandfather, to my recollection.

 

What role did Dad’s father play in making him the man he was?  The man who had to drink, who couldn’t sleep more than a couple of hours at a time, who worked hard to help take care of his family.  A man who so wanted to have a normal life, a home for his wife and children, while at the same time ruining the very life he wanted. 

There was no way when I was a child that I could have put together a kind of character profile or synopsis of the life of my paternal grandparents.  It remained a mystery to me.  When my grandfather Frank showed up on Sander Street when I was 12 years old, watching him through the living room window only added more to the mystery. 

I had heard some, but not enough.  Now there he was standing on my sidewalk.  Why could he not come in our house?  Why was Grandma hiding with me behind the window?  Why was my father so nervous, and why did he come in and literally beg Grandma to come out and see her long-ago husband? 

Grandma wouldn’t go out of course.  “I told you, Raymond, I never wanted to see him again.” 

If she was angry at Dad for allowing the man to come to our house, she didn’t act it.  I think she rather enjoyed seeing him from a distance, though she did not want him to see her.  Was this some kind of closure for her? 

I would have given anything to break loose of Grandma’s hand on my arm, to run out the door and down the long wooden porch to stand up close to the man who was my grandfather.  I would have watched and listed to the interaction between my own father and his father.  I wanted to know how they felt about each other, if they loved each other.  He'd come to see us, hadn't he?  Did that mean he cared?  Did this stranger who was my grandfather care about me, his first grandchild?  And my sisters and cousins?  He wasn’t allowed to see us, so how could I know.

I was old enough to understand this was a form of punishment for my grandfather.  His family felt he didn't deserve a regular visit.  He’d failed in the worst way.  Once again it was my father who had the burden of dealing with the situation.  Just like he’d had to throw his father out of the house so many years ago, now he had to deal with his return.  He had to protect his family from his own father again.  It was easy to see my father was not happy in this role.  

That was the first and last time I saw my grandfather Frank.  I’m not sure if it was the last time for my father and Uncle Norb, who had also stood on the sidewalk that night with his father.  I just know Frank Bernard Dean died shortly after that night.  I’m positive it was the last time Grandma saw him.  She did not go to the funeral, nor did either of her daughters.  My mother and father, and Uncle Norb and Aunt Vera all went.  I was certainly not allowed to attend, though I pleaded with Mom and Dad to let me.  It was Grandma who decided my fate, however.  I believe Dad would have taken me with them had Grandma let him.  She came and watched me, my sisters, and cousins, the day of the funeral. 

From that time on, at various times my curiosity resurfaced and then lay dormant for long stretches of time.  I never anticipated I would find anything more about my grandfather.  I never intended to really.  It just happened. 

I picked at shreds of information over the last few years and then just let it be for a while.  I finally gave up diligently seeking and dabbled with research off and on.  Then it took on a life of its own.  

Revelations appeared when least expected.  I began feeling like I was meant to discover the story, find the answers to the long-held questions.

In the process, I discovered my family history, my ancestors, and then slowly the pieces all came together to knit a story. 

I’d already been writing, small pieces here and there, a chapter for a nonfiction book, an online guest blog, so I knew I had to write this family story.  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Frank & Clara                                            

   

A year before my paternal grandparents, Frank Dean and Clara Wehrle, were married, Frank Bernard Dean  joined the ranks of the Ohio Soldiers, fighting World War One, serving as a Private in the 10^th Company Pensacola Coast Artillery Corps at Fort Barrancas, Florida.

        Ohio Military Men, 1917-18  Frank B. Dean

Name: Frank B. Dean Serial Number: 413152 Race: W Residence: 1214 Freeman Ave., Cincinnati, O. Enlistment Division: Regular Army Enlistment Location: Fort Thomas, Ky. Enlistment Date: 30 Apr 1918 Birth Place: Cincinnati, O. Birth Date / Age: 20 4/12 Years Assigns Comment: 10 Co Pensacola Coast Artillery Corps Fort Barrancas Fla to 12 July 1918; Battery E 49 Artillery Coast Artillery Corps to Discharge Private American Expeditionary Forces 5 Oct 1918 to 8 March 1919. Honorable discharge 22 March 1919. Volume #: 4

Frank was awarded an honorable discharge on March 22, 1919, and one month later, on May 7, 1919, he married my grandmother, Clara Wehrle. 

Frank’s address at the time of his marriage was 314 Main Avenue, Elmwood Place. 

Clara Wehrle’s address was 1216 Poplar Street, Cincinnati, in Over-the-Rhine.  The Williams Cincinnati Directory in 1919 lists Joseph Wehrle, Clara’s father, a “laborer,” living at the same address on Poplar Street.  Clara was living at home with her family when she married my Grandfather Frank. 

Clara Wehrle, Probably as a Bride in 1919

The above photo, from my Aunt Dot’s collection, was likely taken for a special occasion.  The white dress shoes, or boots, and white embellished dress tell me this was probably one of my Grandma’s photos taken the day of her wedding to Frank.  I would imagine, knowing my grandmother like I did, that any pictures including my grandfather would have been either destroyed or given back to him after he left.

Frank was 21 years of age on December 23rd, 1918.  His occupation then was woodworker. 

Clara, age 23, was working as a "Box Maker," or "Marker."  The handwriting is not clear, nor is the document.  For the actual book, the record will be enlarged to full page size, which is easier to read.

This document was the missing link to finding my grandfather online.  Frank's parents are recorded as John Dean and Nellie Cramer.  With that information, I was able to find records for both of them, which led to records for their parents, meaning Frank's grandparents, both paternal and maternal.  

I'd already discovered Grandma Clara's parents and grandparents.

Chapter 5 will be "The Deans and the Cramers," and Chapter 6," The Wehrles."

Stay tuned also for an updated Table of Contents.  We're getting close to finishing.

Raymond, Part 2. In the Still of the Night

Sander Street, about a block-and-a-half from St. George Church and School,
a little more than a mile from Over-the-Rhine

I was seven when Dad and Uncle Norb went in together to buy the narrow, three-story, green-shingled house at 2606 Sander Street, the second house on the right off Corry Street.  

 We’d lived a short time on Hollister Street, across from Inwood Park, and before that the first-floor apartment in Grandma’s building.  We also lived intermittently on Grandpa’s farm in Morrow, Ohio.  Where Kay lived. 

Kay and Me on Grandpa's Farm in Morrow, Ohio.  

I would have loved living on the farm with my step-grandmother Elva had it not been for the spiteful bully, Kay Francis.  She was older, bigger and bored to death and amused herself by torturing me.  As with most bullying, the victim seldom talks.  Kay had warned me.  I just had to live with it.

Kay was finally busted when she tried to drown me in LeSourdesville Lake.  I had to have mouth-to-mouth resuscitation according to Grandpa.  All I remember was waking up on the sand and puking.  Kay was more careful after that, and I stayed away from her, until she finally ran off at age 15 with the boy who’d gotten her pregnant.  

 

During the time we lived in Morrow with Grandpa and Elva, we spent most weekends in Cincinnati with Grandma on Clifton Avenue, next-door to the Prosit Café, in her second-floor apartment, and then finally we moved into the first-floor apartment.  I liked it there and hated moving .  I was upstairs in her apartment more than ours. 

My two aunts, Clara and Dorothy, were still at home, as well as Uncle Junior, 13 years older than me.  Moving away from Clifton Avenue was like leaving the state, or the country.  A mere eight-tenths of a mile was like crossing the ocean to me.  I couldn’t just escape up the stairs to a place happier than my own.  And after my parents’ third girl was born, they were just fine with me hanging out with Dad’s family upstairs. 

There were four years between me and Phyllis, but only two years between Phyllis and Donna, and those two did not blend together well.  Phyllis demanded  attention, and Mom had her hands full with a toddler and newborn baby.  My four years of stardom in our home had ended, but it was still intact at Grandma’s.

The best thing about 2606 Sander Street was the thick, spiraling, wooden staircase that began on the third floor at Uncle Norb’s and Aunt Vera’s apartment, curving in the hall outside our second floor quarters, and going straight down to the street-level  entrance, outside our kitchen.

It was a strange house, obviously built for small flats instead of a two-family home.

In no time, my cousin Terry and I had the banister polished slick as ice, using wax paper out of Mom's kitchen under our rear ends, and when Aunt Vera was busy with something else, we’d sail down and around as long as we could away with it.  Aunt Vera hated us being on that banister and would yell, “You kids get off that banister now!”  You always did what Aunt Vera said.

Our living room was at the front of the house at street level, but the door onto the sidewalk was always kept locked with a heavy upholstered chair in front of it.  Off the living room was the one bedroom with a sink hanging on the wall, and a small bathroom. 

Mom slept in a brown upholstered fold-down chair in the living room just wide enough for one slender person.  My father had the couch.  A heavy slide-in French door separated the living room and our bedroom.  The door was stuck in open.  It no longer pulled out from inside the wall where it stayed encased.   The living room and bedroom were like one giant open room.

The bad nights on Sander Street could have been avoided had my parents had their own private bedroom with a door.. 

There was in fact a small room downstairs right off the kitchen, with another bathroom, but it was used to store junk, the boxes of possessions brought from the last house that never got emptied and used. 

Our lives back then centered around the neighborhood and church.  Few families on our street had automobiles.  As stated already, my father did not drive, and in the early fifties neither did Uncle Norb.  Several men on Sander Street drove cars, and so did the woman next door to us, Thelma, who wore slacks that looked like men’s pants, similar to those worn by her husband Steve.  Thelma was a woman ahead of her time.  She and Steve had no children, but they did have a nice bar and rec room in their basement, and they were always entertaining neighbors and friends. 

I remember thinking what must it be like to live as Thelma.  Not afraid to dress differently, or not want babies, who could drive a car anywhere she wanted.  I’d never known any other women like her.

My father and Uncle Norb both worked at St. George School.   Dad was manager of the bowling lanes, the Georgian Club, and Uncle Norb was the janitor. 

Dad worked long hours at the bowling alley.  He was a one-man show.  If the pin setters broke down, he had to fix them.  He had full responsibility for the leagues  that bowled every night of the week and making sure every alley had a “pin boy” to man the pin setters.  Our telephone rang incessantly with Dad’s business.  He was on call 24/7.  I knew he liked his job and didn’t mind the unpaid overtime.  He was autonomous in the bowling alley.  It was his domain.  He took the work seriously.  He earned 75 dollars a week. 

I wanted to be a pin setter more than anything, but I couldn’t, Dad explained, because I wasn’t strong enough to swing myself up on the racks when the heavy balls whizzed down the alleys and into the pits.  And those pin boys were fast too, holding four pins in each hand which they deftly slipped into the slots and pushed the button to lower the rack, almost at the same time as hoisting themselves up onto the rack, out of the pit, their legs out of the way of the speeding ball.   

I was allowed to wash the beer glasses and polish them with the bar towel.  I could serve Cokes, and other “pop,” potato chips and pretzels at the wooden bar, and I got to polish the bar, kneeling on a barstool.  I was allowed to put coins in the jukebox and play the songs I liked.   When Dad didn’t want me helping out at home with Mom and the kids, I stayed at the alley.  It was a happy, loud, exciting place.

My youngest sister Nancy was born two years after Donna and slept in the baby crib on Sander Street, in the only bedroom.  A narrow path separated the crib against the wall and the double bed where Donna, Phyllis, and I slept.  When Nancy graduated to a bed to make room for our first brother, a roll-away bed was placed on the other side of the double bed, up against the wall, and Phyllis and I slept there, while Nancy and Donna shared the double bed.  The bedroom was full up.  I didn’t expect any more babies.  There was no room.

My mother spent most nights tending to babies on Sander Street.  Newborns needed feeding every three or four hours and diaper changing around the clock.  Babies often get sick, and back then, before all of the inoculations doctors administer now, we all had chickenpox, measles, and whooping cough.

My mother was exhausted most of the time.  She had started getting sick a lot.  She lost weight and her clothes hung on her, her normally pale complexion turned pasty white, her straight and thin, light brown hair, was held back with Bobby Pins. 

And about this time, for some unknown reason, my father began holding all-nighters in the living room, beginning at three or four in the morning, after he came in from the saloons where he hung out after locking the bowling alley. 

I learned what drunk looked like at a real early age.  I heard  what drunk sounded like, and what it smelled like because every morning a stale, sour alcohol odor permeated the air inside. 

I felt that my father wanted, needed something that only my mother could give him, in middle of the night when he came home and couldn’t go to sleep.  Whatever  this thing was he needed and wanted, he could not get from my mother.  I heard her tell him, starting in a low voice, even though I was awake, to go to sleep.  But he would not.  She said she was tired and had to get up in a few short hours with the baby and get the kids to school.  It didn’t matter.  He wanted her to stay awake and talk to him, argue with him, and answer why she didn’t love him like other women loved their husbands.

I was confused.  Obviously, wives loved their husbands.  Why wouldn’t they?  Wives were mothers who took care of children, cooked, washed clothes, took you to the doctor.  What was wrong with my mother?  Why did my father constantly accuse her of not being a good wife?   

Something deep inside me said not to ask anyone my questions, even my Grandma.  Especially my Grandma.   This was something I couldn’t voice to anyone.  Somehow it was embarrassing before I actually understood what embarrassment meant.  It felt bad inside me, and no one could know it was there.

The day came when I did understand, and I targeted this unfolding scene almost every night on Sander Street as the one thing that negatively impacted my life from then on, causing issues in every relationship I entered.

Some nights I wished my mother would just throw something at Dad to shut him up.  Pour a bucket of water over his head, hit him with something.  Anything just to get him to go to sleep.

Other nights I prayed my father would not come home.  And then when he’d be even later than usual, not coming in until four or five, I begged God to forgive me because he’d probably got hit by a car or something and was dead somewhere on a lonely sidewalk. 

But he always came home.  Sometimes he woke everybody up with bags full of White Castle hamburgers, or Skyline Chili Dogs, sometimes bacon and tomato double-deckers.  Phyllis and I would sit up in our roll-away bed and silently, numbly eat whatever it was, Phyllis with her eyes closed but still eating, sometimes drinking a pop, then lying back down and sleeping for what little time was left before school. 

When people all over the world, I remember thinking, were sleeping in their still and quiet houses at night, we were wide awake because my father could not go to sleep. 

As I lay there next to my sister, gritting my teeth, squeezing my eyes shut, trying to lay on my good ear so as to muffle the angry words coming from the living room, it never occurred to me that I should get up and let my parents know I was awake and could hear every word they said.  I should have told my father to either go to sleep for the sake of all the rest of us, or go somewhere else where people liked staying up all night.  I still don’t know why I didn’t do that.  I’m sure my mother would have appreciated it, and I know my father wouldn’t have gotten angry.  He never did when he was drunk.  He only got mad at my mother.

As the nights on Sander Street repeated the same scenario over and over, my mother’s health declined further.  When a cot was put in the small downstairs room off of the kitchen for her, with a bucket next to the bed for prolonged vomiting, I knew she’d reached the end of her rope.  

During her sick episodes, my father became a different person.  He came home from work early and tenderly took care of her.  This continued over and over.  Driving her to mental and physical exhaustion, and then taking care of her.

As an adult, I learned this was typical behavior in dysfunctional households.  It was only so long before the cycle would begin again.  Mom would get better, take care of herself and look pretty and happy.  Then the all-night scenes in the living room would slowly return, and the tired lines in her face and the dark under-eye circles would appear as well as the straight line of her lips.  Eventually she wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning when it was time to get ready for school. 

Eventually, Mom had to go to the hospital , and our relatives came, divided us up, and took us home with them.  I went to Aunt Dot and Uncle Bill’s.  Aunt Vera, upstairs, took care of Nancy and Donna. 

I remember one occasion where Phyllis went to Aunt Clara’s, who lived across the street from Aunt Dot on West Eighth Street.  After the first night at her house, Aunt Clara told Aunt Dot that Phyllis was up most of the night washing her hands in the bathroom.  They wondered what was wrong with my sister.

Phyllis’s hands were dry and scaly from constant washing, and in our roll-away bed at night at home, she would peel the skin from her fingers.  I learned later in life this is usually considered by psychologists as a guilt behavior.  I guess Phyllis thought it was her fault Mom and Dad fought every night.  She had a speech impediment and had trouble in school because of it.  She also vomited if she ate or drank certain foods, especially milk.  Maybe she felt she was too much trouble. 

The last time Mom got pregnant on Sander Street was with Ray, my first brother.  Ray was born in January, so Mom, only five feet tall, was heavily pregnant through the Christmas holidays.  She was a lot bigger with Ray than with Nancy and we had to help her get out of her chair.

I was ten when Ray was born, so I was able to help quite a bit during this pregnancy.  I remember Mom having various food cravings and asking me to go downstairs to the kitchen sometimes at night, when we were watching TV, and fix her something.  The one dish I remember was egg noodles.  She wanted some buttered noodles with peas.  Sometimes I’d need to go to the little store just around the corner to buy something we didn’t have.  She drank a lot of Pepsi Colas, her lifelong favorite soda. 

Of course, Dad was never home until the wee hours of the morning.

One of the worst scares for me was one particular early morning when Dad came in out of breath, like he’d been running.  He shut the hall door, a few feet away from mine and Phyllis’s bed, and leaned back against it, trying to catch his breath.   When Mom got up and walked into the bedroom toward him, he said, “Dorothy, I’ve been here all night.”

He then explained that he’d gotten in a fight at Art’s Place, the corner saloon, while trying to protect Uncle Norb, and when he landed his knockout punch, the man had fallen backwards, his head hitting the brass foot rail of the bar.  Dad said he saw blood coming from the back of the man’s head, and he ran.

Dad wasn’t sure if he’d killed the man and if the police would come looking for him.  He wanted Mom to avow he’d been home all night.

I don’t remember what else was said that night, how long it took my parents to settle down and go to sleep, but I lay awake waiting for the police to come and haul my father to jail.  I wondered how we’d get by without him.  We wouldn’t have any money.  What would happen to us?

In the morning, as I walked to school and passed Art’s Place, I still wondered what would happen.  The bar was empty and locked up.  What had happened to the man my father knocked down?  As usual, when I got out of the bed that morning, my father had already cleaned himself up from the night before and was probably in the bowling alley now.  As I walked in the school’s side door, I hesitated at the top of the steps leading down to the basement where the bowling alley was.  Then I walked up the steps and into my classroom. 

No one ever mentioned the fight again.  I waited for Mom and Dad to say something about it, but they never did.  I suppose the man was all right and there were no charges against my father, but I never knew for sure. 

So many things I never knew or figured out back then.  Life was crazy and confusing.  It was hard to know what was right and what was wrong on those dark nights on Sander Street.

Raymond, Part 1: Everybody Loved Him.

Raymond Clarence Dean
Born 24 Feb 1920, Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Ohio

I was told that the first time I laid eyes on my father, I yelled to high heaven.  Here was a stranger, a man trying to hold me, and I kicked and thrashed for all I was worth.

I then heard it didn’t take long for me to not only warm up to my father but that I absolutely fell in love with him.   

The family story goes that by the time my father returned from war, almost a year after my birth, I was completely spoiled beyond all hope by his family.  I was the first grandchild and the first niece to two aunts and two uncles. I spent at least half my time since birth at my Grandma Dean’s second-floor apartment on Clifton Avenue, next door to the Prosit Café. 

Private Raymond C. Dean

U.S. World War II Army Enlistment Records, 1938-1946 about Raymond C Dean

Name: Raymond C Dean Birth Year: 1920 Race: White, citizen (White) Nativity State or Country: Ohio State of Residence: Ohio Enlistment Date: 10 Aug 1942 Enlistment State: Ohio Enlistment City: Cincinnati Branch: Branch Immaterial - Warrant Officers, USA Branch Code: Branch Immaterial - Warrant Officers, USA Grade: Private Grade Code: Private Term of Enlistment: Enlistment for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law Component: Selectees (Enlisted Men) Source: Civil Life Education: Grammar school Civil Occupation: Semiskilled occupations in mechanical treatment of metals (rolling, stamping, forging, pressing, etc.), n.e.c. Marital Status: Married Height: 68 Weight: 156

My mother, during this time, while my father was serving in the army, was taking care of her mother, my grandmother Cecile Leeds Jones, who was dying of breast cancer at her home in Morrow, Ohio.  My grandmother died in September 1943, just days short of my first birthday.  Mom told me that my grandmother loved me more than I’d ever know, and having a baby granddaughter was a true blessing in the midst of her terrible suffering with a disease that wasn’t easily handled in the 1940s. 

Me, BettyAnn Cecile Dean, born September 22, 1942,
 in Dayton, Kentucky,
while Mom was visiting with  relatives.

I’d been cared for almost exclusively by women before I met my father.  My mother, Grandma Dean, and my two Dean aunts who were still at home.  After a few years, though, I became my Dad’s side-kick.  By the time I was six, I’d already gained two younger sisters, and Mom was okay with letting me hang out with Dad.  I was a curious child and easily got into trouble constantly searching for adventure. 

I had to be kept busy.  At Grandma Dean’s this wasn’t a problem.  Someone was always teaching me new things.  Grandma taught me words and how to put them together, how to spell.  She told me stories.  I lived for her stories.  My aunts, Dorothy and Clara, taught me how to sing and dance, how to entertain suitors who came calling.

Mom, with her hands tied up with a four-year-old and a new baby, became frustrated with my need for attention.  This would change within a few short years as I became old enough to help take care of the babies and my mother herself when she suffered what were called “nervous breakdowns.” 

But in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, I was “Little Ray,” the name my father’s friends gave me, because I looked so much like him.  I was proud when they called me that, and I was proud I looked like my father, because I thought he was the most handsome man alive.

BettyAnn, about age eight

Among all the things I was curious about, my father was toward the top of the list.  Grandma's stories of  my Dad's entire life history intrigued me.  The story that most kept my attention was about my father having to throw his father, my Grandfather Dean, out of the house because he was drunk and hit Grandma.  I grew up thinking about that story and asking Grandma to tell it to me again and again.  I waned to understand.

That story and the one where my Dad went to work on the streets selling newspapers and shining shoes during the depression to help take care of his family played over and over in my mind, where I gave the characters life and watched them move through constructed scenes.  When the nuns in Catholic school in first and second grade told Dad I "daydreamed" a lot, they were right.  I daydreamed Grandma's stories.

I knew my father drank.  Beer mostly.  Grandma explained that my grandfather was "a drunk."  That's how she put it.  She said that's why my Dad had to throw him out.  Because he was mean when he drank.  She said my father started drinking in the saloons when he began working on the streets as a teenager because the grown men inside the bars would invite my father in and buy him a few beers.

Grandma made it clear to me that my father was "a good man."  Not like his father.  I can't remember my grandmother ever losing her temper with Dad.  Even when he drank too much, Grandma never said a word. Dad's younger siblings loved him; that was easy to see.  "He protected them," Grandma said, when they were younger.

He did a lot of fighting to protect his brother, my Uncle Norbert, who just could not help starting fights with bigger and meaner guys.  When Uncle Norb drank, he got mean like his father.  He liked to say Ray had his back, meaning my father, who was bigger and a better fighter.  All of the Dean boys, just like their father, learned to box in the ring and barehanded on the streets.

When Dad drank at the family parties, he told jokes and teased.  And he was really embarrassing.  But neither Grandma nor his two sisters got angry.  Like Grandma, they loved him.  It was like they merely tolerated his behavior and wore sad smiles.  He was the big brother who always tried to take care of them and protect them.

My Aunt "Dot" (Dorothy) talked to me about my father when I stayed with her and Uncle Bill .  Aunt Dot always had a soft spot for my father.  She consoled me so many times because of the life my father's drinking imposed on my mother and us kids.  She taught me so many things that helped me get through some really hard years.  She gave me some coping skills I wouldn't have otherwise had.

I told Aunt Dot when Grandma told me how my father had gotten sick when he was a boy, with first rheumatic fever and then subsequent Chorea's disease, a neurological condition that causes muscle twitching and odd movements.  (Chorea's disease was aptly called "St. Vitus' Dance" by the Catholics because of the dancing-like legs of the patient that reminded them of the patron saint of dance.)  My aunt remembered that, and both of us felt sorry for my father.  It was just like he was born into the world for hardship.

At that early age, knowing those stories, my father was a hero to me.  He was bigger and more exciting than any movie star.  Combined with sadness for him having been so sick as a boy with a condition that left him impaired in many ways, I was devoted to him.  I never repeated Grandma's stories to him because something about my father let me know he didn't like to talk about the past.  Not about his father, his sickness, the war, the depression.  None of those things.

I just loved being with him and the exciting life he lived away from our home.

The saloons and the back-room poker games, where I'd stack his quarters, dimes, and nickels, and he'd show me his hand and explain the art of the game and how to bluff.  And how the neighborhood men and close friends and drinking buddies of Dad's sat at the round wood table and welcomed me being there and treated me respectfully because they loved and respected my father.

The walks downtown and back, stopping in stores and window shopping, helping him choose gifts for my mother, drinking Coca-Colas from soda counters.

Going to work with him and watching his serious side, his total concentration on the work at hand, his pride for a job well done.

Going to the Reds' games at Crosley Field that Dad lived for, especially the night games.  How he explained the game to me, and we ate hot dogs and popcorn and walked home in the dark.

 And then, in just a few years, I would become confused as I watched my father start to lose the star quality I'd attached to him.

It's a hard thing for a little girl to want to hang on to the life she's known and the love she's felt, knowing she's going to have to find her own way in a different kind of world.  It's hard to grow up when you're ten years old.

Miracle of the 1940 Census

I finally pulled up the new 1940 census.  I didn't think it would add anything to my family research.  After all, I'd managed to find the exact addresses of my relatives from the Williams Cincinnati Directories for almost every year, and they even included the residents' occupations. So, I thought, what could the census tell me.

This morning I wanted to write about Camp Washington, Henshaw Avenue, where my father was most likely born, according to the 1920 directory.  But Ancestry's shimmering green leaf on my paternal grandmother's name couldn't be ignored any longer, and I clicked, if only to get it out of my mind and get back on track with what I started out to do.

And then a question I've been carrying around for almost my whole life was finally answered.  Just by studying the 1940 census.

According to this new census, Grandfather Frank Dean and my Grandma Clara were living at 1455 Columbia Parkway, an apartment most likely or a two-family home, because Charles and Mabel Creech, the next family on the form also lived at that same address with their daughter Betty Doris and son William.  The "r" for rent was apparent on both listings.

Frank, "head of the house," lists his employment as "watchman" at a W.P.A. park project.   This would be a Works Project Administration, part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal program.  

From Wikipedia:  "The Works Progress Administration (renamed during 1939 as the Works Project Administration; WPA) was the largest and most ambitious New Deal agency, employing millions of unskilled workers to carry out public works projects,^[1] including the construction of public buildings and roads, and operated large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects.^[1]"

I notice a few lines down on this census form another citizen working for a W.P.A. sewer project.  Employment was picking up thanks to FDR.

My father is listed as working as a stock clerk in a retail book store, and Uncle Norb was working for the C.C.C. Reforestation Project as a laborer.  The CCC, Civilian Conservation Corps, was another FDR New Deal project set up in 1931 by the state government as a temporary emergency relief administration which hired the unemployed.

I notice both my grandfather and Uncle Norb were making quite a bit more money than my father.  Dad probably liked his job a lot more, however, because he so loved books and reading.

The listing of the Dean children on the form is what finally grabbed my attention.  My father, Raymond, is 20, and the youngest, Frank, Jr., or "Uncle Junior," is 8.

In all of the directories I've researched over the last few years, I wasn't able to make a connection to an event that I've pondered for so long because the city directories did not list the children in the household, except those who were employed.  For instance, the 1935 Williams' Cincinnati Directory only lists Frank B. Dean  as a laborer, living at 1455 Gladstone Avenue, which brings up a question.

The '40 census states that the family was living in the "same place," as in 1935, and indeed the house number is identical, 1455.  However, this 1940 census has the family living at 1455 Columbia Parkway, not 1455 Gladstone Avenue. When did Gladstone turn into Columbia Parkway?  I know they are close together, but they've never been the same street.

Our recent trip took us all over the city to houses my family lived in, and Gladstone was one of those.

I don't know if houses were once on the other side of the street, the other side of the tracks, but this is Gladstone Street, in the East End, the street where Dad and his family lived from 1935 and on into 1940, even though the census says they lived on Columbia Parkway.  There was no 1455.  The houses shown in the photo were on the even side of the street.

This was the neighborhood, however.  Looking today a lot better than it looked back then.

View from Gladstone Avenue, 1937 Flood ~ 

Facebook/ Cincinnatis-East-End-Columbia-Tusculum-Linwood, with permission

I found the 1937 Flood photo on Facebook, showing the section of the city where my grandparents lived.

Back to this morning's eye-opening moment and the '40 census.

Studying the Dean family listing, I suddenly grasped the clarity of the information staring me right in the face. This was the first listing that showed all of members of the family together.

1940 was the last year my father lived with his parents and siblings as an intact family.  Dad married my mother soon after this, and Grandfather Frank disappeared from the family by the next directory or census listing.

And Uncle Junior was eight, old enough by this time to remember the night that changed their family history, the big fight.

It never seemed logical to me that Dad didn't live in the same house he threw his father out of.  The way Grandma told the story, though now I realize she held some things back, my father was there when Frank came home and everything went out of control that night.  They all were there that night.

A last family get-together, as it were.

Why this seemingly unimportant, tiny fact has bothered me so much I'm not sure.  I just know I needed to picture my father at this particular event as precisely as possible.

That night, which I now believe happened on Gladstone Avenue, or Columbia Parkway if that's what the Ohio Census Bureau wants to call it, was no insignificant happening for my father.  He carried that memory with him as long as his brain was functional.  I know that for a fact.

The guilt Dad took on his shoulders from that night weighed heavy at times in his life.  When Grandfather Frank came to our house in the '50s, to tell Dad and Grandma he was dying, after all those years not seeing anyone since the night he was forced to leave for good, that night I watched my father sag under his burden of guilt.

One would have to have known Dad intimately and understood him, listened to what he said during those times he was deeply depressed, to grasp the full impact that night with his father had on him.

Dad was a fighter, as were both of my uncles.  They knew how to box in the ring.  Uncle Norb wasn't as good as Dad and Uncle Frank.  Dad had to take up some of Norb's fights and finish them for him in the city barrooms and saloons.  This was going on when I was ten years old, so I recall it well.

I always had the impression, from Grandma's telling of the story, that my father was maybe a teenager, or possibly age 12, that night of the fight.  But thinking of that now, she was telling me that my Dad was still living at home.  He was a "boy" to Grandma.  That's how she referred to her oldest son at age 20.  A "boy." Just like my mother thought of my brother Ray at age 30 as a "boy," because he still lived at home.

Little pieces of the story continuing to be uncovered.  That's what family history is.  So many times these tiny nuggets shed much insight into the personalities and character of our relatives.

And I think that's why I do it.

My whole growing-up life was spent trying to figure out the people around me.  Maybe because if I knew them and what they were about, I'd be able to finally figure out who I was.


I don't have a photo of the house at 1455 Gladstone Avenue.  Just the memories, both good and terribly bad, that still live in those of us who were told the stories.

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."