photos of my Great Uncle Ted, Great Uncle Bob, and Grandpa Ham
Linking up this story by my Dad to Sian's Story Telling Sunday which occurs on the first Sunday of each month. Big thanks for hosting us Sian!
The Uncles I Grew By
by Bruce H. Mero
My extended
family was pretty close during my early years. I was routinely in the company
of many of my adult relatives in my adolescent, pre-teen and early teenage
years, by virtue of multiple proximities. All of my Mom and Dad's parents and
siblings lived within a half-dozen miles of where we lived while I was growing
up. They all liked each other as well, consequently they spent a great deal of
time in one another's company. With the exception of my Grandfathers, all of
the adult male kin I spent time with growing up were WWII veterans. That fact
alone accounts for much the closeness of my family, I think, in those Post-war
years. All of the boys enlisted, all were deployed either in Europe or in the
Pacific during the war, all survived and all came home. To a young boy, these
guys were all heroes; my Dad and his two brothers, Bob and Ted and my Uncles
Don and Joe, my Mom's twin sister's husbands. I now know they were all heroes
in everyone's else's eyes too.
All are gone
now...with the wonderful exception of my Uncle Bob, my Dad's younger brother. He
is still going very strong in his late-80's, still celebrating life with my lovely
Aunt Maryellen. Uncle Bob did admit in a recent conversation, that my cousins will
not allow him to climb up a ladder and onto his roof to fix the leaks any longer...
reluctantly he now leaves that chore to his 64 year-old son, my cousin Mike to
do. He called a while ago to tell me that he had been cast as an extra in a
movie about bootleggers. He played a moonshine-drinking old timer in the film. Seems
fitting...the old-timer part, that is. More about Uncle Bob later.
My Grandpa Theodore
died when I was very young. I don't remember him much. He was a smoker, that I
do remember and that probably contributed to his early departure from my world.
My Uncle Don also left us earlier than he should have. He died in a bar. Heart
attack. Not such a great end for a Navy war hero, unfortunately, but Uncle Don
fancied his beer. I was very young when my Grandpa Ted died and have few
memories of my Uncle Don. The rest of these guys, however, I do remember...and
well.
Uncle Ted was
my Dad's older brother, by a year or so. Uncle Ted was a confirmed
bachelor...one very close call at the altar of St. Agatha's Catholic Church
cured him forever of marriage, so he boasted. Ted lived with my Grandma Mero in
the family house in Canastota until she died in the late 1960' or early 1970's.
I have fleeting memories of rolling pie dough and making cookies with her
Saturday mornings when my Dad would drop me off to spend time with her. When
there wasn't pie dough to roll out or when the cookies had been baked, Grandma
would put me in a chair in her living room to string buttons from a tin box
which held a thousand loose buttons. Sometimes she would release a string so
that I could re-string them all over, saying that whomever did it the last time
did it in the wrong order and that she knew I would do it correctly this time. TV
hadn't been invented, so she found cleaver ways to keep a young boy entertained.
I liked making pies and cookies. I did eventually grow weary of the button
stringing thing. I did love to sneak upstairs and look things over in my Uncle
Ted's bedroom. He had all sorts of things I found interesting there...like a furry deer skin at the base of
his bed. a stuffed squirrel on his dresser and a stuffed duck hanging off a
nail in his wall. There was a cabinet full of rifles in one corner that he
never kept locked. I would just crack open the door a little to look...I'd
never dream of touching any of his guns. There were boxes of shotgun shells and
various other cartridges atop the cabinet. His room smelled manly.
I learned to say my first dirty word at Grandmas'
house. I said the word BASTARD one time in her company. Grandma Mero was a very
proper lady and of course she was horrified at my language and demanded to know
where I'd learned such a thing to say. I told her, (it's the truth, I swear)
that I heard her parakeet, Blue Boy say the word. She was incredulous and
somewhat disbelieving.
"Where
did Blue Boy hear such a thing?" she demanded to know. She then pieced the
evidence together. She knew that Uncle Ted had a propensity to use that word
(and a few others that she didn't like to hear) to describe most everything and
surmised that the parakeet had heard BASTARD said enough times by her eldest
son to be able to learn and speak the word. The bird then taught me, somehow
knowing that Grandma would not
approve, so did the teaching surreptitiously, when Grandma's ears were not
near. I offered supporting evidence of the fact that I'd learned it from the
bird by walking up to the cage and saying the nasty word to Blue Boy. As if on
cue, Blue Boy repeated "bastard, bastard, bastard, bastard"...a dozen
times. Grandma was horrified and left the room. I had been exonerated. The
lesson I drew from that experience was that some words I heard Uncle Ted say were
bad and especially to avoid repeating them in Grandma's company.
In her later
years Grandma had a housekeeper, Mrs. Raymond, come to the house to "tidy
up" every Saturday. She paid the lady $5 each week she cleaned. After
Granma died, Uncle Ted still insisted that the cleaning lady still come to
tidy-up every Saturday. He asserted that $5 was a handsome sum to pay for that
kind of work and refused to pay any more. After Mrs. Raymond passed (she was in
her 80's when she died and had cleaned the house the Saturday prior), Uncle Ted
never found another housekeeper. It might have been the $5 salary cap that
deterred prospective employees or, more likely, Ted's propensity for leaving a
recently killed grouse or mallard duck on his kitchen table for a few days to
allow them to "cure" before being plucked and eviscerated, cooked and
dined upon. Whatever the case, Uncle Ted never replaced Mrs. Raymond, or for that
matter ever "tidied up" again. Uncle Ted refused to waste his time cleaning
up his house. That had always been his mother's responsibility, or Mrs.
Raymond's. Since he had been unable to hire a housekeeper after both ladies had
gone, he simply gave up cleaning his house. Why bother? Who cares?
Two things I
remember from that house while Uncle Ted was its sole occupant. The first was
when he was much later in his years. Gretchen and I visited in the early
evening. He greeted us at the back door and led us into what had been Grandma
Mero's formal parlor, where he had been watching the TV. We passed through the
dining room on the way. I noticed that the plaster had fallen from the wall in
a spot two or three feet square on the outside wall and the old lath was
exposed. Both of us mentioned it to my Uncle. No problem, he said...it's been
that way for a long time. He watched the TV as we chatted. In the room suddenly
we both saw what we thought were flying shadows, eventually recognizing those
shadows as bats flying around the parlor. We were horrified, of course, but
Uncle Ted told us that these guys were nightly visitors, that they'd come down
from the attic and into the room though the holes in the plaster we'd observed
earlier. Once they realized where they were and the fact that there were no
bugs here for them to eat, they'll go outside. Eventually the bats went
elsewhere. That wall was still unrepaired when my Dad sold the house after
Uncle Ted's death. Presumably, the bats
were still nightly visitors.
The second
memorable thing we discovered in the house when Uncle Ted had been hospitalized
for a heart condition a couple of years before he died. My Mom decided that it
was her responsibility to clean Uncle Ted's house while he was recuperating. As
always, the backdoor key was hidden on a hook under an ancient mop head near
the screen door, so we came and went as we wished. We cleaned, Mom, Gretchen
and I for days, it seems, remembering that the last cleaning was twenty years
or more prior. A couple of days before Uncle Ted was to be released from the
hospital, I went into the cellar to recover and dispose of several hundred jars
of canned fruit and vegetables that Grandma Mero had put up during WWII. Uncle
Ted had bragged that he was still eating those fruits and vegetables...40 years
after they had been canned. Common sense dictated that that eating forty year-old canned goods was probably not a
really good practice, so the jars, contents and all went into the trash, though
admittedly, those canned peaches looked as good after forty years as they did
the day Grandma put them up. During one of my trips into the cellar, I noticed
a thin extension cord plugged into a light socket and the light bulb in that
socket was lit. I thought it a waste, so I unscrewed the bulb and pulled the
extension cord from the receptacle. Unbeknownst to me, and not discovered until
Uncle Ted's return to the house was the fact that the electrical socket into
which the kitchen refrigerator was plugged had failed a number of years prior.
Ted had drilled a hole in the floor behind the "Fridge" and fished an
extension cord through the hole and into the cellar. He then plugged the
extension cord into a receptacle screwed into that light socket. The
refrigerator ran so Uncle Ted was satisfied that he'd solved the problem. I'd
messed it all up by pulling that extension cord from the socket. Of course, the
refrigerator cooled, defrosted and everything inside spoiled. The contents of
the refrigerator had to be discarded, though Uncle Ted sniffed every item
before it went into the garbage to be sure that nothing was still edible. He
was very pissed with me that all of Grandma's canned goods were gone from his
larder. He was particularly fond of those forty year-old canned peaches.
Long before
that time, I learned to hunt small game with Uncle Ted, ducks and squirrels
mostly. He'd drive us south of town on a Saturday afternoon and decide to hunt
in one of several places we usually frequented. He always hunted squirrels with
a 16 ga. shotgun, I used a Target Master .22 ga. Fall was the best time to hunt
for gray squirrels and when the trees began dropping dry leaves, ideal. His
technique always worked. He'd tell me to make as much noise as I could while we
walked to his favorite spot, rustling the dry leaves and loudly talking. Once
we had reached our hunting spot, we'd sit against a giant Maple tree and be
absolutely still, quietly surveying the tree canopy. All of the noise we'd made
shuffling through the leaves had spooked the squirrels and they hid as we
approached. Our silence, however was unnerving... to their undoing. Within a
couple of minutes of quiet, their curiosity would prevail and they would stir
from their hiding places in the branches to check us out and of course, reveal
themselves. It worked every time. We'd take turns shooting. Uncle Ted was
deadly with his shotgun, so I learned early that I'd best make good use of my
shots if I wanted to get a kill. We never went into the woods using Uncle Ted's
technique without coming home with a couple of gray squirrels in our quarry
bag.
One late
afternoon we'd been successful in the woods and Uncle Ted wanted to check-out a
spot we sometimes went when we hunted for ducks. We parked the car on the
shoulder of the road and started to cross a mowed hay field, heading to a small
pond. A noisy pair of Canada Geese flushed off the pond and flew in our
direction. Not hesitating, Uncle Ted pulled up and fired one round from his
shotgun. To my amazement, the lead goose slumped and dropped instantly to the
ground in a thump, nearly at our feet. The hunt was over. The goose went into
the trunk of the car. We went into town to buy a Waterfowl Stamp for Uncle
Ted's hunting license. He didn't see the necessity to purchase a $3 Waterfowl
Stamp in advance, until he actually needed one. It now appeared that he needed
one, he had a dead goose in his trunk. Of course, the Conservation Department
required that the stamp be secured before hunting ducks or geese, but that
seemed just a formality to Uncle Ted, arguing that it would have been a waste
of his time and his $3 to get a stamp before it was actually needed. I
understood his logic, but also knew that he was playing a little loose and free
with State Conservation Law. The goose went from the trunk of the car and onto
the kitchen table, fully feathered, for a couple of days before becoming dinner
and leftovers.
I learned to hunt for White Tail deer using an
ancient 8mm German Mauser that Uncle Ted brought back from WWII as war booty.
He loaned me the gun and a box of shells for my first deer hunts. In this case,
however, it was my Uncle Bob who was my mentor.
We were deep
in the woods several miles south of Limekiln Lake, in New York’s Adirondack
Mountains, hunting on property belonging to a family friend who I called Uncle
Pete. Arthur Ellis, a.k.a. Pete, or Uncle Pete to me, was a childhood friend of
the Mero brothers. Pete had been successful in business and owned a large tract
of several thousand acres of forestland in the Adirondacks. He shared his good
fortune and the bounty of his woods with my Dad and my uncles. He'd built a
plush hunting lodge a couple of miles off the paved road and we were often his guests.
I was 14 at
the time and a brand new big-game hunter. One Saturday morning, Uncle Bob was
arranging a deer drive and setting spotters. He set me atop a granite boulder
and gave me my instructions. He then took a small bottle from his vest pocket
and began sprinkling drops of liquid from the bottle on the rock. When I asked
him what he was doing, he explained that the stuff in the bottle was an extract
from the musk gland of a female deer and if there were any bucks in the area
they would be attracted by the smell of the stuff and come running. It was
called buck lure. A friend had given it to him and he wasn’t sure how much to
use so he put the entire contents of the bottle on the rock. He figured that if
a little was good, a lot was better. He
said that he would be close by and would be watching to see if the stuff worked
and that if it looked like I was in trouble, he’d shoot at anything trying to
get to me on that rock.
“If I was in
trouble? What the heck does that mean,”
I asked him?
“Well,” he
smiled, “I hear this stuff makes bucks go crazy and want to screw everything. When
they get a whiff of this stuff they may decide that you look like a doe and try
something. Sometimes a whole herd of bucks are attracted to the scent and they
may fight each other to get a chance at you.”
He suggested
that I keep my thumb on the safety of my gun so that I’d be ready to fire in
case one of them tried to climb the rock. He chuckled as he left.
Needless to
say, that scared the crap out of me and for the next couple of hours, I pissed
in my pants each time I heard a twig snap in the woods. We never saw a deer that morning, but I’d had
an experience that I’d remember forever.
I did
eventually get a deer that fall using that ancient gun of Uncle Ted's. I didn't
know I'd even hit the first one I shot at...that Mauser had such a violent kick
that it spun me around and knocked me onto the ground when I pulled the
trigger. I had a sore shoulder for a week from the recoil on that rifle. It was
Uncle Bob that told me that I'd bagged a real trophy, a slight exaggeration on
his part. The deer was a young doe and hardly weighed a hundred pounds. It was
my first deer, however and Uncle Bob made a big deal of it on my behalf. We used
the venison from that doe as camp meat most of that fall and Uncle Bob always
told whomever was eating it just who was behind bringing it to the table.
Uncle Bob was
responsible for organizing an annual spring trout fishing expedition at a place
called Beaver Meadow on Uncle Pete's property. It was always something I looked
forward to with great anticipation. I loved to fish for trout, but my Dad
wasn't too keen on it, so at home, either I went fishing alone or with kids my
own age, or I did something else with my time. The yearly fishing trip to Uncle
Pete's place was a whole lot better. Uncle Bob would plan it in conjunction
with a holiday so that we'd have a three day weekend to fish. Usually my cousin
Mike and I were able to each invite a friend to go with us and we always stayed
overnight in Uncle Pete's cabin. The fishing spot was about a mile further into
the woods from the cabin and the walk on a footpath through the woods to get
there was a part of the adventure. The
trail crossed a small, crystal-clear creek a number of times near the fishing
spot, it was this creek the beavers had dammed-up to make the ponds in Beaver
Meadow. We kids would clatter down the mossy path carrying fishing poles, nets
and cans of night crawlers for the fishing. Uncle Bob would carry down a frying
pan, a stick of butter, cooking utensils and mess kits. My Dad carried the
requisite six-pack of beer (for the
adults) and a set of paddles for the leaky old row boat someone had dragged to
the pond and left there many years before. Fishing in Beaver Meadow was a great
time. We built a campfire in a clearing next to the pond and if we were lucky enough
to catch fish by lunch time, Uncle Bob would fry up a couple of trout for our
lunch.
We'd take
turns with the row boat, negotiating around sunken logs, islands of floating
cranberries and standing dead trees not yet fallen into the water. The fishing
was just as good from the shore. If we were particularly intrepid, we'd walk
atop the beaver dam to find the best fishing spots in the deeper water. We
always caught fish. The smaller trout would be tossed back, anything 10 inches
or longer went into a creel or onto a stringer in anticipation of a later
feast. It never failed that either Mike or me or one of our friends would get
so caught-up with a trout on our line that we'd step in the slippery mud atop
the beaver dam and slide into the pond. That too was a part of the fun, of
course.
By the end of
day we (all of us kids, that is) were wet, muddy, sunburned, mosquito bitten
and dog tired, but eager to do it all again the next day. We'd haul our bounty
of trout and the rest of our stuff back to the cabin. It was a rule that we
leave nothing in the woods. We'd even bring the paddles for the boat back each
night. Once we left them under the boat overnight and a porcupine ate them both
down to little stubs. No boat that day. Once we left a can of night crawlers
with the boat, but by the time we returned the next morning, a raccoon had
found them and eaten them all. My Dad hiked back to the cabin, then drove into
Old Forge and bought more worms at the unheard-of price of 4 cents each.
As tired and
dirty and sore as we all were, the anticipation of repeating the process the
next morning revived us. Fresh trout for dinner was the best. Of course, Uncle
Bob was the chef. We kids got the clean-up detail and complained that Uncle Bob
always used every pot in the kitchen to make dinner.
At noon, or
thereabouts on the third day, we had to stop fishing and pack our belongings
into the cars we arrived in. It was also a rule that we all had to take a
shower before we left for home. The showers were for self-defense, reasoned
Uncle Bob...either for the drivers of smelly kids cooped-up in the car for the
three hour ride back home or to fend-off our Mom's disgust at our appearance as
we disembarked from the cars at home. The more experienced of us got into the
shower first...the hot water tank was shut off prior to our departure and the
last of the kid showers were usually performed in cold water. Once I was in the
shower and Uncle Pete shut down the generator, which not only turned off the
hot water heater but also the water pump...just as I was soaping up. I had to
rinse off with the cold water left over in the tea kettle, accompanied by the humiliating
laughter of my Cousin Mike and our pals.
We kids slept
most of the trip home.
I had the
opportunity to re-live the tales of some of those fishing experiences when
Gretchen and I spent a week in a beach house in South Carolina with Uncle Bob
and Aunt Maryellen a summer or two ago. It was then he introduced us to a new
type of fishing...crabbing. It involves sticking a chunk of raw chicken neck
onto a huge safety pin tied to thirty feet of string. One tosses out the bait
and Blue crabs grab on and the crabber gently pulls the string toward shore
until the crab can be netted. Great fun.
My Dad built
houses when I was a kid. Uncle Ted and Uncle Bob both helped. All were skilled
builders...masons, carpenters, roofers. Early in life, both Cousin Mike and I
were conscripted as laborers. We screened sand, mixed concrete and mortar,
carried blocks and re-bar, fetched tools and boards, carried bundles of
shingles, varnished boards, spackled sheetrock and a hundred other chores that
were needed by the builders. Both Mike and I hated the work at the time, but
both of us have realized in subsequent years that those hours and days of
laboring with our Dad's and Uncle Ted were invaluable. We assimilated skills
that we both took into our adult lives, skills and the confidence that we could
do anything, fix or build from scratch everything we needed. What a legacy.
One of the
houses my Dad helped to build was a new house for my Uncle Joe and Aunt Jeanne.
I guess I was eight or ten at the time the project started. The new house was
located in the country, a couple of miles out of town on a lot in the bend of a
creek. Before that, Uncle Joe and Aunt Jeanne lived in a second floor apartment
in the same house my Mom and Dad lived in at the time. The house was owned by
my Grandpa Curt.
Because we
lived in the same house for a number of years, I was exposed to my Uncle Joe a
lot. He was in my life from my first recollections.
Uncle Joe was
a US Marine in WWII, which means, you know, he was always a Marine. I thought
every little kid knew the Marine Corps song. I sang it from memory before I’d
learned Little Teapot and Old McDonald’s Farm. Uncle Joe knew more old songs
than anyone else I knew did. He loved to get people singing and he always sang
the loudest. My first memory of getting a spanking was from Uncle Joe. My
cousin Tari and I had done something for which a spanking was apparently
deserved and a simultaneous spanking we got. Uncle Joe administered it. We were
in the back of Grandpa Curt's shop...I remember it as if it were yesterday.
Uncle Joe cut
hair while he was in the Marines, consequently all of us cousins got haircuts
from him. He must have given me dozens of haircuts. Usually, haircut night was
a communal affair, all of the male cousins in the family showed up on the same
night for the ritual. I knew enough to volunteer to go first if there were
others in line. Uncle Joe always drank beer when he cut hair, which he always
shared with whomever was in the hair-cutting chair. My first taste of beer was
from a bottle Uncle Joe was drinking from during a haircut. Going first for a
haircut meant less slobber on the beer bottle.
It also meant a better haircut.
By the time Uncle Joe was on his second beer or third or fourth haircut
he was usually singing and paying less attention to the hair being cut.
He once gave
me a whole bottle of beer to drink and a cigarette to smoke. I was probably
about five (if my mom is reading this it is a revelation to her!). I think I
drank about half of the beer, but the cigarette lasted no longer than the first
puff after he lit it for me. He told me to suck hard on the cigarette and to
inhale the smoke. Of course I coughed and choked. Uncle Joe laughed and
laughed…he knew he’d cured me of smoking.
Uncle Joe
taught me how to ride down the back stairs in the house in Oneida. There was no
access into the cellar from the outside of the house, so Grandpa Curt designed
and built a system whereby the stairs to the second floor apartment would part
in the middle, and with the assistance of a counterweight, lift to access the
cellar. Uncle Joe would push them up and then have me jump on them from above,
gently riding the arc to the bottom. It
was great fun, but something Uncle Joe asked us not to do when either Aunt Jean
or Grandpa Curt was around.
He helped my
Dad and me build a tree house in the apple tree in the back yard at the house
in Oneida. He had the great idea of borrowing a steel ladder from Grandpa Curt
to get really high in the tree. Eventually, this ladder was the only way to get
to the tree house, but neither Uncle Joe nor my Dad had bothered to ask Grandpa
Curt if they could use his ladder. I caught the wrath-of-Grandpa when he found
out, but Uncle Joe smoothed things over.
Uncle Joe set
the siding on Grandpa Curt’s house on fire while he was using a blowtorch to
peel off the old paint. It was our secret, though, as there was no one else
around at the time that saw him do it. He was on a ladder about fifteen feet
above the ground when the wood under the paint ignited. He tried spitting on the flames to put them
out but this would not work, so he threw the torch onto the lawn, scrambled
down the ladder, ran for the hose and squirted the flames with water. He looked
around after to see if anyone had witnessed the incident and I had. He swore me
to secrecy with a wink, a handshake and a salute. Many years later he confessed
that he actually thought of peeing on the burning paint, but saw me watching
out of the corner of his eye and thought better of that pursuit.
He parked his
car at the top of the upper driveway at the house in Oneida one snowy afternoon
because it was too icy to drive it down the driveway. He got out and started to
walk to the house when the car passed him skidding down across the lawn and
smacking against the house. It hit the house a few feet from the spot Uncle Joe
had set the siding on fire a few months earlier. A similar thing happened in
the driveway in our Canastota house. The driveway was too slippery to make it
with his car all of the way to the top, so Uncle Joe parked it midway and
started walking to the house. The driverless car slid down the hill and collided
with another car attempting to come up. It was my Mom in the second car. She
was not amused.
At their new
house in the country, the creek which delineated the lot was a popular attraction
for us kids, Uncle Joe was no exception. One time he put me on his back for a
horsy ride and then told me to hold my breath and hang on tightly. He then dove
into the creek and swam underwater as far as he could until the shallow bottom
forced him to surface. It felt like we were underwater for an hour. My Mom was hopping
mad, I wasn’t wearing a bathing suit and still had my sneakers on.
I could speak
much more about Uncle Joe. I have more to tell about Uncle Ted and Uncle Bob as
well. I love those guys. It is said that it takes a village to raise a child
and I couldn't agree more. My Dad and Grandpa Curt were the Alpha males in my
life and I'll have more to say about them at another time. My three uncles all
played tremendously instrumental roles in my upbringing and are responsible in
a huge way for the adult I became. Their influence is still felt and
appreciated every day.
