Requiem for a Grandmother

There's a scene in Woody Allen's Annie Hall in which Annie tells him her tie was a gift from her Grammy. He is bemused and asks her if she didn't grow up in a Norman Rockwell painting. Well, I had a Grammy, too (I had two of them--as Paul McCartney says of grandfathers in A Hard Day's Night, "Everyone is entitled to two"), but I lost one of them this week, and she in many ways seemed to have come to life from a Norman Rockwell painting.

She was born in 1914 in Addyston, Ohio (pictured above), a very small town just down river from Cincinnati. It was a town full of oddballs, sort of like Mayberry, with a particular habit of assigning nonsensical nicknames to everyone. My grandmother was known to her family as "Tood," though her real name was Evelyn, and no one knows the derivation of that nickname.

Her father worked for the pipe foundry, which was the main employer of the area. In 1940 she married my grandfather, who was from another small town across the river called Rabbit Hash, Kentucky. These were real country people, and I grew up knowing what country cuisine tasted like. For years when I visited she made me my favorite--navy beans with cottage ham, with cornbread. These people didn't know about fancy things like Chinese food, and they tended to boil the food until it was an unrecognizable mush (soft green beans I especially remember) but they sure did know how to fry chicken, and make biscuits that made your mouth water just to look at them.

My grandparents relocated a few miles to Cincinnati, where my father was born (he was childhood friends with a famous Cincinnati native, Pete Rose), but in 1951 they moved up to the Detroit area, and for the rest of her life she was a resident of Dearborn, Michigan. My grandfather worked for GM, and he died in 1977. After that, my grandmother lived with her spinster sister, and for over twenty-five years they formed what could only be termed a special kind of comedy act. With the timing of vaudevillians, they could tell a story or engage in misunderstandings of technology that would become family lore, such as when they kept returning electric toothbrushes to the appliance store until the salesclerk asked if they were turning the on/off switch (they just thought you had to plug it in), or somehow turning on the mute button on their TV and having to enlist the aid of family members to discover why the thing had suddenly lost sound.

A few things characterized my grandmother. For one thing, she was a rabid baseball fan. Growing up her team was the Reds, and she remembered the players from their 1940 championship team well. But her allegiance changed to the Tigers, and no one was a bigger fan. She would watch or listen to every game (she liked to watch the TV broadcast but listen to the radio call, because Ernie Harwell was the radio broadcaster). She would hold the transistor radio tight to her ear and eventually this would make her wrist sore. She knew all the players, all the strategy, and lived and died with each pitch. I went to many games with her during the seventies, when the Tigers had great players like Al Kaline, Norm Cash, Willie Horton, and Mickey Lolich.

She was also very politically aware, and a lifelong Democrat. She was no crazy-eyed liberal, in fact her social values were pretty conservative. But she believed in the Democratic party, and always voted (for many years she was one of the those little old ladies who worked at the polls). She hated Nixon, revered the Kennedys, and sized up the current president with disdain. Even at the end she was disgusted by the misadventures in Iraq, summing it up as "another Vietnam."

Her tastes were pretty standard middle-American fare, like the Lawrence Welk, Andy Griffith, Andy Williams, and the Statler Brothers. However she also liked edgier fare. As the family were sitting around talking my father speculated that her favorite show may have been All in the Family. She also, while she was able, loved to go the movies. She took me to many, including her favorite, Gone With the Wind. I remember her saying to me afterward how terrible the Union had been to the people of the South.

That brings up some unpleasant tendencies that she did have. Though Ohio was technically a Northern state, the white people of the southern part of the state were not particularly enlightened when it came to race relations. I heard some appallingly racist comments from the elders of my family for many years. I remember when a black television repairman came to fix the TV and they reacted as if it were a home evasion, huddling back in the kitchen while he worked. However over the years she softened, and when she actually met black people she was as warm and friendly to them as she was to anyone. At the end her lucidity would come and go, but she was aware of the candidacy of Barack Obama. She was all for him, claiming it didn't matter what color he was, because he was smart and he gave a good speech. But old habits die hard, and my father told me that during a visit the Sunday before the election she walked he and my stepmother to the door of her apartment in the senior citizens' home and said, "That n*gger better win."

So long, Grammy. I'll miss you.