Mom’s Mom and Dad, Weepy Wednesday, episode 1

It maybe doesn’t sound like I have the cheeriest series of blog posts planned, but you know I will throw in what humor I can. But I have lost so many family members in my lifetime, that I wanted to take time to pay tribute to them all. Hopefully I can find a funny story or two to share.

I never got to know my maternal grandparents. My mom’s dad died a few years before I was born, and her mom passed away when I was only two and a half.

Grandpa was born in Wisconsin in 1876. His parents had been born in what was part of the Germany Empire at the time, but is Poland now. They had nine children after they moved to the United States and settled in Wisconsin. After his first wife died in 1893, Great-grandpa remarried and had four more kids. Sadly, because child mortality was so high back then, three of those thirteen kids died before they reached adulthood.

Anyway, back to Grandpa. He worked at a logging camp in northern Wisconsin, and that’s where he met my grandma. He was seventeen years older than her, which wasn’t an unheard-of age spread for the time.  

Along with her younger sister, Grandma was a cook at the logging camp, where Grandpa worked. They were married in 1912, when she was only nineteen, and worked at the logging camp for at least another five or six years, because this picture shows them with my uncle who was born in 1916.

Anyway, the way my mom described it, Grandpa died from congestive heart failure at the age of 82. This picture was taken three years before he died.

Besides raising three kids and working on their farm, Grandma continued cooking and baking for anyone who wanted to eat. After her husband died, my dad turned the porch on the side of their house into a separate bakery, so she could sell her baked goods. I sure wish I could remember how they tasted, or it would have been nice to have inherited her talent in the kitchen.

By the fall of 1963, she had lost a lot of weight. She attributed it to having worked so hard all summer in her bakery, but Mom finally convinced her to go to the doctor. He found what sounded like a uterine mass, and he got her connected with a specialist in Madison.

My mom shared this story many times over the years. They were in a hotel room across from the hospital in Madison on November 22, when they heard the news that Kennedy had been shot. I picture them huddled around the small screen of the black and white TV, watching in disbelief. 

Grandma hung on until the following June. Everyone seems to have loved her, and her pies, pastries, and breads remain legendary. I wish I would have known her.

Okay, sorry, I didn’t have much of a funny story this time. I’ll work on it for next week.