Snoopy and the Red Baron

I remember one specific Christmas episode with my great-grandmother Leta Eckman. I’m not sure exactly what year it was—1971, perhaps. I was seven then. Whenever it was, I was old enough to walk to my grandparents’ house on my own—with permission.

My dad’s parents—Vivian and Ed—only lived about four blocks away from us. With permission, my siblings and I could go over there at any time, since we didn’t have to cross any busy streets. (My mother’s parents lived about two miles away, so a bit too far for a young child or children to walk alone. That grandmother also worked, so she wasn’t as accessible.)

As a child, I rarely went to my grandparents’ home on my own. Usually I was with my younger sister Michelle, but this time I was alone. Maybe she was too young to go with me yet, or she was just doing something else.

We had permission to simply enter the house without knocking, as if it was our own. (This was standard for both sides of my family at the time.)

So I walked in the house that Saturday or Sunday afternoon and called for my grandmother who was in the basement. This boded well for me. My grandparents had a finished basement room for entertaining, complete with a built-in bar. If I had timed it well—i.e. arrived before 3:15 p.m.—my grandmother would let me have a glass of root beer, cola, ginger ale or even Fresca. This was a special treat and perhaps the reason I went over in the first place.

The back door of the home led directly from a small landing down the stairs, so I went right down to visit with my grandmother (and get my glass of pop). While I was with her I learned that Grandma Eckman was upstairs, and I should say hello. Also, could I get the bathroom towels for her so she could wash them?

Grandma Eckman was sitting at the dining room table. From the kitchen I couldn’t see what she was doing, so I trooped right in there. Well, maybe I knew what she was doing, but I walked in as if I didn’t. In retrospect this is a little surprising, since I was a big snoop. You see, she was wrapping Christmas presents.

“Hi, Grandma!” I said nonchalantly, as I walked from the kitchen into the dining room. (Now, I had to walk through the dining room to get to the bathroom, so it wasn’t as though I was just snooping.)

Her reaction was quick and forceful.

“Get out of here!” she ordered, spreading her arms over the table as if to cover the presents closest to her. Of course, that didn’t work very well at all. She had presents everywhere, including stacked on two chairs, which I could easily see. Some were wrapped already; others were simply decorated with ribbons and bows.

But she scared the crap out of me, and I immediately dashed into the hallway. Well, not so immediately that I couldn’t take a quick survey of the room.

While it was only a guess, I suspected that one of two unwrapped games stacked on the chair was for me. It was called “Snoopy and the Red Baron.”

Actually, there were two of them, both unwrapped. One could only be for my brother Jeff and/or me, and the other most likely for her other great-grandson-- Christopher Demski, who is my age.

What I remember second most (after the present) was just how much she intimidated me. How strong and forceful she was. I stood in the bathroom with the towels for a few minutes, not knowing what to do. I was both excited (about the present) and scared of her. How could I get past her and back to the basement to her daughter-my grandmother?

After about sixty child-hours, she called to me far more gently, “Jerry, your grandmother is calling you. You better see what she wants.”

This was my permission, so I slinked through the dining room without even looking at her. I am positive she was watching me, however, her eyes and force of character pushing my head in the opposite direction of where she and her gifts were.

Oh, and my brother and I did get one of the “Snoopy and the Red Baron” games for Christmas. She wrote “Merry Christmas, Jeff and Jerry. Love, Grandma Eckman” in magic marker on the lid of the box. We played that game a lot!

Smoking

She'd just stop. That was it. How hard could it be? She had self-control. She didn’t really care that much about smoking anyway. She only started to keep her former husband company in bars. She only continued because she knew there was something alluring about a slender woman with a cigarette, and she liked being alluring. But she was too old to be alluring any longer, and besides, she didn’t go to bars any more. She rarely smoked, anyway.

Most importantly, the smoke seemed to irritate her new grandson, and she wanted to get to know him. While she feared she wouldn’t have patience with older grandchildren, she still liked babies. She had three young grandsons, and the first two had breathing issues that kept her from holding them very much. The new baby also seemed restless when she pulled him close. Having recently lost her husband she just couldn’t bear that he seemed irritated.

Hell, she didn’t like the after-smell herself. Sometimes when she came home to her house after being out for some time, she could smell stale cigarettes in the air. And she was a meticulous housekeeper. She cleaned and emptied her ashtrays as soon as she finished each cigarette. Still, the smell still lingered. She never really noticed it so much when she lived with Richard (who also smoked), but now that she was in a new house and on her own, the smell was aggravating.

So she decided to stop.

Doing so, she learned, was neither easy nor hard. “It had its moments,” she would say later.

Of course, she didn’t quit instantly. Instead, she began to quit by setting up a rule. She would only smoke in the kitchen with the window open and the oven fan going. This, at least, would keep as much of the smell out of the house and off her as she could. And since it was a cold, harsh winter, she didn’t want to keep her window open very much.

However, she could still smell the stale smoke in the air, even after having thoroughly cleaned her drapes and furniture. So she moved into the basement when she wanted a cigarette, again turning on a fan to diffuse the smoke.

While she was still a healthy and capable woman, even at age 68, going up and down a flight of stairs every time she wanted to light up and for no other reason was annoying, especially when she awoke in the night, lonely, with the craving pulling at her. She would crawl out of bed in the dark, don her heavy bathrobe, trudge through the quiet house, retrieve the cigarette pack and lighter from the kitchen drawer, stumble down the stairs into the cold basement, fumble for the fan and light switches and then light up.

One night in April, she just couldn’t do it. She had been up too late celebrating her birthday, her head ached, her legs hurt and there was a wicked draft. She simply rolled over and went back to sleep. A couple of weeks later she realized that she had stopped smoking altogether.

And that, she was fond of saying, was that.

Found money

My father's mother--my grandmother Vivian--died suddenly when I was 12 years old. She had entered the hospital for hip replacement surgery, which went very well. But on a Friday morning, several days after the surgery, she shared that she was having difficulty breathing. Shortly after she lay down, she fell into eternal slumber. A blood clot moved into her lungs.

Naturally, this was tragic for my family, leaving us all floundering for a while. As a wife, mother and grandmother, she ferociously worked to maintain a solid and stable family. This makes sense; her own parents divorced when she was a girl, she moved with her mother (my great-grandmother Leta) several times through nearly a handful of step-fathers and then lived with her father from high school to marriage.

As many women of the time, she was the master of her house, particularly the interior. My grandfather, of course, was the master of the lawn and garage. They shared the responsibility of the flower and vegetable beds.

When my grandfather and aunt (only 22 at the time) went through my grandmother’s personal things and the rooms and storage areas of her domain, they uncovered several tins and containers of money—change and bills—that she had hidden in various places around the house.

Prior to this, we knew that she had a couple of places where she kept jars of primarily pennies – her bureau, the dining room hutch and the linen closet, specifically, but this stash of cash all around the house was a surprise discovery. They found money jars (and plastic baggies) in the pantry cupboard of the “fruit room” (an unheated room in the basement for food and other storage), laundry cupboard, flour canister, spice cabinet, hall closet, guest bedroom closet, her closet (in a shoe box), her craft closet and an upstairs storage closet. (My grandparents’ home had a single second-floor bedroom that was used by my father and uncle when they lived at home.)

Nothing in her relationship with my grandfather indicated that there was any distrust in their relationship, giving her cause to have her own money, just in case. He may not have been the easiest man to live with, but he believed in their marriage.

However, Vivian was a child of the Depression, which may account for her hidden savings, at least partly. Perhaps she adhered to an understanding that it is always good to have some cash at home, just in case. (My grandparents were financially secure, and both were extraordinary money managers.) She may also have learned to hide her money when she lived with her father. While I am not positive of his financial state, I do know that his second wife was an alcoholic, and it is quite possible that the step-mother appropriated “found” money for her addiction, since that is common for such persons. Or it could be that having grown up in several unstable homes with her mother (four husbands from age eight to 15), Vivian learned that she needed to keep an emergency stash. Whatever the reason, she did it.

There wasn’t a lot in each location, but the total was several hundred dollars.

Grandma's Game

I grew up playing cards. Like many children I learned how to play Go Fish and Old Maid at a young age. When we played Old Maid, we didn’t use specialty cards, we used a standard deck, removed the Queen of Diamonds and let the Queen of Spades be the Old Maid. We didn’t, ironically, use the joker. For some reason, it always had to be the Queen of Spades.

Maybe because we also learned how to play Hearts. In that card game, the Queen of Spades is the highest scoring card, and also the one no one wants.

As I grew older, but still a child, I learned a flurry of other card games – Rummy (a few variations), Hearts, Crazy Eights, Kings-in-the-Corner, Solitaire, Poker, Blackjack, Tripoli, Nerds, Bullshit, Fan Tan, Muggins and Euchre (three variations, including Bid Euchre). I’m pretty sure I played Cribbage, too, but that one I have forgotten. When I was in seventh grade, my friends Glenn, Todd, Jeff and I used to play Euchre every day at lunch.

But as a child, we had a special card game that I learned from Vivian, my dad’s mother. We played it every holiday and at every other occasion we could talk her into playing. This was a big family act. Everyone would play, and it was a simple enough card game for my younger sister and I to play just as competently as everyone else. Plus, my grandmother let us keep the pennies we played with. Yes, we could also use poker chips, but playing with pennies was far more fun for a young child.

I don’t know where my grandmother learned the game, but her mother – my great-grandmother Leta – also played with us, as she always spent her holidays with us. Since Leta came from a family of card players herself, it is quite possible she taught her daughter the game.

Here’s how it goes:

It requires two decks of cards shuffled together.

Everyone puts a penny in the “kitty.” The dealer shuffles. (I also learned how to riffle shuffle at a young age. My sister and I practiced it until we got it and quickly became proficient. Grandma Eckman was proficient at this, but pretended she didn’t know how to do it. She mostly used the overhand shuffle.)

The dealer distributes five cards to each player, who lays them out face up in a line. The best poker hand wins the kitty.

That’s the first part of the game.

The next part is a kind of redistribution of wealth. The dealer turns over the first card. Let’s say it is a Five of Diamonds. “Five puts in one,” dealer says. This means that every other player who has a Five of any suit in her hand must add a penny to the kitty. The dealer than turns over the second card—such as a Queen of Hearts—and says, “Queen puts in two.” All players with a queen in their hands must add two pennies to the kitty. This goes on through five.

Following this is the inverse. The dealer turns over a card, say a Nine of Spades and says, “Nine takes out one.” Any player with a nine of any suit in his hand then retrieves one penny from the kitty. The dealer continues in the same way as the “puts in” step, only by calling “takes out” for four additional cards—i.e. through five.

Sometimes the kitty runs out of pennies. When this happens, the dealer must boost it with pennies from his own personal stash.

The final step of the card game has the dealer turn over one card at a time on a count: first card = “one;” second card = “two;” third card = “three;” and so on up to “thirteen.” When the card matches the count—for example a Seven of Clubs on “seven,” then every player except the dealer adds that number of pennies to the kitty.

At the end of this section, the dealer then collects what has been deposited in the kitty. This is the end of the hand, and the deal then goes to the person on the left.

In our family, we played this game for hours.