Grandmother and Grandfather
My paternal grandparents were not well known to my generation. According to the photographic record they did try to get along with their in-laws after my parents’ wedding. However, they soon drifted apart. They summered in the Adirondacks at their cabin on Lake Pleasant. They had negotiated Thanksgiving with my parents and Christmas with Alberta or friends in Brooklyn. We saw them infrequently at my parents’ home.
When we visited the lake we always encountered golf, corn and steak barbecues, relatives by the dozen, all related to The Doctor who lived at the farm on the main road, South Shore Road. The Love family had come to Lake Pleasant from Albany by stagecoach during summer vacations and camped in canvas tents along the shore. Gradually they subdivided the land and each built houses along the shore. Between Bunch and Aunt Harriet’s “Hatbox” was vacant forest until Harriet gave her land to Uncle Bats relations from Thompson Ridge, NY (Vogelbach and Ordway) and Coach House and Rothe were given to decedents of the patriarch who were left out of the initial land allocation because their father was a gambler and outcast.
On the far side of the Hatbox was the Love beach and a couple of rented cabins. Further along the lakeshore on a steep bluff was “The Big House.” The Farm was at the beginning of our road, now called Houghton Lane. The farm was important because the crop of sweet corn matured in August and its harvest provided for various picnics and barbecues throughout late summers.
My grandfather had an unusual sense of humor. Up at the lake he would tell us that if we continued to chew our gum, the flavor would come back. We chewed for days until the gum was hard as a pebble. He then would tell us the Adirondack substitute for gum was pine sap that we could find oozing from the trees out on the lake shore. (It tastes terrible and stays in your mouth a long time.)
He once told me how the locals hunted for rabbit in the winter. They would go out on the south end of the frozen lake in February when the ice was solid and build a large bonfire. The rabbits would come out of the forest in hundreds drawn by the flickering flames. They would gather in a big circle close enough to feel the heat. Meanwhile the ice would melt slowly out spreading under them. Then the fire would burn through the ice and, whoop, the cold air would instantly refreeze the melted ice trapping the rabbits. The locals would then come out from their hiding in the woods and pluck them up like harvesting pumpkins.
Grandfather also liked to shock me. On one occasion we drove to a friend’s house where he was given a box of Greek dolmades, lamb wrapped in a dark green grape leaf oozing olive oil. In the back seat of the car he opened the box with a flourish and asked, “Have a turd?”
Their apartment in Brooklyn was somewhat famous for us. It had deep carpets from Persia. Apparently a close friend in Brooklyn gave them more rugs than they had room for so they simply layered them two or three deep in all rooms. My aunt Alberta had a weight loss machine in her room that intrigued us. It had rubber loops that you put around your waist. When the machine was turned on the rubber loops vibrated at a furious pace. The weight was supposed to jiggle off your waist fat. Spencer tried it; it generated giggles that threw him off the stand.
In the living room was a life sized cast iron statue of Mercury. Boxes of candy and cigarettes were on the tables but neither smoked. The refrigerator was filled with Lily of the Valley cold cream (“Where else would you store cold cream,” was my grandmother’s puzzled reaction.). It had a dumb waiter in the kitchen near the maid’s room which fascinated us. A dumb waiter was a small elevator used to bring food or other supplies up from the basement.
This dumb waiter entered family lore when my grandparents’ apartment was broken into. Apparently the thieves got inside the dumb waiter and hoisted themselves up one story into the kitchen. They didn’t find much of value and were possibly quite puzzled by all the cold cream in the fridge.
Grandmother was nice enough to let Sandy and I live there after we returned from our honeymoon. The apartment was always quite dark when we visited as children, but it had big windows and was on the first floor. I left shortly thereafter for training in publishing in the Poconos while Sandy stayed behind in the apartment. She was somewhat unsettled to notice the stone window ledges had all been greased to prevent burglars from climbing up from the sidewalk.
Grandfather was an attorney in New York. We knew little about him except that he liked to play chess and was something of an expert. However, he might have been exaggerating his prowess; he liked to play his grandchildren but would always start out holding a white pawn in one fist while presenting two, inviting us to chose the starting color while asking, “ do you play the Nimzowitsch-Larsen convention,” I think he was trying to intimidate us, which he did; years later I discovered this was simply a bishop opening attack.