Nearly every year during my boyhood my family drove from North Carolina to Pennsylvania to visit relatives. Both Mom and Dad had lived in the Keystone State, and their parents and cousins still lived there. President Eisenhower was just getting the work crews into high gear building expressways, and we would drive up through the Shenandoah Valley on Route 29, now a secondary road to Interstate 81, passing the towns and battlefields I had read about in various Civil War books. Sometimes we drove all night, and Dad would fold down the seats and make the back of our station wagon a sleeping platform for kids. Cars didn’t have seat belts at that time, and during the day we’d sprawl all over that platform, reading books, coloring, and staring at drivers behind us.
My mother’s father owned a farm at that time, where he lived with his wife Helen, whom he had married after divorcing Grandma several years before I was born. Grandpa Cox was at the end of a long life of entrepreneurship. He had won and lost bucket-loads of money on the stock exchange. During the Depression he owned an auto-parts store in New Castle, Pennsylvania, thriving because so many people, no longer able to afford to buy new cars, had to keep in repair those vehicles they did own. While much of the rest of the country experienced food lines and relief programs, Grandpa Cox owned a small airplane, purchased a horse farm in Kentucky, and played golf with Babe Ruth in Florida. Later, when he lost that money through speculation, he raised goats in Florida, ran a boarding house in Philadelphia, and owned and operated a restaurant, The Dinner Bell, near Hendersonville, NC. His last business venture was the Pennsylvania farm, where he raised dairy cattle.
Grandma Helen, his wife, was a small-built sharp-tongued woman. Though we later became great friends, we boys sensed that Grandma Helen liked the girls better and tried to stay out of her way. Once I did pop out a question. Thinking of the Civil War, I innocently asked, “Grandma, are you a Yankee?” She stared at me, her blue eyes looking enormous behind her glasses, and said crisply, “I’m a damn Yankee and I’m proud of it.”
There were deer in the woods behind the house, barns and fields for play, and a rock driveway where we children once spent, for reasons long forgotten, three or four afternoons crushing pebbles between larger stones. In a field near the house was a tiny pond surrounded by trees. One afternoon my dad, suffering from a rare migraine headache, was watching over us while we swam in the pond. My sister Penelope, age seven, was doing a backstroke and began swimming in circles. Soon she was flailing and crying out for help, and Dad, headache pounding and fully clothed, waded into the water and rescued her.
The house offered a sun porch, where I enjoyed reading, and a sunny kitchen. But the rest of the interior was dark and gloomy, smelling slightly of age and must. At night in our beds my brother Doug and I were terrified. The two hundred year old floorboards creaked, shadows pooled in the corners of the hallways and bedrooms, and we were convinced that ghosts roamed the hallways at night. A farmer had built the house around the time of the Revolutionary War, and though sleeping in such an ancient abode appealed to the junior historian in me, those shadows, creaks, and ghosts made for an uneasy sleep.
My grandparents owned an old black-and-white television, and I remember watching Art Linkletter and his show “Kids Say The Darnedest Things,” and laughing at some of the bits. One night, however, we watched a performance of what I believe was “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” (I investigated this possibility online and see that a live performance of this story occurred on television on February 14, 1960. I don’t know what we would have been doing in February in Pennsylvania, so maybe I’m wrong.) At any rate, at one point in the movie two men are talking to each other. One pulls out a cigarette and starts fumbling for his matches when the other man reaches out a hand, clicks his thumb against his forefinger, and pops out a flame. That’s when you knew he was the devil. I can’t remember anything else of that show, but that scene terrified me. I am sure the rest of our time there I slept with my covers pulled to my chin.
Grandpa Cox died of heart failure a couple of years later. He’d collapsed while milking the cows one morning. Before he left the house, he wrote out a little note for Grandma Helen, who was still sleeping, telling her he loved her.
I wish now I had thought to ask Grandma Helen whether he wrote such a note every morning or just that one time. That’s one of the terrible things about death. Years after someone has died, you want to ask them a question, but no one is left alive to give you an answer. Someone once said, “When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.” We rarely think about that library until it goes up in smoke.
My father painted two watercolors of the farm, one of a storage shed beside the driveway, another of the valley below the farm. When I look at those paintings, I think of my grandparents, that spooky old house, and libraries lost forever.
Grandma Helen, his wife, was a small-built sharp-tongued woman. Though we later became great friends, we boys sensed that Grandma Helen liked the girls better and tried to stay out of her way. Once I did pop out a question. Thinking of the Civil War, I innocently asked, “Grandma, are you a Yankee?” She stared at me, her blue eyes looking enormous behind her glasses, and said crisply, “I’m a damn Yankee and I’m proud of it.”
There were deer in the woods behind the house, barns and fields for play, and a rock driveway where we children once spent, for reasons long forgotten, three or four afternoons crushing pebbles between larger stones. In a field near the house was a tiny pond surrounded by trees. One afternoon my dad, suffering from a rare migraine headache, was watching over us while we swam in the pond. My sister Penelope, age seven, was doing a backstroke and began swimming in circles. Soon she was flailing and crying out for help, and Dad, headache pounding and fully clothed, waded into the water and rescued her.
The house offered a sun porch, where I enjoyed reading, and a sunny kitchen. But the rest of the interior was dark and gloomy, smelling slightly of age and must. At night in our beds my brother Doug and I were terrified. The two hundred year old floorboards creaked, shadows pooled in the corners of the hallways and bedrooms, and we were convinced that ghosts roamed the hallways at night. A farmer had built the house around the time of the Revolutionary War, and though sleeping in such an ancient abode appealed to the junior historian in me, those shadows, creaks, and ghosts made for an uneasy sleep.
My grandparents owned an old black-and-white television, and I remember watching Art Linkletter and his show “Kids Say The Darnedest Things,” and laughing at some of the bits. One night, however, we watched a performance of what I believe was “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” (I investigated this possibility online and see that a live performance of this story occurred on television on February 14, 1960. I don’t know what we would have been doing in February in Pennsylvania, so maybe I’m wrong.) At any rate, at one point in the movie two men are talking to each other. One pulls out a cigarette and starts fumbling for his matches when the other man reaches out a hand, clicks his thumb against his forefinger, and pops out a flame. That’s when you knew he was the devil. I can’t remember anything else of that show, but that scene terrified me. I am sure the rest of our time there I slept with my covers pulled to my chin.
Grandpa Cox died of heart failure a couple of years later. He’d collapsed while milking the cows one morning. Before he left the house, he wrote out a little note for Grandma Helen, who was still sleeping, telling her he loved her.
I wish now I had thought to ask Grandma Helen whether he wrote such a note every morning or just that one time. That’s one of the terrible things about death. Years after someone has died, you want to ask them a question, but no one is left alive to give you an answer. Someone once said, “When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.” We rarely think about that library until it goes up in smoke.
My father painted two watercolors of the farm, one of a storage shed beside the driveway, another of the valley below the farm. When I look at those paintings, I think of my grandparents, that spooky old house, and libraries lost forever.
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