My Grandparents (part 1)

 My father, George William Simmons, was born to Burt Baldwin Simmons and Bertha Susan Tate Simmons on March 21, 1909.  He was the baby of eight kids.  He had two brothers and five sisters, the youngest was his twin sister.   Burt and Bertha were from Viola, Wisconsin in the Kickapoo Valley and moved from their Elgin, Illinois farm about 1910 to what became the family farm in Pewaukee, Wisconsin. 

Burt, also known as “B. B”, was a famous herdsman, and he and his three boys showed their cattle at many national fairs.  Burt was a difficult man resulting in his two older sons leaving the farm after finishing school, and leaving my father to deal with their cantankerous father alone.  I began my life with my parents and brother living above my grandparents on the family farm, where I lived until I was fourteen.  When Grandpa retired, he built a small house for him and Grandma on the edge of the farm.  This street today is known as Simmons Avenue.

I remember Grandma as being a tall, handsome, prim woman whose wardrobe consisted of plain dresses always worn with a plain apron.  Her shoes were dark clunky shoes that laced up the front.  Her straight gray hair was pulled back into a bun that was held with large rather dangerous looking hair pins, and she never wore any makeup.   I remember her being a pleasant person but not very talkative.  She seldom laughed but when she did it was a very quiet laugh.  The only time I remember her raising her voice was when Grandpa swore in the house.  No swearing in the house was one of her rigid rules, and if it happened, which it seldom did, we kids knew it was a good idea to leave.  Another rule I remember was that we girls had to wear dresses when we visited Grandma.   I’m sure I broke that rule often as I didn’t wear dresses a lot.

Brushing Grandma’s hair and making her bun was a real attraction for a few of us granddaughters.  Her poor head was unfortunately pushed back and forth as we vied for this job but she was very patient with her granddaughters.  We also loved dressing up in her old dresses she kept in a bag in the closet of the guest bedroom. 

My brother and I often stopped to see Grandma on our way home from school.   It was always a special treat when she baked bread and made apple butter, which was the best I have ever tasted.  Her sugar cookies were special too and most days when we visited she would have these on hand.  Grandma still used her wood burning stove for a lot of her baking even though she had a small electric stove in her kitchen.  She seemed to prefer the wood burning stove and claimed she baked better pies and cakes with it.

Grandma loved to walk up to the large woods which was located on the farm where the cows mostly grazed.  She always carried a long, thick stick she used as a walking cane, and we would walk way back into the woods near the creek searching for all of the wild flowers, like wild violets, buttercups and cowslips.  She loved the flowers and brought many of them back to plant in her yard. 

Grandma always had a large garden, and every summer my cousin Michael, my only cousin from my mother’s family, visited for a couple of weeks.  He could be seen crawling through the sweet pea aisle eating peas as fast as he could before he got caught.  I know Grandma saw him from her kitchen window but she never let on.  The raspberry patch on the garden’s edge was a big attraction for us kids, too, but Grandma was stricter about how much we could steal because she made lots of jams and jellies with the berries. 

Probably my favorite memory was when Grandma summoned the entire family for the annual picnic up in the woods, now known in the village as Simmons Woods.  Dad, Dave and I went up to the woods early to make a large pile of wood for a fire and to look for long thin sticks for roasting hot dogs and marsh mellows.  Each family claimed a place around the fire spreading a blanket to sit on and sharing all the delicious food each brought.  Afterward we kids usually played tag or hide and seek, while the adults chatted and caught up on family news.

Working in the barn and in the fields is how I remember Grandpa the most.  He was not a big man, always a little slumped over, was bald, had a large mustache and always had a scowl on his face making it difficult to tell how handsome he was.  All twenty-one of us grandchildren were afraid of him because we knew how quickly he could blow up.  He thought he was right about everything, and if he was challenged at all, he cursed loudly and wildly at whomever stood up to him.   We were sure that sometimes his cursing could be heard in the village, and the family joke was on Sunday when he yelled “Jesus Christ” at one of his sons while they were milking the cows, every congregation in the town’s five churches yelled “Amen!”

Grandpa owned his first car while he and Grandma still lived on the family farm.  It was a little gray coup.  He of course was used to driving horses, and he drove his car pretty much the same way he drove his horses, hard and impatiently.  Racing down the driveway amidst clouds of dust, we never knew if he planned to stop at the end of the driveway before going out onto the street. 

One day when I was about five or six, I was playing in the front yard.  Suddenly I heard a loud thud at the end of the driveway as he came home from one of his village trips.  I turned to see him barely making the turn into the driveway.    But that didn’t stop him.  He raced down the driveway in his usual fashion, clouds of dust flying, heading for the garage.  As he neared the turn towards the garage he began shouting “Whoa, Dammit, Whoa!”  and he and the car went right through the back of the garage.  The little gray coup, unlike the horses, apparently didn’t understand the command “whoa!”

Our Christmas Eve tradition was to go to church first for a special children’s program.  The whole family was usually there as we all went to the Methodist Church.  Afterward, Mom and Dad dropped Dave and me off at Grandma and Grandpa’s house while Mom and Dad went home to welcome Santa.  After Santa’s visit, we could come home to see what he had brought us that year. 

Grandma died when I was twelve.  I remember when she was ill, Mom spent a lot of time taking care of her.  Her death naturally affected the family traditions greatly.  No more annual family picnics in the woods and no more hickory nuts and wild flower hunting. No more special sugar cookies, fresh bread and delicious apple butter waiting for Dave and me, and no more secretly stealing sweet peas and raspberries in the garden.  No more a lot of wonderful things.  Life as we all had known it was over because Grandma was gone.  In her quiet manner, she had been the core of the family.

Grandpa moved back to the farm to live with us.  He went out to the barn occasionally to work with Dad but I don’t remember him losing his temper or swearing loudly.  He just stayed in his bedroom and read most of the time.  Occasionally, I would make myself a special salad because as a teen I was of course dieting all the time and because he sat next to me at the table, sometimes he ate my salad thinking it was his.  Mom and I would just look at each other and smile.

Grandpa did not talk much especially to us grandchildren.   But he and I had one thing in common which he seemed to appreciate.  I did get a rare smile each year on July 11, his birthday, when I reminded him that his birthday was the day after mine, July 10.  That seemed to please him.  That was all, however, in the way of communication with me.  Back to his quiet demeanor.  It was obvious to all of us that as much as the whole family missed her, he was lost without Grandma. His happines had really depended upon her being there.