Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: October 26th, 2013

As I said, Grandpa Sam came and picked up pop and left the two girls in Coos Bay.  Now it was pop’s turn to drive and whenever they had free time he drove.  As as the case with previous drives, he also never could keep track of wherever they went.  In his case, it was throughout Washington, Northern Idaho, British Columbia, and so on, just drive and drive and drive.

Once while they were driving out on a country road, they came around a corner and grandpa said, stop, there is something that is not right in that house.  So, pop pulled over and stop and grandpa took his pistol which he always had with him on these drives and went to the house.  The door was open and there seemed to be no one at home.  So, he carefully walked into the living room and there lying in a crib was a small baby, about two or three months old and curled up at the feet of the baby on the crib was a rattle snake preparing to strike.  Grandpa was a crack shot, he pulled out his pistol and shot the snake in the head.  It turns out that the mother was outside working in the garden and she heard the shot and came running in.  There was grandpa taking the dead snake outside.  The woman was terribly grateful for his saving the life of her child and asked what she could do, anything.  He said he wanted nothing except for the rattles of the snake.  She naturally agreed to that and so he cut off the rattles, let them dry out and when they got home, pasted them into the inside of his violin.

I had heard that story many times growing up and had not given it much thought, mainly, I guess, I figured that it was one of those cock and bull stories and let it go at that.  Well, many years went by, pop played that violin on occasion, usually his own when we played through music together, and then I had a family of my own.  Christine took up the violin when she was quite small and after she had grown, it was time for her to have a full size violin.  We had inherited grandpa’s violin, that is pop had given it to us because he no longer played, and we took it to Schuback to repair it.  By this time it was in need of some real repair.  There he found the rattles and took them out.  He said that the old timers all put rattlesnake rattles into their violins, they claimed it helped the acoustics.  It was really a mediocre violin but OK for a starter.  Later, Christi needed a better violin and so we passed this violin on to Dory whose own daughter had become interested in the violin and needed an adult violin.  Then Dory’s house burned down, the violin was crushed into a thousand pieces or more and that should have been the end of the violin.  But Brother Ed, who is good at this kind of thing, took the crushed violin and put it all back together.  It was like a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces pretty much looking alike.  It was amazing and so now Brother Ed has the violin.  The violin itself has its own adventure story.  Who knows, maybe one of his family will take up the violin, decide it needs improving and seek out some rattles, but then again, maybe not.

To be continued.