Author: Ron Guenther
Date: September 23rd, 2013

Well, Big Don, I hope that I get most of this down before I kick the bucket as you so delicately put it. You know, in the good old days, though, nobody ever died, they passed on. The people talked in code. There were no more graveyards, they became first cemeteries and after people figured out that those were just graveyards, they became memorial gardens. Undertakers no longer existed either, they became funeral directors. If you had cancer, nobody talked about it, that is for sure. I remember when a friend of our family had to have an exploratory operation, pop was asked at a picnic how this all turned out and he said, they opened him up, looked and closed him up. That is all he said. But everybody knew, it was cancer and he was doomed. Sure enough, three months later, they toted him off to the funeral director and left him at the memorial garden.

OK, so, now back to the family history. After the old folks Stead died and Grandpa Sam’s father died, our grandfather Sam inherited the farm and married Grandma Alice. Grandpa Sam’s mother, though was still alive. Grandpa Sam and Grandma Alice had five children. The first was our Aunt Berchion, Berchion Alice Guenther. Then came Charles. He died at about age six months and my understanding was he was buried on the farm. Shortly thereafter Baby Robert was born. He lived seven months. According to Grandma Alice, he was a wonderful baby, cute, cuddly, perfect in every way, he was such a jewel that God wanted him in heaven and so at age seven months the angels came and took him away. Again, he was buried on the farm. Grandma Alice then became pregnant again. She was sure that she was going to have a girl and when she visited some friends just before Christmas, she noticed that the name of the Christmas tree lights was Noma and she said, now I know what I will name this baby. Sure enough, it was a girl, and she named it Noma, Noma Elisabeth. I have no idea where the name Berchion came from, though. It is an unusual name. You can still buy the Noma Christmas tree lights. It always irked Aunt Noma that she was named after the Christmas tree lights. Finally, the last one to be born was our father, John Emmel, named after the family of Sam’s mother. He was born April 15, 1912. The children were all born at home. Grandma thought it was a nuisance to register the birth of her son John and so she did not. She later said that the courthouse had burned down and so there was no record of his birth, but in fact, the courthouse did not burn down and even if it had, there were other places such as the office of vital statistics where the birth would normally have been registered as well. She just did not do it. All his life that did not matter until Papa John wanted to collect social security and then the state did not know him. His two sisters, Berchion and Noma had to go to the post office and swear that he was who he said he was.

As I said, grandpa Sam was very much a German nationalist and he tried to teach the children German. Aunt Berchion could speak German all her life, the German of a little girl. Aunt Noma forgot it all. Papa John could still count at least to twenty, he knew a couple of nursery rhymes and a couple of common expressions like Danke Schoen (thank you) but could not speak German. When he was two, his parents dressed him up like Kaiser Wilhelm II. You have all seen pictures of him in his Kaiser Wilhelm suit. Grandpa Sam also was a good violinist and love of classical music and so he taught Berchion and John to play the violin and later Berchion specialized in the piano. Aunt Noma played the piano but Berchion was better. Papa John got very good at the violin and eventually took lessons from a professor at what became Eastern Washington University, at the time, Cheney Normal, a teacher’s college. I will say more about that later. Grandpa Sam had what he considered a great violin, too. It was a Schtainer violin and marketed in this country by Sears and Roebuck for $6 at the time, which was a fortune when a worker felt lucky to make a dollar a day. That would have been over a week’s wages. But at any rate, things seemed to be going rather well. Pop told me the corn grew so fast on the farm that you could hear it grow as it snapped and crackled. But then the US entered WWI on the side of the allies. Grandpa Sam at that point dug a huge hole and had a big bonfire to give him light to what he wanted to do. He laid in all his German books, which were about all the books he had, and the German flag and carefully wrapped them so that when the time came he could retrieve them in good condition. That time never came and I always wondered if they were still there or if the graves of the little brothers were still there. But I never got back to LaPorte City and after they left the last time, neither did pop. One set of books, he did keep, though, and those were his most prized position. Grandma Alice was a Methodist, a practicing Methodist. But Grandpa Sam did not belong to a church. He subscribed to the teachings of Swedenborg.

Swedenborg was an amazing scientist and philosopher. In his old age, though, he died and went to heaven and spent seven years there. When he came back, he wrote about his experiences and one of his most famous books is called: On Heaven and Hell. You can still find it in any library. As you might expect, his assertions were met with skepticism, but he patiently explained, even to Immanuel Kant, what he had found. He kept those books all his life, read them and pondered over their contents. He claimed the answers to all questions can be found there.

At any rate, after the war was over and all was prospering, he became convinced that his brother in law George was cheating him in the common brick factory that was really raking in the money and one night he went over to have it out with George and hoped that Arch would see what was going on and be an ally. The exchange was heated, George denied that he was cheating, but things got nastier and nastier and finally George pulled a pistol out and shot grandpa between the eyes. Luckily just as he shot grandpa tipped his head back and so the bullet only grazed his skull. He got back home, Grandma Alice bandaged him, and they decided they they should probably no longer be in business together. Grandpa Sam even decided that maybe he would like to move his operations out West. After all, two of his sisters, Elisabeth and Molly lived in Spokane, the brick factory was on his property and legally he owned it, and so maybe he could sell out there in Iowa and move. It was just an idea.

To be continued.