  I went over to what once was my grandparents’ house today to help my mother pack things up for the big move on the 12th of this month, and was immediately given the odious chore of packing up the stuff on my grandfather’s work-bench in the basement. Actually, it wasn’t that bad, there was just a lot of stuff to pack. On the other hand, though, my mother told me that I could go through the boxes on the shelves against one of the walls and sort out what I wanted to keep. This was a good thing. This was a very good thing. Apparently both my mother and my aunt haven’t been entirely on top of things, then again my grandparents had a lot of things they’ve gotten over the years to sort through, and being the inquisitive person that I am (i.e.
a professional snoop/researcher since I was four) I made a number of finds they missed. The first was a black faux fur coat that had been stuffed away. It looks like a cross between a wrinkled velvet blanket and a teddy-bear skin gone wrong but I liked it, must be my grandmother’s side of me poking up. Come to think of it, if I was leaning that way in my thoughts, I would have said that the spirits of my grandmother and grandfather were guiding me in a way, or at least bludgeoning me because I’m the only one in the family who apparently pays attention in a half-assed sort of way. You see, aside from the coat, I also found five boxes of L.P.s (yep, good old vinyl) of all kinds of music, although most were of a classical or operatic nature...which means they had to have been my grandmother’s.
Add to that, I found three boxes of sheet music and old books on music, and I do mean old! There are more than a few that will need to be re-bound, and one of them had the date of 1909. The above two things were important because music was very important to my grandmother. For most of her life she had been taking singing lessons and was very, very active in the music community here in St. Louis.
Both an opera and a night club singer, she was one of the hands that built an opera company here in the city, as well as for a time had a night club called "The Lorelei” in Gaslight Square (a very ritzy, night-club area of town in the 50’s and 60’s). To say she was a character would be like saying that a diamond was just shiny. She was a big woman, both in height and personality, a real grande dam. Among her possessions was a navy blue dress studded with a wide swath of rhine-stones around the collar and cuffs. I won’t tell you how many shoes she had specifically because I’ve never bothered to count, but she loved shoes, and being the only member of my family with big enough feet to fill them, what my aunt didn’t take for her remembrance, I inherited, and there were a lot! And all in their own labeled shoe-boxes. As for personality, I can sum up my grandmother into two small anecdotes.
The first I learned of shortly before she died...that when she and my grandfather owned “The Lorelei” not only did she sing, but her last song for the night would be “Let Me Entertain You.” This would have been no big thing except for the fact that as she was singing she would pull the falsies out of her dress and throw them into the audience. Note for those of you too young to know what “falsies” are and those too old to remember...to sum up they were the old-timey version of the wonder-bra, only instead of it being a bra, it was just two pads that you stuck into your bra to lift, create cleavage, and make the breasts look a bit bigger. The second of these small anecdotes: the morning my grandmother died from her long fight with metastasized melanoma, barely able to speak clearly because of the second tumor in her brain, she sang “Let Me Entertain You” with all the energy she could.
Grasping the arms of the hospital bed we had put in her room at home (she had wanted to die in her home with my grandfather), she shook the bed while belting out the song as best she could and laughed when she was done. On the 5th of November 1999, shortly after 10 p.m. she passed away. My aunt, the eldest of the two daughters my grandparents had, and the only two children they had, practically beatified my grandmother into sainthood when she passed, or so it seemed. Seeing it from my perspective, and with what I know, although my mother thinks my aunt is off of her rocker, I can understand where my aunt is coming from to some degree, and that it’s part of her grieving process. Note: after my grandfather’s death, my mother and my aunt finally came to terms with the blatant truth that while my aunt is the emotional one, my mother is the logical one...and both of them can take it to extremes. What can I say, my aunt and my mother are human...and then I can laugh, because I know I’m human too, and have my own quirks.
The big find of the day though came when I found a box marked “souvenirs & letters.” Opening it up, I found a hard-cover, leather bound notebook/binder with “Students Note Book” embossed on the cover sitting on the top. The first lined page was dated 28 November 1934, and as that the rest of the notebook had all the hallmarks of a Roman Catholic school education, I assumed it to have once belonged to my grandmother, and as that she was born in 1923, that at the time of writing this, she would have been 11 years old. If that had not been enough, right below it was a manila folder marked AG-201—Klatz, Harold D. (Civ), and within the folder were letters my grandfather had written to her while he was serving in World War II, and interspersed with them are letters she had written him and other odds and ends from what looks to be May 1943 through September 1943. I still have to sort through them, and as I do, I’m typing them into the computer with the full intents of making them available on the internet as well on the grounds that even if my computer goes belly-up, I will still have access to them.
Not to mention, maybe someone else will find them interesting as well. I have to admit that when I first found the letters and rifled through them, I came across a hand-written “Notice of Divorce” with another line right below it which read something like “so we can get married again, and again, and again.” Beneath the introductory phrase was a kind of running list of what my grandfather apparently liked about my grandmother, and I couldn’t help but bust out laughing. One line read “built like a brick shithouse in a strong wind” which is very much the way I view the youthful version of my grandfather’s wild sense of humor. Not long after that I was in tears, sad because I miss both of my grandparents (my grandfather died in June of 2003), and sad because their house had been sold...a kind of physical reminder of their existence.
I’m still kind of grieving, which is fine, it’s a part of life and I can contend with it...so long as I find something besides my shirt to blow my nose on. Lloyd’s comment upon seeing the box once we got it home was “You could be going through this for the rest of your life.” We found neat clippings of news articles, camp newspapers, and comics in just the second bundle of letters wrapped in a “Victory Pack.” Well, it’s already getting late, so off to bed I go. Needless to say, I’ve had a couple of great inheritance’s plopped into my proverbial lap. A real find for a history and archaeology junky like myself. :-) 
