Month: February 2023

I am going to save most of you some valuable time. If you are not of my clan, you’re going to find the following Family History pretty boring, so you might as well sign off right now. However, before y’all leave, I’m going to share the oldest known photo of a family member I’ve found. It’s a posed shot of my great-grandfather Charles Wolf, who lived for exactly 66 years, 6 months, and 6 days.

What I find most interesting about old Charlie is not the fact that he farmed the same plot of land that I grew up on and that was in our family for over 150 years. (The farm is featured in a previous post, here.) It’s also not the numerology associated with his birth and death. No, rather, what I find most interesting is that he was conceived on the very day that my great-great grandfather George returned from his Civil War service. And if you doubt that fact, you can look it up, here. Fascinating stuff, at least it is for those of us who are his descendants and who owe our collective existence to that glad homecoming.

The rest of you are now free to go.

<whispering>

OK, they’re all gone now, right?

Good. Let’s down to business then, shall we?

Cpl. George died in 1901 at the age of 61. You would know that if you’d clicked and read the second link above, but of course I know better than to trust you guys. So, I’ll make it easy for you: No more links. Only old-timey photos, and plenty of ’em. Got it? Good. Oh man, this is going to be fun.

Abba Rebecca Ritter was Willis Wiley’s first wife. She was also my mom’s mom. Abba died at the age of 63, not long after I was born. Although she lived about as long as George and Charlie, the circumstances of her passing came as much more of a shock. Basically, she caught a terrible cold, then inexplicably fell over dead three days later. Yikes!

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Grandpa Wiley got re-married not long afterward, to a woman named Odessa. My mom hated her in the well-worn tradition of fairy tale step-mothers since time immemorial.  It’s not that Odessa was particularly wicked per se.  I remember going for walks with her down by the creek whenever she baby-sat me when I was little, and it was all perfectly fine. Really, it was.

It’s also not that mom was Cinderella. But, well… I guess those fairy tales were written that way for good psychological reason? When Grandpa Wiley died a number of years later, it came to light that he had written mom and her 3 sisters out of his will leaving everything to Odessa. Talk about a shock. The Brothers Grimm could’ve had a field day with that one.

In our family, we don’t talk much about this stuff.  But I always wonder how life would have been different if Abba hadn’t caught that cold. Or if Willis hadn’t had such a terrible lapse in judgement when it came to planning his estate. Or if Odessa had slipped on a rock down by that creek and had hit her head… Oh, no, wait. That’s the plot line from an episode of Murder She Wrote. Sometimes I get a little carried away. Sorry, my bad.

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Tune in next week for all the Civil War dirt on Cpl. George’s escapades with Co. I, 127th Pennsylvania Infantry. Why was he discharged barely a month before the Battle of Gettysburg, only to re-enlist in February of 1865? Inquiring minds need to know.

Or maybe something on my grandpa Wolf’s 3rd cousin, a mildly famous third-rate novelist of middling repute who died of TB at age 37 after an ill-fated trip to the American West. Of whom his contemporary and rival Ernest Hemingway had this snark to say:

“He was a one book boy and a glandular giant with the brains and the guts of three mice.”

O man, I just can’t decide.

So much melodrama, so little time.

Bonus Family Tree, For Family Only

I knew there must be a good reason for being on Instagram.

Best I could come up with today was this lame snow globe.

Uh, no, wait… ah well.

Just keeping it real.

When I first went to the University of Chicago in the fall of 1976, I took the train. That was so I could take my bike and also because the green metal trunk that carried my clothes was too heavy to lug onto a plane. In addition, the train station in Harrisburg – as well as the South Chicago stop on the other end – were close to home (first) and close to my new home-away-from-home (second). A further plus? Amtrak was cheaper than flying on now defunct US Airways, the low cost carrier back in those days. I mean, after all, there was tuition to think about.

For the first three years at the UofC I lived off-campus in The Shoreland over by Lake Michigan. This was a charming 12-story once-upon-a-time hotel that had been converted into dorms.  My final year I took advantage of a free-room-and-board gig as a residence hall assistant back on campus, just south of the Midway in a complex called Burton-Judson Court. AKA “B-J” for short.

Brief blurb on “B-J” from The Chicago Maroon is here.

Vaulted ceilings, arched walkways, vines of ivy climbing the limestone, wood detailing in the rooms, a tower — Burton-Judson is an old dorm that looks even older…

B-J had six “houses.” Mine was Vincent House. Each house came equipped with a student Resident Assistant (or “RA” for short – i.e. “me”) and a faculty Resident Master.  In the case of Vincent House at that time, the Master was Joel Gray, an older history prof and long-time bachelor.  Finally, the year before I moved in, he had tied the knot with a much younger woman named Leah. In fact, Leah was a UofC student a year behind me. This led to, shall we say, an “interesting” dynamic during my tenure as RA. And thereby hangs a tale.

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The assemblage of mostly freshman residents of Vincent House in ’79/’80 ran the gamut. Clustered down on the first floor lived a tight-knit group of preppies I referred to in my head as “The Sons of Privilege.” There was Joe Jares Junior, son of a well-known-at-the-time sportswriter of the same name (JJ Senior) who worked at Sports Illustrated. There was a guy whose name I now forget, but his dad was the CEO of International Harvester Corporation. And there was a cheeky kid from Toronto who I remember to this day.  He went on to later acclaim as a political commentator on PBS and the NY Times op-ed pages. His name? David Brooks.

I lived on the 3rd floor in a single near the stairwell, just down the hall from Joel and Leah. Both those geographic details become important later on. Trust me, you’ll see why if you persevere to the end.

Up on the fourth floor, a motley crew I thought of as “The Miscreants” held court in a non-stop card game that only rarely was interrupted by class attendance. These students would not end up faring well, either academically or socially. One guy, addicted to a particular pinball machine down in the basement lounge of B-J – a place known affectionately as “The Pit” – lasted less than a single term before dropping out. Another decided mid-year to return to Boston to become a mail carrier. You heard me. A postal worker. I kid you not.

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The two ringleaders of the terror campaign against Joel and Leah were kindred spirits who looked as different as night and day. One was tall and fair with a wispy goatee. The other by contrast was smaller and had dark curly hair.  I don’t remember their names, but maybe we can just think of them for discussion purposes as Leopold and Loeb? For those of you not familiar with these two much-earlier star-crossed UofC students, that hair-raising story is here.

The Miscreants may have done well enough at poker, but they smoked so much dope that it was sometimes hard to see from one end of the fourth floor hallway to the other, let alone to see why in the hell they were attending college in the first place. I’m pretty sure their parents saw it similarly once their offspring were expelled from the University. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. More on all this later.

I think maybe the underlying issue that got them in such a rage about Joel and Leah was the ratio of males to females among the student population at the UofC in those days. Nowadays it’s roughly even. But back then it was closer to 3:1.  And I can tell you from personal experience that guys getting dates were few and far between. “Frustrated” doesn’t even begin to cover it.  So Joel marrying Leah they saw as an unforgivable act of poaching a scarce resource (i.e. eligible females). Or so it seemed at the time.

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Nonetheless, they were creative, I’ll give them that. The cold January night when they set off an M-80 explosive in the Vincent House stairwell nearly blew me off my narrow bed. Smoke alarms blared at 3 AM.  Everyone in B-J evacuated. And let me tell you, baby, it was cold outside. But no one got caught, at least not that night. Of course, we all had our suspicions….

Their comeuppance came later, in Spring term when the sun had started to warm up the Midway.  They had devised a rock-on-the-end-of-a-rope pendulum device that swung out from their fourth-floor window, and correspondingly swung through Joel and Leah’s third-floor window, at 3 AM no less. Leaded glass shattered all over the Master’s bedroom interrupting God-only-knows what. Fact is, even to this day, I shudder to think.

They either didn’t plan it through far enough to realize that the principles of physics and geometry – as well as the regulations of the University – were not going to be in their favor in the aftermath of such an escapade, especially after one of them let go of the rope. That left it dangling out Joel and Leah’s smashed third floor window. Hmmmm, I wonder how did THAT happen?

Or maybe they just didn’t care. When dragged before Ed Turkington, Director of Residence Life – who also happened to live in B-J himself at the time – they put up no defense. Instead they preferred to snicker with heads bent together. Sent packing forthwith, I never heard tell of either of them again.

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For all I know these guys eventually became successful investment bankers or Internet kingpins. I mean, c’mon: Andy Alper, a classmate with a middling academic record at best, went on to become chairman of the University’s board of trustees, and ended up donating a hundred million dollars to establish the Odyssey Scholarship. This was, of course, after his career as a vulture-capitalist at Goldman-Sachs made him a mega-gazillionaire.

Another classmate, John Huggins, invented the streaming technology that allows online videos to buffer ahead, thus solving the problem of jerky interruptions to porn videos on the early Internet. With some grad school buddies he patented the code, sold it to AOL, and became wealthy enough to spend the rest of his days as an angel investor for worthy causes.  He also served a stint on now-Senator Hickenlooper’s transition team back when Hick moved up from being Denver’s mayor to being Colorado’s governor. John also lived for a time in the iconic “Sleeper House” along I-70 on Genesee Mountain just west of town. Hey, it’s a tough life, but somebody’s gotta live it.

It’s pretty safe to say, the Miscreants never got UofC diplomas, honorary or otherwise. But my hope is that neither of these creepy Nietzschean ne’er-do-wells ended up as a serial killer. Of course, you never know, what with the ghosts of Leopold and Loeb hovering nearby.  As for their parents, I imagine they were plenty steamed when that final tuition bill arrived in the mail – after the fact, once all the dust had settled.

Parting Shot

.Once upon a time, if God in his heaven wanted to find me, he’d have to look no further than the bounds of this bird’s-eye-view of the Pennsylvania landscape. It was taken around the time of my birth by a family friend who owned and flew a Piper Cub.

See those curved contour strips in the center-left in the aerial view? Dad put those in – along with the ponds – to combat erosion. He was a real forward-thinker, our dad.

If you squint real hard and look at the lowermost center right – just along the edge of the woods underneath the power lines? That was the blueberry patch. None finer anywhere. And you can trust me on that one, folks.

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Summer was spent baling hay, picking berries, and pulling sweet corn. Down time? Swimming and fishing of course!

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Come fall we’d hunt pheasants or rabbits in the spent stubble of cornfields. White tail deer we hunted too, from tree stands built deeper in the woods.

Since our fruit and veggies fed them year round, it was only fitting we’d get to feed on them in turn. You know, it was the ever-spinning cycle of agrarian life back before the the dawn of the Internet left us all too often indoors and sitting down.

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Nowadays our horizons have expanded, as have our butts. If God wants to find one of our kids, he better get in something bigger than a Piper Cub and be prepared to fly halfway across the globe. It’s a new day, and a new world.

The apple and other fruit trees are no longer trimmed or harvested. The land is now broken up into 5-acre plots, with a separate house on each. It has become mostly a bedroom community and the remaining fields are fallow.

I honestly have no idea what has become of the deer, the fish, or the small game. My guess is they are all doing just fine.  I doubt that they eat as sumptuously as they once did, however.  But maybe that’s just me? You can make that call. All I know for sure is that the Alpha-predator for deer where we now live in Colorado definitely does not hunt from a tree stand. And that’s the one other thing you’ll just have to trust me on, folks.

Here on the day after Groundhog Day, just a quick look at the lighter side of life, very briefly.

Shout out to my daughter (RGW) who journeyed to the Southern Hemisphere for a Peace Corps conference in Botswana recently. FYI, she had a 12-hour layover in Paris, just in case you thought maybe the Eiffel Tower had moved. The first photo is from LA, specifically the Santa Monica pier, from a few years ago when she visited me there on a Peace Corps training mission. The rest? Well, you’ll figure it out.

Usually when I close this kind of thing I say something like “Live Long and Prosper.” But in this case, for RGW the proper closing is “Live Long and Make the World a Better Place.”

Love ya, Sweetie!