I never knew my maternal grandfather who died from a cerebral hemorrhage before I was born. I have had to fill in the blanks in my knowledge of him from the few comments that my mother and her siblings made about him. Only two of my many cousins were old enough to have had a relationship with him and of the two only one was willing to describe him for me. He spoke of Friday afternoon visits with Grandpa Ulrich at a time when he was just a young boy. He remembered talking with our grandfather about his large collection of books. In fact, he described Grandpa coming home from work each Friday with a mesh bag that contained a loaf of rye bread from the local Weingarten’s grocery store and a new book that was his weekly splurge.
My cousin explained that our grandfather was collecting all sorts of books but that his main interest was in agriculture because he was planning to move to a farm once he retired. I would later learn that my grandfather had already purchased some land in a small town just to the south of Houston, Texas. There he hoped to spend his golden years raising crops and animals and reading his books. My cousin related that our grandfather was a very bright man who had been studying multiple topics for years. He enjoyed sharing what he had learned with his eager young grandson.
My mother spoke of her father with a kind of reverence but also a bit of hesitation. She loved him and questioned him at one and the same time. She was never as emotionally close to him as she was with her mother. Her memories are of a hardworking and proud man who never missed a single day of work. She described how he would leave their house each morning wearing a suit which he would replace with a uniform at the Houston Meat Packing Company where he labored all day in the butchering area. The work was unforgivingly back breaking and as he grew older his legs would ache so much that he wrapped them in ace bandages for relief. He endured the pain nonetheless because his job allowed him to bring home scraps of meat that kept the family fed during the worst of the Great Depression.
My grandfather was an immigrant who came to the United States from the Slovakian area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He arrived at the Port of Galveston in 1912, barely escaping World War I. He worked on a local farm and lived in a rented room near the present day stadium for the Houston Astros. He was a frugal man who secured passage for my grandmother a year later. Together they combined forces to save for land of their own and then to build a tiny house that grandpa would pay a contractor to construct one room at a time, paying cash all the way. When the home was completed my grandfather was the owner of his tiny castle which never ceased to make him proud. He would often remind his children that few people in the world ever rose to the level of being masters of their own fates.
He and my grandmother grew vegetables in the backyard. He purchased a cow and brokered with someone to allow the cow to graze in a pasture within walking distance of his home. My mother would often speak of taking the cow back and forth from her home to the field in the shadow of downtown Houston. It was an onerous task for her, especially as she became older. Her father would remind her that owning a cow was a grand thing and that she should walk with her head held high. That was often the essence of her description of her father, an industrious man who provided well for his family, but also made his own way, unwilling to accept favors or admit that the family of ten souls was ever struggling during the most difficult times.
A rift opened between my mother and her father when he and two of her siblings testified before a judge that my grandmother was mentally ill and needed to be hospitalized. My mother was only about five years old at the time and she saw this action as a punishment for my grandmother. Her older siblings would explain that the stress of birthing ten children, watching two of them die in infancy, and caring for such a large brood had broken her and left her quite ill. Nonetheless my mother would maintain for all of her life that nothing had been wrong with my grandmother and that her father’s actions had been hateful.
I suppose that none of us will ever really know what went on in the tiny house that we would visit with our parents. By the time we came along and developed memories of any kind our grandfather had been long dead and our grandmother spoke no English so it was impossible for us to garner any information from her. The rest of my mother’s siblings said little about their father. Only the books remained gathering dust in the bookcases that lined the walls of the dining room. They spoke volumes to me. They were witnesses to my grandfather’s intelligence and curiosity. They spoke of his dreams.
Now and again my mother would proudly describe how much her father loved the United States of America. He was grateful for the opportunities here and would encourage her and her siblings to take full advantage of education and freedom. He became a citizen of the United States only a few years after he had stepped from the steamer that brought him to Galveston. He faithfully read the newspaper and listened to President Roosevelt’s fireside chats, He followed the events unfolding in Europe.
My mother said that there were only two times that she remembered seeing her father cry. One was when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. The other was after World War II when the Russians made Czechoslovakia part of the Soviet Union, placing an iron curtain on the freedoms of the people there. His brain hemorrhage occurred shortly thereafter and my mother always seemed to believe that seeing the place of his birth being dominated once again had been too painful for him.
I have found myself watching the fate of Slovakia and thinking of my grandfather. I wish that life had been kinder to him, but I also know that he thought of himself as being a lucky man. He was determined to make the best of his life and he was able to do it here in the United States. Today as his homeland leans far to the right I wonder if he would disapprove of their desire to become more insular. Would he see history repeating itself? Would he worry that Slovakia will cave if Russia continues a drive to restore the former Soviet Union, to dominate Slovakia once again? I simply don’t know, but I care about the tiny country and its people because I suspect that individuals who share my DNA and his are living there. I am happy that my grandfather came to America and provided his children with freedom and opportunity. I understand from his story how important it is to safeguard those privileges well. I watch the pulse of the world carefully and hope that I don’t have to cry in his name for any country or people who lose their basic human rights. Sadly, I am worried because so many of the signs do not bode well. I will be vigilant and hope for the best.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 