The Grandmother I Never Knew

Emily Tichenor Greider

Emily Tichenor Greider was my paternal grandmother, but I never felt that I knew her. We visited my mother’s parents every summer on their farm in Pennsylvania and usually stayed a couple of weeks, so I knew those grandparents well. My father’s parents lived in Topeka, Kansas, and Kansas seemed far away from Ohio in the 1930′s. We did not visit Topeka as a family until the summer of 1941 when I was 10 years old. We were a crowded household there and I have few specific memories of Emily, just a general sense of her presence. She died later that year. After that my grandfather, William Henry Greider, came to spend several weeks with us every year. I remember that he critiqued my efforts in high school Spanish. So Emily remains the grandparent I never knew as an individual.

Brother Bill and I have discovered 105 letters she wrote to her oldest son and our father, Harold William Greider, between 1924 and 1930. At the Greider Clan blog we have posted excerpts from the correspondence. Certain themes are repeated: visits to and from relatives and family members, giving and receiving presents, the garden, the weather, the new technology of radios and automobiles. Passages related to these themes are samples from a much larger number.

Now, in her letters, Emily Tichenor Greider comes alive to me: inquisitive, generous, and somewhat exacting.

Click here to read the letters.

Childhood Pleasures

Richard, William and Nancy Greider, Wyoming, Ohio, c. 1938

At my Greider Clan blog, we have a new Pictures of the Clan page, one devoted to the pleasures of childhood as shown in the old snapshots. Please take a look at Childhood Pleasures.

William Tichenor – my dental great-great-grandfather

At another blog, Greider Clan, we members of the clan are posting pictures, documents and memories of our extended family.

William Tichenor, Early Dentist and Inventor

We are fortunate in that the Rochester Public Library published the story of ancestor William Tichenor of Rochester, New York. (His dental tools are now on display in the office of a practicing-dentist descendant in Florida.) Among William Tichenor’s children was George Tichenor. He was my great-grandfather. Click here to read all about William Tichenor and his family.

Emily, Bethia Augusta, Mary and George Tichenor, children of William Tichenor

My Father’s Model T

If you are interested in the Model T or in early experiences driving one, I have posted My Father’s Model T at my Greider Clan blog. Your own comments and memories are very welcome

The Archaeology of Home

Immediate Disclaimer: Katharine Greider, the author of this book, is my niece. She is the daughter of journalist William Greider, and William Greider is my brother. I don’t think I can be detached about this book.

The subtitle of The Archaeology of Home is An Epic Set on a Thousand Square Feet of the Lower East Side. An epic, maybe, with lots of characters and some important themes related to an actual but not completely knowable history. I prefer, however, to see it as a tapestry of three different threads: the history of the house at 239 7th Street in the East Village; Katherine’s experiences before, during and after living in the house; reflections on the meaning of home. My tapestry is not exactly a wall hanging, but has more the shape of a scarf, as the threads weave in and out but also move forward in time.

Katherine and David, expecting their first child, bought portions of an 1840-era town house and lived there for five years until a nighttime call:

The situation, he told me, was more serious than we had supposed. Indeed, the foundation of the building in which my children and I were even now settling down for another night’s rest was in what professionals call a failed condition, its crushed and rotted wooden beams propped up by crumbling brick piles and …. Ralph said he would wait until Monday morning before reporting this hazard to the City of New York, at which time city officials would almost certainly seal the building. And he left no doubt as to what we should do over the weekend: Get the hell out.

They got out, and spent the next two years trying to clean up the mess. But mostly this is not a story about the mess. It is the story — going back to the Lenape Indians — of those who used the land, owned the land, built on the land, and lived in the house they built. It is a history of this particular slice of the lower east side, and it’s not an architectural history: it’s a history of the people. In the true spirit of archaeology, Greider digs down through the layers of occupation, dusting off and examining and marveling as she goes.

As a family member I was interested in her account of their attempts to deal with the financial problems resulting from the buildings almost-collapse. In Chapter Eight she documents the swings in their personal fortunes, sometimes accompanying the ups and downs of the value of 239 7th St. I’ve been there myself and discovered, as she did, that you do what you have to do. What you have to do only includes what can be done. And, as she said to herself at the time in a list of precepts:

7. Don’t give up on your own happiness.

Sounds corny, but it worked. So, although they admitted to self pity at times, they came out about even at the end, plus, of course, the experience.

Several times Greider looks at the question of what is home. Is is any place where you can take your shoes off and rummage in the refrigerator? Or is it a particular place, to which one is attached by strong associations? Both, apparently, and when the attachments have to go, you start over and build new ones. When David blew his nose at the closing on the new apartment, purchased with the proceeds from the sale of 239, Katharine saw it as

…the mystical sequel to that moment when he stomped the crystal glass at our wedding, acknowledging in our joy the destruction of the Temple, etc., etc.

The “etc., etc.” is telling because Katharine has not previously used that expression, generally preferring to give us specifics. Yes the Temple was destroyed and, while we can’t forget that, we recognize the joy possible in all the et ceteras.

And here is a quibble. Please. More maps, and bigger maps with color; more pictures; maybe some family trees of those multi-generational families like the DeLanceys and the Weiders. You could link to them at your Facebook page.

Thank you, Bill

Journalist William Greider is my little brother, and I am his warm supporter and affectionate critic.

His article in the new issue of The Nation feels my pain and makes me proud, proud that someone I love and respect has articulated what I have been fuzzily groping toward for several years now.

When Bush won in 2000 I was disgusted; I believed he had stolen the election. When he won again in 2004 I was disgusted again. Yes, he had really won this time, but by playing on our fears. During all those eight years I grieved at the trashing of the public welfare but hoped that better times were coming.

Obama fed that hope and I greeted his victory in 2008 and inauguration  the following January with exhilaration. It was good to elect our first black President, although it would also have been good to have elected our first female President. My joy came from the belief that we were now back on track to build an America based on shared values and the equal worth of every individual.

Bill has learned that it’s not working out that way:

I asked an old friend what she makes of the current mess in Washington. “Whatever the issue, the rich guys win,” she responded.

As Bill points out, the system seeks excess:

What the capitalist system wants is more — more wealth, more freedom to do whatever it wishes. This has always been its instinct, unless government intervened to stop it.

You may disagree. You may say that simple survival instincts will keep the major corporate interests from going so far that they destroy the system. Our experience — as recently as two years ago  — does not support this. When you are on a big ship, you believe you are immune to problems like icebergs and, should you encounter one, you have your own lifeboat on reserve. This attitude disparages a culture that thinks we are all in it together.

In Collapse, his book about the extinction of once-successful societies, Jared Diamond shows how the elite can go on denuding resources until no one can survive. The chiefs on Easter Island always wanted more statues, even though it was clear the practice could not continue They knew they were superior and they felt secure, especially because they were making more statues. They were wrong, of course and, when they went down, they took everyone else with them. Diamond also asks why, conversely, a society may be willing to pay a great deal to ensure the security of all. In the Netherlands, social and political opinion supports a very expensive system of sea walls. They know that when the sea comes in, they will all drown.

We are living behind sea walls that our elites no longer wish to maintain. Our father (Bill’s and mine) worked for one company all his life and retired on his Social Security and a modest pension. My husband and I have our Social Security, he has a small pension, and we have some other resources. Politicians act as if Social Security were nothing, an insignificant amount of money to the individual. Maybe it is minor if you are making big bucks and big bonuses and are used to living that way. We held moderately-paying middle class jobs. In retirement our two Social Securities are enough so that, even without other resources, two people can live modestly in a paid-for house — but only if they have medical insurance.

I don’t know if our present way of life will be available to our children. Right now, they count on their own educations and smarts and careers to see them through and to educate their own children for similar survival. I hope it works for them; if not they’ll have to figure it out themselves because I certainly won’t be here to tell them it doesn’t have to be that way.

So I love Bill. He doesn’t think it has to be that way either. After suggesting what you can do, now,

Somewhere in all these activities, people can find fulfilling purpose again and gradually build a new politics. Don’t wait for Barack Obama to send instructions.

What I Read in November 2009

Reading this past month reflects the Bison Bison project, my book groups, and preliminary reading for a future course on Louisa May Alcott and Zora Neale Hurston.

Henry James, The Wings of the Dove
Ernle Bradford, Ulysses Found
Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People
Stephen Ambrose, Crazy Horse and Custer: the Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Harriet Reisen, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman behind Little Women

I have posted on all of these except Olive Kitteridge. That book was a disappointment.

With my course over for now and the book groups taking some time off for the holidays, I look forward to some different kinds of reading.

Vermont Weekend

Everyone should have a brother with a summer place in Vermont. We just spent a long week end with brother Bill and his wife Linda in their 1809 house near Andover. We walked the mountainside and also saw a beaver in action. We sat around and read. Mostly we talked.

Bill and I are the last of four siblings. Growing up with three brothers and no sister I was convinced I had an over supply of brothers. Now that two of them are gone, I want them back. Bill and I need to talk family with the only person left who also remembers.

We want to create what we call The Family Book. We are blessed with certain documents we think should be preserved. For example, in the late 1940′s, Grandpa Greider  wrote a brief autobiography, the adventures of a young man on his own in the west and later as an army doctor in France during World War I. Uncle Cicero, on our mother’s side assembled two genealogies of branches of that family. We have some wonderful old photographs too. Further, Bill and I are both guilty of having written essays and memoirs about the family. Some of mine are rather personal and I’m not sure I want them published, even to the family — maybe especially to the family. These record our lives, who we are and what we know about those who came before us. They are not the experiences and knowledge of our children and grandchildren. Do they care? We don’t know, but we care.

If you have tried something similar, I would love to hear your experiences. Meanwhile, a brother and sister are looking backwards and forwards and trying to figure out where to go from here.

Afterthought. Here is a sample of the sort of thing we would put in The Family Book: Cousins, and Forebears.

More afterthought. The framed sampler behind Bill and me used to hang in my parents’ living room, over Mother’s piano. For an memory of a picture which now hangs in my living room, see The Picture.

Come Home, America ~ Finis or Finale

When a writer puts “finis” at the end of his story, he’s telling you that this is as far as he can go. It’s over, for now at least. Finale has a somewhat grander implication, coming at the end of the performance. The lead singers and chorus join together on the stage for a final, joyous affirmation of what it’s all about. In William Greider’s new book Come Home, America chapters 13 and 14, The Reckoning and The Underground River, are both finis and finale.

It is finis as he sums up our problems and explains the rights we should claim:

First, every American who is able and willing ought to have the right to work a job that pays a livable wage….

The second idea is that everyone who works, whether in the front office on on the asembly line, deserves to ‘own’ their work….

The third idea is that, to lead the way for social values, the economy needs a new, reform-minded business organization….

These ideas combine with a recognition that we must reconsider both America’s role in the world and our own roles as citizens.

The finale?

Here is the grand vision I suggest Americans can pursue: the right of all citizens to larger lives. Not to get richer than the next guy or necessarily accumulate more and more stuff, but the right to live life more fully and engage more expansively the elemental possibilities of human existence.

I interrupt this message to suggest that the place to begin in in your own affairs. When I was interviewing for the last job I had before retirement, I needed the money but I also wanted more life outside of work. Fortunately, my future boss really needed me. Do you want to work full time or part time, she asked. Do I have a choice? Yes, you can have it either way. I chose three days a week. Of course, when problems and projects arose I tried to accommodate them by temporarily working more, appreciative that they had given me a choice in the first place.

Bill’s finale is a chorale of hope, acknowledging that these changes take time, on the individual or on the national basis.

Each generation inherits the knowledge of the past and discovers new things that it hands on to future generations. Life is not a footrace where people declare victory at the finish line. Life continues on with or without us.

And,

We can do this. We can do it for ourselves, for our children and grandchildren, for the country. I don’t claim to know for sure that we will succeed. I do believe that we will try.

Come Home, America ~ Corporations

I think it was Bill who told me once that the problem with corporations is that they don’t have grandchildren. Corporations live forever. They are not programmed to die eventually, as we are, although they may be killed by dissolution or bankruptcy. More likely, they merge and live on in a new form. It reminds me of mort main, the dead hand of the medieval church. When you die, you may leave your property to the church but, since the church never dies it keeps the property forever.

Chapter 12 of my brother Bill Greider’s Come Home, America is Machine Politics,– not the political machine which provided a load of coal during a bad winter — the  politcal machine the corporations have constructed so that they have an effective veto on many government actions that affect them.

What the country needs is a third front in the political power struggle, a counterforce to both government and the private sector. This new source of countervailing power can come only from the people themselves.

Bill’s calls for a counterforce of citizens may not be answered. The managers, lawyers and lobbyists of the corporations are paid to do what they do. It costs them nothing personally. And since the corporation is immortal, fallen lobbyists are easily replaced. You and I, however, have to make a living and then exercise our citizenship at home and in our spare time.