Irdy's Christmas Brittle

Although I have often written about my dear, late mother-in-law, Ellen, I have not written about my father-in-law, Arthur. The slight is not intentional: I never met the man during his lifetime. I knew of him - knew of him, in fact, long before I knew Ellen or even Warren - but was never introduced to him.

Warren has passed along to me some of Arthur's story. A veteran of World War II, he was one of our town's optometrists for 41 years before finally retiring when he was 80. Older than his wife by a decade, he was a quiet, no-nonsense man who early on shelved his love of drawing and art for the more practical and necessary problem of making a living: first to help out his family while growing up, then to support himself, then to support his wife and three children. A handsome man, he had a wide, bright smile in his younger days that dimmed to a muted but still pleasant hint of one as he aged.

Arthur Irvin Hyer, known in his family as "Irdy" until he enlisted in the Army, didn't have it easy growing up. The oldest son in a working class family, he worked during high school to help the household. He graduated from high school just months before the Great Depression hit, causing him to shelve his art studies and find paying jobs wherever he could. Joining the Army in the late 1930s to support himself, he was set to muster out in January 1942 before Pearl Harbor put an end to that plan. Art, as he was now known, spent the next three years in the Pacific as part of the Signal Corps of the 37th Division, taking part in the Solomon Islands campaign, until the physical and mental toll sent him stateside to recover in a military hospital in Virginia. It was there that he met a vivacious and striking Red Cross volunteer, Ellen Wilson, who was visiting recovering soldiers before she shipped to England. Four years later, after a courtship in Chicago, they were married, and two years after that, they moved to this town, establishing a practice and a family. Over fifty years later, he and Ellen died five weeks apart at home.

That's a snapshot of Art Hyer. That is the bare bones frame on which I hang whatever I have come to know about him. But there is another side to him that does not come through that lean retelling of his life and it is this: Arthur Irvin Hyer loved Christmas.

Absolutely loved it. Per Warren, Art loved the lights, the decorations, the songs, the spirit. He loved A Christmas Carol and often listened to a recorded retelling of it with Basil Rathbone playing Scrooge. I have seen family photographs and movies spanning many Christmases: there were wreaths, there were evergreen swags everywhere, including draped over paintings, there were the children, sequentially older, trooping to open their Christmas stockings.

Yes, Art Hyer loved Christmas. Our first year here, I filled a small wicker sleigh with an assortment of bulbs and set it on the chest in the front hallway, so you would see it first thing when you entered the house. Warren paused a moment and said, quietly, "Dad would have liked that."

An annual Christmas ritual in this household was the making of Hyer peanut brittle. Warren makes it yet; his brother also makes it. The recipe is set out at the end of this post, but I will tell you right now that you won't have quite the same experience, although you will have excellent brittle if you make it. It is not merely that you will lack the large waiter's tray from the Edgewater Beach Hotel on which to pour out the molten mixture for cooling - any buttered surface will do. No, you will catch a taste of a Hyer Christmas if you make this brittle, but you will miss the ineffable flavor that comes of making the brittle down through the generations, of knowing when you make it that you are carrying out traditions laid down long before your birth.  

I started this post by saying I never met Arthur Hyer during his lifetime, but that is not to say I never met him at all. Over four years after Arthur and Ellen's deaths at home - this home, after years of increasing tension and discord in this home as Warren's marriage crumbled and broke, after over two years of Warren being barred from here and kept from contact with his children, we married, moved back in, and made our first Christmas.

Warren commented often how comforting and sheltering the house was now that we were in it. I often felt the presence of Ellen as I worked in the home that she had loved and raised her family in, especially when I was baking in the kitchen. All during our first Christmas season in this home, Warren would get tears in his eyes at the restoration of peace and love.

One evening, after dusk had deepened but not yet turned to night, I stepped into the family room to retrieve something. The Christmas tree was not yet lit, but the lighted Chicago buildings that Warren placed on the window seat were. Warren was sitting in the recliner, rocking gently and looking at the lighted buildings. In the shadows, I could not see his face, but I could feel his contentment. Turning around to get the item I had come for, I asked him some small question. Warren didn't reply, so I turned back to ask him again, thinking he had not heard me.

The recliner was empty.

"Warren?" I quavered.

Warren was in another part of the house, had been in another part of the house the whole time. As I told him what had happened, I realized - we realized - who had been rocking in the recliner, enjoying the quiet and the lights and the peace.

It was Arthur, it was Irdy, come home one more time for Christmas.

Arthur Hyer's Peanut Brittle

1 ½ cups sugar
1 ¼ cups corn syrup
1 pint (2 cups) of water
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla
1 ½ lb. raw peanuts (note: raw peanuts, not roasted)

Cook sugar, water and corn syrup to hard ball stage (use candy thermometer or drop small sample in cold water to test).
Add butter and peanuts.
Cook slowly, stirring often, until peanuts roast. You will smell them roasting and they will change from the pale, almost white of a raw peanut to brown.
When peanuts are roasted, add vanilla and soda, stirring in quickly.
Immediately pour mixture onto a buttered tray, spreading it out to as even a layer as possible.
Break into pieces when cool.

Decoration Day

Monday is Memorial Day and Warren and I, like many others around here, will observe it in part by visiting area cemeteries in which his and my family members are buried.

Memorial Day grew out of Decoration Day, a direct result of the Civil War. That war touched every town in every state east of the Mississippi River (and some beyond). Small wonder: almost 10% of the nation served in the respective armies of the North and South. Some 20% of the soldiers serving, 2% of the nation's population, died in that war. Decoration Day began officially in 1868 to commemorate the war dead, and it still officially honors all those who died in wartime in service to this country.

In this part of the country, central Ohio, many families still observe Memorial Day, although we tend to treat it as a family holiday rather than a military remembrance. It is a time to head to the cemeteries, clean the graves, talk about the family buried there, and put out bunches of flowers. Boy scouts and veterans groups will beat many of us there to make sure fresh flags are in the war markers of the veterans.(Local history being what it is, local markers go all the way back to the Revolutionary War.)

We will arrive bearing flowers and trowels and, in some cases, statuary or balloons for the graves. In some ways, Memorial Day is as close as we, mainstream white Ohioans that we are, come to observing Dia de los Muertos. We do not feast at the cemetery, but we celebrate our deceased family members by remembering them at this time of year.

Decorating the family graves is a tradition my mother, father, and I observe together and one in which Warren has joined. One of the cemeteries we will visit is a large, open cemetery a ways from town, where my sister and my dad's parents are buried, and where someday my parents will be too.

At that cemetery, my parents and I have lots of friends, both dead and alive. Although that cemetery dates back to the late 1800s, a large section of it has been opened and used since 1950. My parents bought a plot there in 1955, when they had to bury their baby daughter, and bought their own plots at the same time. My dad's parents bought the plots next to them.

Over the years you get to know who's there in a cemetery and who their family is. Nearby is John Link, a close friend of my dad's, who died of cancer in his early 20s. My friend Laurie's dad is buried in the next section over; Laurie and her mother have probably already been out there this weekend. Denny and Marlene Schultz, whose friendship with my parents started back in high school, are just around the corner. Denny died a number of years ago; Marlene just a month ago. There is a little feeling of Our Town in that cemetery sometimes and I wonder how Marlene, who had a wonderful, bubbling, giggling laugh, would do in the setting that Thornton Wilder imagined.

We visited this cemetery a lot as I was growing up; it was on the route to or from my grandparents' farm out on Hogback Road. Although I didn't realize it then, I can appreciate now how much my mother must have missed her baby, who had died suddenly at three months. While my parents took the time to clean the headstone or just stand silently, arms around each other, we kids would use the time as opportunities to explore the nearby graves. Visiting the cemetery was not a macabre experience but a natural part of the rhythm of my childhood.

One of my favorite grave markers of all time is in that cemetery. I must have read it a hundred times as a kid and still always stop and read it every time I am out there. I will read it Monday, in fact. It is the stone for Alfred Livingston, who died in 1911 at the age of 70. Alfred Livingston was a sergeant with Company D, 121st regiment of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and his stone proudly notes that he fought at Chickamauga, marched with Sherman to the sea, and marched in the Grand Review of the Armies in D.C. at war's end. The 121st was organized in Delaware, so I suspect that he was a local farm boy who went away to war.

I have often wondered what stories Alfred must have had to tell when he returned at the war's end. I wonder whether he participated in any of the veterans reunions, and whose memories he marked every year on Decoration Day. I like that his marker notes what must have been the greatest adventure of his life.

This weekend, the cemeteries all around here are full of family members pulling weeds and planting flowers. Some of the small towns in the area will hold Memorial Day parades and observances in the local cemetery. All of those ceremonies will include a recitation of the Gettysburg Address, because that is what you do on Memorial Day around here.

Monday, Warren and I will visit his parents' grave and make sure the flags are in good order. They both served in World War II: Art in the Army and Ellen in the Red Cross. Later in the day, I will clip Ellen's peonies, which are in full bloom right now, and we will join my parents, with their own bunches of peonies, and decorate the family graves in other cemeteries.

Decoration Day has taken on some different meanings since its official start in 1868, but here we are, 141 years later, still carrying our flowers and our memories to the cemetery on Memorial Day, and still looking after our dead. I think Alfred Livingston would approve.

The Great Telephone Operators Strike of 1947

In April, 1947, the telephone operators of this country went on strike. Some 350,000 telephone operators, almost all of them women, walked off theirs jobs around the nation. For almost a month, there was no voice on the other end of the line asking "Number, please" to connect calls.

In the days before dial phones and dial tones, every number had to be spoken into the receiver and a human being - almost always female - connected your phone to the number you asked for. The strike brought telephone communications to a standstill. As the strikers vowed, "the voice with a smile" was indeed "gone for awhile."

The strike was short, lasting about a month. In retrospect, the strike, which was organized by the National Federation of Telephone Workers (NFTW) is remembered as ill-planned and without sufficient strength or money to keep the workers going. A.T. & T also caught the union off guard with its ability to restart and keep the phone systems operating despite the strike. The one great achievement was that it organized telephone workers to the point that they pressed for a reorganization of the NFTW, which was a collection of autonomous units, into a national union of telephone workers, the Communication Workers of America, that exists to this day.

I had never heard of this strike until a few months ago. I learned about it only then through a most unconventional source: a cartoon that my late father-in-law drew at the height of the strike.

In the spring of 1947, Arthur Hyer was living in Chicago and attending optometry school. He was also head over heels in love with Ellen Wilson, a young woman he had met two years earlier at Camp Story in Virginia while she was serving in the Red Cross and he was convalescing at a base hospital. The war-weary sergeant recovering from battle fatigue was smitten with the young, idealistic Ellen, who was about to ship out to England and had dreams of changing the world.

Before the war, Arthur had also had dreams, in his case of becoming an artist. Following the war, he returned to Ohio, his home state. Feeling he was too old to resume his art studies and knowing Ellen was from Evanston, Illinois, Arthur used the GI Bill to fund optometry school at the Northern Illinois College of Optometry. After carefully ascertaining that Ellen was not involved with anyone else, he began a cautious courtship of his wife-to-be while pursuing a degree in optometry.

When the telephone strike hit, it slowed but did not extinguish Arthur's wooing of Ellen. Despite his optometry studies, his hands and his heart had not forgotten how to express his feelings in an economy of line. Sometime during that month of limited telephone service, a cartoon made its way from 4170 Drexel on the south side of Chicago to 825 Reba Place in Evanston, lamenting the loss of phone service.

After the strike ended, Arthur continued his studies and his wooing, and in May of 1948, a year later, he married his Ellen in Evanston.

My late mother-in-law was a voracious saver. My husband, the oldest child in the family, tells me that her packrat proclivities drove his father to despair and, finally, resignation. Among her voluminous papers at her death in 2004, 5 weeks to the day after her husband of almost 56 years died, were photos, postcards, newspaper clippings (often multiples copies of the same one), menus from restaurants, old Christmas cards, and, folded carefully, a cartoon from her then future husband, drawn during the great telephone operators strike of 1947.

Channeling Amy March

I am a huge fan of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s great novel about the four March sisters, whom Alcott takes from their Civil War girlhoods to adulthood. I stumbled across it early on in my life when family friends gave me a drastically edited Golden Press illustrated version for Christmas gift the early 1960s. I soon afterwards came across a more complete edition in my grandparents’ home and took it both home and to heart. I have probably read the novel fifty or more times since I was ten. I own three versions today: my badly dog-eared Golden Press copy, the battered copy from my grandparents, and a complete “uncut” version my mother gave me fifteen years ago.

In short, Little Women was a Big Influence on my reading life.

I wanted to be Jo, of course. Who wouldn’t want to be? Jo was bright and impetuous. Jo was not afraid to climb a tree or cut off her hair to raise money for her mother to travel to Washington to care for her wounded husband. Jo was funny and always her own person, even when that got her into trouble. She turned down the boy next door and found lasting happiness with a man after her own heart. As the novel closes, Jo and her husband are operating a boy’s boarding school on their hearts and minds and a shoestring budget. What bliss!

The other sisters float around the novel, although none are so vivid a character as Jo. There is Meg, the oldest and the most domestic, and Beth the do-gooder who dies heartbreakingly young.

And then there was Amy, the baby of the family. Selfish, silly Amy with her golden curls and her pretensions and airs. Amy who got to go to Europe instead of Jo because Amy had better manners.

I found Amy the most tedious of the March sisters, and the most annoying.

But the truth is I have my Amy March moments, although not in the curls and the dancing. No, I identify with Amy when she realizes that while she has some artistic skills, the brilliance of a true artist is far beyond her ability. Her trip abroad during which she hoped to hone her skills instead reveals her shortcomings. Amy announces that she is setting aside her dreams of being a “great” artist, “because talent isn't genius and no amount of energy can make it so.”

Boy, I’ll say.

All my life I have wanted to be a writer. Oh, I write—letters, a journal, press releases, this blog. At one point I wrote a monthly newspaper article about downtown Delaware architecture that won a community following. All satisfying, but my attempts at “bigger” projects—a short story, a novel, poetry—have all died on the vine. Repeatedly.

The writer Janet Flanner commented “genius is immediate but talent takes time.” I still like to think I may have a book inside of me, perhaps the story of Red Cross overseas volunteers during World War II, springing from the notes and records my mother-in-law left behind.

Only time will tell.

Love, Ellen

I never got to meet my mother-in-law as my mother-in-law; she died four and a half years before I married her son. Fortunately, I had met Ellen decades earlier as a teenager dating her older son (now my husband) and, after he moved on to college and out of my league, as a friend and teammate of her younger son. Over the years, she kept me current on her older son’s life whenever she had a chance, knowing, I suspect, that he always occupied a warm spot in my heart. I like to think she would have been pleased to see us together finally.

I got to know Ellen posthumously after her son and I started planning a life together. I learned that she had served in England with the American Red Cross during World War II, despite the protests of her parents, and that it had been an adventure of a lifetime for the young, idealistic woman from Evanston. What I didn’t know until after I moved into my husband’s home (which had been built by his parents 45 years earlier) was that she documented much of her European adventure with letters, with photos, and with many of her Red Cross papers she worked with, and that those items, along with most of a lifetime of correspondence with her parents, were in the basement.

I have only skimmed the surface of the collection, which is in no particular order at present. The handful of letters I have read reveal that my mother-in-law was a lyrical and graceful writer, and that she gave deep thought to her purpose in life, whether serving her country or raising her family. All of them are signed the same way: Love, Ellen.

A picture of Ellen now sits on my desk, next to a photo of my husband. She is wearing her Red Cross uniform with her cap cocked at a precise 45° angle. Taken sixty-five years ago, the photo captures the confidence and pride she clearly felt in her civilian enlistment. Her wartime service lead to a lifetime love of all things English and the love of a lifetime when she met her future husband, a war-weary sergeant.

The writer in me thinks there may be a book in the basement in Ellen’s papers. I wonder whether she may have thought of telling her story herself one day, and that is why she held onto her papers. I think about doing the research and telling it myself. Whether I will be any more successful than she in getting it down on paper remains to be seen, but I already have a title: Love, Ellen.