Grampy came when dad (Harry Cole) died. Grampy "farmed" in our back lot behind the garage. Along the side of the garage (built by dad before I was born (he also built our back porch) Grampy grew 6 ruby red rhubarb plants, and these he stewed with sugar to make one of my favorite foods. Cucumbers were another favorite, which he soaked in salt water and marinated in vinegar (no sugar in his recipe). He was very fond of sitting in the sun room and listened to the radio. Tom recalls his listening to professional baseball and college football games (he was especially fond of the White Sox. Another winner was the Gillette Friday night fights. I remember he and mom listening to the opera on Sundays (me sitting with mom as she my hair). Grampy was fond of showing me the cartoon in the Saturday Evening Post and asking me what it meant; whatever I said made him laugh. In an earlier period I was very happy when Dad brought home the funnies for me to look at.
Tom Cole notes
I was a shade younger than six when Dad died. It seemed awfully sudden to me. He had been home sick for a few days, then he was wisked to the hospital and died a few days later of pneumonia, precipitated by a heart attack. Mom was devastated and was in mourning for quite awhile before taking on a teaching job in the local school system (Father Dussman's Our Lady of Perpetual Help School in Glenview).
My Dad memories are pretty slight. My favorites include him walking home from the train station with candy in his pockets, which Marylin and I would run out to get. Other than that, he was pretty strict. He seemed like a stern guy. We kids were expected to be seen and not heard and if we put anything on our dinner plate, it had to be completely finished. I spent some long nights alone at the table trying to stare some bit of leftover food on my plate completely out of existence. To makes things worse, we had to put some of everything on our plate to start with, including the dreaded canned green peas...which always triggered the gag reflex in me.
Dad was pretty strict about a lot of things. TV hours were severely limited by today's standards. Discipline was easily maintained by the mere mention of "when your father gets home." He was a stickler for absolute honesty, no matter the consequence. In fact, I later heard from Mom that he had a hard time keeping some of his jobs because of it.
Unable to go to law school because of the depression, he did paralegal work for a number of insurance companies. Towards the end, he demanded to go into the field as a salesman, particularly in the black ghetto areas because he believed that blacks were getting a raw deal. Mom says that his immediate boss protected him in this venture. I remember being bundled up in the car (an old Henry Hudson) with him, Mom and Marylin and sitting there, sometimes sleeping, while he made the sales. It seemed a joyless event, since we were often cold and the mission wasn't much fun.
Another story had it that some friends of theirs pilfered some lumber from a construction site so that he could finish some building at our house. He demanded they return it and ended the friendship. All in all, he was a no-nonsense stickler. The only family member on his side that I knew was his sister Eleanor who lived near Detroit. She was a stickler too and very religious, She was married to Joe, a tool and dye maker for a tire company (Goodyear?), and they had no children. He was a quiet and genial fellow and pretty moderate in his ways. She seemed to rule the roost. Her friends were Catholic nuns and church people. I remember her praying a lot, on her knees in our living room, especially in the first year or so after Dad died.
Mom taught kindergarten for many years after Dad's death. What with two young kids to raise, it took a lot out of her. She worked very hard at that job and was much beloved by many a parent. Being the first teacher in a kid's life in those days, she made a big impression on kid and parent alike. She was constantly approached on the street by parents who wanted to talk and bring her up to date. She was frequently overwhelmed by this; she could rarely avoid being spotted on even the most simple outings, and she often took the back way or didn't go out at all. She had a hard time keeping them all straight, and I suspect sometimes she just pretended to know them so as not to hurt their feelings. Of course as I went about my own business, I was constantly regaled by stories of her impact on the many families she touched. I felt a special need to not cause her any embarrassment, and on the few times I crossed the line, I was firmly reminded in no uncertain terms that I best not cause her any grief.
Some of my best memories with Mom were the great road trips we took, or to be more exact, that she took and took us along because, well, we were too young to leave behind. With rare exceptions, these were wonderful adventures. She would get academic credit for "experience" and that would get her a pay raise. She would pack us into the car, with a tent and camping gear and off we would go, sometimes camping sometimes staying in little motels. It was great fun. We covered a good part of the west and southwest.
My earliest memories include the many hours listening to the radio with Grampy and toiling away in his garden (aside from his special rhubarb patch) which consisted mostly of green beans, cucumbers, and tomatoes and some poorly performing corn stalks. Most of the produce made it to the dinner table, and the rhubarb was fashioned into several concoctions, one a pie and another into a thick stew like dessert dish. I remember desperately trying to sweeten it up with spoonfuls of sugar.
Our house was bordered by the Shmelzer farm that became an endless source of play for the neighborhood kids. It was an old family farm, barely holding on in the face of growing suburbanization. There were several cows, whom we all knew by name. There was a good sized field of feed corn that provided many months of hiding and chasing opportunities. A fine little creek nursed a small herd of crawfish. Marylin and I got our love of nature there and in the barnyard among the pigs and chickens.
The cow pasture was my first field of dreams as I began my athletic ventures. I loved all sports save ice hockey, owing to unfavorable ankles. Like Charlie and Steve before me, those long Swedish legs resulted in some exploits in track and field. Charlie excelled as a sprinter, Steve as a distance runner, and I as a hurdler. By senior year in high school, I held the league record, had the fastest time in the state, and won a college scholarship to Loyola Univ and the Univ of Wyoming. Ended up in Laramie Wyoming with much encouragement from Charlie. An out-of-sport knee injury brought the sports career to a quick close. After a bit, had to get a knee operation, left school, got drafted right away but was rejected for the bad knee just as Vietnam was gearing up in 1964. After a short working stint, I returned to Wyoming. Got into school journalism and politics and spent a couple of years in student government before changing school and finishing my BA in Sociology and Psychology at Southern Illinois Univ. Then I spent about six years in the social work field before going to New York City to study portrait painting at the Art Student’s League (Marylin was also a student there---in fact over Christmas 1998 holidays we did a memorial visit and went to a sketch class like the old days.) We were pleasantly surprised we could still draw and would not be embarrassed to show the fruits of our labors).
Then, for seven years I survived (not exactly prospered) as a portrait artist in New York City, Provincetown, MA on Cape Cod and in Albany, NY. I spent much of this time in relationship with another artist, Jackie Andes, but we went our separate ways just as I was entering a new field, television production. Since 1984, I have been working as a television producer and director, mostly in my current home of Cambridge, MA
This seems to be the right fit and harkens back to the days when I did an enormous amount of make believe fantasizing and pretend film making as a kid in Glenview. Some of my memorable staged events included setting a fleet of plastic warship models ablaze in our basement at 218 Nottingham. Mother was not especially pleased. It was in this same basement that Steve practiced some of his litigation skills on an ill-equipped little brother by putting me on trail numerous times for a variety of mostly trumped up offenses. I rarely got off and it taught me a valuable lesson: to avoid lawyers and courtrooms, which to date I have succeeded. Marylin would join in on the fantasy business, but from a different angle. I was mostly making movies and she was mostly acting out any number of life situations. Charlie, of course, was off already into the real world. Mom was mostly the happiest when we weren't starting a fire or painting something. Grampy just wanted the noise level not to exceed the radio volume. We all managed to get along.
Television production has been fun. I have done a lot of work for C-SPAN over the years, and run a unit that is practically the Northeast Bureau for them. Lately, I'm producing a series of ecology documentaries being shown worldwide. That has resulted in some fun travel to some interesting locales. 1999 looks interesting too, with trips to the Middle East for a program on water conservation in conjunction with the peace process, and a trip to zero gravity from the Houston space center on a NASA project.