The Lion's Roar

This will be a short posting - a flashback memory of what would be a strange thing to see today. Guess I was four or five years old when we were awakened one night by this loud roar. It sounded like a lion - and it turned out that it really was. The corner of Nebraska Avenue and Hillsborough Avenue was a major roadway intersection. There was a gasoline station on the northeast corner. They had put in a small zoo. I assume it was to attract customers. There were monkeys, birds, and some other small animals - and a lion. It was about six blocks away from our house, and that thing roared all night long. It sounded like it was in our yard. Don’t think it was there very long because there were lots of complaints. The picture is me at the neighborhood zoo.

My Mother

My mother - Clemmie Madelyn Croft - grew up in Florida. In fact, her father’s family - the Crofts - moved to Florida from south Georgia before the Civil War. Her mother walked to Florida in 1890 alongside a horse drawn wagon carrying all the family belongings. I think I mentioned in an earlier posting that it took three weeks for them to get from Barwick, Georgia to Dade City, Florida. So, Mom had strong Florida roots - "plenty of sand in her shoes," she often said. She grew up on a farm near Dade City with an older sister and two younger brothers. She hated the farming lifestyle and left home as soon as it was possible. She attended Florida State University (it was then called Florida State College for Women) in Tallahassee long enough to get a teacher’s certificate and taught school for a couple of years in a rural, one-room schoolhouse in Pasco County. In 1921, she moved to Tampa and found a job clerking in the office of O’Berry & Hall Co., a wholesale grocery distributor. It was there that she met my father.

She and Walter Berg, Sr. were married in 1930. The country was in a deep economic depression. They kept the marriage secret for a couple of years to avoid one of them losing their job. Company policy prohibited the employment of man and wife. When she became pregnant (with me) they both resigned, moved to Orlando, and bought a little store. They quickly learned that the former owner had alienated the people in the neighborhood. Nobody came in, so Mom started making house-to-house visits trying to befriend the neighbors and get them to come to the store. She succeeded in making many friends, but money was scarce, and the business ultimately failed.

I was born in the apartment above that little store. I never knew how dreadful an experience that was for Mom until 23 years later when my first son was born. He was perfectly formed without a mark on him, and when my Dad saw him the first time, he told me the story of what happened when I was born. Mom was a small woman - barely five feet tall if she stretched a bit. She was 35 years old. They couldn’t afford a good doctor or to go to a hospital. The only doctor they could get was an alcoholic who had essentially lost his practice. It would have been a difficult birth anyway, but this doctor nearly killed us both. He butchered Mom pretty badly. The forceps the doctor used nearly tore my head off. Dad said that my head was bruised and scratched and contorted all out of shape. They feared brain damage. Mom was unable to have any more children. Mom never talked about the ordeal - never. And, that one time was the only time Dad ever mentioned it. I don’t know whether anyone else in the family ever knew what had happened.

They moved out of the apartment soon after and rented a little house about a block away from the store. The community was called Jamajo, after three developers. Few people in Orlando know anything about Jamajo any more. The area has deteriorated badly, but back then, it was an upper middle class neighborhood with retired architects and other former professionals living there. Revisiting the area a couple of years ago, the only reference I found to the name, Jamajo, was a street by that name. Dad used to tell the story that the "Jo" in Jamajo was Joe Tinker, a Hall of Fame baseball player. He was the legendary shortstop with the Chicago Cubs who started the famous double play combination of Joe Tinker (SS), Johnny Evers (2B), and Frank Chance (1B). They were immortalized by a sportswriter’s poem - "Tinker to Evers to Chance" and all three were inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame at the same time - in 1946. Joe Tinker died in Orlando two years later in 1948.

These are the saddest of all possible words,

A trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,

Tinker and Evers and Chance.

Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,

Making a Giant hit into a double--

Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:

"Tinker to Evers to Chance."

How’s that for a diversion.

Despite the upscale character of the neighborhood, the depression had hit everyone hard. The day I was born was the day that President Roosevelt closed all the banks in the country. Things were grim. Mom said that one day, about a month after they moved into the house, that they were down to their last few pennies, and there was no food in the house. She got down on her knees and prayed for help. Shortly after, Dad found a large turtle that had come up in the yard. He killed the turtle, and that became the next meal - the answer to Mom’s prayer. They held out for a few more months, but finally gave up. That was when Dad swallowed his pride and begged for his old job back in Tampa. I don’t remember any of that. I wasn’t even a year old when we moved back to Tampa.

Mom was the spiritual leader of the family. Every night she’d get us together to read from the Bible and pray. She seldom missed a worship service at the Seminole Heights Baptist Church, and she always took me along. She sang in the choir and held the job of Church Librarian for many years.

Mom was the disciplinarian of the family. When I misbehaved, she’d cut a switch from a wild cherry tree in the back yard and make me dance. That's the tree behind us in the picture to the right. I think she was a little over protective, at least early on, since I was the only child. I can understand that now, but at the time it made me a little resentful. For a long time, I couldn’t leave the yard, while other kids were roaming free in the neighborhood. When I started to school, I couldn’t stay after school and play as other kids did. If I was five minutes late getting home, Mom would be walking the floor and demanding an explanation. She gradually eased up on that, but I could never run free like I thought other kids did.

My mother was a good cook, and she was also a good seamstress. She made all of her own clothes. For a time, when material was scarce during the war, she made many of her dresses out of used flour sacks. They were pretty nice too. The cloth sacks were printed with a variety of colorful flower patterns. She had a treadle operated Singer sewing machine that she could make fly.

As a cook, Mom tried to learn all the German recipes that Dad remembered his mother making, and she did a good job of it. I guess my favorite cookie was pfeffernuesse. These were hard, spicy little balls about the size of a large marble - a German tradition around Christmastime. Mom would make about a bushel of them, giving them to all the neighbors, the preacher, the doctor, and most anybody who came around. I’d fill my pockets with them to take to school. Kartoffelklase und Sauerbraten was one of those German dishes - potato dumplings and a sauce of vinegar soaked beef. That wasn’t served often, but it was good.

It was always fried chicken for Sunday dinner. Saturday was baking day and the day to catch a fryer and wring its neck. Mom was good at that. If company was coming for Sunday dinner, she’d kill two. I can see her now, grabbing two chickens, and with one in each hand, wringing both necks at the same time. When the necks were broken, she’d let the birds flop around on the ground until they died, then plunge them into a bucket of scalding water to loosen the feathers. I’d get the job of pulling the feathers while she’d go back to her baking in the kitchen. Everything got fried except the head and the feet. Dad’s favorite piece was the gizzard. Mom got a breast. And I got the pullybone. When the meat was eaten, we always made a wish and pulled the pullybone. Whoever wound up with the long end was supposed to have their wish come true. Why don’t chickens have pullybones nowadays?

Mom always baked five loaves of bread on Saturday morning, and one or two coffee cakes with any dough left over. She’d knead the dough in a small washtub, then divide it into the five bread pans. There’s just nothing finer tasting than homemade bread fresh out of the oven. It filled the house with a delicious aroma too.

Mom lived to be 83 years old, outlasting my father by fourteen years. Her last few years were not pleasant ones. She developed Parkinson’s disease which was slowly debilitating. Her mind remained sharp through all of that, but by the end she had lost control of all bodily functions. She was a proud woman, and it embarrassed and humiliated her to become so helpless. Through it all though, she never lost her Christian faith. She loved her grandchildren. I think she thought of Laura as the daughter she always wanted, and when Laura was killed, Mom just gave up.

My Father

I mentioned in an earlier posting how my father - Walter Berg, Sr. - worked his whole life with little to show for it. That was true, but it was not because of any lack of talent or intelligence. He was a quiet man, not given to showing emotion, but he was thoughtful and considerate of those around him and took his responsibilities seriously. His greatest talent was with numbers. It might be said that he was a genius in that respect. He could run down a long list of four and five digit numbers, adding them in his head and then write down the sum at the bottom faster than most folks nowadays using a calculator or computer. Guess that’s why he was a good bookkeeper on the job. He loved to play cards and would challenge himself by never rearranging the hand dealt to him. He could just scan the cards and know immediately what he had and how to play them.

Dad was born in Indiana, but grew up in Beardstown, Illinois where his father was the pastor of the Lutheran church there. He had two sisters and five brothers, but two of the brothers died as young children. That was not uncommon in earlier generations. The family lived in a German speaking community, and all the services at his father’s church were in German. Dad didn’t learn English until he started to school. When he finished school in Beardstown, his father sent him to Ft. Wayne, Indiana to study for the ministry. He made good grades in Ft. Wayne, but quickly decided that the ministry was not for him.

It was in Ft. Wayne that he started playing baseball and rose to the semi-pro ranks. A bout with rheumatic fever left him with a crippled foot. That ended his baseball career. He tried to join the army when World War I came along, but was rejected because of that foot. He spent those war years in Philadelphia working for the Army Quartermaster Corps as a civilian. When the war was over, he moved to North Carolina to be nearer his folks. His father, by then, had taken a job as president of a college in Greensboro. Dad found a job selling Bibles. He rode on horseback through the mountain communities selling Bibles, until one day he was challenged by a bootlegger who thought he might be a revenue agent. I don’t know the details of that, but it must have been traumatic. It was soon after that he got out of there and moved to Florida.

In Florida, Dad’s first job was as a night watchman at one of the phosphate mines. During the day, he bought fresh produce and shipped it to his brother in North Carolina to sell. It was while doing that that he found the job as bookkeeper and office manager of O’Berry & Hall Co., a wholesale grocery distributor in Tampa. And it was there that he met my mother. That was about 1926 or 1927. It didn’t take long for the two of them to decide to make a life together and get married.

But there were two problems. Dad developed a bad case of tuberculosis and had to leave his job. He spent a year in bed, nursed by his mother. He went from a skinny 160 pounds to 225 pounds, but the confinement and good nursing brought him back to health. He went back to work in 1928, and he and Mom resumed their engagement. But they had to keep it a secret from their boss - the owner of the company. Even after they were married in 1930, they had to keep it a secret because if it became known, one of them would have to quit work. With jobs hard to find, especially at the beginning of the Great Depression, they avoided the issue as long as they could.

Then Mom became pregnant. Rather than just her resigning, they both quit. They moved to Orlando, Florida and bought a little grocery store and gasoline filling station. The building they rented had an apartment above the store where they lived. The timing was wrong. It was a neighborhood business, and nobody in the neighborhood had any money. With me coming along, the situation soon became desperate. I’ll get into a little more about that on the next posting about Mom, but after I was born, Dad swallowed his pride and went back to Tampa to beg for his old job back. He was 45 years old then. So when I was less than a year old, we moved to Tampa, and Dad went back to the job that he kept for almost the rest of his life. Mr. O’Berry took advantage of him and kept him on meager wages for years, but I never heard Dad complain.

My Dad was a Christian, but I think he was disillusioned with church, having grown up as "preacher’s kid." His father had been treated rather poorly at the end by the church in Beardstown. Also, Sunday was Dad’s only day to rest, so in my early memory, he never went to church. That changed in time, and about the time that World War II came along, he started attending the Lutheran church a couple of blocks from our home. He never felt comfortable in the Baptist church that Mom attended, so they went their separate ways on Sunday. During the war there were a number of soldier boys stationed in Tampa who would come in to Dad’s church. On many occasions he would bring them home to dinner for a home cooked meal. We never heard from some of those boys again, but lifetime friendships developed with others.

I loved my Dad. He was also my best friend. He never lifted a hand to me that I recall. Mom was the disciplinarian. I have a clear memory of listening every evening for the sound of his old Model A Ford rounding the corner at the end of Wilson Avenue as he was coming home from work. Supper was usually ready, and afterward, if there was any daylight left, we’d go out in the yard and play catch. If not, Dad would set up a card table in the living room, and we’d play Rummy. When Mom finished with the dishes, she’d join the game, and we’d play three-handed Londonderry Rummy. I learned how to count playing cards with my Dad. It took awhile to overcome the idea that 11, 12, and 13 followed the 10, instead of Jack, Queen, and King. He also taught me the alphabet and got me reading things. So, before I started to school I already knew how to count and read - and play cards.

I’m trying to confine these postings to things that occurred before the end of World War II, so I’ll stop here except to say that Dad lived until 1969 when he died at age 80 after complications set in following cataract surgery on his eyes.

Reflections3

After devoting a posting to my Berg grandparents, I’d better balance things by saying a word or two about my maternal grandmother - Laura (Drew) Croft. My earliest memories of "Nanny" were at her home in Dade City, Florida. By 1936 she had been a widow for 12 years. She was a nurse and took in boarders to support herself. She raised chickens, selling the eggs and the fryers, and she had a garden. Her house was right across the street from her youngest son, Wade. She was an excellent cook and made all her own clothes. Once when we were visiting her, she had a big batch of doughnuts made. It was my first exposure to doughnuts, and I thought they were great - couldn’t stop eating them until I got my hand slapped.

Her family moved to Florida around 1890 when she was sixteen years old. They walked the entire distance from Barwick, Georgia to Dade City, sleeping under a horsedrawn wagon at night. The trip took three weeks. Though her life was hard, especially after losing her husband, she remained faithful to her church, never missing a chance to tell about her faith in God.

After a few years, she gave up her house in town and moved into a little house in the country, built for her by her son Drew, next to his home. In ways it was a step backward - no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no bathroom. I spent a week with her one time, pumping water by hand, bathing in a tub on the porch, and frequenting the outhouse when the need arose. When I complained about the stink, they assigned me the job of throwing lime into the pit under the outhouse, but I couldn't tell that it did any good. Was that the good old days?

One nice thing about Nanny's little house though, it was on the edge of a lake, and Nanny loved to fish. She would spend hours sitting on a board at the end of a narrow, rickety dock that extended into the lake. She’d go out with two cane poles - one long, and one short - and a loaf of bread. She’d use the bread and the little pole to catch shiners for bait (she called them silvers), then fish for bass (which she called trout), and it was seldom that she didn’t catch fish. She’d fish every day, weather permitting, except Sunday. There was a little row boat tied to the end of the dock in which that she taught me how to row - pulling on one side to turn the other way. She wouldn’t go out in the boat alone, but with me there to man the oars, she would love to go out to some favorite fishing spots.

Nanny lived to be 87 years old. She died two days before Christmas in 1961.

I never knew my grandfather - Henry Bradham Croft. All I know about him is what my mother told me. He was a hard working farmer, devoted to his family. Early in December, 1924, he rode out on his horse to check some fencing around one of the pastures. When the horse came back to the house without its rider, the saddle hanging upside down underneath, his son Wade, then just barely 10 years old, went out looking for him. He found his father underneath a tree unconscious. Somehow Wade, carrying or dragging, got his father home, but his neck was broken. They had no phone back then, no car - no way to call or go for help. Had he been handled gentler and been able to get help, it may have turned out different, but he only lived for a few hours. He was 53 years old. This is one of the few pictures that we have of him, taken shortly before the accident. He didn’t like to be photographed. That’s my grandmother with him, and son Wade.

Reflections2

Running through old pictures has brought back a lot of memories. Here’s a picture of me and my Grandmother Berg (Augusta Jox). I guess my earliest memory is of standing next to her and thinking what a mountain of a person she was. She was almost as wide as she was tall, or seemed that way to a two year old boy. Actually, she was just five foot tall. She died in 1935, so I know my memory dates back to when I was two. Excerpts from letters that she wrote to one of her sons (my Uncle Albert) chronicle life as she knew it in Tampa from about 1920 until her death. I submitted all of that to the Tampa Tribune a few years ago, and they devoted a full page to the story. That article came out on March 29, 1998. Augusta was quite a lady. The excerpts from her letters are published in my 1994 book on the family, Together They Came.

The second picture is of me and my grandfather - Friedrich Berg. He was a Lutheran minister in Beardstown, Illinois and later a college professor in Greensboro, North Carolina. He spent his last few years in Tampa, and I got to know him a little better than my grandmother. He had a crippled arm resulting from an mill accident as a young boy. I remember him as very quiet and proper - always in a suit and tie - but a rather harsh man without much humor. I think I was a little scared of him. I remember him telling me the story of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. That happened when he was a young boy. He told me about that while demonstrating how to bring the image of Lincoln to a piece of paper by rubbing a pencil over the paper with a penny underneath. We were sitting at a card table on the front porch of our house on Frierson Avenue. I was probably four years old at the time. My grandfather died in 1939 at the age of 82. He died one day before my sixth birthday, so my impressions may not have been too accurate.

Reflections

While rummaging around through old pictures, these brought back some memories. I was about five years old when Daddy built this thing in the backyard called a "climbaround." For a couple of years I had been sickly, diagnosed with a heart murmur, and restricted to house and bed. Then the doctor said I was well and needed exercise. Dad built this climbaround as a result. It quickly became a favorite spot for neighborhood kids too. It was there for several years until some of the boards rotted away.

Dad also put up a swing and a set of rings A neighbor boy - Raiford Daniels - could swing right up into those rings, but it was a long time before I could do that. I had to use an old crate to stand on to get up there.

I also got a vehicle called an "exerciser" about the same time. Pumping the handlebars turned a gear that drove the back wheels. It was guided by turning the front wheels with my feet. Our house fronted on Frierson Avenue, and there was a sidewalk. I could run that thing up and down the sidewalk as long as I didn't cross an alleyway about 100 yards away. The side street - Wilson Avenue - was just dirt back then.

Mama had me enrolled in a tap dance class too, but that didn't last long. I had pretty good rhythm, but I wanted to be outside.

The Good Old Days

I often wonder about the thoughts that run through my head. I wonder now if it’s the thing to do to share some of those, but here goes anyway. I know that there are folks around that think the things going on around us these days are awful, and that such moral depravity signals the coming of the end times. I don’t know about that, but I’m convinced that the "good old days" are now. I’ve lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War and can bear witness that those weren’t good times. Before that was the First World War, even worse. And before that the Indian Wars and probably the worst time of all - the Civil War. Revolutionary War time were pretty sad too. The moral decay that we hear so much about is not new either. We just hear more about it nowadays via the television networks and 24 hour a day news coverage by CNN and Fox.

When I think of the difference between my life now and my Daddy’s life at this age, it’s like day and night. We’re blessed with living in retirement in one of the most beautiful parts of the country with every material thing we need and most of what we want - and I think enough saved back to see us through. My Dad was still working at my age just to keep food on the table. When his health didn’t permit that any more, Mom had to go to work. Dad died with little to show for a lifetime of labor. He had a house paid for, but little else, and that was all gone by the time Mom died. It wasn't that Dad lacked talent or intelligence. He had plenty, but there just weren't any opportunities like I've had.

My most vivid memories of childhood are from about 1936 to 1946. Those were the years of the Depression and World War II. Dad was lucky to have a job, though it paid barely enough to keep us fed and make house payments. That house, on the north side of Tampa, Florida was wired for electricity (lights only) and had indoor plumbing. But, there was no air-conditioning, only a fire place for heat, no hot water heater, no washing machine or dryer, no telephone. We didn’t even have a radio at first. Mom cooked on a kerosene stove which was also used for heating bath water. She washed clothes in two galvanized wash tubs and a scrub board on a bench behind the garage and hung the wash on a clothesline in the back part of the lot. Anyone living like that nowadays would be considered in the depths of poverty. A lot of those conveniences were gradually added after the war.

Dad had an old Model A Ford that he used to commute to work in downtown Tampa. He was a bookkeeper at a wholesale grocery distributor. He worked six days a week, seldom getting home before dark. Sunday was his day to rest. Mom was faithful in her church - the Seminole Heights Baptist Church - which was three blocks from our house. Walking to church on Sunday was just about our only excursion. We were a block off the street-car line and would occasionally go to town, but those times had to be rationed to save the nickel it cost to ride.

We had a garden out back of the house and a chicken pen. The chickens provided meat for the table and eggs to sell. I’d go up and down the street selling eggs before I ever went to school. A vegetable truck came by the house about twice a week selling fresh produce. His horn had a unique sound to it that I would recognize even today if I heard it. Those street cars had a unique sound too. Our house was on a corner lot in an area that was once an orange grove. We had a few left over orange and a couple of grapefruit trees. There was never a shortage of fruit when it was in season.

I remember our first telephone and even remember the number: S-2465. Five or six of our neighbors shared the line. Guess folks nowadays don’t even know what a party line was. We got our first radio some time before Pearl Harbor in 1941. It was a table model housed in a nice mahogany box. You had to twist a dial to hunt for a station, and there was a lot static. My favorite programs were Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy and Sky King. Dad seldom missed the news by H. V. Kaltenborn. I remember the Sunday night when President Roosevelt announced that the Japs had attacked Pearl Harbor - December 7, 1941.

Dad never got a vacation. The only time we ever left town was to drive the forty miles to Dade City to see my grandmother Croft three or four times a year. That was always on a Sunday afternoon after church. Even that had to be curtailed during the war when gasoline was rationed. I was sixteen years old before ever leaving the state of Florida. It was quite a thrill crossing the line into Georgia - but that’s another story.

I’ll try to reflect some more on this in coming days, but that’s enough for now. Maybe I can scare up some pictures of those days when time permits.

Picture of Larry

Still trying to learn how to do this. The picture in the last posting is of Larry and his two grandchildren - Trinity and Cameron. Thought I had it labeled, but it didn't come out that way.

Catching Up

Since last posting, we've made a short trip to Florida to visit son Larry and his family during the Christmas holidays. It was nice seeing the family and getting re-acquainted with two of our great grandchildren - Trinity and Cameron. It was also nice to get home again from the hectic hustle and bustle of the crowds in Florida. There's nothing to compare with the peace and quiet of our mountain retreat - even if it a little cooler up here.

Our latest project on the house has been to install "underdecking" beneath the open part of our deck to keep the rain off the area below. The major part of that effort is now complete.

More up to the minute news: At our usual gathering of friends at the local bowling alley this morning, I was bested - as usual - by Oskar Lehotskey and Don Bradley. My series of 555 was third among the six of us bowling together - Oskar, Don, Bob Davis, Dale and Erika Claypool. Don't know what the girl's scores were on the next alley, but they seemed to be having great fun. Don and his new fiancee drive all the way from Franklin each Monday to bowl with us. Then, we enjoyed a nice lunch at the local Sushi Bar - a Chinese, Thai restaurant near Hiawassee that took over the now defunct Burger King building. We gathered a bowlful of raw vegetables and meats and it was all cooked on the grill while we waited. Very good, but too much.