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.