My mother wrote her grandfather’s biography for a school project with her grandmother supplying the details. What she wrote is on the family website. But there are a few details about activities that he loved that didn’t make it into her story.

Important for me, he was a gardener – flowers rather than the vegetables that I grow. He liked to grow roses, easier in upstate NY’s climate compared to Wisconsin’s, at least until recently with global warming. When he and his wife Anna moved to the brand new house on Windsor Place in Syracuse with his daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter, there was a blank slate as far as plantings. My mother told me that he planted peonies on the bank along the driveway. Since peonies are long lived perennials, I drove past the house once when I was visiting Syracuse, just in case they were still there, but they were gone by then.

I also found out that he was a serious fly fisherman. I had no idea of this until we were clearing out my parents’ house on Mayes Rd after mom was in a nursing home. I found framed pictures of fish. I asked my mother about them and she explained that he really enjoyed fishing. Then I found a big photo of him in a canoe with a guide in the stern and his line arched far out into the water from the bow. Who knew? Amazing what you learn when you dig around.

The other factoid, a sadder one, that she did not include, involved her birth. My Grandmother, Bertha Woese Smith (she preferred ‘Bird’) had rheumatic fever as a child. I never heard exactly what damage that left her with – I presume a rheumatic heart condition. When she was pregnant with my mother, the doctors slapped her into the hospital. She had already lost one child during pregnancy and the doctors were very concerned about her and the baby. My mother was born on April 19th, so her mother must have been in the hospital at least a couple of months. I know this because her father, Julius, was admitted to the same hospital while she was stuck there and passed away on March 15th. I never heard if they saw each other in the hospital before he died. That must have been very hard for her, losing her father, being stuck in the same hospital and not even being able to go to the funeral, while at the same time anticipating the joy of birthing a longed-for child. Life can be so complicated!