My Father’s Son

      I was gazing at a cartoon one day. Here was a man in his early elderness, bald and saggy; two-faced, that is he was checking on himself in a mirror. Startled, he exclaimed "Get to work on your autobiography!" The pointed barb pricked me equally hard. Postponement now might be eternal. My descendants must be served! I claim this right of self defense; these are vintage years for claiming rights anyway,¹ and they must hear me out.

      It is noticed that autobiographies seldom begin at the beginning. Even the bible found it hard to pin-point. One can, in his mind's eye, see a frustrated old and hairy patriarch hover over the good book. It is Moses with his pen. He seeks an opening statement. It evades him. Finally, in desperation, he scribes, simply, "In the beginning,—", and the hurdle is cleared!

      My own problem seems less simple. There really was a beginning back among the Norse, and their efforts to secure my birth in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, must not be taken lightly. Even the timing, January 8, 1893, seems to have been well planned! It gave Mother and Dad an excuse to visit the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, that summer. My day of days was a Sunday. So, older generations would have concluded my mission to be clerical. Number 13 Oxford street could have stalled the superstitious ones. But luck has been uniformly good, although Oxford is not my alma mater.

      Why pick Oshkosh for birth? Well, this is just a facet of the great plan. The town didn’t need promoting (no chamber of commerce in those days). Some place has to be found to which Dad could migrate from Woodstock, Maine, as a little babe and then grow up in the farm neighborhood where another little babe would be born, who would like Dad very much. Then they both would grow up and get married. Planning day by day never looks this involved. But it comes out just right in the end.

      You ask, how did Mother's folks choose Oshkosh for farming? This one really is involved! For brevity, we'll start down in Marion, Ohio. And, by the way, great folks come from there, as witness President Warren Gamaliel Harding.²

      My two Ohio families knew each other quite well. One pulled up stakes and moved to Oshkosh. The other, a bit chary, remained. But an older boy was sweet on an older girl of the first family. Somehow we got to Oshkosh in time for their wedding. It was an important transaction which properly set the scene for Mother’s appearance in the neighborhood where Dad was waiting. This choice countryside is the Town of Algoma. Dad and Mother were school mates at the Omro Junction grade school, a few miles west of Oshkosh. here, gradually, came the fruition of all this planning. The marriage was in Oshkosh, Jan. 1, 1874. He was 20 the preceding May 31; she was 17 the preceding November 22.

      Setting up housekeeping was rather casual in those days for young couples with little more than their abiding love. Shipping boxes became chairs and tables; straw ticks on rugless floors became beds. An ornamented kerosene lamp was the chief source of light; a few tallow candles assisted. No plumbing in the home; all the "comforts" were outdoors. The old wooden pump was somewhere on the lot. It furnished water, and good exercise as a bonus. Maybe there was a wooden stave cistern, if one had a basement where to stand it. In warm weather this collected rain from the roof and produced countless wigglers that later plagued folks as mosquitos. No basement, no cistern. Then one had wooden barrels under the eaves to catch the rain. How those cisterns and rain barrels did stink! Clothes were washed in rain water, wigglers and all.

      Only people of great consequence wrote letters or received them in those times. A farmer got his mail when he went to town for other things; it was purely incidental and not expected. Rural delivery came later.

      Now we have Dad and Mother married and keeping house in Oshkosh. He had taken a course in bookkeeping at the business college; no longer was he a farmer. His employer was a kindly grocer, Nathan Smart, who had come from either Nova Scotia or New Brunswick, Canada. This childless couple figured later in a trek to Canby, Minnesota, to resettle.

      It is probably Dad did all manner of grocery work as well as bookkeeping. These were the days when food was rarely packaged; when fluids came in 50 gallon barrels and had to be placed in a "cradle" before tapping. The wooden bung drawn, a wooden tap was driven home. Cider, vinegar, syrup, and molasses came this way. Large, puffy soda crackers, how tough they were, came in barrels or wooden boxes.

      Empty, a cracker barrel was upended to use its head as a game table. I have seen cribbage holes bored in a head, and squares marked for checkers and chess. If such a barrel was in the store you would always find a card deck on it. Players drank the store’s cider. When one didn’t pay cash for it the owner or his clerk slowly edged over to the player’s account book and put it on the "cuff". As a small boy I wondered what his wife said about that charge (if she ever saw it). Sure was I what my Dad's wife would have said! But he was not stuff they make drinkers of. Sober, kindly, short spoken and many times funny, Dad was small and purposeful. Directions to the youngsters were brief, clear, and definite. Our having got them in detail, he expected nothing other than compliance. Then came the inspection! The job was kindly but thoroughly checked; deviations were noted and discussed in few words. Inspection satisfactorily passed, we felt a great mountain had been climbed and, now, we were coasting happily down the other side.

      Four children couldn't be more unlike and yet of the same parents. Elder sister, Pearl Anna, was 17 years older than I, and she married when I was eight. It seemed the bottom fell right out of things. She was my second Mother in the early years when Mother was not in good health. To care for me Pearl dropped out of high school.

      Then came brother Thomas Lynn. He beat me about 7 years, but sister Ruby Fern helped close that gap by being born about 3 years ahead of me. Regardless of all these head starts it's doubtful that I'll ever catch up with them. By sequence, our color of hair in those days was brown, another shade of brown, black and red. As elderly folks it is silver, silver, brown with silver, and gold with silver. Lynn, sparsely thatched, admits that grass just can’t thrive on a busy street.

      Time came to learn something. But I hated change. It was far easier to remain a dumb child, and for some months my folks seemed to be of the same mind. Summer had ended and suddenly Miss Bessie Jones,³ the Dale School kindergarten teacher, had me at a low and substantial table with square wooden blocks and brightly colored paper strips. I was to do something with them and she told me what. But shyness and embarrassment tied me down, and I let her do those things alone and without aid.

      Something else seemed the matter. Among the table kids, a co-ed community, one or two little girls were competent enough to do tricks with the blocks and paper, and still look at me. This completely leaded me down and Miss Jones had to intervene in my behalf. Under her advice and compulsion I left there and walked designs painted on the hardwood floor. Those gals' eyes were still on me so I wasn't very expert at this job, either. Now, I wonder on reflection, if Miss Jones wasn't suspicious that I might be wearing two left feet. She was kind and said nothing much about it, although later it turned out that she had a secret conference with sister Pearl, her friend. Who assured her of my proper assembly said probably I would come out of what ever was the matter. I did, later finding little girls are half the deal wherever one goes and whatever one does. Their liability has to be figured into each equation. Then things go along better. A real helpful thought in any little boy’s mind.

      One of my inabilities was related to being unable to make things come out even, and at this point I'm farther along with the biography than with the auto. So let's bring up for full identification my hero and heroine, Dad and Mother.

      You've heard how they got together from two distant points. Now let me tell you it is they who put four of us together with many, many different points.

      Dad, Arthur Edmund Chase, was forty, baldish and greyish and mustached, when I entered the arena. It was a tremendous event for me to have come last, rather than not at all. Appreciation grows as I develop the thought. My parents were sacrificingly grand.

      Mother, Alida Eldora Little, was thirty-seven. Both has come from early settlers along the Atlantic shores of the now United States of America. Both were proud of the stature of this country, and let nothing stand in the way of stating and acting it.

      Leaving home at almost 19 years of age, there was a comparatively short time for me to be with Dad and Mother. A boy of ten years just begins to know his parents, and, less that nine years later found me away from home. But in this home experience were established basic patterns of love and family loyalty and solidarity that provides the "tie that binds".

      Mother had stately beauty, inwardly and outwardly; an inoffensive dignity. She was an easy conversationalist, but quietly thoughtful. She read good authors and had her children do likewise. Soon in life I learned never to idly sit; something with the mind or the heads had to be doing. She long knew that the mind was a muscle and it had to be frequently flexed.

      She enjoyed her women friends if they meshed into her pattern reasonably well. She met them at the meetings of Eastern Star, Rebecca Lodge, American Literature Club, etc.

      Her humor was quiet and delightful. Her life would have been more churchly if Dad had been of a similar disposition. But she, under this circumstance, found the way to her God in the manner of Dad. This was direct, and without the need of intermediary. Nominally, we were Congregationalists, but not long on orthodoxy. Along with my brother and sisters I was a Sunday schooler there, always conscious of the Deity's power and oversight.

      As a family we were taught to be of normal behavior, upright and unassuming, asking no favors, bowing to no human. Increasing responsibilities were expected of us and without complain. Very early we were to know that our forebears helped bring America into settlement through thick and thin, and our United States into being. This seemed to solidify our personal sense of responsibility, but we were to make little of it to others.

      Sit with me in Sunday School⁴

      Memory recalls the Rev. Edward Henry Smith, native of England, with an Oxford delivery. He had been chaplain with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders when they charged up the hill to take San Juan, Puerto Rico. His stories were still fresh. The Spanish American war had run its race. He was back in the pulpit, playing havoc with "a's" and "r's" to our keen delight! His broad, British brogue, "When I was in the wah, down in Cuber and latah when chahging up the hill in Pohta Ricer," still rings in my ears.

      Let's bring into focus our Sunday School superintendent, Luther Davies,⁵ stolid and staid. His store on Main street sold bolt cloth and ribbons, hooks and eyes, linens and thread. From its high ceiling hangs a large shaded gas, light burning low. You enter and no one seems to be about, but you feel a pair of eyes working you over. So you stand away from the counters. Your wait is fruitful and Mr. Davies appears from somewhere like a towering apparition, calm, stoical but not unkindly. What do you want? You forget, but luckily remember Mother's note and fish it out of the pocket that is the least full. Here it is, Mr. Davies, "a spool of Coates's #60 white cotton thread". Well, he drops it in a little paper bag; you put a small dime in the big palm of a great hand; not a muscle changes in his face; relieved you turn and go out. This is the week day Luther Davies. But on a Sunday he approaches church cane swinging, in a formal dress from his silken plug hat and winged shirt collar, to patent leather shoes saddled by spats. He announces the day’s churchly events in sort of an Episcopalian chant which to my small ears made the Christian Endeavor sound like the Christian Devil.

      Life went on with widening experiences. My Dad's sister, Aunt Mirsilva Beals and her much bent over but kindly husband, Uncle Ira, lived on Dale street, through the block from our home. I was always a corner-cutting kid, ever straight-lining my footpaths as much as possible. So, my childish duty being to frequently visit this elderly couple, led to a direct path through the school yard; a vast waste land of cinders and dirt. I trod the choicest area, between a row of large-trunked trees and a line fence. Once there I grazed on sizeable raisin polka-dotted oatmeal cookies and listened to my aunt tell of neighborhood tragedies as a frosting. They were marvelously good cookies and filly. As long as there was room in my maw, the tragedies weighed lightly. Once stuffed, I aimed to go home. Often darkness had fallen and that row of trees could have hidden a small tribe of Indian warriors. Lights of home cheerily beckoned, but O, so far away. Dad's whistling lessons were drawn on, and on the wings of some Civil War tunes I flew to safety.

      As a lad, Dale school was my major seat of learning, but home rated pretty high, too, what with two Mothers and one mind-reading Dad. It was my lot to get caught an average of twice on once most every dereliction; once before I got a chance to stray and once immediately after. The folks had the benefit of three juvenile problems before me and worked this training well. Some misdeeds properly called for a brand of learning that impressed my biological seat, too. It was during this period of taming of the little savage that Dad was discovered in the basement fashioning a sturdy handle on a shingle, as I passed and repassed him with wood for the kitchen range. He was a good workman, in design and craftsmanship. When, in my sight, he finished this task and hung it on a convenient nail, there was nothing left to guess at.

      Oshkosh was Wisconsin’s sawdust city. Lumber mills lined the banks of the Fox River. Waste wood of every kind was almost free for the hauling. While the Chases had one of the first hot-water heating plants we still got wood for the kitchen stove. Many times this was known as edgings or planing mill blocks, bright, clean, and clear pine; wonderful for kids to play around with. Among the kids was a definite division of labor set up by the family board of control and sometimes masterhanded by sister Pearl, and always executed as fairly and comfortably as possible.

      Since we have brought up the shingle incident maybe we should give equal time to the marvelous wood box in our roomy maple-floored kitchen; it surely is deserving.

My Dear Family:

      There comes a time when life’s cycle closes. In respect to this futurity may I earnestly request that my parting be quietly observed. My contemplation of death holds no fear, but great loss of your love and companionship.

      All of life’s steps require resources. Death is but one of these steps. My wishes, deeply concluded, are these:

      My ashes or body be very simply buried in the CHASE family lot, Riverside Cemetery, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where lie those of my Father, Mother, and Great Grandfather Simon Peter Little.

      Undertaking fees be limited to my Social Security burial allotment. All undertakers have exchanged their services and material for these fees; often for less. However, they always [ask] for more.

      A stone marker attend my burial spot. This to be keeping, but not more elaborate, with the markers of Father and Mother. In our papers are deed and evidence of perpetual care.

      Rites be purely, and only, Masonic; as private as possible, and only at graveside. To effect this Masonic ritual in Oshkosh, I suggest that the then-secretary of my home lodge #47 (Kenosha) be asked to make such arrangements.

      This has been a good life, full of stimulating challenge, and as I pass on, I leave great love to you ALL.

March 21st, 1965⁶