Remembering Grandpa C.P. On Birthday 109.

Hope you all have been having wonderful Holidays! 

In addition to New Year's Day, we have Old-Calendar Christmas (aka Russian Christmas) coming up on January 7th, which we prefer to call Nativity of the Lord. Eastern Orthodox festivities associated with Nativity are full of old-world, joyful solemnity that is exquisitely beautiful, and yet reflects the poverty of spirit of Christ and his earthly family, as well as the countless generations of poor people over the centuries who have been touched by the Grace and Hope of Christmas. 

Marty and I are very casual about Western, Gregorian-Calendar Christmas on December 25th. Marty has fun wearing a Santa hat and lets his white beard get fluffy, and we like spending time with family, but we don't party or shop very much. The Brenneis family has a tradition of making ravioli. I usually bake pumpkin pies for the family and dairy-free breads (cranberry-orange, zucchini-walnut, banana, and pumpkin) for our home. I make batches of Martha Stewart's recipe for cranberry sauce with cognac. Also try to sneak some fish dishes into the family gatherings.

Speaking of fish, the main subject of this article was an avid fisherman. The day that I am writing this (December 28th) is the birthday of my maternal grandfather, Clarence Everett Pryne, known by friends and family as C.P.. He was born 109 years ago, in Eagle Township, Brown County, Ohio. He passed away in 1985, when I was 24, and I'm grateful for all the years of contact with him. The older I get, the more I identify with Grandpa C.P. In my opinion, I've always resembled him, both physically and in personality, more than any other relative. In a previous post from 2017, Mom's Home Town, and C-SPAN for Genealogy, I related some of my favorite memories of Grandpa C.P.

Here is a picture of Grandpa when he was about 3-1/2 years old. Grandpa's brother, Aaron, had died earlier that year of TB at age 6, so it had to have been a melancholy time in their home. He's dressed so oddly here and could easily be mistaken for a little girl, especially with the bow in his hair. Wish I knew the name of the dog.

Speaking of Grandpa being mistaken for a girl, here I am at age 5, already looking a lot like C.P.!

These days, I look a lot more like his mother, Great-Grandma Lou.

Even in her 50s, she had a mischievous look, didn't she?

Grandpa C.P. was a very dapper, yet fun-loving guy. Here we see him in the late 1930s, standing behind Grandma Dorothy and my mother, Bonnie.

This is a nice picture of C.P.(L) standing near a bright, shiny car with his wife's youngest brother, Elmer. We called Uncle Elmer "Whitey," because he was the only sibling in his family with blond hair.

Here are Grandma and Grandpa playing on the beach, probably shortly after they moved to California in 1951. Love this photo!

Here's a sweet family photo, probably also taken in the early 1950s. Pictured, L-R, are Bonnie (Mom), Grandma Dorothy, Grandpa C.P., and twins Joanie and Jimmy (the only person in this pic still living). Grandpa seems to be having the most fun, once again!

My memory has always associated trout with Grandpa C.P. and Grandma Dorothy (known by the kids as Grandma "Shug," short for "sugar"). They had a hillside get-away in the southern Sierra mountains, near Lake Isabella and the Kern River. Trips to our grandparents's get-away were called "going up the hill." Both nearby bodies of water were great places to fish, and my grandparents loved to go fishing! They had their favorite spots along the Kern, but they were not averse to taking a boat out on the lake to fish. Most of my memories fishing with them were on the river, and river trout has remained my favorite fish to this day.

C.P. "up the hill" in front of their mobile home in 1968,

having laid out the day's catch, by size.

In the early 1970s, Grandpa C.P. and Grandma Dorothy both retired from General Dynamics. They sold their place "up the hill" and bought a place in the Kern River Valley, right next door to Dorothy's older sister Elva. Here's a photo from the valley property, with C.P. apparently taking a rest after sawing some lumber for Aunt Elva, who stands behind him.

Aunt Elva was always one of my favorites, because she was another musician in the family and was always very welcoming to us. Elva had played piano for silent films when she was a teenager and also loved to sing in church. My mother's sister Joanie was a gospel singer, too. Mom could sing, but she was more of a music fan than a performer. Mom loved dance music, like big-band, rock, and country, but she had a set of classical music records and played them quite a bit. Mom got me started listening to Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky, and also let me have many years of music lessons. Mom didn't like Elva's piano playing, because she thought Elva "banged" on the keys. I liked playing Aunt Elva's piano because some of its notes were way off kilter, and I would make up tunes based on the worst of Elva's piano keys.

Sadly, Grandma Dorothy died in early 1975, just a few short years after they bought the valley homestead. She was only 58 years old (my age now), when she had a sudden, massive cerebral hemorrhage. She always seemed to be such a tough lady to all of us, but she wasn't taking her blood pressure medicine properly. Losing her was awful, just awful, and Grandpa C.P. spent the remaining 10 years of his life feeling rather lost.

Not long before Grandpa passed away, I talked with him on the phone for a while. I was finishing up four years of active Navy duty in Charleston, South Carolina (a lovely place!). He was not doing well physically and was living with my mother. We usually talked about what was in the news or on TV, as well as family stuff. During that call, Grandpa and I had our final conversation. The last thing I told him was that I loved him. When news of his passing reached me in Charleston, I was so grateful for the way our last conversation ended. 

We all need to end our conversations with expressions of love, because we may not speak to that person again.

A very blessed New Year to all!

Annie

"My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition." -- Indira Gandhi

Mom's Home Town and C-SPAN for Genealogy

It's a drizzly day here in Marin County. The gray clouds above the hills visible from our office window are offset by the crimson and green leaves of a tree in our front yard that evokes the Advent of Christmas soon to come. Mom loved Christmas. 

The last time I saw Mom over the Holidays, I told her that we always appreciated all the efforts she had made over the years to make sure our Holiday celebrations were special. Because she was bed-ridden, I brought in a small pine tree with little "package" decorations on it and placed it on her dresser so she would have the Christmas-tree smell in her room. Uncle Jimmy, her brother, performed some "Linus magic" on the tree and made it look simply gorgeous! Thanks, Jimmy!

While in a grocery store this week, I spotted several elderly ladies shopping carefully for their Thanksgiving cooking, and it made me miss Mom so much that I almost started crying in the store. I told the checkout clerk about it, and we agreed that there is something universally irreplaceable about mothers. I'll always be grateful for the lovely mother I had and for the tremendously wonderful sisters, nieces, nephews, and uncle who miss her just as much as I do.

Seems a good day to delve a bit into the Mom's relationship with her birthplace, Covington, Kentucky.

Mom and the Flood
Bonnie Rae Pryne was born in Covington on the 26th of July 1937, a few months following a devastating flood of the Ohio River that Mom was able to describe to my sisters and I in some detail, despite the fact that she was still in utero when it happened in late January and early February of that year. No doubt, her family talked about the flood quite a bit during the early years of Mom's life. There were likely to have been quite a few areas of flood damage remaining in the neighborhood where Mom would play as a little girl--sights that could have fueled wonder in her young mind, helping her to imagine the horrors of the disaster described by her family. 

In particular, Mom would tell us about the flood waters having washed away topsoil from cemetery plots, exposing and opening a number of coffins and, in a few cases, revealing scratch marks on the insides of coffin lids. The thought of someone awakening from a death-like coma, to discover that they had been buried prematurely, is a terrifying thought to anyone, particularly a little girl, who could very well have had nightmares about suffocating as she tried to scratch her way out of a tomb!

(A photo from the 1937 flood.)

Arrival from One War, Departure for Another
Mom's family had lived in northern Kentucky and southern Ohio, in the region of metropolitan Cincinnati, since the early years following the Revolutionary War. The family of her father, Clarence Everett Prine (later Pryne), farmed mostly in Brown, Union, Adams, and Highland counties in Ohio. The family of Mom's mother, Dorothy Esther Marksberry, were mostly craftspeople, such as tool-and-dye makers, builders, and machinists, although they raised animals and crops, as well, and she had one uncle who was a physician. 

Clarence Pryne, known as "C.P.," decided early in his life that farming was not for him. He loved to draw and paint. He could draw a straight line without a ruler and a perfect circle without a compass. C.P. had only an 8th-grade education, but his mother was a voracious reader whose vocabulary and fund of knowledge were so advanced that she was, according to her granddaughter (my mother), ever in search of crossword puzzles that were difficult enough to challenge her. Lorena May (Segondollar) Prine had left her husband, James Millburn Prine, when Clarence was a small child. Apparently, their marriage was destroyed by the devastating loss of C.P.'s older brother, Aaron, who died at age seven of tuberculosis. This left little C.P. and his mother to look after themselves, but they were both intelligent, hard workers who found ways to get by. 

As yet, I have no evidence of where C.P. and his mother lived immediately after his parents separated, but when C.P. was 13 his mother married a fireman named Frank McMurray in Cincinnati. Clearly, Lorena had chosen to take her son away from rural Ohio, where both her father and ex-husband had farms. By the time of the 1930 Federal Census, 19-year-old C.P. and his mother were living on their own in Bellevue, Kentucky (a suburb southeast of Cincinnati) away from Mr. McMurray, who had remained at his Cincinnati residence. Following another failed marriage, Lorena was waiting tables in a restaurant, and C.P. was pressing clothes for a dry cleaner. 

Their economic situation was likely the cause of C.P.'s limited formal education. The idea of helping his mother financially by starting work as a young teenager probably appealed to C.P. Of course, in those days, many men began full-time work at a younger age than we typically see today. However, C.P. inherited his mother's penchant for mental challenge and was a seeker of knowledge throughout his life. C.P. was always keen to share his knowledge with me as I was growing up and seemed delighted by my curiosity. My grandfather C.P. gave me a slide rule and showed me how to use it, since I showed an interest in mathematics. He would show me blueprints and other drawings he liked to do, and he shared his magazines about history and geography with me (Biblical Archaeological Review was a favorite of his). He did not live to witness his granddaughter's own scholastic pursuits in History and Archaeology, but he deserves great credit for stoking my interests.

It could not have been long before the Great Depression affected the ability of C.P. and his mother to find work. My great-grandmother Lorena told us about a Depression-era job she had sitting overnight with dead bodies in a funeral parlor, making sure no one came in during the night to steal clothing and other valuables from the bodies. She brought books and puzzles with her to pass the time so, despite the interruption of her circadian rhythms, the job was fairly easy. She stated, however, that she never became accustomed to the sudden movements of the bodies as rigor mortis set in because, if the corpses had not been properly secured in their coffins, they would sit straight up suddenly and give poor Lorena quite a start! 

As his mother kept the body-snatchers at bay, C.P. was able to secure a job with the Work Projects Administration (WPA) as a draftsman, so finally he could put his drawing talent to work! By the mid-1930s, C.P. was in love with Dorothy (who was the niece of his mother's cousin's husband--such things we learn through Genealogy!) and ready to start a family. The couple settled in Covington, had my mother in 1937 and boy-girl twins in 1939, and lived there until the World War brought an opportunity for C.P. to work on secret projects for the Department of War as a civilian. This new job took the Pryne family away from the region that had been home to generations of their kin for about a century and a half, as they were called upon to move to different areas of the country during the war years.

(L-R, Lorena, C.P., and Dorothy, mid-1960s)

C-SPAN for Genealogy!
Grandpa C.P. would have loved the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, known as C-SPAN! Although he was still alive during C-SPAN's early years (they began broadcasting in 1979, and C.P. died in 1985), he never had access to cable or satellite television. I imagine that C-SPAN's weekend broadcasts of American History TV and Book TV would have become obsessions of his, as they have become mine.

It has been fun to discover how useful the C-SPAN website can be, not just for following current events, but for researching geographical and historical context for Genealogy! 

The C-SPAN Cities Tour, for example, offers over 2000 video tours of historical and cultural sites in cities all over the U.S. There is a great deal of contextual learning to be found at C-SPAN Classroom, as well. You don't have to be a teacher to find much to appreciate about the thousands of videos they have covering such topics as U.S. History, World History, Comparative Government, and Geography. For primary resources about culture, people, and events of the 20th and 21st centuries, C-SPAN's Reel America features over a thousand historic videos that are sure to spark your own memories!

One way to search C-SPAN for genealogical purposes is to visit their American History TV page and enter the name of a place, historical event, or historical person in the "search" box at the top of the web page, which you can filter by media such as "videos" or "clips." You can also click on the "Filter/Sort Options" to the right of the "search" box to enter more specific criteria for what you seek. For instance, a simple search of "Covington, Kentucky" yielded over 60 videos through which to scroll in order to find something new to learn about Mom's home town. 

Covington and the Bridge

One of the video choices on American History TV for Covington is about the Roebling Suspension Bridge. The video treats us to 6-1/2 minutes of history about this bridge across the Ohio River that links Covington and Cincinnati. It was engineered by a Prussian immigrant named John Roebling, who had arrived in the U.S. in 1832. Roebling invented a method of building suspension bridges by winding metal cables on-site. This method has been used to build many suspension bridges over the years, and Roebling's wire-rope technique is still used today. 

For about 20 years, people in northern Kentucky expressed their desire for a bridge to be built over the river because they wanted to avoid the cost of transporting livestock and other goods across the river by ferry boats into the Cincinnati markets. The State of Kentucky granted a charter to build the bridge in 1845, but the State of Ohio did not grant a charter for their end of the bridge until 1849. The project was further held up by a lack of funding, and construction did not begin until 1856, only to be discontinued in 1858 due to a financial panic. During the Civil War, the need to transport troops across the Ohio River convinced government officials to raise funds and resume the project, and the Roebling Bridge was completed in 1867, the year that work began on another suspension bridge utilizing Roebling's cable method, the Brooklyn Bridge. Sadly, before the Brooklyn Bridge was built, Roebling's foot was badly injured by an arriving ferry boat as he stood on a dock, and he died a few weeks later in Brooklyn Heights of tetanus. 

The Roebling Bridge has been updated a few times and strengthened to handle modern traffic, but it is still essentially the original bridge. The State of Kentucky took full ownership of the bridge in 1953. The original floor of the bridge was made of oak, although later the oak was replaced by a metal grate system. The bridge's metal mesh creates a humming/rumbling sound as vehicles drive over it, so the structure has been given the nickname, "the singing bridge."

Interestingly, a cousin of Mom's home-town Roebling Bridge is the Golden Gate Bridge that opened in 1937, the year Mom was born. I drive over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco at least once a week--a fact that further connects my family to Covington, Roebling, and suspension bridges. But alas, the Golden Gate Bridge is paved and does not sing!

(A statue of Roebling along the Northern Kentucky Riverwalk, with the bridge and the Cincinnati skyline in the distance.)

Annie

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." - Marcus Tullius Cicero