Vacation Bizarreness

Ok, I'm back from vacation. We went to northern Alabama to visit old family stomping grounds and friends.

I visited my Onkel Ernst and Tante Irmgard, pseudo-uncle/aunt to my mother (and, hence, us). He was a rocket scientist in Huntsville, along w/my grandfather, but 10 years younger than my grandfather. He and my grandfather became best friends. He's now 92 or so .

I had a wonderful time talking to him about his experiences on the eastern front during WWII. He was trained as an astrophysicist and actually did some research into how many neutrons are generated when a U-238 atom splits, but Hitler decided making him a schutzer was a better investment of Germany's resources at the time. So, off he went, and nearly died in a Russian artillery bombardment. He was in the basement of a house that collapsed. He was pinned by timbers and debris, but a second incoming shell freed him. His 30 comrades weren't so lucky. (He did lose some toes to frostbite. Walking across the Ukraine in 40-below temperatures can do that.)

When he got back to Germany after that, he was notified to report to Peenemunde. Wernher von Braun, the chief of Germany's rocket program at the time, needed highly technical people to help him. He'd gotten clearance to scour the rolls of soldiers' names, and he'd sent down a classmate of Onkel Ernst's to do the job. Coincidence and personal connection ("hey, I know that guy!") may have kept him from being sent back to the front.

We talked about the replica of the "apex predictor" he was building in his garage, for an upcoming 50th anniversary celebration of our first satellite launch. He built the original apex predictor in that same garage 50 years ago for the insertion of the Explorer satellite into orbit in Jan. of 1958, a few months after Sputnik went up. Basically, he had to predict the apex of the trajectory of a missle in order to fire the booster pack on the satellite to give it the right horizontal velocity to keep it in orbit while the rest of the missle fell back into the ocean. The device itself is extremely simple, basically just a very accurate, calibrated timer-activated switch. The complexity comes from the conversions of input data from three independent (and therefore disagreeing) sources into a seconds-from-liftoff figure. This was all in the days before electronics, so he was doing his calculations with a slide rule. (Not "live", but he set up pre-programmed conversion tables, essentially.)

He was successful, though, because the satellite stayed in orbit for twelve and a half years.

So, that's family connection #1, a gen-yoo-wine Rocket Scientist.

Then, we went to Guntersville to see the house my great aunt lived in all her life (she never married) and to visit her grave. My sister was especially close to her; she's named after her. The house was built by my great- or great-great-grandfather around the turn of the century (I think it was built earlier, around 1875 or even 1855, but others in my family say 1895). It was a big frikkin' house, two stories, 12-inch timbers, a maze of hallways and staircases and downright spooky. My sister and I used to explore it whenever we visited and scare ourselves silly in some of the rooms (which did have an eerie vibe). After my great aunt died (in the late 1980s), the house was sold by my second cousin, once removed. In doing so, he had more than one offer and chose to sell it to the party who he thought would be the better custodian of it, even though they offered less money. Yay, second cousin, once removed! The folks who bought and restored it, we had assumed, were totally unrelated, but it turn out that the wife is related (she thinks our grandmothers were cousins). This house was then sold by these folks to a local bank that wanted the lot it was on (pretty much downtown) and which promised to build a new headquarters inside the house (a remodelling). It turned out the house couldn't be used (too many interior walls would have had to be removed), so the bank offered to sell the house back to the owners for $1, but they would have to move it. They took that on, because they didn't feel the house should be demolished. That was a tremendous project because of all the various administrative headaches. The biggest problem was getting the telephone company to agree to move the phone wires strung between telephone poles along the street. The plan was to roll the house across the street to the Tennessee River (dammed, to make Lake Guntersville), float it around the point (under a bridge) and bring it back on land on the other side of the point. If you've ever driven through a medium-small Southern town, you know how many wires are in the air. My understanding is that the cost of moving it was about equal to their selling price, so, apart from the hassle, the move was free.

For those that are interested, see maps.google.com. The house was moved from the corner of Blount Ave. and Brown St., down Brown St. to the river, floated around the point and brought back on land to sit almost at the corner of Lusk St. (how appropriate) and Sunset Drive (next to the Episcopal Church :) ). By the way, while you're looking at the map, you might be interested to know that great aunt Ibby and a whole passel (what is that, a corruption of "parcel"?) of my ancestors and their relatives are buried in the cemetery at the corner of O'Brig and Debow. (I'm guessing "O'Brig" is apostrophe'd, based on the funky spacing on the street sign I saw. Maybe it's "O. Brig.")

We got to visit the house and spent an hour or two chatting in the front parlor with my heretofore unknown relative. She's pretty damn cool, a former high school English teacher, cancer survivor with short, brilliant white hair, wearer of slightly unconventional jewelry, gracious in the best tradition of the Deep South and runs the town history museum. And, no, the contradictions and implications inherent in being rich, white and connected in the Deep South in a smallish town are not lost on me. Did I mention she's on a first-name basis with my father's second cousin who's somewhat of a mover and shaker in this town? Close enough to him to be able to twist his arm to lead some sort of historical tour of Guntersville.

That move was a tremendous hassle, and I, personally, am glad they undertook it.

So, that's family connection #2, a rich, gracious cousin who bought the family manse and took care of it, basically out of the blue.

After that, we pressed on to Gadsden, to see the town where my dad grew up, and to visit his mother and father, buried in the cemetery there. At both cemeteries, we took pictures of headstones, the digital equivalent of rubbings, I guess. (Some of the headstones in Guntersville were so worn and eroded that rubbings might have been the better approach.) After we visited Pop and Nana's grave, we toured around town looking at the places my father grew up. I would have (should have, really) videotaped the whole thing, but it would probably be excruciatingly boring to just about everybody else, so I just tried to pay attention as he pointed out houses left and right. Then, we drove up the mountain overlooking town to see the house he had spent the latter half of his adolescence, the fabled "House on the Mountain" that had figured in so many conversations but which I had never seen. The house is on a ridge overlooking the town, built around 1925 by my grandfather, not big, but you know the real estate dictum: location, location, location. (And, of course, "not big" is a relative term -- it ain't a bungalow.) It's on a huge lot, set back from the road by a long driveway and a thick forest, adjacent to (but out of sight of) similarly upscale houses. So, we pull up this long, asphalted driveway that looks like a street, past the one house at the end of the "street", into the big apron in front of a big old garage, turn around, behaving like the stereotypical lost family, and, as we're slowly cruising by the house again, an older gentleman comes out with that sort of suspicious "can I help you lost folks who shouldn't be on my property?" sort of thing going on. My father introduces himself and the guys says "I'll be damned. I was a freshman in medical school while you were a resident," and introduces himself. (He grew up in Anniston, a local city.) And suddenly, they're two medical colleagues exchanging reminiscences about med school and the local VA hospital and whats-his-face with that ballistic cardiogram device he was trying to get people to adopt and so on and so forth. Then, on top of that, it turns out this guy was a bomber crewman (pilot?) in WWII, over Germany, while my dad was an infantryman in the same theater. (My dad actually spent seven months in the south of France as a "fugitive from the law of averages", as he puts it. He eventually had a German "potato masher" grenade bounced off his knee while he was hunkering down in a foxhole and was lucky enough to escape with only the tiniest fleck of steel in his knee. However, as you might guess, any piece of steel in your knee is enough to hospitalize you.) So, now they have something else to reminisce over.

So, we (and that includes the current residents) got the full tour of the house and all the mischief two little boys (my father and uncle) can get into. We saw where my dad's cat Bosco was buried in my grandmother's turkey roaster. (Bosco had an unfortunate encounter with a dog, and the boys gave him a full funeral, with honors. The best available casket was the turkey roaster, which was appropriated without consultation with the lady of the house. When she later found out about it, they offered to exhume it, but she declined the offer, and it remains in the yard to this day.)

We got to sit in the front parlor of this house, too, and chat a spell. The man of the house was all sweaty, since we had interrupted him at lawn-mowing. He was about 80. The lady of the house came home in the middle of all this, also all sweaty, from a line dance class. They were both hale and hearty, in full possession of their mental faculties, enthusiastic about life, and outgoing. Another example of Southern hospitality, sort of. She was from Iowa, complete with corn-fed, big-jointed Iowan accent, so I guess on her part it was Midwestern hospitality, which is pretty much just as good. We would have chatted longer, I think, but my dad was impatient to get on the road.

So, there's family connection #3, a med-school colleague, again, completely out of the blue.

So, my takeaway from all this is this: it's really interesting how small the circles are when one lives in the top layers of the social pyramid.

I can't really claim any of this, I guess, since I'm just a software developer and a web hack, at that (I compete with copy-and-paste offshore developers for my employment), but I suppose with the proper amount of hustle earlier in life, I might have been able to. I suppose I could say I'm not living up to my heritage, that I'm the unproductive scion of greater generations, the proof that blue blood alone does not determine destiny. Still, there is a certain sense of familial pride.