The Giant Faucet

Immigrants

My mother's paternal grandparents were German.

Johann came to the U.S. in 1877. He was 18 years old, and came to join his older sisters who were living in Philadelphia. He lived in Chicago for a while and then in 1884 moved to Rock County, Minnesota, where he took up farming. He became a U.S. citizen in 1891.

Martha was born in 1863 in a small town in New York. Her parents were German immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. as children. They moved to Rock County, where Martha and Johann were married in 1887.

Johann and Martha's first two children died of diphtheria, and the third of whooping cough. With three more children, the family moved to California, where my grandfather John was born. They lived in a rural area where most of their neighbors were German, and their home language was German.

When the older kids started school, they discovered that English was the dominant language. As they learned, they also taught their younger siblings, so by the time my grandfather got to kindergarten, he was prepared.

The children were bilingual, speaking German at home with their parents, and English everywhere else. After their parents died they stopped speaking German altogether.

During World War II, when Japanese-Americans were hauled off to internment camps, the local German community was horrified. They feared that they would be next. The older people were especially frightened because many of them did not have their paperwork in order. In fact, a relatively small number of Germans (mostly non-citizens) were imprisoned, but as it turned out, there was no real threat to the members of my great-grandparents' community. Germans were safe largely because there were so many millions of them (either immigrants or the children and grandchildren of immigrants) living throughout the U.S. They also had the advantage of not being targets of blatant racism as the Japanese were.

All this happened long before I was born. Growing up, I knew little about the German branch of my mother's family until we traveled to Europe and she looked up some distant cousins. My grandfather and his surviving siblings hadn't spoken German in decades and were no longer fluent. They did not define themselves as German, or even as German-American. Like so many ethnic groups before and since, they were simply, and proudly, Americans.

 

Shorty

I had a summer job at a car dealership. I had not been introduced to the service manager, although I had seen him from a distance. As it happened, he was a Little Person. One day, I needed to talk to him about something, and I asked one of the salesmen what his name was.

The guy said, "It's Shorty," and I cringed.

"I can't call him that," I gasped.

"His real name is Elmer, but he hates that. Shorty is his choice -- he's got it on his business cards."

Well, if it's on his business cards....

I got used to calling him Shorty, and life went on.

Until the moment three months later when a customer asked me for the service manager's name.

"It's Shorty," I said, and she cringed.

"I can't call him that," she gasped.

"His real name is Elmer," I told her, "but he hates that. Shorty is his choice -- he's got it on his business cards."

She sighed and walked off, looking grim, for her conversation with Shorty.

 

Playing Doctor

"The Bad Doctors" (1892), James Ensor

When I was little, I had a lot of toys, and usually the things I really wanted appeared on my birthday or Christmas.

One wish-list item I still remember was a doll whose name I can't recall, but whom I'll call Medical Marva. Marva's role in life was to be a patient. She came with a hospital bed. Her accessories included arm and leg casts, a sling, crutches, a thermometer, medicine bottles and equipment, bandages, and plastic dots that could be stuck on her face to resemble measles or chicken pox.

I really wanted that doll, but it did not show up under the Christmas tree. My guess is that my mother found it extremely unappealing, too much like a sick child. Of course, I saw it from a different angle, envisioning myself as the heroic doctor who would make the doll well again.

Once or twice I've searched online to see if I can find Medical Marva. It doesn't help that I don't remember her real name. Even so, searching for "doll" and "hospital bed" sometimes yields interesting results. I tried it yesterday, and found a company that crafts miniature insane asylum furnishings for dollhouses. Crutches and a few bandages seem pretty tame by comparison.