Paddock Calls

MOM & DAD

One of Anna’s comments did a terrific job of explaining how Mom and Dad met.  I’ll let her tell the story:

The way Mom and Dad met was sweet. Dad was a Master Sergeant.  The war was over and the troops were waiting to be shipped back to the States.  Dad was in charge of entertainment.  He had the jeep.  He would go pick up the local orchestra and bring them to entertain the soldiers. Yes, Mom was one of the violinists.  When he first saw her, he signaled to her to sit in the front seat of the jeep.  Grandpa Raffe found out and took Mom's violin away and locked her in her room.  Mind you, she was 33 at the time and was engaged to, I believe, Roberto (Angela's brother).  Dad was distressed and finally got the courage to go confront Grandpa Raffe.  He asked to marry Mom.  Grandpa Raffe finally gave his permission, but he told Mom that if she did this and went to America, if things did not work out, she was never to return.  In other words, he practically disowned her.  Mom never went back home and never saw her family again.

In my mind, that belongs in a book.  There is another part to all of this, but I will save it for the next post.

DAD

Finding a picture of Dad before he was married, or even before he was 30, is a challenge.  I think that I have one, however, and I’ll post it as soon as it turns up.

When I think of Dad, what comes to mind is a pot of beans and weenies flying through the air, students crying on Mom’s shoulder, family dinners from 6:00 to 6:05 PM so he could hurry back to teach, a man who always had a few bucks for me when I was going out, and someone who was very quiet about his past.

He mentioned a few things, like saving pennies in a sock during the Great Depression, and attending his father’s funeral (a man who ran off, leaving Granny alone to raise the family), but nothing really significant.  It was Mom who revealed the shocker to me: Dad was married once before Mom.  He was 19, and the lady’s name was, I believe, Caroline; she was the only child of Aunt Ruth and Uncle Otto.  The tragedy here is that Caroline died in childbirth, so Dad lost both his wife and child at once.  I can’t even imagine.  When I was 19, Dad was footing the bill for me to go to college and learn party planning.  No wonder he didn’t talk much about his youth.  I am sure that there were good times, but between an absent father, the Great Depression, and the loss of his wife and child, I am sure that he often wondered why he remained alive.

I remember once asking Dad why he enlisted in the Army during World War II.  His answer surprised me: “Because I thought it would be fun.”  Somehow, I never thought of him as someone who went out looking for fun.  But, when I think back over the years following his shaky start in life, an attempt to find fun in a war taking place overseas is probably not so odd.

Eventually, I will add more on what I know and remember about Dad’s early life, but I’ll just end this post with a list of other relationships in the family.  If I think of anything interesting about those kinships, I’ll mention them:

• Whose mom or grandma was Grandma Dihlmann?  Aunt Ruth Kaelin’s?
• Granny Mildred had a brother (Uncle Willy) and a sister (Aunt Ruth Poleitis - Sp?).  I have this picture of Granny shuffling from point A to points unknown, and Aunt Ruth swaggering in the opposite direction.  Inevitably, Swagger bumps into Shuffle, and Swagger says, “Mildred, you are always in such a hurry!”
• Aunt Ruth Kaelin had a brother - Uncle Percy.  He lived in New York and came down periodically.  That visit was a big deal.  He was the first person I knew who stirred together all of the food on his plate to eat it because it all went down the same way.  We, the kids, just thought it was gross.
• Dad’s sister was Aunt Al (Albertine Emma Paddock), married to Uncle Joe (Joseph Leonhard - he was proud of the ‘h’ in Leonhard).  Anna and Christy have some interesting memories regarding Aunt Al, and I look forward to finally seeing those in writing.  I know that Aunt Al and Uncle Joe lost one child (at birth?  a miscarriage?), and I suspect that it pretty much ended the physical part of their marriage.  That didn’t become really clear to me until Aunt Al died (from the attempted cure of her lung cancer - smoking), and Uncle Joe met and married Rose.  Clearly, he re-discovered love.

That’s enough for this post.

MOM

I'll start with Mom, mostly because I don't know a whole lot about her life before Dad.  I know that she spent a long time in school because she had a Ph.D. in Music.  She also played in a symphony orchestra.  Her full name was Adele Vincenza Paoli, and her sister's name was Amalia.  Our Italian grandparents were named Raffaele and Felicina (Rossi) Paoli.  Amalia married her first cousin, with the Pope's permission,  and had three children: Maria Adelaide (Made), Raffaela (Raffa), and Susanna.  Made still lives in Bologna, where Mom and her family were from.  She is married to Roberto, the Italian Factory Rep for Ducati motorcycles, and has a son - Ricardo - who is a Ducati test rider.  Raffa lives in Cuneo, and is married to Beppe, an oncologist.  They have one son, Giovanni.  Susanna is, I think, the black sheep.  I have never spoken to her or heard from her, and  I believe that she lives in or near Rome.

Apparently, there was love in Mom's life before she met Dad because she was engaged to someone else when she met the American soldier.  Who was that other guy?  What did he do?  Did they meet during WWII, or did they meet beforehand?  Mom was a nurse during the war.  I think that during a war, it must be easy to fall in love and share the hard times with someone.  Did she play the violin much during the war?  Was she glad to give up nursing and go back to music when it was all over?  I think so.  Was her fiancè part of her music past or nursing past, or none of the above?

I recall an incident when the topic of this other man arose.  Dad flew into a jealous rage over a man representing an incident in Mom's life that occurred before he ever met her.  What caused that?  Was it just jealousy?  I'm not sure.  I suspect that Mom's decision to break off her engagement did not happen easily.

Does anyone remember more?  Do you, too, have unanswered questions?  I don't recall that Mom talked about those early years very much.  I have almost nothing on the Paoli side of the family, but Made and Raffa sent me some info, including a tree, of the Rossi side.  At some point, I'll make copies of that and send it out.

Let's Capture What We Can

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, it is the Second Witch (there are three of them) who says: Paddock calls.  The part of me that enjoys acting always thought that it was cool to have my name in Macbeth, even if Paddock refers to a toad.  It is that kind of trivia that is lost when families don't write things down.

That is what happened in our family.  When Mom and Dad reminisced about their pasts, no one wrote it down.  I don't know how much is lost, but I'm sure that it is a lot; I don't intend to lose more.  In this blog, I will publish as much as I can squeeze out of memory - mine, my sisters, my children, and anyone else who can help me to recall.  Feel free to make comments of any length.  It isn't too late to do some saving, and have a little fun.

Why a blog?  Because it is easy for us all to contribute, and then to print out or otherwise save what appears.  There is nothing like good old paper.  Blogging just makes it really easy to collect whatever we have so that we can each save the result in our own way.  How often will I post?  Who knows, but feel free to rattle my cage when you think that it has been too long.

So, here's to Mom and Dad and us - all of us - and whatever we can conjure!