Posts Tagged ‘Cherokee’

Technically, she’s my Great-Great Aunt Maude: my Great Grandmother Effie’s sister.  However, we always called her Aunt Maude.  She is, to my knowledge, the longest lived member of the Cherokee side of the family.  She died at the ripe old age of 102.

Aunt Maude

That’s her when she was about 97 standing on the front porch of her ramshackle little cabin.  She had broken her foot while trying to carry a load of firewood into the house, thus the crutches.  I’m sad the picture didn’t show the long braid hanging down her back.  She always wore her hair in a braid, and she truly looked like a little Cherokee squaw.

Aunt Maude was also something of a rebel for her time.  For starters, she and her sons, Buck, Cub, and Squirrel (not their legal names but that’s what we always called them) made moonshine.   They sold some of it to support themselves, but they also drank a lot of it too.  I think that’s where my Grandpa learned to make moonshine and probably why he decided to enter the family business from early 1950s to the mid 1970s.  Aunt Maude also grew her own tobacco and smoked a pipe.  If you went to her house, you usually found her sitting on her front porch in a rocking chair, smoking her pipe and often wrapped in a quilt.

Secondly, she was an animal whisperer.  I generalize that because she really could commune with any animal.  At one time she had a pet opossum who would crawl into bed with you at the ass-crack of dawn, wet from the morning dew, and she would scold you if you complained about it.  She also fed a mama skunk and her babies through a hole in the floor next to her old wood stove.  However, you had to leave the room when she fed the skunk because the skunk would spray anyone but Aunt Maude.  Finally, she had a black bear as a pet.  She scooped him up as a cub after some asshole shot his mother, and she raised him on a mixture of condensed milk and Karo syrup.  She always thought he would return to the wild when he got older, but he never did.  He knew where his bread was buttered.  Why forage in the woods when he had free room and board at Aunt Maude’s cabin?  This doesn’t even include all the other critters she half tamed: raccoons, foxes, and even an old red-tailed hawk.

Despite her dubious enterprise of moonshining, Aunt Maude was a hard worker and strong as an ox for her size and age.  She could carry a huge bundle of firewood on her back like it was nothing.  She maintained a huge wild blackberry patch behind the cabin and could make the best blackberry cobbler you ever tasted in your life.   And the floors in her cabin were so clean they shined.  You could eat off Aunt Maude’s humble wood floors.

Some of my favorite old photos are those of my maternal grandfather.  I especially love the photos we have of him in uniform.  Unfortunately, some were not stored very well and are damaged.  I suppose it just adds patina.  Right?

Grandpa & Unknown Girlfriend

That’s my Grandpa with some unknown woman.  He’s 20 years old in the photo.  I’m not sure if it was taken in the states or if it was taken in Europe.  The Kewpie dolls lead me to believe it was taken in the U.S.  at or after some type of state or county fair.  The woman isn’t the French girlfriend he had while stationed overseas.  My Grandmother always referred to that girlfriend as “his Alsatian Floozy.”  (She was from Alsace, apparently.)

Grandpa in Morocco or Algiers

That’s Grandpa during WWII, and we believe this was taken in either Morocco or Algiers.  He was part of Operation Torch, and we know he was part of the group that landed first and setup the infrastructure to support the other Allied Troops during the invasion of North Africa.  I’m pretty sure he’s sporting a patch on his uniform that puts him in Morocco at the time this photo was taken.

Grandpa the Mechanic

This is how I remember my Grandpa.  After the war, he worked as an auto mechanic specializing in frame repair.  I’m not sure if that uniform is from when he worked at the Ford dealership or the Dodge dealership.  There’s a funny story with that too.  While my Grandpa was working at Ford, he bought a Dodge for himself.  Well, that didn’t set right with the owner of the Ford dealership, and he fired my Grandpa.  When my Grandma found out, she was pissed off.  She called the owner, cussed him out, and said “I work at Bell Bomber, but I don’t drive a damn airplane, you stupid son of a bitch!”   LOL!  Hey, at least I come by my sharp tongue honestly.  The owner of Ford, sensing a possible lawsuit, called and offered my Grandpa his job back, but Grandpa had gotten a new job the same day at Dodge after he told them what happened.  Neener neener neener!

He was the best frame man in town.  Based on his reputation, he was hired by the local  Shriners to create those funny little cars they drove in parades.  The cars at our local Shriner’s temple were trick cars; some could raise off the frames, like a jack would raise a car, but still drive.   I sure wish I could locate some pictures of those things.  They are just one of the many creative things my Grandpa could do with mechanics.  I would go so far as to say he was a genius when it came to designing and building things.