Jim Goldsworthy, Columnist
When my dad used to tell me about his grandfather, he said he had grown to love him almost as much as he did his father. I understood, because had I felt the same way about mine.
I’ve often written about my grandfather, and my father once wrote about his. I’d like to share parts of that with you today.
My great-grandfather was named James, but everyone in the family called him “Pap.”
“Grandfather was big-hearted and generous,” Dad wrote in a letter to his cousin “Peaches,” who now lives in Ohio. “One afternoon while sitting on the front porch with him, I had been smoking for some time and was rolling my own cigarettes using Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco.
“I started to roll a cigarette while we were talking, and he said, ‘Boy, why don’t you smoke a pipe?’ I said I did not have the money to buy a pipe. He got up and said ‘Come with me.’
“We went down to a drug store and he bought me a Yellow Bowl pipe and another can of tobacco. Then we went across the street to a restaurant, and he had a bottle of beer and I had a Coke. I was really proud of that pipe.”
When I was a little kid, my parents and I often spent the evenings on the porch at my grandparents’ home on Main Street across from the old Keyser Theater. Granddad usually walked with me down the street to Romig’s drug store to buy me a Coke or an ice cream cone.
Pap worked for a time in the coal mines, then was a freight agent at the B&O; Railroad station in Keyser and ran a pool hall before becoming chief ticket-taker at the Music Hall Theater. It was his job in the mornings to sweep the place and dust the seats.
“I would help him,” Dad wrote. “Often I would find a nickel or dime that someone had dropped. Boy, what a thrill a nickel or a dime was in those days.
“Of course, since he took tickets it meant that Abe (Dad’s brother), Penny (his sister) and I could get in free. Mother and Dad always paid their own way.”
Boys from Potomac State College sometimes went to the theater and swept in a group past my great-grandfather without buying tickets. They’d go inside and split up, scattered around the theater.
“But Grandfather was very thorough,” Dad wrote. “He watched to see where all of them sat, and then he’d go through the theater and get them and run them out of the place one at a time.”
There were twin sisters who did get the best of him. One bought a ticket to see a movie, then toward the end of it would get up and make her way out, telling my great-grandfather that she wasn’t feeling well.
She went home and changed clothes with her sister, who returned to the theater with the ticket. The sister showed Pap the ticket and told him she felt much better and liked the movie so much she wanted to see it again.
“It made him mad as hell that they could do this and get away with it,” Dad wrote, “but he could never prove that’s what they were doing, and he couldn’t do anything about it.”
Dad said his grandfather “was essentially a creature of habit. His routine was almost like clockwork.”
My grandfather operated a barber shop, and Pap went there each day for a rub of hair tonic on his way to the theater. Granddad’s brother and son, Paul and Abe, worked there as barbers. Uncle Abe took the shop over after Granddad died in 1959 and ran it until 1977. (Paul’s nickname was “Moose,” for reasons nobody can remember, and Abe was “Gussie.”)
Pap’s obituary in the Keyser newspaper said he was “the most immaculate man about his dress of any man his age.”
He wore a hat, and Dad wrote that, “The only time he took off his hat in the house was when he sat down to eat a meal or the last thing before he went upstairs at night to go to bed.”
Upon sitting down for dinner, Pap always undid his belt and the top button of his trousers to make room for what was to come.
He poured his coffee into the saucer and blew on it until it had cooled off, then poured it back into the cup and drank it. The coffee was referred to as having been “saucered and blowed,” and that came to be one of our family expressions — usually meaning that you (or the dog) were settled down and ready for bed.
Once when he was a kid, Dad passed the mashed potatoes back around to Pap’s end of the table, but had forgotten to put the spoon back in it.
When he was asked to return the spoon, “I just flipped it like it was a knife and I was playing mumbledy-peg. It landed in the bowl and splashed mashed potatoes out right in front of my grandfather. That’s the last time I ever did anything like that at the table.”
After dinner, Pap sat in his chair and read the Bible until it was time for a nap.
“Before he went to sleep,” Dad wrote, “he would tip his hat over his nose so that it would cover his eyes and at the same time let him smell the hair tonic that Dad or Uncle Paul rubbed on him that morning.”
Great-grandfather Goldsworthy died in 1936 at the home of his daughter, Irene.
Dad wrote that funeral homes were scarce or non-existent back then, so his grandfather was laid out at Aunt Irene’s.
“I was standing at the casket by myself and I was gently crying,” he wrote. “I felt like something tapped the top of my shoe and I looked down and a little silver-like tack had fallen out of the bottom of the casket and hit my shoe.
“I picked it up and put it in my pocket, and when I had a chance later I wrapped it in a little piece of tissue and put it in my billfold. I carried it for years. One day, I wanted to show it to somebody and looked in my wallet, and it was gone. I have no idea what happened to it,” he wrote.
Dad showed me that tack once when I was young, and who knows? Some day when I’m going through as-yet undiscovered things at the house I might find it. If I do, I’ll know what it is.
These are just a few of the stories I’ve heard about my great-grandfather. It’s funny, but even though I never met him, I’ve come to love him just as much as I do my father, my grandfather, my great-uncle and my uncle.
Happy Father’s Day, Pap. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. Happy Father’s Day, Granddad. Happy Father’s Day, Moose. Happy Father’s Day, Gussie.
As long as I or any of my cousins still live, so will you.
