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Otto
The Grouch |
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Cast
of Characters: Mom - my grandmother, who raised me since I was
seven
Otto - her ex
husband, my grandfather
Marny
(actually Mary) - Otto's second wife
All others are self
explanatory
My grandmother put up with a lot from me as I was raised without any male influences in my life. Mom was just too softhearted to be a disciplinarian, so I got away with too much. But I loved her very much and I would never abandon her, but I did give her a lot of grief. It was not always intended, like the time I accidentally threw the dress she made herself for my sister's wedding, in the trash.
I was watching TV the day before the wedding. Mom was in the kitchen and we could hear the garbage truck coming, so she hollered to me, "Bud, throw out that trash in the living room for me, will you?"
"Okay," I answered. I looked around and saw a bunch of goods that I took for scraps laying on a chair, so I grabbed them and tossed them in the garbage can. About thirty minutes later she came in and looked around, asking guardedly,
"Where's my dress?"
"What dress," says I.
"My dress I was making for your sister's wedding. It was almost finished and I laid it on this chair," she cried mournfully, dreading what was coming.
"Oops, I think I threw it away."
"You threw it away?"
"When you told me to throw out the trash in here, that's what I saw."
"I meant the trash in the waste basket. Quick, you've got to take me to Ben Snyders right now." So off we went to Ben Snyders to buy some new material so she could stay up half the night making a new dress for the wedding. I felt really bad about that.
I recall the time I dyed my hair green. Not on purpose though. I had seen a movie where Anthony Quinn portrayed a gunfighter with grey hair. I thought it looked really cool and wanted to duplicate it, so Bud helped me and we dyed my hair. For some reason it came out distinctly greenish.
Mom about had a fit. It didn't look very good so we got my friend Bud's mother, who was a hairdresser, to dye it back before anybody saw me. She got a big kick out of it. His mom was okay.
Speaking of green, I once painted my shoes green. They came out looking good, like bright green patent leather. I used the paint from the service station where Bud worked. I think it was Sinclair, they were big on green. My shoes had been a pair of white bucks that had seen better days, until I painted them.
One time I lost my graduation clothes. My grandfather didn't give us much, but he had given her a few bucks to buy me a new shirt and a pair of shoes for my high school graduation. I bought the stuff downtown and stopped in another store to look at something else and left my stuff on the counter and went home, forgetting all about it. When I arrived home without my package, mom was once again upset over my stupidity and unconcern. I went back downtown, but my stuff was gone and she had to scrape the money together to buy me a new shirt and shoes.
My grandfather was a gruff, unlikeable person to begin with. He was a prominent architect. One of the designers of the Kentucky State Fairgrounds and Freedom Hall, but he was an a--hole. Most of the family kissed up to him because of his money. He was a drunkard. More specifically, a weekend drunk. Come Friday he would hit the bottle as soon as he got home from work and stayed drunk until sobering up with coffee royals Sunday night. He bought Early Times Whiskey by the case. The same for holidays. He wouldn't touch a drop during the work week, but got rip-roarin' drunk at every opportunity on weekends and holidays.
His holiday tradition was to corner one of my aunts and berate her until she was reduced to an uncontrollable fit of tears. Then he would curse at a woman on the television and throw his shoe at her. That would set us kids off on spasms of giggles while Marny would fuss over him and try to calm him down. "Oh, Otto!" was a frequent refrain.
Marny was well liked by all of us kids. We would visit for a week or so every summer and she would play games with us and take us to baseball games and the movies. We would go to the drugstore with her and she would buy us magazines and ice cream and sit up for the late TV movies with us. She was also a great cook. She would easily get on the kids side by topping her sweet potato casserole with colored marshmallows.
They also had three dogs. Hey, we could have had a night.
Grandpa had a mean little dog named Tiny that had adopted his personality. No one could get near him with her around. After she died, Marny took my uncle George's dog Fawn, when they moved out of the apartment. She was a nice little dog that became the alpha dog in the family.
Marny then rescued a big ol' hound dog that was living on the street, and named him Lucky, and finally there was Gretel, a daschund, who would steal my socks every morning when I stayed there. I had to wander around the house to find them in the morning, but I wouldn't hide my socks because Gretel seemed to have too much fun stealing them.
The whole family would gather around the big table on holidays and Marny's family was nuttier than mine. Grandpa hated every one of them, mainly I think, because they were always trying to borrow money from him. It was quite a gathering. He owned a big house on Southern Parkway with two apartments on the second floor. Uncle Kenny and Aunt Lucille lived in one apartment and Uncle George's family lived in the other. Mom, Sis, and I would ride the bus for frequent sunday visits. In the early fifties, he purchased a huge new TV to watch the pro football games. I liked that. What I didn't like was that we had to sit on the far side of the room to watch it so it wouldn't ruin our eyes. But the only thing that strained our eyes was trying to watch a sixteen inch screen from twenty feet across the room.
I actually saw my first television broadcast on Thanksgiving day in 1948. It was a bitter cold day and my Uncle George took me on his Cushman motor scooter over to Heleringer's Department Store to watch the annual Male vs Manual high school football game. It is one of the oldest high school rivalries in the United States. They had opened the store to promote the new television sets. I was amazed.
My sister had a date for the big game and my family did their part in making him wish he had never asked her out during his short, uncomfortable visit. It couldn't have been much of a date for them anyway, as he played trumpet for the Male High band as well. But having a date for the big game was tradition. Sort of a miniature Yale versus Harvard thing.
One Sunday, us kids had eaten before the adults and I was sitting in the great room looking through a magazine while the adults were dining in the kitchen. Out of the blue, a ruckus began, which was not unusual. Voices were raised, a woman screamed, Marny hollered, "Oh, Otto!" and a breaded chicken breast came flying out of the kitchen and skidded across the floor right in front of me. I watched it go zooming by and laughed. Marny came scurrying after it and returned it to the kitchen, giving me a smile as she passed. That incident would live in family infamy.
Grandpa had taken offense at a wisecrack from uncle Kenny. Marny had given grandpa a chicken breast and uncle Kenny kidded him about it and he became irate, which he was wont to do, and bellowed, "Well, if you want the Goddamn thing you can have it, I don't want it!" and he flung it across the kitchen and into the next room.
I eventually severed all ties with him over a car. Uncle George had a Green Plymouth that he sold to grandpa. I don't know why he bought it because he never drove it. It just sat in his driveway. I needed a car and mom suggested I ask grandpa about the Plymouth. I thought that was a good idea because it was a nice car in great shape, so I asked him about it. He flat refused to sell it to me, saying I was too young and didn't need a car, then sold it to the kid who cut his grass. This ticked me off but I let it ride and began looking for another one.
I found a car cheap enough for me to buy, but I needed to have two cosigners. I asked uncle Kenny and he instantly agreed and then I stupidly asked grandpa. He refused, saying that I was too young and if I could afford a car, we didn't need his help anymore, so he was cutting us off. He had been helping mom a little bit by giving her a few bucks a month. That was the last straw. I had nothing to do with him for the rest of his life. He just couldn't stand anyone not knuckling under to his bidding. My sister joined the boycott, even though he had been generous with her. He once bought her a brand new Schwinn bicycle. I told mom that since I had a job, we would make it somehow. I got an evening job at the corner Pharmacy and worked there for a year or so to supplement my income and we got along fine.
It made me think. I didn't get along with my father or my grandfather, but all was aces with my two uncles. I guess it was because my uncles never tried to boss me around.
When he was dying, Marny tried to tell mom that Otto was asking about me. I wasn't naive enough to believe that and anyhow, I didn't care. To prove the point, he left us nothing in his will and I didn't care about that either.