Memoirs of Norbert E. Gnadinger, Sr. Volume 1

1933

I have started the seventh grade with a new lease on life. I was now taking my studies more seriously and my grades had improved very much. I can even remember the name of my teacher, Sister Mary Leandra. I had always done well in history and geography because of my interest in such reading material. And my spelling grades were good for the same reason. What really improved were my grades in less interesting subjects such as Writing, Catechism, Civics, Bible History and Arithmetic. Sister Leandra was an excellent teacher and I ended the school year with a 92.4 average of my final exam. subjects. I am not trying to brag about this, but only trying to show what can be accomplished if you are serious about your studies, work harder and listen. The few music lessons we received were always interesting because I liked to sing and my background on the Player Piano and Carl’s Ukulele were a great help. I have to confess that I could not read one note of music. While a member of the Choir and the Glee Club in High School I memorized every sound and through repeated practice I had no trouble singing my part. The sounds of music are what captivated me. The words were mostly immaterial. The young persons of today will be surprised to know that I like some of the sounds of the “new” music but the screaming vocals turn me off the same way “my” music would turn them off.(Billy’s wife, Amelia Dolores[Peaches]{Dillman}Gnadinger was born, July 31, 1933)

Maybe you have read of the many dust storms which occurred in the middle 1930s’ in the plains states out west. Along with the Depression, as if that was not enough, the plains states were having a serious drought. There was so little rain that the ground completely dried up and was churned into powder. The prevailing winds seemed to run from west to east. Area citizens out West couldn’t go outside during a wind storm without a rag or handkerchief over their faces so they could breath. The dust would pile up against buildings and on roads just like snow would in a blizzard. I knew nothing of this happening until the wind and dust became so bad that the dust began appearing in our skys over Germantown. The dust would not block out the sun but it was thick enough so that the sky acquired a yellow hue. It appeared as though the air and the sky had turned into gold. A lot of the farmers in that region had to end up abandoning their farms for nothing could grow. They piled most of their belongings on a truck and headed west, mostly to California. Try reading “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck which features a family which lived through this difficult time. A movie was also made based on the book.

The whitening of coffee in our house was not done with whole milk but with canned milk. Mom would always buy Wilson’s milk in the small can. Our kitchen table always had three things on it. A small pewter milk pitcher containing only spoons, a pewter sugar bowl containing sugar and a small can of Wilson milk with two holes punched in the top using an ice pick. The condensed milk did not have time to spoil because everyone used it in their coffee or tea. I always drank the whole milk fresh from the cow and cooled in the “ice box.” Why did we only use Wilson’s milk? Because it came with a label which you cut off and saved to turn in for prizes. The label on the small can counted as a half label and the regular can counted as a full label. The labels belonged to Mom and I think she furnished her kitchen with gadgets by accumulating these labels.

We didn’t have the ice box very long after we moved to 1027 Ellison Ave. but I do remember the ice man, Mr Louyan of Goss Ave., hauling in the twenty pound blocks of ice over his shoulder and held with ice tongs. He wore a sort of leather shoulder protector to keep from getting soaked from dripping water from the ice. He would lift the lid on the top of the ice box, lift out the small piece of ice that still remained and then lowered the large chunk into the box along with the small left-over piece. Then Mom paid him his ten cent charge(?). Block ice came in one hundred pound blocks and Mr Louyan picked his up from the Arctic Ice Co. located on Logan St. near Breckinridge St. He would use the ice pick to cut it down to whatever size you needed. When he cut it down to size, there were chips which in summer time we were always eager to “bum” from the “ice man.” The ice man knew exactly what size block of ice you needed from observing a printed card which we placed in the front window on delivery day with the correct size you wanted facing up. We didn’t need a “cell” phone. Some time during the 1920s Mom and Pop saved enough money to buy a “brand new” General Electric Refrigerator. It was the envy of everyone in the neighborhood and I know the ice-man didn’t approve of it. You can see these same refrigerators today in museums. It was square shaped and sat on stout legs about a foot tall. It was coated with white, baked enamel. The door and sides were filled with about four inches of old time insulation(cork?)so the inside of the box was not very large. There were two small ice making trays enclosed like those today in small refrigerators. But it was the latest cooling invention for the home and we didn’t think it could ever get any better. On its’ top was a round container which held all of the compressors and motors needed to cool the box. To give you an idea of what the refrigerator looked like, come to downtown Louisville, and from a distance, view the Doctors Office Building located on the corner of Floyd and Liberty Sts. The same design except the top was round instead of square.(1-30-2001)

I mentioned the Ellison Ave. Dump before but not in any detail. Evidently the area from Fisher Ave. all the way back to Beargrass Creek was low land subject to flooding. Sometime before I was born, a bridge was built over the creek and the land was filled in only to support Ellison Ave. as a dirt road. I suppose dumping was encouraged in order to fill in the remaining low areas. On the north side of the street, generally, fill dirt was accepted. On the south side, anything was accepted and that is why there were fires flaring up all the time. Being a low area and saucer shaped, there was usually standing water and we had two ponds, a small one near Fisher Ave. and a larger one near Schiller St. In the winter, you could ice skate if you were careful not to trip over the bedsprings and other junk sticking up through the ice. These pond areas were eventually filled in with dirt and it is now all within the fence of St. Michael’s Cemetery. Don’t tell anyone about this and no one will be unhappy. In this year of 1933(?), Ellison Ave. was blacktopped from Reutlinger St. all the way to Barrett Ave. A good thing too for this became the only open artery from the city to the highlands during the 1937 flood. We used to play on the “dump”, in spite of the smell, because it had interesting mountains and valleys and you could always find some even more interesting treasure to take home.

You may not believe this, but 1933 was also the year Bernie and I painted the house. Bernie was without a job at this time. You are correct. Bernie did ninety percent of the painting and I probably messed up the rest. I think this was about the time that Bernie started calling me, “Lazy Bones.” The nick-name gradually faded out of usage. I do remember climbing up the ladder at the back of the house and it seemed as though I was a hundred feet off the ground so I ended up doing the low, easy parts.Mom must have realized that she would have a hard time getting anyone to paint the house in the future for, the next time the house needed painting, she had an “easy care” siding installed and its’ still in place in this year of 2001.

Two of my best friends while going through grade school, were Jerome Daunhauer and Charles(Buster)Mitchell. They lived next door to each other at 937 and 939 Ellison Ave. Jerome was the “buster” and Charles was slender. Charles must have been a chubby baby and we continued to call him buster all through life. I learned my gambling ways on Mitchell’s front porch. You will find that we were a well rounded group. If there was any fun in anything, then we did it. We had no money so we played for “kitchen” matches. This was very innocent fun. I suppose Mom wondered why she kept running out of matches for she was my supplier but I did win some times. You are now wondering, what is a kitchen match? It was also called a “wooden” match, or, lucifer match. You can still buy them in some out of the way stores. Simply put, it was a small, wood, stick about two inches long with a bead of sulfur or other combustible material on one end which you scratched across a rough surface and the bead would ignite and also ignite the wood. You touched the flame to whatever you wanted to burn and blew it out before it burned your fingers. Anyway, we would play poker using the match as our show of wealth. Since we had the deck of cards, we naturally played other card games as well. It still amazes me the different things we were allowed to do by our parents. But, you mess up and you have had it. That fun thing was eliminated forever.

I am going to tell you this story because it made quite an impression on my young mind. We were at the age where we just naturally soaked up any story we heard about girls and/or sex. A gang of us young boys were walking along Ash St. with a couple of older boys. As we passed one house which looked deserted even though there were curtains and shades on the windows, one of the older boys mentioned that, in that house, every Friday night, a group of older boys and girls played strip poker together. Our young ears perked up. What was “strip poker”? The older boy explained that each hand of poker was played for an article of clothing taken from each players body. The game went on until one of the players was completely naked and then the game was over. The older boy had no more details except to say that he knew this because he had looked under the window shade while a game was in progress. Our nimble minds had a great time with that information. Whether this was true or not, I know that every time I walked past that house after that, I would think about it and look around to see if anyone was out and about. In later years, on television, there were comedy skits which touched on this same subject and they were uproariously funny. So much for the learning experience.

In the Mitchell’s back yard and lying next to their shed were some old railroad ties. From the ties to their back porch it was about forty feet. Buster’s older brother, Robert, owned a Remington automatic .22 caliber rifle. We would place some thing or other in front of the railroad ties and then would take turns shooting at the target. There were two kinds of .22 caliber shells, .22 shorts and .22 long rifle. We bought the .22 shorts because they were cheaper to buy and they were each packed fifty to the box. We did not point the rifle at each other or shoot into the air for we were taught the correct way to shoot. But, can you imagine anyone shooting in their backyard, in the city, nowadays. You would hear the police sirens out in front of your house within five minutes. We did this only when one of us was flush with money. We all owned BB rifles and we carried these out on the street without anyone giving a second thought to what we were up too. I must admit that one of our sports was trying to shoot out the glass globe covering our street lights. This wasn’t too easy for the globes were made from pretty thick glass. The city evidently learned the hard way to protect the lights from kids with air rifles. BB’s were cheap and you could buy a tube containing about five hundred of them for about a dime. They would last us a long time.

After Charles Lindbergh flew his single engine “Spirit of St. Louis” airplane solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1929, I guess every kid in the country had to own the proper wearing apparel for flying solo across the Atlantic. I finally talked Mom into buying me a slick-leather aviator’s cap with chin straps and a sheep skin coat. The coat was practical as a winter coat for it was warm. The fur faced to the inside and the tanned skin to the outside. I wore it all through the winter months every winter as long as it fit. I think I had more than one “sheep skin” coat though. I have been in long trousers for quite some time now and I did feel more grown up. I may not have acted that way sometimes but I did feel that way.

Part of the daily uniform of choice worn by the men each day was a hat. In the summer time it was a straw hat, the flat type, and in cool weather they wore a felt hat which I believe they called a fedora(?). Both hats looked very dressy on them. But, the real winners were the ladies. Up until a few years ago it was common practice for women to wear hats in church. I’m not sure if this was a religious practice required by the church(?). I don’t really think it was. Little girls did not have to wear a hat but at some age their mothers thought it was immoral not to wear one. Perhaps the open showing of their waived hair purchased with a new permanent wave kit was considered ostentatious and must be covered. In some ways it showed respect for God and your fellow parishioners. The fact remained, though, that each hat could be more flowery than the next. Women’s hats worn in those days would put to shame the ones worn each year to the Kentucky Derby. I have to now say that the women did look very cute in their beautiful hats.

Uncle Harry Cooper was temporarily out of work like so many people at this time. Pop was working but with reduced income. Mom and Pop had a little money saved and they had a fortunate foresight which I’ll explain more completely, later. Uncle Harry was a “jack of all trades” so Mom and Pop decided to hire him to expand the upstairs of the house at 1027 Ellison into a private apartment with an additional bath. I have mentioned that the front room and the kitchen extended all the way across the width of the house. They were big rooms. The first thing Uncle Harry did was to cut the rooms in half with partitions in order to make two more bedrooms. Mom and Pop occupied the front bedroom and Mary Catherine the back one. All of we boys took over the large bedroom in the middle of the house. The stairway to the upstairs was enclosed and a solid door was installed for privacy. Uncle Harry then started on the upstairs. He extended the plumbing and made the back room into a kitchen and built a dormer out on the west side which included a new bathroom over the one below and a new bedroom next to it. Our old middle bedroom became a living room and the front bedroom remained one. The upstairs was now a two bedroom, single bath, apartment ready to be rented out so that there was more money coming in to live on. I don’t remember Mom ever having any problem renting out the apartment. Our first renter was the family of Mr. Joseph Young who worked at the Louisville & Nashville Railroad Co. as an oiler. While working on the apartment, Uncle Harry was always in a good humor and he would kid everyone. I remember that one day my friends, Clifford White, Buster Mitchell and I were having a meeting in the kitchen of our secret “club” trying to decide what mischief we could get into. Uncle Harry came in, asked what we were doing and what was the name of our club. We really had no special name so he suggested that we call it “The Black Hand Club.” This was before we washed our hands for lunch.

While all of this construction was going on, another improvement took place which was great and fairly new for home use. An automatic “furnace coal stoker” was installed into our furnace. Now, we didn’t have to run up and down the basement steps all day long firing the furnace and an automatic thermostat controlled the workings of the stoker. All we had to do was, once a day, on average, fill up the hopper of the stoker with small lumps of stoker coal. This was still not as convenient as our modern, automatic, electric or gas furnaces, but it was all we knew and it was a better system than what we had been using. Now, for the explanation. Stoker coal is about an inch all around in size. It was pre-washed so there was no dust. The stoker unit consisted of the hopper about three feet from the front of the furnace. It contained a motor drive and controls. At the bottom of the hopper and leading through a metal pipe into the furnace grate was a cork-screw device made of the same material as the grate. This was all run from the thermostat upstairs in the house. At the beginning of the heating season, you built a fire in the furnace, set the thermostat to the desired temperature and the stoker cork-screw fed coal into the fire as needed. The lazy man’s approach. Of course, you still had to fill the hopper with the new type coal and empty the coal ashes when needed, but, it was a definite improvement over the old way. This new system was needed to ensure constant heat to the new apartment on the second floor. You had to take good care of your tenants.

I have two large scars on my body among many small ones. One large one was caused by a large lump of coal. I don’t know the year but when I was very small, I was playing hide-and-seek in the basement. I was “it.” As I went around looking for my fellow playmate, I stuck my head into the coal-bin just as the other person made a jump to run to home-base and I was met by a lump of coal on top of my head. Get in line to see my scar. The other scar, on my left ankle, was the result of my being thrown out of a wood box while it was sitting on a coaster wagon which was being pulled by another boy who turned it loose while it was going pretty fast and it ran into the curbing throwing me out of the box past a sharp nail. You can visualize the rest. This was a pretty deep cut but Mom fixed it up and soothed my hurt.

While we are still in the basement, more or less, I have to tell you of my great prowess with my Maytag machine gun. I was the scourge of the neighborhood. World War I had not been over that many years so all the boys played at war when they had a chance. There were a lot of veterans living around us and they did talk about the war. To us it was just fun. After getting rid of our “water-powered” clothes washer, we acquired an electric Maytag. It had an automatic clothes wringer attachment which would swivel a full 360 degrees and, I swear, it looked, in our imagination, exactly like the pictures of real machine guns we saw in magazines. I swear, again, I could wipe out an entire detachment of kids(soldiers) in a few seconds. It was a noisy operation for I could mouth a good imitation of a shooting machine gun. It was fun. I could lie and tell you all about the “water-powered” washing machine but I was too young to remember just how it worked. All I know now is that you attached the water hose to it. Somehow the force of the water pressure did the job(?).(2-2-2001)

Occasionally I am faced with this phenomenom. Young people believe that because they come up with something “new”(to them)that they are the originators of this wonderful approach. For Instance, IM4UL, IM4UK or IM4IU among others. My cousin, Helen(Steinmetz)Hammond reminded me of this one which we recited when we were young and I suspect my parents did the same in their young days. Are you ready for it?-----2YsUR, 2YsUB, ICUR, 2Ys4me. Do you remember another one?