Grandma and the Prince - Part 9

Yes, that's the actual manifest from the Philadelphia, the ship that brought my grandmother and her family from Liverpool to New York. They left in disgrace but arrived in a style unlike the usual early 20th century immigrant. They brought trunks filled with finery, a yappy Pomeranian, and the memory of a life they'd never know again.

Which, in some ways, was probably a good thing even if it didn't seem that way at the time.

Charles Henry Dimler, my great-grandfather

Ellen Fawcett Dimler, my great-grandmother

If you can't make it out, here's what I see on my screen, courtesy of Ancestry.com :

Manifest of the S.S. Philadelphia sailing from Liverpool 28th August 1916

Dimler, Charles Henry - age 43, English from Great Britain, butcher, other things I can't read
Dimler, Ellen Louise - age 38, wife
Dimler, Edith Barbara - age 18, daughter
Dimler, Charles Casson - age 17, son
Dimler, Elsie Isobel - age 16, daughter

Last month I promised I'd share the transcript of my grandmother's reminiscences. Fasten your seat belts!

Elsie: We came back to Liverpool when I was 14. They were broke and in disgrace. We stayed at Sea View for two years. Oh, Barbara, the things people thought! The Germans were the enemy and someone said my grandfather was signaling them with secret messages and people threw rocks at us and set fire to the house. We were hated by the town. You don't know what it was like . . . the bombs . . . the fires . . . the zeppelins overhead . . . terrible . . . terrible. Then he decided we were going to. It was 1916. The War was still on but he had to go. We made the trip on an American ship. We stopped in the middle of the Atlantic with our engines off on account of the submarines everywhere. I remember that only the American flags on the ship saved us.

I remember it was hot, so hot, when we reached New York. We didn't waste any time getting jobs. The second day our parents said, 'Find work," and we didn't know anything. I was brought up rich. I couldn't do anything. So I found a job as a nursemaid for a rich Jewish family on Central Park West. I took care of their little girl and the mother used to say to her, "Now you should learn to speak like Elsie" -- cahn't, tomahto -- and I would feel so good to be appreciated.

We used to go--I can see it now--to the swanky shops like B. Altman on Fifth Avenue. She had a chauffeur and a limousine and I would sit in the rear and I can still see him placing the fur robes over the madam and the girl. But not me. It wasn't done. I told them that I'd had servants too but who knows if they believed me. I was just a green kid.

One day I left them. I don't know why. I just left. I didn't know any better. [silence] You don't know what it was like to come here . . . everything so big . . . so much . . . all the food and stores and people. I loved it from the first.

I got another job with rich people. Their name was Hayes. The little girl was Bunny; she was 2 or 3 years old. I stayed there, lived there, and they treated me like their daughter. They were lovely people. I stayed with them quite awhile then next I knew I got a job at a store downtown on Broome Street where they sell picture frames and all. I had to measure pictures for frames and I didn't know how. We were living up in the Bronx on the beautiful Grand Concourse. I had to bring these frames home on the el (BB: elevated subway) and I didn't know where I was going. Even the dumbwaiter! I didn't know about garbage going down on the dumbwaiter. I didn't know what a deli was!

The Grand Concourse c.1919 - the carriage is heading west to the el, now the #4 subway

A kid comes here and sees all the food and everything . . . [silence]

Well, dearie, I got a job at National Outlet. I was a tabulator. National Outlet was like a Sears Roebuck catalog. [laughs] Can you imagine? I was a young girl. Seventeen? Kathryn was the supervisor. The girls used to get a great kick out of me. They'd get me to answer the phone: "Halloooo?" Cahn't and all that stuff. The Duchess of the Grand Concourse they called me. It was on 23rd Street. I'd take the el every day.

And then I met a boy. I had a crush on Louie. He was about 18 and I fell madly in love with him. "Would you fetch me a glass of water?" I'd say. And he'd laugh. "Oh, the Duchess again!" He liked me. Such a nice boy. I was very happy there, with the job and him. But he left and then I left. He took a job (he had a brother in show business, a comedian, and his father lived up in the Bronx.) I went to his house. I can see it now -- all slipcovered, even the desk, everything was covered. I liked his father. His mother was nice, but she didn't like me. His brother was on the road, so we went out. Louie got a job as assistant manager at the movie theater on 125st Street. I used to go to the movies at night and I'd sit in the box and he'd come up and talk to me and I'd get a thrill watching him rush down the aisles. Black hair! He had style. He wasn't good-looking, but he had style. Something about him fascinated me--his eyes?

But things happen. I don't remember what. My family and money. They needed my wages. We, all three children, would hand our pay envelope to our mother on Friday. Unopened. I was so proud. She would give each of us something for the week but no more. Every penny was accounted for. I had to move on to another job because Edith had trouble keeping work. We were going to work together. Our father would bang on the door in the morning. "Girls! Don't forget you have to get up and look at the paper. You need jobs!"

to be continued next month




PS: I'm Barbara Bretton, author of Girls of Summer (available now) and Laced With Magic (available in two weeks) and you can find me here and here and here.

To celebrate Girls of Summer's re-release as a trade paperback, I'm giving away five copies to five commenters. Just leave your message here and I'll post the winners here in the comments section on Saturday. Good luck!

Grandma and the Prince - Part 8

<==Grandma at 19

Something happened to me the year I turned twenty-six.

It was 1976, our Bicentennial year, a year of history and memory. A year of looking back to discover how we came to be. I suppose my family is as representative of the U.S. in the 20th century as any family could be.

Three of my four grandparents were born in other countries. Only one, my mother's father, was born in this country and he was halfChippewa.

I started thinking a lot about how my family evolved during that year, trying to weave together the disparate stories into a whole I could understand. And who better to start with than my garrulous, storytelling grandmother El?

Grandma was living in a small apartment in Elmhurst, Queens, the New York City neighborhood where I'd grown up. It wasn't much as far as apartments go, more a glorified studio than anything else. You entered into a dark and narrow hallway. The bathroom was off that hallway, along with a huge walk-in closet that also held Grandma's chifferobe and secretary desk. Everything else had been lost in the fire two years earlier that destroyed the Woodside building where she and her daughter Mona had both been living.

The moment she smelled smoke and heard the fierce sibilant hiss of flame, she grabbed her strongbox of old photos, her bankbook and jewelry, and climbed out onto the fire escape in her nightgown. The metal rungs of the ladder were slick with ice but that didn't stop Grandma. She ordered the firemen to keep their hands to themselves and made her way down two flights to safety.

When the smoke cleared, she learned she'd be traveling much lighter through life. Paintings, framed photos, furniture, clothes--gone, all of it. These days they call it simplifying your life but it was more than that. It was a tragedy.

So much of her past was lost in that fire, so many clues to her heart and soul. Of course, none of that mattered to me in 1976. I was only twenty-six and my grandmother was going to live forever. She was my constant, my North star. And she was ready to talk.

We decided I'd drive in early Sunday morning for breakfast and conversation. I had my questions all planned, fresh batteries in my cassette recorder, and a curiosity so intense that I was willing to brave the Long Island Expressway on a July Sunday in order to satisfy it.

No matter where Grandma lived, the place always looked like her. I remember the Prospect Avenue house with the steep front steps and angled roof. The small ranch house on Eckhardt Terrace with the apple trees in the back yard and the pinball machine in the basement. The address didn't matter. You'd know who lived there the second you walked through the door. She hated this apartment, her last, but still she'd made it her own. She'd found a loose pillow-back sofabed at a thrift store and stitched up a slipcover in a slightly tatty chintz fabric that seemed to give off the faint scent of Tigress. She had paintings on the walls, oils and watercolors and prints, street scenes, rainy vistas, all of them in ornate frames hung suspended from thick velvet cords. They weren't the pictures she'd carried with her from home to home but still they fit. I can see each of her homes in my mind's eye.

Grandma and I talked for hours that summer day. She was instantly comfortable with the whirring of the tape recorder, so much so that she would ask me to stop the tape when she wanted to say something incriminating or downright bitchy. But I can’t remember the words.

I remember the room and the heat and the smell of toast and bacon and the feeling of having turned a corner, of being accepted in her world as an adult and not a child. I remember the narrow little table pushed against the wall, the way you could reach the sink from your chair without even stretching very far at all. I remember the sound of people talking beneath her window, of the gentle ticking of her anniversary clock.

Whatever we talked about, I captured ninety minutes of it on tape. I remember the
cassette. Capitol Records made the blank tape and packaged it in a cardboard box
decorated with a Peter Max drawing that was all curves and primary colors. The label was red and white.

The tape is old now and a little flukey with age. I popped it in an ancient cassette player and was jolted from my chair by the sound of our laughter. I didn't remember the laughter. Isn't that ridiculous? But I remember now.

It wasn't easy but I transcribed the tape about ten years ago and while the
omissions are telling (like forgetting her first husband, the man who was my biological grandfather) the content is downright fascinating and I hope to share it with you next month.

(The photo above is Grandma El at 70.)

* * * *

Today's my birthday and to celebrate I'm giving away a signed ARC of my August
book, LACED WITH MAGIC. All you have to do is leave a comment and I'll choose one winner (thanks, Random Number Generator) on Sunday night and announce it right here and on my blog.

Good luck!