What is the fun of digging into history if you aren't digging into your own? This past Thanksgiving proved to be very successful for me. I wanted to find out more about my dad's side of the family and I was thrilled to get information! It started at the cemetery while my dad and I were visiting my grandparents, his parents, graves. It continued when my dad got excited to show me the graves of other Spragen ancestors buried close by. Among them were his grandparents, Arthur Clayton Spragen and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Duncan. This led to a field trip in Cincinnati where dad told me the stories of his childhood and showed us the places he remembered. I was thrilled to hear my dad excited to show me these places and tell me the stories.
Among these stories were memories of walking to the playground down the road to play football and baseball. Dad compared himself, his siblings, and the neighbor hood kids as a parade walking down the street with ball bats and gloves in hand. He spoke of walking to Echo Park on top of a hill overlooking the Ohio River and a great part of the downtown Cincinnati area and train yards. Mother later whispered to me that this was also the park where my father ask her to marry him.
We drove past his childhood home and stopped for a moment to admire how much it had changed. A tall two story, brick house with a third story attic had aged quite a bit over time. Future residence had added a side porch and at some point the building next door had been torn down. Driving through the area, it was hard to imagine it was ever a good place to live where children could freely walk down the street and play tag in the dark. Now a days, it's not even safe to walk down the street in daylight hours. I tried to picture this story in the good ole days when my dad and his siblings played in the yard and my grandmother would yell out the kitchen window for them to come in. Or the times when my grandmother would tell one of the neighbor kids to let her children know they needed to come home and like a game of telephone, it would pass from child to child until my dad and his siblings were informed it was time to go. There were the stories of using tables as sleds to slide down hills, homemade videos of neighborhood pageants, and bouncing balls off the neighbors house just to drive him crazy. It brought a smile to my face to know my dad had an exciting childhood.
The fun only continued when we got home and Connie, my dad's sister, joined in the fun. She told a story of being punched in the face by my dad when he got mad at her for wanting to go with them somewhere, the stories of how the girls in the family wouldn't go to the third floor until my dad went up and fumbled in the dark for the light cord in the middle of the room, or the scary monster in the basement with glowing eyes also known as the furnace lights which caused my dad to take steps up from the basement three at a time. Soon after, my aunt pulled out my grandpa's old camera which was in amazing condition.
No comments:
Post a Comment