How Grandma Lucy broke her nose

Here's an excerpt from story time with Grandma Kathleen. I love her unique style of telling a story and her expressive use of pauses.


While we’re talking about broken noses, I have a story about Grandma Lucy.

She broke her nose! This was way back, the roads weren’t paved. She lived on a gravel road. She drove an old, old car, and this was back in the 30s, I guess.

Anyhow, she was out on this dirt road, and I don’t remember if the car turned over or something, but she had a wreck. And broke her nose! The lady that lived at the house in front of where she had this wreck, came out--

“Oh Lucy!”

went back in the house and came back with a mirror. Mom’s nose: smashed all the way over.

Mom took a look at the mirror, straightened her nose back up again. And she did go into the hosp--not the hospital, back in those days you didn’t have a hospital around, anyhow, went in to the doctor, and the doctor said, it’s a good thing you did what you did. Because of course now it was all swollen and the doctor couldn’t do anything about it. But she had placed it, and yeah, she had a little bit of a crooked nose, it was okay, the passages worked okay, but anyway, it was a pretty neat story. I believe that my older brother was just a little baby in the car at the time.

You can see in these two pictures, her nose looks perfectly straight! Click the picture to zoom in.

Granddad Jerry on being smaller than most of his friends

Here's an excerpt from story time with Granddad Jerry:

What would you do to hold your own against bigger kids?

Well in the first place, we were at White Acres. We had the barn, the yards, we could play football in the front yard, baseball in the side yard, we had the barn we could play basketball in, we could play Catcher in the Mow and whatnot, and so that’s where all the neighborhood kids came. I mean, back in those days, Amelia had a real mixture of sort of elite, to right down to the very bottom, drunks and whatnot. And I’m afraid that the language of the lower classes took over for us. I mean, there was one point along the way where I remember thinking, “y’know, all this cursing isn’t right, I can do better’n this.” And I stopped pretty quickly. 

We were a bunch of hoodlums. They were all older. I mean nowadays, I think parents and everybody would go crazy to see how we were left alone. And these kids came up to play at our place, and they just showed up by themselves on their bike or whatever to join in the games. They came because we had the big yard.That’s where the kids always came. I guess when I was about 7 or 8 we were playing Kick the Can and Wolf and stuff like that. And our place was just the place where everybody came. But when you’re the smallest guy, you don’t want anyone taking advantage of you. So I was always playing with bigger kids. I never felt bullied by anybody.


I remember everybody else could climb up to the rafters and they could reach up to the top, and their feet would touch the bottom. But when I’d climb up on the rafter I couldn’t reach to the top, so if I was going to climb up on a rafter playing Catchers, I’d have to go to the second level or whatnot and go up to the top of the barn. But I was always the smallest. But like Kathleen said, I had the football. And 5th and 6th graders would play, and I was a 3rd grader when I started to play, but I had a helmet on, no one else had a helmet on. And I always played safety, and a guy’d come running down the field by himself, I’d go over and hit him in the legs, knock him down, other times, I’d be hanging on and he’d be dragging me along, then somebody else would come up and hit ‘em. I was the only kid who got to play up like that.


G’ma: Not only did you have the ball, you also had the barn and the whole farm to run on. You had a good place.

G’dad: I guess I thought most of the kids my age were kinda wimps or something.


I never thought about it [all the others being bigger]. They were the guys I played with and they were always older than me. When I was at school, I was always playing with the older kids. And I was sorta the leader of the younger kids. I say younger kids, I mean kids in my class. But I never played with them for a long time. My best friend was Jack Francis, he was center on the basketball team, but he was always like a foot taller’n me. I never thought of him as--I knew he was bigger’n me--but I never thought of him as tall. I’ve seen some movies, pictures later and thought, “he was that much taller than me?” But I never felt handicapped because I was short, except that I couldn’t reach, and I couldn’t jump and I couldn’t --wasn’t as fast or as big as the other people, but I never felt short. But the girls that I dated, the shortest was probably about 4’11, and the tallest was probably like 5’10 or 5’11. I was 5’5 ½. It never bothered me. If they didn’t want to go out with me because I was short, I figured that they would tell me.

Valentine's day in Cincinnati, circa 1953

For the longest time, I thought I had the stereotypical sweet grandmother, the kind who gave her grandchildren unlimited sweets and never yelled, and was perfectly sweet and kind in every way. To be fair, I never heard Grandma Kathleen yell (even when she was upset!) and my siblings and I were always delighted by the amount of sweets and other treats we got while we were at her house. Grandma made visiting her home truly magical for us kids.

When we would talk about it with her as adults, she would say, "Well, you don't know; I'm not actually all sugar and spice!" We didn't believe her, even after she told us about devious plans that she'd come up with in the past--that never came to pass.

Until ONE day, we found out that she sent mean Valentine's to Granddad and his roommates!

Grandma was living at the YWCA in Cincinnati, and Granddad was attending the University of Cincinnati. They were living close enough that they could see each other. Granddad says that Grandma even came over at one point and cooked a meal for everyone to share.

Jerry (1951), Kathleen (1952)

Grandma had a brilliant idea. Months in advance, she prepared cards to send to Granddad and each of his roommates, and sent them home with her roommates during Christmastime. Why, you may ask? To throw them off the scent! Each of Grandma's roommates sent the card from her own hometown.

So when mean Valentine's cards started arriving for Granddad and his roommates from seemingly unrelated places in Ohio and Indiana, Granddad and his roommates were perplexed. 

When retelling the story, Granddad said, "The cards started out with something that looked nice and then got right nasty when you opened them up."

Granddad received this one "signed" by his cousin and roommate, Dave Grupenhoff:

Me thinketh

Thee stinketh

Another one that came in, also "signed" by the roommate of the recipient:

I would climb the highest mountain

I would swim the deepest sea

just to get 

away from thee.

I can imagine Granddad and his roommates' confusion, and Grandma struggling to keep a straight face while he tells her the riddle of the mean Valentine's cards. "How could this be happening?" Granddad and his roommates must have wondered out loud.

Granddad reminisced, "When the culprit finally confessed, we all could imagine she and her friends just sitting around and laughing at our confusion." 

He and Grandma both get a good laugh out of it now.