North Star Writers Group

My father’s first name was Junior, which I always thought was strange because his father’s first name wasn’t Junior, so why did they name their son Junior? My mother’s name was Mildred (they called her Millie) and you don’t meet many Millies these days, either.

That was just the beginning.

My grandfather on my mother’s side of the family was Elmer (as in Fudd and glue) and his wife (my grandmother) was Odiel. I’ve never figured out where her first name came from. Odiel had three sisters who were named after plants (Verbena, Ivy and Holly), and they had a brother named Henry who in his later years earned a pretty decent living as a professional juror.

It worked like this: Every weekday morning Henry would show up at the courthouse in downtown Flint and sit around waiting for a call to sit in on a jury to take the place of somebody who didn¹t show up for a trial. Apparently lots of people didn’t show up for jury duty because Uncle Henry ended up making big bucks as a substitute juror.

Oddly, most of the people on my father’s side of the family had ordinary names, except for Hildegarde Hintz, my father’s grandmother.

Hildegarde Hintz, who was something like 134 years old when I met her in the mid-1940s, was a wonderful woman who was born in Germany, came to the America in the 1880s, lived alone in a small house in Saginaw, Michigan, kept her bathtub filled with newspapers and taught me how to drink coffee when I was eight years old.

Whenever we’d visit Grandma Hintz, she’d whisk me into the kitchen, whisper “don’t tell your mother” and then she’d pour a cup of black coffee and hand it to me. The first couple times she did it, I hated the coffee. But, as time went on, I learned to love the taste and those talks with Grandma Hintz.

If you were a kid growing up in a large family in the 1940s, you went to viewings and funerals.

They were almost as much a part of your life as games like Pom-Pom-Pullaway and cleaning blackboard erasers on the school fire escape.

Kids had a great time at viewings because it gave cousins a chance to play hide and seek in the funeral home’s casket display room and shove smelling salts up each other’s noses.

Dad, on the other hand, hated viewings almost as much as he hated Republicans. Every time he was at a viewing, he’d excuse himself at least a dozen times to have a cigarette. That was odd because he didn’t even smoke.

At Grandma Hintz’s viewing, we were standing at the casket when one of the relatives turned to Dad and said, “How do you think she looks, Junior?”

“Dead,” he replied.

Then he excused himself to go outside for a smoke.

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