Bob

Batz

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August 18, 2008

There’s An Old Saying . . .

Whatever happened to the old sayings that were once an important part of the American language?

I grew up in a family where sayings were a part of everyday life.

My mother had favorite sayings. Ditto for my father, five of my uncles, three aunts and most of the neighbors who lived on my street when I was a kid growing up in the 1940s amid the automobile plant smoke stacks in Flint, Michigan.

My Aunt Margaret was famous for her loud “Land sakes!” that she shouted whenever she was upset, or surprised by something. Then there was my Uncle Ken, a dapper gentleman who once owned a Stutz Bearcat and had a penchant for poker.

When members of my family sat down at the poker table – and they did it every holiday and on assorted weekends during the rest of the year – Ken would bring his favorite saying into play.

It came every time they were deep into a game of five-card draw and Ken requested cards by bellowing his trademark “down like a deep-sea diver.” Nobody even knew exactly what he meant by that. But nobody ever asked him about it, either.

When it came to sayings, nobody could match my grandmother Odiel Dobbs’s enormous and wonderful cache of phrases odd and interesting. My grandmother was the “queen” of the one and two-liners. Despite her small size – she stood 4 feet, 10 inches and weighed about 90 pounds – my grandmother was Henny Youngman and Jonathan Winters long before either comedian came along.

Because I spent a lot of time with Grandma Dobbs back then, I had lots of opportunities to hear and memorize her sayings. Though she was a soft-spoken woman most of the time, she had a way of getting your attention when she wanted to – and she always wanted to if she was listening to one of her favorite soap operas on the monstrous Philco radio that was big as a 1941 Buick, had a round dial and dominated the parlor of her home on Page Street.

If you happened to be dumb enough to utter even one word while she was listening to one of her “soaps,” Grandma Dobbs would suddenly shatter the silence with a booming “Hark!” and the room would suddenly become quiet enough to “hear a pin drop,” which was another of Grandma Dobbs’ favorite things to say.

Grandma Dobbs, it seemed, had a favorite saying for darned near everything in life. If she was describing someone who was pregnant, she’d invariably characterize the mother-to-be as being “big as a barn.”

Her others included: “Mad as a wet hen,” “Quick as a wink,” “Sly as a fox,” “Hard as a rock,” “Skinny as a rail,” “Clean as a whistle,” and “Fat as a pig.”

My father, on the other hand, apparently didn’t much care for sayings, but he did deliver a line one day that I’ll never forget.

It was the mid-1950s and even though our friends, neighbors and relatives had TV sets, we were still listening to the radio because my father firmly believed television was a passing fad. My mother and I bugged him so much about getting a TV that he finally agreed to go to a TV store to see about buying one. He quietly listened to the salesman’s spiel about the merits of TV and it appeared as if my father might just make a purchase.

But then the overzealous sales clerk told my father, “Listen, Mr. Batz, if you buy a TV right now it’ll pay for itself in a year.”

Dad studied the salesman for a few seconds and replied, “Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll leave the TV here . . . and when the damned thing pays for itself, send it over to my house.”

Contact Bob at bbatz@woh.rr.com

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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