I’m continuing to sort through the scores of file folders of official documents, paperwork, memorabilia, and keepsakes I’ve taken from my mother’s home. In one of the folders I found the three inch by three inch piece of metal above. It’s the plate from which the invitation to my parents’ wedding was struck.
I’ve also found some truly fascinating stuff. For example, I found a program from the 1926 World Series, the series in which the Cards, led by Grover Cleveland Alexander, bested the Yankees in seven games. Included on the Yanks’ roster were legends like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and, apparently, my grandfather and my dad went to the game (I’ve also got the ticket stubs).
I also found my dad’s card for his membership in the St. Louis Cardinals’ “Knothole Gang Club”. If you’re not familiar with it, that’s a promotional device to encourage youngsters and, presumably, their parents to come to the games. Some minor league clubs continue to have knothole gangs but the Cards were the pioneers.
I also found the passport on which my dad travelled through Europe in 1938 and 1939, complete with Third Reich passport stamps when he travelled through Germany. Using this I was able to pinpoint the precise date he departed for home: March 15, 1939, just ahead of when the gunfire started for World War II. In addition I found his typewritten description of the last few weeks of this trip. They include what he saw and what he did in Greece, Yugoslavia, and southern France. I’ll collate the manuscript with his journal, some pictures he had, and a few annotations and publish them here bit by bit.
I notice that he was a bit freer in his manuscript, written no doubt after he returned home, than he was in his journal. For example, although politics was a frequent topic of conversation with the people he met, nowhere was the discussion so tedious as in Germany where, apparently, every German wanted to convert him.
Interesting post.
While living in Holland 1973-1978, we had adorable older friends. He was Dutch; she had been a pretty German girl that he noticed and he dropped peanuts onto her head from the balcony to introduce himself! Mr. Van had to literally live in Germany for two years while he fought approval for the paperwork to make pretty Mrs. Van his bride and be able to take her home to Holland with him. His potential bride couldn’t wait to leave Germany and prayed that her love would finally have success. She had tales about longtime schoolgirl chums who “simply disappeared” overnight and everybody was too afraid to ask what might have happened even though the chums were Jewish, and everybody knew WHY they had disappeared.
Mr. Van succeeded, married the pretty German girl in Germany in 1933, took her home to Holland and then to Curacao where he worked for Shell Oil, returning to the Netherlands in the ’60’s. Mrs. Van was talented, loved Americans and helped lonely Americans feel less homesick. She was grateful not to be in Holland while her adopted country was so ill-used by her birth country.
Americans have no idea about the richness of our freedoms. Sometimes things go haywire, but things are still governed under our Constitutional law.
While we were there, the Dutch phone system still ran under the system the Dutch installed after The War, where extensions can NOT be picked up to listen to the conversation. For you to talk upstairs if phone was answered downstairs, you had to shout “picking up 1…2…3”, pick up the phone while the downstairs hung up. It (almost) always worked, but inconvenient for those of us who desired to have two of us talking/listening to our beloved relatives in the U.S.
Fabulous country to live in…..wonderful memories!
Wow, a lot to unpack there. Are any of those ticketstubs from Game 7? By some accounts Grover was found in the bars, right before the game, still celebrating his victory in Game 6. In any case, it’s widely believed he was still drunk when he came in to save Game 7. And with that victory, St. Louis became a Cardinals town, before then the Browns were generally the favorites.
I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned it before but my dad was a bat boy for the Browns. I’ve still got a baseball signed by all of the Browns.
Unfortunately, the ball was varnished and varnish has a way of leaching the signatures out. When I was a kid the signatures were plainly visible but now they are very faint indeed.
Something I found in the same scrapbook of my dad’s was a metal Hoover elephant pin, pretty scarce IIRC.