After my dad died well over half a century ago, the journal, a slender brown college notebook, that he wrote in during his trip to Europe in 1937-1938, sat on a workbench in our garage for decades. When my mom died which is now more than a decade ago it fell to me as co-executor of my mom’s will to sort, catalog, and distribute her voluminous personal possessions. To accomplish that I spent several days a week for several months going down to St. Louis, staying in her now-quiet house, sorting, cataloguing, and in many casees, photographing her things and placing them in numbered boxes for retrieval. I then organized their distribution among my siblings and myself.
The last place I tackled in my rather dolesome project was the garage. Up in the rafters of the garage I made a discovery. In a large moving box I found all sorts of things I had never seen before: correspondence, magazines, odds and ends from college, and, mirabile dictu, more of my dad’s journals. I immediately recognized what had happened. When my grandmother, my dad’s mother, had died the better part of a century ago, my dad dumped all of the stuff she had been keeping for him in the two-flat on Clayton Ave. that he owned and she lived in into a box and stored it in the garage of our house on Griefield Place. When we moved from Griefield Place to Ladue the box moved, too, to the rafters of our new garage. And there it remained until I disturbed its resting place 50 years later.
Clearly, what had happened is that my dad had filled up many of those old brown journals with his notes from his European trip and, when he filled one up, he sent it to his mother who kept it for him. So I now have quite a number of journals that I never knew existed.
Here’s an example of something I have. After Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938), which evoked an extremely cryptic and guarded notation from my dad, the U. S. Department of State inserted mimeographed flyers into the American Express boxes of all U. S. citizens, warning them to get the heck out of Europe. I have that flyer.
I’ve been putting off going through those journals because it will in all likelihood not be a pleasant task. No sort of preservation was done—they were just dumped unceremoniously into a box. They’re mildewed, covered with mouse droppings and insect casing, and generally disgusting. Additionally, my dad’s handwriting is not the easiest to decipher.
I think I should break down and preserve and transcribe those old journal immediately. After all neither they (nor I) are improving with age. I’m hoping that they hold some of the stories my dad told me: attending a Hitler rally, getting arrested as a German spy in Serbia, his bicycle chain breaking while cycling down an alp, etc. In his own words I mean.
