My father and his two brothers, good first-generation German boys, who despite harder lives than what's on offer for most white folks nowadays, hitched up their belts and worked away their newly minted American lives. I miss them and wish they were still around so I could ask them what they made of George W. Bush's world.
I ended up knowing a bit more about my mom and her siblings, because the Irish side of the family turned out to be more social and longer-lived.
My mother, still kicking one month from 89 (knock on wood), was one of four children. She was a twin. I got my middle name, Paul, from her twin brother, but I never met him - he was killed in the Pacific in 1945 during one of the last bloody campaigns of World War II. His death created the only lasting prejudice in my mom; she never really warmed up to any Japanese Americans, including a Seattle girlfriend of mine, because - as she said at the slightest provocation - "They killed my brother."
It was considered mere sophistry to point out that my uncle was armed and firing at them when his life was snuffed out. Of course, it was easy for the younger me to score points on Mom that way. I'd never met my Uncle Paul, called "Buck" by his family. My only knowledge of him was some old black-and-white, fading-to-sepia snapshots.
I did know my mom's younger brother, John, called "Peck" for Peck's Bad Boy, very well. In 2005 I returned to Cincinnati and had dinner and a drink with Peck a mere 10 days before he died, at 83. As a younger man, Peck lived up to his nickname. He was a veteran of both WWII and Korea, and was loudly firm in his defense of our country's adventure in Vietnam. But late in the game he had an awakening and was just as firmly, if not as loudly, against the quagmire in Iraq.
"I'm glad I served in World War II," he told me not long before his death. "But I'm not sure about Korea, and I was wrong about Vietnam. This is a rich man's country now."
To hear this rabidly jingoistic flag-waver of my youth uttering the aforementioned sober reassessment proved to me once again that nothing is sure in this life except death and taxes.
Peck wasn't all politics, though. He loved sports and played sandlot versions of football and baseball into his 50s (just like his nephew Dennis). And when I came back from the military a skinny, drug-addled wreck, so scary my own mother wouldn't take me in, Peck and my Aunt Joan - a witty, laidback Welsh lady - did.
My mom's oldest sister, Dorothy, called "Dot," also allowed me quite a bit of couch time in her tiny Cincinnati apartment. Unlike my dad's bachelor brother Bill, who lived a terribly circular life consisting of menial manual labor, church, the library, the grocery store and his brothers and sisters, Dot lived large.
Four different men proposed to her, and at one point she was said to be considering going into a convent.
But despite her deep Catholic beliefs, Dot was fun to be around. Like my mom and Peck, she was a fierce arguer, and the debates around her kitchen table concerning politics, religion, local sports, morals and manners - fueled by good beer, semi-cheap whisky and loads of tobacco - still linger in my memory.
Dot belonged to card clubs and bowling leagues and traveled quite a bit compared to the stodgies I was used to. My mom still plays in a weekly card game. Since all the players in her original game died out, she now plays weekly with the departeds' children, all in their 60s.
She bowled and golfed right into her 80s and still, despite some health woes, walks a mile or two with friends "at the mall," four or five days a week.
The Irish side of the family was always the fun side, and I can see quite a bit of their attitude reflected in my own life, along with a tinge of melancholy the Germans on my dad's side bestowed on me. I like the mix, and have always enjoyed the similar mix in other Kraut Micks I've known over the years. It's a zesty, hearty brew.
Seattle writer Dennis Wilken may be reached through editor@sdistrictjournal.com.
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