Russ&Suzie

Trip Log
2009-12-01 14:51:44 (UTC)

Section 2 (Gardner) of Chapter 1 of A Social Brain: A Memoir

Gardner Migration to Clark County and Evolution There

Leslie Frank Gardner usually known as Frank moved east as a young man to
central Wisconsin, and worked on lining fireboxes when he met young Minnie
Retzlaff, a cook. They married on Christmas and established their homestead
east of Granton that included Minnie’s younger sister, Tillie. They built a tiny
two-story house with a very steep staircase filled with the warm environment
of a wood-burning stove that gave way to progress and a gas stove only long
after he died. His two bachelor sons finally replaced it and also acquired an
indoor bathroom some time after I had adult status and married with children
of my own. Frank and his five boys had cut great amounts of wood from that
homestead, selling it for fuel to folks in town. They had maples and a sugar
bush we visited every spring. Dad’s mother had died from a hip fracture
approximately five years before I was born; she had seemed to do well, but
then pneumonia killed her.

Frank envisioned that the 160-acres he homesteaded might outfit each boy
for the future, but I gather didn’t much worry about that either as that kind of
thing had long departed reality by the time I knew him as an short portly man
who didn’t speak much and resembled his sons, often smoking cigarettes.
But I recall strong memories of a time when he spent a day and overnight with
our family.

It must have happened not too long after my birthday, as I worked with great
interest using a new gift that I had gotten from an aunt or uncle; it allowed
me to design composite faces and various facial expressions from inked
templates of eyes, mouths and other features that I recorded by rubbing
them onto waxed paper. I include this minor detail for the vividness of the
memory and because doing faces in somewhat parallel ways remains an
interesting mode of expression for me to this day. I also remember, while on
the living room floor doing this project, overhearing Grandpa, who seemed to
like Mother, tell her a family secret hitherto unknown to her: the oldest child
of his eleven children was not his and Minnie’s, but Tillie’s illegitimate
daughter.

Thinking of this now, Tillie had perhaps died the previous summer; I
remember the family gathering on the large lawn of the “old place.” So I was
perhaps twelve years old. Later, he and I walked in the spring-woods of our
pasture next to the O’Neill Creek. To my best recollection, we talked this way
only that time, though I don’t recall our topics. I recall nothing parallel with
either Grandma or Grandpa Haines. Conversations took places in groups of
various sizes, but rarely with kids individually. Grandpa Gardner died about
age 83 during my early high school.

Grandpa Gardner didn’t believe much in education for boys as it took them
from work, but Dad’s older siblings strongly urged him to high school (the
only boy to accomplish that; his brother Mike famously said “I went through
school; in one door and out the other.”).

Then Dad interestingly went further to the Neillsville Normal School ten miles
west of Granton (where the O’Neill Creek flowed into the Black River). The
school trained rural grade school teachers in a one-year course; Mom went
there too, two years after him, and she herself taught for two years prior to
marriage. Both parents felt strongly about education, “the way to get ahead”
of which they’d been deprived (though not complaining, at least to us). Dad’s
model had been his high school physics teacher who went on with earnings
from that to become the family physician in Neillsville, but so working to get
money for higher education certainly could no longer happen in the late
1930s when the country experienced a second wave of economic depression.
The summer before she married, though, Mother took an opportunity to
study art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her mother had done something
similar a generation before with Chicago-study that featured sewing. Parents
of a neighbor lived in the big city and furnished Mom a place to stay as she
commenced her life’s major adventure. She had likely saved the needed
money from her teaching. Her identity as an artist took full form during that
summer of 1936, and never lapsed although her inability to express it directly
for a long time presented her (and us) with major conflict.

Her children may have benefited from her zeal and passion, but we
apparently presented her with mixed feelings as well, however much she
dearly loved us and Dad. Once, she related in recent years, she worked on an
art project when she found to her horror that she had forgotten completely
about the baby (presumably me) so that she completely avoided art activities
while we remained home. She worried about her passion getting out of hand,
that driven passion itself notable; I take it up in the closing chapters of this
book.

One spring-cleaning on the farm, obviously upset, she instructed me to burn
nude male drawings she had made at the Art Institute (her youngest sister
Anne at Mother’s memorial told admiringly of both male and female studies).
My preadolescent mind felt most impressed. I may have preferred the females
but I recall the burning as a most disturbing event that over-ruled such
details. She over-ruled my protest. She said “burn them” insisting on it from
frustration felt over having concluded, I believe, that she had to abandon the
dream of carrying such ambitions forward, though in fact, after a long delay,
she did carry forward the dream. After Keith graduated from high-school,
she acquired a trailer for a studio that she parked south of the garden,
accepted and took to heart Robert Henri’s book I’d happened to loan her on
expressing one’s self through one’s painting. I found it after she died,
yellowed and falling apart, after a forty-year career intensely painting,
drawing, collaging and widely exhibiting throughout Wisconsin.

Often she felt insecure in her role, subject to extended family criticism. Note I
interchangeably use both Mother and Mom to label her. Once, dramatically for
me, she said, call me Mom not Mother. So I and my brothers shifted at the
time, of course, since the strength of her emotions then made this not a
minor matter (the heat around it diminished over the years so I feel freer
now, obviously). Sometimes I think of her boys while at home as canvases on
which she painted: at variance from other families of the region, each of us
achieved doctoral level educations and each achieved national and
international recognition in our careers, including Keith even though he died
before reaching age 40. Not to diminish what both parents contributed. Dad
gave complete uncontingent support as well. He too was an artist with his
farm projects and machinery, always innovating and improvising, completely
absorbed in the problem of the moment, less frustrated than she with self-
realization. She listened at great length to his explanations that she only
vaguely understood; I can say this because I and my brothers served as
audiences too, like her, dutifully nodding, important soundboards.

Returning to early generations of Gardners, Dad’s mom, Minnie Retzlaff, was
oldest daughter to a German-speaking immigrant, Henry, who in fact never
learned English, and his first wife, Agusta, also an immigrant, who lamentably
died. The second wife, an evil stepmother, treated Minnie and Tillie badly,
favoring her own children to the later resentment of Minnie’s kids. Tillie lived
with Minnie and Frank and helped as an auntie with the eleven children that
Minnie mothered, even her own birth child. Dad placed tenth in birth order.

Interestingly I only knew where “Old Man Retzlaff” lived when I asked the
bachelor uncles, Charlie and Mike, about this line of the family when I visited
them with my oldest daughter then in her adolescence. Subjectively as I
recount this, it seems just yesterday, but in fact it happened three decades
ago. Mom learned later of this visit that we made from my mother-in-law’s
home in Stevens Point when we had lived in North Dakota; Mother
complained in a manner that showed anew her resentment of Dad’s siblings.
Dad had never pointed out the Retzlaff place located on a gravel road
between Granton and Marshfield 18 miles east, though as a kid we must have
passed it a number of times. We often would not take the paved Highway 10
and Dad seemed to know the identity of every other house in the region and
would discuss them at length. In his last years, he loved to examine plat
maps of the areas and to wander on country road-trips. Even with diminished
central vision he could tell if a new building had been constructed. Shortly
before he died, he and I went on an extensive trip of Clark County that
included passing Delbert’s once forty acres, his old home place, and the farm
with its O’Neill Creek.

A few years ago I visited near Munich, Germany, where our genial host
learned of this family name: “Retz” he exclaimed, “Yes, near Vienna,” and
pointed out on a map that place name in Austria! Old Grandpa Retzlaff, he
opined, moved from there. The Retzlaff property left family hands many years
before, but the farm on which Dad and Delbert grew up stayed in the hands
of Charlie and Mike until after Charlie passed on in his 90s, proud of his
survival that long, a few years after Dad and Mom had said good-by to their
farm near Granton, acquired a mere 40 years before, when I was about 5
years old. They sold their farm to Amish folks, but the “old home place”
homesteaded by Frank and Minnie eventually went to well-to-do people from
Marshfield and the house greatly expanded well beyond the tiny one where all
those children had somehow originated and lived. Passing now on the road
we now see a pond from a dammed spring where a sometimes muddy low
garden once grew vegetables for that family.

Grandpa Frank worked hard on this and other gardens, never pausing even as
an old man when “the boys” – meaning Charlie and Mike (we never called
them Uncle at the time) – ran the farm with increasing mechanization.
Grandpa wore out his tools in chopping wood – he supplied wood fuel for
many years to Granton folks, chopping it with well-worn axes and crosscut
saws, as well as hoeing gardens, including a hoe with a blade so small that I
marveled at it.

Plus I occasionally in my art studio find myself examining a worn down axe
with a remarkably worn near cutting corner. It once cut off one of Dad’s toes
– and although not subsequently used, Charlie had also never thrown it away;
when he consolidated the farm remains, he gave it to Dad (and me – Dad
didn’t much wish it around). A pre-teen at the time, Dad worked to chop
some wood. It slipped cutting his shoe and leaving his fourth toe connected
only by some skin. I don’t recall which foot, but many years later as he
recuperated from back surgery, I traced the scar on that long white foot. I’m
very aware now of spreading my own feet when I chop, and my own
grandson, Ritchie, grew weary of my admonitions a few years ago, as we did
some wood management work together on a New Jersey property with lots of
trees that needed cutting, property owned by his mom, my oldest daughter
Beccy (with whom I discovered the Retzlaff house), and her husband, Jon.

So about 80 or 90 years before in central Wisconsin, they took my young dad
the four or five miles to Granton where Dr. Russell Robert Rath sewed up the
wound. The family physician, he had earlier provided my grandparents with a
name when Dad’s birth required one – and eventually of course it became my
name as well, of course. I never resented all calling me, “Junior” through high
school. All accorded my father great respect and I basked in that.

When myself an adolescent, I learned of Grandpa Frank’s triumphal courtship
one day wandering our back farm fields. I unusually encountered a friendly
older man tramping them also who asked my name and that of my father.
Upon telling him, he told me a bit ruefully something like, “Ah Frank Gardner!
I had my eye on Minnie Retzlaff too, but he won her away. So you’re their
grandson!” And I felt some pride in my Grandpa’s prowess. In the very few
pictures of her, she had not seemed very attractive, dressed as she had been
in a shapeless black dress and somewhat overweight. She died when Dad was
in his first teaching position around 20 or 21 years old from a hip fracture
complicated by a fatal pneumonia so my brothers and I never knew her. With
his teaching check affluence, though, he had given her a waffle iron that he
then got back after she died. I'll tell you later how this played a role on the
farm to warm Russell and Ella’s young family in a sometimes cold not yet
insulated house.




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