Happy Birthday to Abe and Uriah

Today is Lincoln’s birthday, certainly a noteworthy event. But more important to me, it’s my Grandpa Uriah’s birthday. I’ve written here about his home in Camp Verde, Arizona, having been the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters for the cavalry unit stationed at Fort Verde in the late 19th century.

I can probably count the number of times that I saw my dad’s father. Grandpa was not a traveling man. He visited our home only twice in my lifetime that I recall, once in San Bernardino, California, and once in Phoenix. We visited him in Camp Verde once and sometimes twice a year, and after frailty caused him to move into Mother Warfield’s, a rest home in Prescott, Arizona.

Grandpa was a quiet and simple man. He didn’t initiate a lot of talk, and his responses to other people’s questions and comments were succinct. When he did start a conversation there weren’t many extra words; he’d get to the point quickly, with no indication that he wanted to go long or deep. He had a good, if dry sense of humor and liked to laugh. He had a mischievous streak and wasn’t above practical jokes, causing my dad to once refer to him as a “man-child”. Interestingly, my mom hung the same title on her father.

Grandpa would sit in his wooden rocking chair, smoking a pipe, almost always wearing a plaid, woolen shirt that had several tiny burn holes due to flying pipe embers. He would sit and rock and more or less preside over his home and those who were in it. His living room had an alcove with a round table on which sat pictures of his loved ones. His family was small, my dad being his only child, but he always wanted new pictures and would display them with pride.

My dad’s mother had died in 1917 when my dad was only four years old. Grandpa eventually remarried a gentle and loving woman named Emma. My dad loved her like a mom. Emma died on my 7th birthday, so I knew my Grandpa mostly as a single man, who, by the way, was frequently flirtatious with women of any age.

I’d be overstating it to say that the trips to Camp Verde were magical visits, but there was something about them that always appealed to me. No matter how old I got I never balked about going there. As a kid, the first anticipation upon arrival was filthy lucre! As soon as we settled into his living room, Grandpa would give my brother and me a Prince Albert tobacco can filled with pennies. We never tired of that little ritual. We’d pour the booty on the floor and count them several times, enjoying the tobacco smell that not only encased them but marked them as special coins of the realm.

Inside this cavernous home we had no trouble finding a spot to play, always avoiding the mysterious “unsafe” third floor with its locked doors that promised imaginable and unimaginable things. Even a journey to the second floor would draw a “Be careful on those stairs” caution from mom or dad – but never from Grandpa. Those stairs are the only reason that my brother and I ever had for owning a Slinky. Who knows how many trips that marvel of twisted wire made down those steps.

The home’s original dining room had been converted to a kitchen and dining area. The original kitchen had become a storage room that was filled with a vast array of old things, including layers and layers of dust and cobwebs. Opening the door to that room was like stepping back a hundred years in time.

Out on the kitchen table we would sit down to the hearty meals favored by a former cowboy. Grandpa worked on several large ranches in the Verde Valley and was a true country boy. At the table, that translated into meat and potatoes. You could vary the meat and the potatoes, but you couldn’t add anything green to his plate. His belief was that animals are supposed to eat green plants and people are supposed to eat animals. Potatoes were given some special categorical dispensation, and he would eat corn occasionally if it was still on the cob. You were welcome to add gravy to the potatoes, but just a slab real butter was always acceptable. On holidays, you could throw in some form of stuffing to the mix, but that wasn’t expected or required. I don’t recall his position on fruit, though I suspect it was marginal.

True to his Scottish heritage, Grandpa would “occasionally” indulge in an evening hot toddy. That makes him the only person I’ve ever known who actually drank this fabled beverage for non-medicinal reasons. His mixture was whiskey, coffee and a little honey. He would accept brandy or rum, but Jack was preferred.

This is where I should mention that my pipe-smoking, meat-and-potatoes-eating, hot-toddy-drinking Grandpa lived to within one month of his 90th birthday. He was still pinching nurses’ butts, too. I said he was quiet and not too talkative; but I also said that he had a mischievous spirit, sometimes almost boyish.

Outside his home, there were things to captivate a boy, including the bathroom. No, I don’t mean an outhouse. I mean a bathroom that had been added to the home at some point, but it could only be accessed from outside on the back porch. In that bathroom sat a classic four-legged bathtub that, unlike Grandpa’s conversations, was long and deep. A youngster or a small woman could barely see over the edge of that thing. In the winter, only a small spacer heater stood between a wet body and the cold air.

Next to that bathroom, where the outhouse used to stand, was the septic tank. I’m certain it was septic; I’m less sure about the presence of any tank. This “tank” was partly covered, loosely speaking, by some sheets of corrugated tin roofing material. The rest of it was covered by soil – soil that seemed to subside in a menacing manner more and more each year. The only parental warning in Camp Verde that ever exceeded the third-floor stairway warning was the one about that septic tank. I violated the third-floor warning from time to time, but I never even thought about getting too close to the sinking earth and its accompanying sheets of tin.

Several times Camp Verde was overwhelmed with grasshoppers. These weren’t normal grasshoppers. These grasshoppers could be saddled and ridden by small children. They could and would jump over a small child with disquieting ease. If captured they would emit enough “tobacco juice” to warrant keeping a spittoon in the yard.

Nearby was the home of my Aunt Lola Wingfield. Lola wasn’t a real aunt. She was married to my dad’s cousin and became one of those special people who are given the honorary “aunt” or “uncle” designation. She collected antique bottles and glass, in their varying shades of purple and green, but not the kind that you buy – the kind that you find half buried in old washes, alongside dirt roads or near old trash sites. I never turned down a chance to go bottle and glass hunting with Aunt Lola. Lola’s conversion to Mormonism at some point in her adult life made her a bit of a “foreigner” in the family, so she loved being around non-judgmental children. She kept her proselytizing to a minimum. Plus, her semi-outcast status freed her to share family secrets that others wouldn’t talk about. It was Aunt Lola who first told me that my mom had been married to someone else before my dad. That was a piece of family “glass” that had gotten buried and turned purple, which made it Lola’s stock and trade.

I could go on. I didn’t mean this to become a piece of family history when I started it. I just wanted to wish President Abe and Grandpa Uriah a Happy Birthday. I’m grateful for both of them.