PulseJournal.com

Leon Harrison
West Carrollton, Ohio
Friday, March 7, 2008

To: The Editor, East Kentucky Magazine

Subject: Five former Frigidaire female friends gather


“Five Old Frigidaire Friends”


EKM Buckeye Bureau
West Carrollton, Ohio
Friday, March 7, 2008

At 3:34 p.m. cold wind blows falling snow, outside the big picture window of the Buckeye Bureau, adding it to the thick clean blanket of white that covers bushes, lawns, roofs and streets, beneath a gray overcast sky and bare tree branches around these 1956 ranches. It will be warm and green outside, at least in Kentucky, by the time that you get to read this. This morning, I drove my new Chevy HHR EKM car down to the BP for my Dayton Daily Snooze, USA TODAY, banana, fruit cup and caffeine. Sean Hannity is ranting on my stereo. Fear not, my friends, I do not mind being snowed in, since I am retired and can no longer be fired. I have time to write and no [honest] excuse not to. Therefore, I shall not whine about the pressure of these recent bimonthly East Kentucky Magazine deadlines.
Speaking of which, this great Jan./Feb. 2008 issue of East Kentucky Magazine was delivered today! I was relieved to see that I have only to autograph each magazine on page 24, at the end of my “07 Leatherwood Reenactment” story. Yesterday, Fireman Fred had another one of his little editor letters printed by and inside the Dayton Daily Snooze. He autographed a zoomed-up clipping copy for me inside the Moron City Awful House. I told Fred that it took me at least two hundred words to just get warmed up for my real/EKM writing…as you can attest to. Fred also asserts that, much like your humble EKMBBC, he does not care for fleeting fame or seeing his name printed with his little letters that could be better…as could his editors.
To further delay, procrastinate, and waste even more of my writing time, I have been reading and researching with my newspapers, including this latest Hazard Herald and EKM, and responding to this internet message-board cyber-chatter that does not matter. My public expects so much and expects me to be and stay in touch with the outside world …if not outside ladies and girls. Well, I went outside into the global cold and took some snow pictures, after taking pictures of a few birds that were feeding at my birdfeeder, sneakily shooting from inside through an open window. One cardinal was red, the feathers of the other birds being duller darker colors.
Considering these blizzard-warning radio reports, I am glad that I can remain inside this warm house, even without a warm spouse, from which I do not have to roam. When I once again consider that this will be read by some of our troops, who are currently serving in Afghanistan and in Iraq, I must zip my lip and remember not to babble or prattle about my minor personal problems or civilian hardships. As of yesterday [Thursday morning], 3,966 U.S. military members had either died or been killed in Iraq.
Last Tuesday [March 4], thanks to The Queen, uh…my mother, Bill Cunningham and other voting folks [including racist sexist Democrats], Hillary Clinton won the Ohio Democrat primary election; thereby remaining in the [white liberal flower-child] race against Barack Obama and his [racist sexist] supporters as a presidential candidate. Because I drove Mom to the polls, I guess that I, in effect, got Hillary Clinton another vote! No doubt, this made my dead Republican dad mad.
Now, I look at this old Dora Dehart GAR group photo: wondering who those posing long-dead Civil War veterans were. Surely, Sam, Ford or W.C. (Cam) Campbell could not be my late granny’s (Callie Campbell-Allen’s) father, uncles, kin or friends! According to old oral [unreliable] family lore, Callie’s father, Sam, was supposedly a Confederate POW who had been captured at Cynthiana; and had then accepted a parole on condition that he was to go west and fight Indians as a galvanized Yankee. If any of her Allen or Campbell kin fought for Abe Lincoln and the Republicans, they must have kept it a secret, or moved and stayed away from Rowdy, especially after the war between the states/war of northern aggression. Nobody alive remembers them now…who, what, where, when, why and how. Every October, these ancient ancestors may cheer for or boo Pvt./Sgt./Lt./Capt. Harrison [a Buckeye] at Leatherwood. Snow still falls and Sean Hannity still chatters. Take a break and relax. I’ll be back.

Saturday morning, March 8, 2008

There is at least a foot of snow on the ground and more coming down, causing problems for drivers, people bitchin’ about winter and blizzard conditions on local roads and on interstate highways. My public is lucky that I am snowed in, my friends. Hungry birds have returned to my front-yard tree and bird feeder. Thank God and the Chinese for coffee makers and microwave ovens, enabling bachelors to survive without restaurants and wives. When I look outside I am once again reminded of the Blizzard of ’78; when Charlie Battery of the [Piqua] Ohio Nasty Guard was activated to help and shelter stranded civilians and local citizens. No talk-radio shows today. A variety of CDs play on my stereo. I shall let the Buckeye Bureau’s new Chevy HHR LT car remain safe and dry inside my attached garage.

I look at this group picture of five old Frigidaire female friends, former coworkers who retired 30 or so years ago, widows who have outlived their husbands and men friends. Since that Tuesday dinner, Mom and I have delivered and snail-mailed five of these 5X7 pictures to her friends. Garnett had to miss this dinner because she is living in Florida…also missing all of this cold Ohio snow.

Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2008

That Tuesday afternoon, your Duke of Hazard drove The Queen Mother [Ma, Taulbee done it again!] and Marie to Kettering and to Dorothy Poffenberger’s house, he being the de facto chauffeur of the LeSaybro’ limousine. Mom loves it when I refer to her motor vehicle as a “Byyoook.” My refrigerator and clothes washer [currently in use] were not made in Moraine because Dayton Frigidaire facilities had finally closed in 1979. Dorothy, 96, was having and hosting her farewell dinner party with her four old Frigidaire friends, who ranged in age between 86 and 96 years old.
Later, Mom told me that, thirty or so years ago, there used to be about eighty of these Frigidaire retirees, including men friends, when they first started driving themselves and each other to their dinners. Back then, they did not need their children, grandchildren, nephews or nieces to do the driving for them. They used to gather at and inside local restaurants, where we can still see similar retiree and veteran reunions…with fewer and fewer people attending as time goes by.
Dorothy is moving to California, to move in beside her sixty-something-year-old daughter who is retired, thus leaving the house that she bought with her late spouse back in 1951. In 1951, I was one year old when Janet [Ann of the Carney Clan] was born, the first if not the worst of my two sisters. Kettering was a brand-new post-WWII suburb, covering corn fields with streets, plats and plazas, spreading away from Dayton to become a typical one-story city without a traditional downtown center of activity.
Since the roads and streets were clear if not dry, your EKM Buckeye Bureau Chief had no trouble driving and arriving at 808 Buttercup Drive on time, having once again studied and sketched a map beforehand. All of these ladies have to or need to use canes. Dorothy’s white-haired nephew, Michael, let us in through the opened garage door and started spreading salt on the icy driveway and sidewalk. He was living with Dorothy. Jim arrived with his mother, Mardell, likewise helping her inside. Finally, Hazel arrived and came inside with her daughter, Barbara, and son-in-law, Dale. We had all seen each other before at similar dinners, cookouts and local events, including the annual Mountain Days music festival out at Eastwood Park. Your BBC started doing his journalist job by walking around while talking and taking digital images, these mature attendees either being or getting used to this without much bitchin, uh…protesting or posing. Soon, with some digital deleting, your BBC was taking casual more natural pictures, those gabbing gossipin, uh…womenfolk soon forgetting about the young’uns [whose ages ranged between 50ish and 60ish] who were conversing and discussing stuff. Mama also likes it when I add “…ish” to words. Let’s do lunch. Take a break. Blowing snow is still falling outside.

Saturday, March 8, 2008, 2:07 p.m.

John Boy Bolyard (an old Frigidaire-veteran DMAX-retiree friend) called me from Florida, talking on his cell phone while walking along a beach and looking at women who were showing skin to men, asking me about the weather in Ohio. Last year, he, Hamm, Robbie and I had gathered at a restaurant in Huber Heights to eat, gab and gossi, uh… discuss persons not present for the very first time. With their late-middle-aged morality and memories, they forgot some of those folks whom we used to work for and with during our careers at Frigidaire, the Moron Engine Plant, and finally at the DMAX factory, about which the rest of them @#$%& like a bunch of old women. We posed for pictures inside and out; I gave and sent them copies that they shall save if not display for a few decades as they gradually fade. When will my old friends and I meet and mingle again? Could this have been the last time?
I have been taking pictures of bundled-up people outside, shooting, shoveling and pushing snow from nearby driveways. Today, people have their big opportunity to pay for all of those big pickup trucks, with snow blades on the front, and snow blowers. One young man was pushing snow with his little ATV and a small attached snow plow. This takes if not wastes lot of gasoline and wear and tear out there, for those folks who have to care and dare. No doubt, Hummer and SUV drivers sneer at and remember these clean green Earth lovers and others who mocked them but need them, their vehicles and their snow plows now. Take a break. I’ve got to empty my clothes dryer and put in another load of laundry. Oh, why couldn’t I get snowed in with a friendly female whor, uh…who enjoys doing boring chores for the mankind who does not whine. Anyway, by the time that you read this, it will be springtime.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

It’s sunny and 40ish outside now, melting the snow that remains upon lawns and rooftops, at 11:35 a.m. My very first HHR-car fill-up was $44.50, gasoline now costing $3.27 per gallon at the W.C. BP station. Early this morning, the space shuttle Endeavour took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on the way to deliver a Japanese lab section to the International Space Station.
Governor Elliot Spitzer (D-NY) aka “Client 9” got caught arranging at least one $4,300 date with a friendly female that could make him resign if not go to jail. Four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline will reduce reenactors’ range and limit their participation and performances to local events.

Tuesday afternoon, Feb. 19, 2008

Even at the age of 96, Dorothy Poffenberger still enjoys cooking. She has for most of her life. Her nephew, Michael, and Frieda had done a lot of work and had wisely brought in a big bucket of KFC chicken. There was plenty to eat. As soon as I started talking with Frieda, 80, I heard her German accent and we started chatting about Germany and some of the places that both of us had been to and remembered.
Born in 1928, Frieda was no doubt old enough to remember Hitler and the bombing of Munich during World War Two. In 1944, she was about 16 years old when her older brother left to fight the Soviets on the Eastern Front. He survived for one week before being killed. When the war ended, in May 1945, Frieda and her remaining family were living in a bombed-out house that was surrounded by rubble.
In 1948, when Frieda was 20, she met her late husband, Dorothy’s nephew, a WWII Army Air Corps veteran, at the Bavarian resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, that I had likewise toured in 1986. They ice skated and fell in love, the young German lady and her handsome young airman. He transferred to the new US Air Force in 1947. While they were going together, other Germans called her an “Ami whore”. Three million German men had been killed during the big war, and the Soviets had held many thousands of them as prisoners in Siberia until the mid 1950s, getting their revenge for the 20 million Soviets who had been killed.
In December 1951, Frieda and about one thousand other European post-war brides and wives left Europe aboard the troopship USS General H.W. Bucner. The women occupied the top decks, separated from the husbands and other men who occupied the lower ones, sharing no friendly, familiar or familial fraternization for fun with anyone. Frieda had to share a cabin with a French woman who hated her. The Atlantic crossing took ten days. They endured or celebrated Christmas Eve at sea.
Frieda and her husband had a typical Air Force family, stationed, serving and traveling all over the world, including Alaska, West Germany and Wright-Patterson Air Force base. Around such bases and service towns, one can see and hear similar stories and the evident aftereffects and results of our wars and the American Empire. Our Afghanistan and Iraq veterans are or will be joining millions of our military retirees and veterans with their own “dependent” spouses and children; including their descendents who have married, mated and multi-culturally mingled during the decades. That Tuesday afternoon, 57 years after Frieda’s emigration from Germany, it was funny to listen to her talking about her kids, all of them now in their 40s and 50s. Should I revisit Prum Post and Olzheim?

Frieda served dinner to these five Frigidaire friends in the dining room, using the nice china and gold-plated cutlery that was very old and rarely used. Despite his royal and reenactor rank and photo-journalist status, your BBC had to stay out of the way and eat with the other young’uns, from little fold-up tables, in the family room. That way, they could talk about us without us hearing them. There was plenty of good food, a lot of it even healthy, with pop, coffee, cake and pie…unlike at this spouseless house. Take plenty of digital images at these events because you are not wasting film and do not have to ration them. You can save them on CDs or hard drives, for editing and for printing later, seeing some of these places and people maybe for the last time. Each of these Frigidaire ladies, including Garnett, later received one 5X7 print.
I walked around Dorothy’s house and looked at her typical old-lady stuff, treasured little knickknacks, mementos and souvenirs that she had bought and been given throughout the past 80 or more years. Her house was clean and neat, her furniture, paintings, pictures and stuffed animals had been arranged and displayed to her taste, just like my mother’s and those of other widowed grandmothers.
Everything goes with a story, even when it ends up sold at a garage sale, a flea market or a thrift shop for a quarter. Dorothy had to leave most of this stuff behind. She is taking her cat with her. It hid and shyly stayed out of sight during her farewell dinner party.
These five old Frigidaire friends were no doubt swapping stories from way back when, remembering friends who could no longer attend or be with them again. I know that some of those days and nights inside those old factories had been hard, bad and sad, with regrets and thoughts and dreams of quitting and just walking out. Some of them did, as had some of my coworkers and friends. Those old wood-block and concrete floors had been soaked with blood, sweat, tears and vomit. Some people had fell over and died inside those walls and upon those floors, the assembly lines [tracks] and production not stopping for them. Still, they had outside lives with children, husbands and wives, spouses and houses with pets. Each of these five elderly ladies had at least six-decades-worth of remembrances to share there, both before and after the big war and at Frigidaire. Us young’uns did not rush them because we all knew that this could be the last time that they and we might see and be with each other.
These five old Frigidaire friends almost cried, misty eyed, after they got up from the table with their canes, to walk around and say their final goodbyes, but also joking, laughing and smiling while hugging and kissing each other, before getting their kids and putting on their hats and coats again. Inside the kitchen, there was much promising and planning to gather with our friends again, maybe for lunch or dinner at a restaurant or for a cookout at somebody’s house. After our final goodbyes, we carefully walked outside, entered our vehicles and drove away from 808 Buttercup Drive. Warmer weather will make everything better. Again, I look at this 4X6 group photo of these five old Frigidaire friends with that added date, Tuesday, February 19, 2008.


EKMBBC Leon Harrison, G.C.M.

EKM Buckeye Bureau
West Carrollton, Ohio