Looking for the Next Chapter: Bert Harder

If he were alive, my maternal grandfather, Herbert Race "Bert" Harder, would observe his 136th birthday on Christmas Eve.

Grandpa, who was the only grandparent I actually knew in my lifetime, was almost 80 years old when I, the last of his 20 grandchildren, was born in 1951. He was born Dec. 24, 1871 in a sod house near Columbus, Kansas --- when Ulysses S. Grant was president. His family relocated to Wilburton, Oklahoma, at some point, and what I remember of his voice had a slightly western twang to it --- the kind that said "Missour-A" instead of "Missour-EE."

Bert Harder was the second oldest of 10 children, seven brothers and three sisters. His father, Hudson Harder, was a Mormon missionary with a practical eye toward converting wealthy farm families all across the United States. When he would come across such a farmer with an eligible son or daughter, he would send word back home to his oldest available child and tell them he found a live one.

When Hudson met southeast Ohio's Fitzpatrick clan in the 1890s, he was taken with the lovely teen-age daughter, Emma, and sent word back to Oklahoma to his oldest son, Hiram, that he should pack his bags and come to Ohio pronto. Hiram wrote back, "Found my own live one, Dad, and I'm married, but Bert's interested."

And that's how my grandparents, Bert and Emma Harder met. They got married in the Fitzpatrick parlor on Dec. 23, 1894, when Hudson, impatient with the progress the giggling young couple made, said, "Why don't you two kids get hitched?"
Emma replied, still giggling, "Well, I reckon we could right now if we wanted to, Mr. Harder."

And Hudson pulled out his bible, read a scripture, declared, "Whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder, and said, "You're married, kids. Gotta go." And he left before Emma had time to close her jaw.

Throughout the rest of her life, Emma Fitzpatrick Harder was known as a woman not much prone to laughter.

Bert and Emma had a successful marriage, if you measure it by the eight kids they had. My mother, Minnie, was number seven, and remembered the later years, when things were not so good. Bert was prone to wanderlust --- he would periodically take off and go off West somewhere to visit one of his brothers and leave Emma at home with the kids to run their 100-acre farm. He would return long enough to get her pregnant and would take off again.

He also wandered into the bedrooms of other men's wives, which had to annoy Emma to no end. Bert Harder was known as a hard-working carpenter, a dreamer, a raconteur (the less-polite term was "whopper-teller"), a Democrat (he served on the local school board which put his kids in the position of having to finish high school; some actually went on to college or business school), and all-around character. He was devastatingly handsome, tall and blue-eyed and by all accounts had a good singing voice. He loved trading guns, horses and dogs and bragged about how many homes he had built in southern Ohio, as if he were a major contractor.

I knew none of this, of course. By the time I came along, Grandma Emma was dead, and had been divorced from Bert since the 1930s, quite a scandal in rural southern Ohio back in those days. Bert had remarried twice, once to another Emma, who divorced him because he wouldn't take a bath, according to the newspaper accounts which embarrassed the family but not enough for my mother not to save the clippings in a volume of her multitudinous scrapbooks. The third wife, Louisa, married and divorced Bert in the summer before I was born. Mother said she left when she found out that Bert did NOT own all of his children's houses, as he told her.

By the time I came into his life, Grandpa would have been homeless except for the generosity of some of his six surviving children, who had worked out a visitation system where Grandpa would spend two months of the year with one child and then move on to the next or else stay for a while with his niece, Avis, out in Batesville, Arkansas. (Avis was a character unto herself, also indulging in recreational matrimonialism--- mostly to members of the Seventh Fleet --- and taking care of her elderly father and his brothers.)

I remember Grandpa as an old man who sat in a chair in the living room, smelling of foul cigars, chewing tobacco and nasty farts. He carried a Mail Pouch can around with him that he would use as a spittoon --- my older sister, Julia, when she would get mad at me would say, "Oh, go look in Grandpa's can, you little brat!" I would dutifully do that, see the old wads of nasty, wet, chewed tobacco and run crying to Mother, "Julia made me look in Grandpa's can!" Mother would then yell at Julia for telling me to do it and at me for being dumb enough to do what she said.

Grandpa had lost his good looks by the time I knew him. He was just old, old, old. Part of this was due to the natural aging process. Part of it was due to his old vanity. In his 70s, when he was working in a defense plant, a nail flew into his eye, causing him to lose it. For a while, he had to use an eye patch, but later this was replaced by a very nice glass eye, the same beautiful shade of blue. Mother would periodically gross us out by taking out Grandpa's eye and cleaning it, and for years after his death, would horrify new mothers in the family by dragging out the glass eye, holding it up to the latest newborn and seeing if the child's eyes matched the color of Bert's ("Get that thing away from my baby, Aunt Minnie!" was a common expression around Mother's house.)

Mother and Dad both worked outside of the home and so I was often left in the care of my sister, nine years older than me, which explains a lot of the strange neuroses I've had to overcome in my lifetime. In theory, she and I also were left in the care of Grandpa Harder, who was supposedly a responsible adult, although by the time I was in first grade, I knew that my household reponsibilities included keeping an eye on GRANDPA and not letting him go out and (1) get married; (2) get drunk; (3) buy a gun; (4) annoy the African-American cleaning women; and (5) visit any of the married ladies down the street while their husbands were not at home. He also was not to empty his can in the kitchen sink.

Grandpa, who was good at breeding children, didn't know much about raising them, and so he and I, like a dog and cat who have declared a truce while living under the same roof, kept our distance from each other. Occasionally, he would get interested in me and teach me how to play poker, as he had learned it while growing up in Oklahoma. Unfortunately, the version of the game he knew involved a few illegal moves and eventually, I was forbidden from teaching my friends how to play poker "Grandpa's way" because it made them cry when they would place bets with their Matchbox cars and I would always win.

Speaking of Matchbox cars, one of my favorite games when I would entertain myself was to line up all my miniature vehicles and play "traffic jam." I would place each little car or truck in a long queue extending through the house and then slowly move them forward one by one, just like real rush hour traffic. Of course, a child's attention span is short, and after 30 minutes or so of this, I would move on to something else, like "baptizing" my sister's valuable Madame Alexander dolls in a metal wash tub outside and leaving them floating face down until their painted faces washed away.

Of course, the little cars would stay lined up in the imaginary gridlock I had created and pretty soon, I would hear Grandpa yell, "Goddam it!" and run to the house and find that he had squashed a couple of the cars, like some sort of farty, tobacco-stained Godzilla stomping through my own personal Tokyo.

I would cry about the losses briefly and then take the vehicular casualties off to a pile in the corner and play "Junk Yard," allowing the cars still in the traffic jam to drive by slowly and view the carnage.
Grandpa chewed tobacco from the age of five, and would say, "Yup, chewin' tobacco's probably shortened my life." He said this until his dying day at the age of 94.

When Grandpa turned 90, we all had a birthday party for him. Surrounded by his children and grandchildren, he said, as he inhaled (nearly choking on a wad of tobacco) and blew out the candles, "I'm 90 years old and I haven't got an enemy in the world. I outlived all them sons-a-bitches!" Those of us who observed the flying tobacco spittle declined on sharing his birthday cake.

Grandpa met a woman named Gehlah out in Arkansas on one of his visits with Avis and some quick maneuvering on the part of the family took place when it was discovered that she might have murdered her two previous husbands and that Grandpa had been telling her that he had lots of money and wanted to marry her. He was whisked back to Ohio and Gehlah, a six-foot-two giantess half his age who had been known to wrestle a bull into a truck all by herself, was left back in the Ozarks, apparently with a broken heart. Grandpa was 92 at the time.

My dad once asked Grandpa, "Do you ever miss any of the women you married?" Grandpa picked up a book he had just finished reading --- his favorite was "Leave Her to Heaven" by Ben Ames Williams, for some reason --- and went through the motions of opening it.

"When I'm done with a book, I close it and never open it again," he said, doing just that with the book. And he never spoke of any of his wives (or anyone else's) again.

I guess that's what I remember best about Grandpa --- he was a rascal, but he was always looking to the next chapter, the next book, the next woman, the next adventure. When he broke his hip during a stay at Uncle Worth's house (Grandpa was killing invisible snakes in his bedroom with his cane) and had to be put into a nursing home, he was completely bedridden. But I remember one visit when a nurse, walking by Grandpa's bed, suddenly squeaked and stood upright. She looked at me --- I was reading a comic book --- and turned to my father and said, "You'd better teach that boy to keep his hands to himself!" I kept on reading, oblivious to the adult conversation. But Dad said, "It wasn't the boy, ma'am," and pointed to Grandpa, lying in bed with a twinkle in his good eye and his hand dangling over the side of the bed just about where the nurse's leg had been.

Hope springs eternal. Life is always an adventure and should be lived until the last minute. That was my grandpa, Bert Harder.