The problem is, you think you have time
My Grandmother, Ester Prudell, was a person who had a lot of time. Relatively speaking. She lived to be 99 years old, just a few months away from being 100.
I know you and I don’t have that much time. Yet.
If we’re lucky.
When she was in first grade, age six, she had a crush on a family friend named Walter Gaulke (who was 13 years older). She carried this secret hope in her heart for almost two decades. And yet that moment quickly reached its conclusion, as you’ll hear in the story for today’s podcast.
People would say she wasn’t my ‘real’ Gramma, she was my ‘step’ Gramma, a cringe-able word for wicked people in fairy tales. Gramma Ester was nothing like that. For me, she was one of my cherished persons who occupied the few exceptional years when everyone I loved was alive.
My ‘real’ grandmother, Gramma Marie, died less than a month before I was born. I stare into her photographs, wondering about the sound of her voice. And yet she brought my mother into this world, who brought me into this world, so I know I carry a lot of her around with me.
There were six of us Hicks children living in Texas at the time, left without a Maternal Grandmother when Gramma Marie died. And many Prudell cousins in Northern California. And Bemis cousins in Wisconsin. And so a mere eight months later, Grandpa Prudell married Gramma Ester in May, the best month of spring. And all of us were in business again. We had a Gramma!
Gramma got right busy with the challenge. She sewed and knitted unique gifts for each and every one of us and packed them up in a brown paper-wrapped box and sent them in the mail from Wisconsin to Philadelphia, or Guam, or California every year, depending on where the Navy had us living. I remember sitting next to these big boxes under the Christmas tree, trying to guess what Gramma had made for each of us, and wondering if she remembered which one of all those children I was.
I have pages of her handwriting. You’ll hear the formality of her training as a secretary from these stories, and there is an implied acceptance of the order of the world as it was in the United States in the early 1900s through the Sixties. Gramma side-stepped Women’s Liberation almost completely, but she was an independent woman, strong willed and unquestionably moral.
The story of this podcast, Gramma’s First Romance began when she was born, July 26 1903, ninety nine years before the time of her life had run its course. When I was fifteen, visiting in Wauwatosa, she introduced me to her grandson, Thomas Gaulke, who was also about my age. (Listen to Podcast: Grandpa on Transport to hear of that summer).
It was wonderful to hear Tom’s voice again; we had kept in touch with news of Gramma as our link; but Gramma died June 11th, 2003, 45 days short of being 100 years old. Eighteen years later, I ‘found’ him again and made contact, hoping he would have a photograph for this story, or something interesting to tell me.
While researching family history, Tom Gaulke had discovered that Ester was Walter’s first cousin-once removed! When I re-read Ester’s line about her birth “I was the first grandchild on both sides of the family,” it made sense, and I realized it was Gramma’s only admission of this fact. Thomas said “Gramma was strange that way . . there were things she just didn’t talk about.”
But he had the photograph I was looking for!
I couldn’t have imagined what their wedding photo would look like – would I even recognize her? What would her famous ‘Walter’ look like? I only knew her as Gramma Ester, a tall, purposeful and capable woman with short white hair and glasses. And a look on her face like she knew what she was doing in this life, with the time that she had.
Here is ‘My Hero’ by Ester Busaker Prudell, in her own words.
