Boarder Wars

Those in the Twin City's still on the sunny side of 50 don't have the context to appreciate how important and bitter the Crystal City Hornets vs. Festus Tiger annual football game was. It was the single most important event on the area calendar. The last game between the two was contested 36 years ago.

Fifty falls ago, Coach Rodney Mills, a 1955 Hornet grad himself, gathered us seniors together before the Monday practice and said, "Friday night you will play Festus. For the rest of your lives, you will carry with you YOUR senior year Festus game." It was that important. At their Homecoming, we shut them out 28-0.

The two “Twin Cities,” separated only by a single street; played each other 45 times between 1946 and 1989, twice in 1947, the second game on Thanksgiving Day. The rivalry was intense. Older fans, for example, still debate the legality of the “sleeper play” CCHS pulled off in the 1949 game. The Hornets dominated the early years, the Tigers the later.

From 1963 to 1967, CC pitched five straight defensive shutouts over Festus. Go back seven years, 1961 to 1967, and the totally outmanned Tigers crossed the Crystal City goal line only once; scoring a grand total of only six points, an average of less than one point per game. The Hornets won all seven.

In 1989, the annual border war was discontinued by mutual agreement. The Tigers won the last ten played. As Festus’ enrollment grew and landlocked CCHS’s dropped, the game became no longer competitive. The final tally stands as a draw, 21-21-3, perhaps, a perfect ending to the greatest sports rivalry this community will ever know.

Tom Pendergast, the Farm and Uncle Joe Murphy

Tom Pendergast was the most famous crime boss in the history of the state of Missouri. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Pendergast]

He controlled every yard of concrete that was poured in the state between 1910 and 1940. His concrete business was a front during prohibition and Pendergast also controlled most of the state's illegal liquor. He was also the man who brought Harry Truman to power.

My uncle Joe Murphy and his road grading construction company in the first 30 years of the 20th century was massive. They won and completed most of the large contracts in the state at a time when roads couldn’t be paved fast enough. I know they paved Kings Highway all the way to Potosi, large parts of Grand Avenue in St. Louis and many other major and minor thoroughfares not only in Missouri, but throughout the nation. They were very wealthy. 

Uncle Joe Murphy was quite the gambler. Our family farm south of Festus where we grew up was inherited from Joe and my Aunt Annie. Aunt Annie was the sister of my paternal grandfather, Robert Almany who died in 1933 at a very young age, when my dad was two years old.

Family lore always said that Joe Murphy won the farm in a poker game. I don’t know if that’s true, but I heard from many old timers growing up that the most high stakes poker games in the state were played in this little Log house, pictured here , on the Murphy farm. Interesting, after its gambling days the log house became the house where I lived the first four years of my life. When I lived there, it had no electricity and no running water. It has fallen into obvious disarray.

Uncle Joe and Tom Pendergast became fast friends. They not only shared the demand for the concrete they both needed in the road construction business, but they both had an affinity for high stakes poker.  Dad insisted that Pendergast was a regular at the log house poker games. The games would sometimes run three straight days. Family bragging also likes to note that several times a young Harry Truman tagged along with Pendergast. Truman was well known as president for his love of a good poker game. I don’t know if Harry Truman playing poker on the farm is true or not, but it makes a good story, so what the heck. But I do know Pendergast was a regular.

Uncle Joe employed a large number of black laborers. They did all of the road grading back then by mule. They had huge road graders that took a large team of mules to pull. I’ve seen pictures or the entire hillside of the barn on the Murphy Farm south of Festus covered with mules. Uncle Joe would winter his black employees at the farm and then in the spring send them and his mule teams out by rail around the country.

Dad loved to tell this story and I’ve heard it from others as well so I think it is true. There was a member of local law enforcement who did not take kindly to so many blacks spending the winter on the farm. Dad always called him out by name but I won’t do that. It’s a well-known local name.  The local cop let Uncle Joe know that he would tolerate the blacks staying on the farm, but they needed to stay out of town, and the cop would need two dollars a head per month for security for each black wintering on the Murphy farm.

Uncle Joe called his friend Pendergast who then sent down a couple of his Goons. Dad said they were both about 6 foot five inches tall and dressed like they had just stepped off an Untouchables movie set. They asked Uncle Joe if he could take them to town and point out this constable as they would like to try to reason with him.

Uncle Joe took them to town and they found the local policeman on Main Street at a gas station with a bunch of his friends. It’s exactly what Pendergast’s boys wanted.

They both got out of the car, each grabbed the local policeman by an arm and lifted him up 3 feet off of the ground. One reached into the local cop’s pocket and pulled out a little Derringer pistol that he was known to carry. The other said, "if you ever try to shake down Joe Murphy again, we will be back and we will stick this toy pop gun straight up your ass.”

Dad said the two goons set the cop down, put his pistol back in his pocket, straighten his jacket for him and patted him on the head. Half the town saw it. Uncle Joe never got harassed again about his black workers staying on the farm.

Mrs. Gruber

Crystal City High School in the 1960’s and 1970’s employed a star-studded faculty. Coaches Rodney Mills, Dick Cook and Rolla Herbert were glib, hip – all well-liked and successful. Men like Mr. Don Housett and Mr. Elmer Smith, by their mere presence in the building wielded control and demanded respect. I liked Mrs. LeFlore and her art classes. And Mr. Wills was the best teacher I ever had. I am not sure who would be second, but they are a distant second.

Business teacher Mrs. Pauline Gruber would have never made the era’s CCHS faculty list of “Cool Kids.” She was not an extrovert in any sense, and, with all the panache of a cloistered nun, her colleagues were generally far more colorful than she. To be honest, I could have seen her in my grandma’s quilting circle, grinning through a weekly dose of fabric fusion fellowship.

But in Mrs. Gruber’s own way she was special. It has taken some time, like 50 years, for me to give Mrs. Gruber her due, but today she is my gold standard for teaching with dignity and unadulterated care.

The first semester of my junior year Mrs. Guber taught me high school Bookkeeping. It didn’t take long for us to come to the agreement that we needed to find for me a new second semester warm seat to occupy, in another class. But before my short-lived accounting career could come to an inglorious end, we first had to get me north of the first semester passing line.

For the last two weeks of the semester, each day at the start of lunch hour I would dutifully report to Mrs. Gruber’s room. After a few days, I secretly began to look forward to the tutorial sessions. In between bites of her brown bag bologna and cheese on white bread (the menu never varied) she drilled me relentlessly on Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Cash Flow and Balance Sheets; sanding down the bumps until, finally, the path between my failing grade and 60%, while not as smooth as glass, was reachable. By the end I am proud to say, I could at least balance a check book. I just assumed I was the worst student Mrs. Gruber ever taught, but she pulled me through. She cared about me, she really did. And I strove to please her. Strange how that dynamic relationship works, isn’t it?

Several years after I graduated, I walked into Dr. Hagen’s dental waiting room, and there sat Mrs. Gruber. I remember I was a little taken back that she had a life outside of her classroom. I had no knowledge of her personal life. I don’t think any of us did. I enjoyed that afternoon visiting with her. I never saw her again.

I found an online obituary for Mrs. Gruber. It was brief. It was also short and predictably bland. She taught at CCHS from 1961 until the mid 1980's. Mrs. Gruber passed away in Horn Lake, Mississippi in 2012 at the age of 89. She was born in Cardwell, MO, where she was buried. She was raised in Senatobia, MS, where after high school she became a hairstylist. When World War II broke out Mrs. Gruber joined the Navy and was stationed in San Diego, CA. After the war, she used the GI Bill to earn her teaching degree. Her first husband passed away in 1953. Her second husband in1987. She spent her retirement years living in Mississippi near her son and his family.

Remember: Mrs. Gruber was a teacher. That may sound elementary, but it's not. Such simplicity is boring to some, but for those who watch closely, there's a purity that's almost surreal. Why did she leave such an impression on me?  A fine God-given mind, for one thing. She had the disposition and inclinations of a teacher, the ability to motivate the most unlikely (myself) to rush to her classroom when the lunch bell rang, because "I couldn't wait."

Mrs. Gruber would have been the last to seek the spotlight. I am sure she never worked the room; more likely she would fade to a quiet corner. But just once, while we still can show appreciation, let’s call her from the shadows of forgotten ambiguity, and ask her to take a bow.

Little League Revisited

 

This photo could not be more evocative. A group of scrubbed clean white boys and their smiling ear to ear black teammates, along with two coaches pose with a trophy proclaiming them kid baseball champions of some corner of a 12-year old’s universe. It is sometime in the 1960’s, I would guess, and the boys are from the blue-collar factory towns of Crystal City and Festus, MO. They live lives dominated by a huge glass factory, not far from their Field of Dreams, that throbbed and clanged night and day. But they don’t care about any of that grown-up stuff. They pose proud and happy, not realizing this is a snapshot in time they should forever treasure. This is as good as life gets.

According to their website, the Crystal City and Festus, Missouri neighbors in 1939 chartered the Twin City Baseball Little League. It has operated at full strength ever since. By the early 1950’s ’s the league had racially integrated. Local historians today note that co-op helped pave a mostly smooth late-1950’s integration of the local schools. In fact, the national Little League organization had always taken a progressive stand on race, especially when compared with the slow pace of integration of major league baseball. In the 1950’s, four Little League World Series champions were integrated teams from New Jersey and Connecticut. In 1955 white teams in South Carolina refused to take the field to play an all-black team of 12-year-olds from Charleston, so the national organization in Williamsport, PA ruled that state's championship vacant and invited the black Charleston team to the World Series in Williamsport as honorary, though nonplaying, South Carolina champs.

Today, Youth Baseball has been revolutionized by select travel teams, preying on parents’ vicarious desire to secure college scholarships and high-paying major league careers for their offspring. A group called U.S. Specialty Sports Association ranks the nation’s top 30 four-year-old and under teams – as in preschoolers.

Travel team tryouts are held in the fall and 11-month seasons dominate and often overwhelm a young player’s schedule (and life).The neighborhood pickup games of the past are as gone as the summer mosquito spray truck. Over the last 50 years we have organized the lifeblood out of youth baseball. Heavy on the mechanics and too light on the fun. Fun requires a summer afternoon in the backyard while dad is at work. Remember Indian Ball? Hot Box? Burnout? Too many recreational leagues today just check off the boxes of “equal opportunity.” We stick kids in the outfield in T-ball leagues, where nobody hits them a ball for an hour, and wonder why they end up on skateboards. I give the Twin City Little League its kudos, since 1939 every child in the Twin City Little League gets a uniform, and every child gets to play. It is a throwback inclusive philosophy, found not often enough today.

From the ages of 10 to 12 I played in the Twin City Little League, for the Indians. It is my favorite childhood memory. We played two games a week through the months of June and July. Our uniforms were gray flannel with blue pin stripes and my number was 6, same as Stan Musial.

In our league the coach was a father who arrived at games straight from work, often still wearing his work attire, and he probably knew more about slide rules or union bylaws than about the double cutoff or a suicide squeeze. My team, the Indians, were an exception. My Coach was Poogie Skaggs. As far as I can recall, he was the only non-father coach in the league. Poogie was perhaps in his mid-30’s. By day, he was a meat cutter at the local IGA. While most teams would shuffle in a new coach each year (as the coaches’ son would age out of the league) Poogie was a fixture with the Indians. Year after year. And the Indians were the New York Yankees of the 1960’s Twin City Little League. When you were selected in the 10-year-old draft, you wanted it to be by the Indians.

Poogie did the little things that made a 10-year-old feel special. Every year he would buy each player a blue long-sleeved shirt to wear under our jersey, just like what we saw on the Saturday afternoon Major League TV Game of the Week. No other team in our league had them. Poogie hammered into us the importance of the pregame infield warmup routine. We drilled and perfected it every practice. With the opposition watching from their dugout, we would sprint from our dugout to our warmup position with enthusiasm and snap. Everybody “chattered” No wasted motion, synchronized execution that left our opponents slack jawed with envy. Poogie and his ever-present fungo bat put us through the warmup. We sent the message, "we are here to win." We finished with a fungo pop up to the catcher who then fired the ball to the starting pitcher standing in the door of our dugout. "Game on," was the message. I was the catcher. Poogie is the only human I have ever encountered who could stand on home plate and hit a baseball straight up in the air.

Poogie was a task master, but he was fun to play for. If I made a mistake, most often I knew it and Poogie never said a word, certainly never yelled at me. If I needed correction or instruction, it was given in a firm manner. I always wanted his approval. For years, Poogie was on the chain gang for the Crystal City Hornet home football games. Even as a high school senior, if I made a good play on the football field, I always glanced Poogie's way and he would acknowledge me with a wave. I always shook his hand after the game.

I coached high school and college athletes for 43 years. When I retrace my path the image of every coach over the past nearly 60 years who passed along their wisdom to me, hand-to-hand, like a bucket on the way to a fire, appears. Poogie is the first.

 

Mr. Peterein

Some stories you hear at a young impressionable age stick with you, mold you. One for me was a tale of when President Lyndon B. Johnson in the late 1960’s was inspecting the operational setup at NASA. As he was walking through the halls LBJ viewed a janitor who was cleaning with a mop in his hand with the intensity of the Energizer Bunny.  The President walked over to the janitor and told him he was the best janitor he had ever seen. The janitor replied, "Sir, I'm not just a janitor, I am helping to put a man on the moon." This man had a purpose. He saw the big picture.

I attended Crystal City, MO High School and graduated in May 1975. In all four of my years of attendance Mr. Charles  Peterein was a fixture in the hallways. He was the janitor. I learned from Mr. Peterein that all work matters.

Our teachers and administrators taught us, and taught us well, the academic knowledge found in textbooks. But every school needs that blue collar guy who models personal responsibility - devoted to the most mundane of tasks through the dignity of honest work. Mr. Peterein was that guy. He had a lot of energy—good energy, positive energy. Just a person you wanted to be around.

If we accept the operational definition of leadership as the effect one has on others, then for me, Mr. Peterein rated among the most powerful leaders in the building. And he did it while pushing a broom, toting in the belt loop of his blue jeans a huge ring of keys.

I have heard God called the great janitor of The Universe. If true, then perhaps the problem when things don't work is we keep looking for some guy wearing a tie, instead of the man with all the keys.

One of my Crystal City uncles knew Mr. Peterein well. While I was a high school student, he told me he had no doubt Mr. Peterein could take a car completely apart and flying solo, put it back together. Give him all the materials, my Uncle Pete said, and Mr. Peterein could single-handedly build a house in the backyard. Practicality is a good thing.

An online obituary I found stated that Mr. Peterein liked to tinker with clocks. When you take a clock apart, there's little screws, and pins and wheels with spokes. If you fail to put all back in correct alignment and order, that thing ain't gonna work. Working with clocks is a skill that requires patience as a virtue.  It implies self-control and forbearance.

Mr. Peterein passed away in 2020 at age 95. He was active and engaged until the end. He was honored as the Grand Marshal for the 2019 Herculaneum Veterans’ Day Parade. He was born in 1925 in Sicely. He was a part of the last wave of the Italian immigrants who were so significant in the building of Crystal City. He raised three sons and three daughters and lived to see his great-great grandchildren.

Mr. Peterein was a Poster Child for the Greatest Generation - us Baby Boomers Parents and Grandparents - who tamed the Great Depression and whipped the Axis Powers. He was a U.S. Army veteran who served in the Asiatic Pacific Theater during World War II. Along with his 30-year employment with the Crystal City Schools, Mr. Peterein worked as a dairy farmer. He was a member of Sacred Heart Church in Crystal City, a charter member of the ROMEO club, a 63-year member of American Legion Post 554 and a member of VFW Post 3777.

When each day the bell rang signaling the end of the school day, Mr. Peterein could be found, push broom in hand, leaning against the hallway wall outside of the Wood Working Shop. It was a chaotic daily ritual, the equivalent of catching the last helicopter out of Saigon, students sprinting down the crowded halls bound for the freedom of the parking lot. I often stopped to speak with Mr. Peterien. He had an unhurried cool and a lightness of being that made him popular with students, a quiet man in a noisy place.

Mr. Peterein loved to talk about CCHS Hornet sports. His sons Mike and Bob were football teammates. He always wanted to know how practice was going; is the team ready for Friday night. At the start of my junior season, I was mulling over dropping myself from the basketball team, not sure where I fit in. Mr. Peterein told me, “don’t do it. You will regret it.”

Those of us who came of age in Crystal City in the 1960’s and 1970’s can appreciate the omnipresent glow of 1961 CCHS grad Bill Bradley’s basketball halo that lit the town. Bradley had been an All-American at Princeton University. He scored 63 points in a NCAA Final Four game playing for an Ivy League team. He was a Rhodes Scholar and the captain of the 1964 Olympic Gold medal winning USA basketball team. What hometown would not be button busting proud of such a favored son?

At the time of our talk, 1973, Bradley had just earned his second NBA World Championship ring as a starter for the New York Knicks. 

I don’t recall the exact words, but Mr. Peterein encouraged me to be like Bradley. Here is a paraphrase of our conversation as I recall it: Bradley doesn't have a lot of color, but he's a great defensive player and a heck of a team player. And he seldom makes mental mistakes. His job is do what needs to be done to help the Knicks win.

I now realize Mr. Peterein was imploring me to not only emulate Bradley, but by example, also himself - show up quietly each day and work hard and everything will sort out fine.

I didn’t really want to quit basketball, I just needed an empathetic adult I trusted to validate my effort. It did all sort out fine. For most of my adult life I have chased a bouncing basketball. My life would be much different today if not for that sage advice given to me over a half century ago by the school janitor. The result, a 52 year and counting detour. That was Mr. Peterein, unassuming but unforgettable. He didn’t roar like a lion. He spoke softly and in measured terms—and thankfully on that long ago day I listened.

As we age, change sneaks up on us. In the 1970’s, I had an Afro hair style roomy enough to sleep six. Now, I use a razor in place of a comb, transitioning my look from Billy Preston to Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3. On a morning so clear you can peer into your past, it is nice to reflect back on these somewhat now dim memories of a good man who impacted my development at an age when I can truly only now savor its value.

It takes strength to clean up after others. Mr. Peterein did it with grace.

The Atlanta Crackers

We took a Sunday morning detour through Atlanta to find an obscure but intriguing nod to forgotten history.

The official City of Atlanta Parks sign can be found at 1401 Bridges Ave outside the Hartnett Community Garden, on the side facing away from the street. Access to the field can be found one driveway down between 1405 and 1409 Bridges Ave. You have to want to find it.

The Atlanta Black Crackers were a professional Negro league baseball team which played during the early to mid-20th century, when segregation was the law of the land.

In 1940 Negro league players were paid $2 a week in meal money and $60 a month in salary, benefits that often went unpaid. They were called the “N” word as often as they were called by name. Barnstorming the nation, the Crackers once traveled by bus from Greenwood, MS to Flint, MI for a one-night stand. Sometimes they played as many as three games in one day. They changed their clothes in open fields, and they shared bathwater with teammates.

It is a well-worn cliche that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it — a cliche, for sure, but an accurate one.

Respecting the past allows a certain perspective over the times in which we live. Maybe lacking in predictive certainty for the future, but even the ugly parts offer some insight into how we as a nation are progressing. Hiding it changes nothing.

On Reunions and Grandkids

Last weekend, I missed my 50-year high school class reunion. Shawna and I have 14 grandkids.

Never in high school did I ever reflect forward on becoming a grandparent. Conversely, as a grandparent, I seldom reflect backwards on my high school experiences. But this week the two juxtaposed into a confluence that defines the 2025 me.

I will always be a proud member of the Crystal City High School Class of 1975. Once a Hornet, always a Hornet. But let’s be honest, high school can really suck. Regretfully, 50 years ago, I kept my circle tight. The cliques, the ridiculous ways we divided ourselves up to sooth our insecurities, well, that’s so 1975. But, in 2025, we are deeper, with richer understanding of who we are, of our humanity and the bumpy road we have all followed. We as now senior citizens have all turned out pretty much the same.

But a long time ago, we all searched for our identities in the same small town that has always taken pride in its roots. We cruised the same Main Street, partied together at any house parentally deserted for the weekend. And even though we all went our separate adult ways, we all shared a CCHS that nourished our angst-ridden teenage souls. Fifty years ago, I was too busy trying to get out to appreciate that my hometown was a great place to grow up.

I enjoyed the reunion pictures recently posted on Facebook - filled with camaraderie and affection, like a cozy 1970s crocheted vest. It is a good chapter of life when the gauze of age has softened those long-ago sharp edges. We, the Class of ‘75 share a pivotal life stage.

It was disappointing to miss the reunion, but not a hard choice. Shawna and I have sat through too many Kindergarten Christmas programs and four-year-old dance recitals to count.

My maternal grandparents, Richard and Francis Dunker, raised ten children who all grew into successful adults, in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house on Crystal Heights Road. Grandma was raised in the bootheel Arkansas boarder Missouri town of Willamette. She answered a classified ad in a local paper for a domestic in the home of a supervisor at the local Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company factory. A few years before, Grandpa had matriculated to Crystal City from Perryville, MO to work at PPG. He climbed his way up to become a crane operator, where in 1970, after 45 years of employment, he retired.

On the Dunker side, I had 26 first cousins. Four of us were in the same catholic school classroom first through fourth grade. Then, Rick's mother and her siter, my mother, decided it was time to break up the comedy team, he banished to the public school.

Saturday nights at Grandma and Grandpa’s were special. At 6 pm, we all gathered in front of the black and white TV for the Newlywed Game. My grandmother was no more than five feet tall, but when the host Bob Eubanks would ask a “whoopie” question, Grandma’s both feet would raise a foot straight up from her recliner, driven by a resounding belly laugh of hilarity. By age 12, I had figured it out.

Next was Roller Derby, then Wrestling at the Chase and finally, the network headliner, Gunsmoke. I was always sound asleep on the living room floor before Marshall Dillon had deposited the last bad guy in the tumble weed blown dirt of Boot Hill. There were five of us. No one got carried to the car.

Grandpa Dunker dropped out of school in the 8th grade. He was getting old enough, he said, the only path he saw to graduation was to marry the teacher, so he quit. Despite a limited formal education, Grandpa was a Grand Master of Life. Once, after Grandma had passed and I was home from college, I took Grandpa to lunch. As we were seated, he told me, “If the waitress has fat ankles, always order the chili.” It has proved over the years, fail proof sage advice I have passed on to my own kids.

Grandpa’s most treasured possession was his 1944 Harley Davidson motorcycle. Even at a young age, I just sensed my grandpa was cooler than yours.

I learned from Grandma and Grandpa Dunker to do the small things, and it'll lead to bigger things. They consistently modeled for 26 grandkids that belief.

My paternal grandfather, Robert Almany, died in 1934, when my dad was three

years old. My paternal grandmother, Mary, had demons. By 1935 she had abandoned my dad in a rooming house in the St. Louis suburb of University City. He told us that his older sister Olive and brother Robert were fiercely protective of him, but just mere teenagers themselves. In the heights of the Great Depression, few were lining up to adopt the four-year-old boy of an alcoholic widow. When the police found him alone for several days and scared, he was on a fast track to the City Orphanage

Somehow, he ended up in Union, MO with the Sherrif of Franklin County. Several years ago I stumbled across a big clue in a 1935 newspaper story on why and how, and I wrote a blog on it. It is head scratching and knee bucklering how a random act of kindness by a stranger changed my dad’s life and thus mine as well. The Sherriff found dad’s Aunt Annie Murphy on a farm south of Crystal City. She agreed to take him in. My four brothers and I grew up on that farm.

Dad hammered into us his story. He had a choice when his father died and his mother left him, he was going to let that motivate him and be the best or he was going to succumb to it and become a statistic of a kid whose parent did something she shouldn’t.

My fellow ’75 classmate Laura Morrow wrote a nice obituary on my dad. https://www.myleaderpaper.com/.../article_a88780f8-1c40...

My dad never acknowledged it, but I know he never forgave his mother for abandoning him as a child. Who could? This ressentiment of betrayal on the most basic human level was a complex and compounding burden that effected his life to the day he died.

Grandma and Grandpa Dunker’s “House on the Heights” is to this day a beacon of a reminder of some of my best childhood memories; comforting and welcoming. Their story isn’t just about a huge brood of grandkids. It’s about a couple who managed to raise a large thriving family through the depths of first the Great Depression, then the Second World War. They laid the foundation for a legacy that today I cherish and pass on. Their lives will influence generations to come.

Conversely, besides a copy of a wedding day photo, I have only one black and white polaroid of my grandmother on the Almany side. In 1963, I am standing with her, expressionless. Like her life, it is stark and blank. Until she passed away in 1976, she would periodically come to live with us. I assumed it was an “all-other options were exhausted” necessity. It never lasted long and it was never good. Dad said as far as he knew, his mother never slept one night of her life in a house she owned.

But life doesn’t always move in straight lines. We are a melting pot and all things are connected. Ninety-one years ago, a grandfather of whom I know nothing, died. Last week I missed my 50-year high school reunion. In a uniquely American way, it all fits nicely.