CHRISTMAS 2005 In past years I have written about most of my relatives but I've never mentioned uncle Stanley, one of my dad's brothers. He died while I was still very young and I have but a few memories of him.
Uncle Stanley, known as Stance to his family, lived in Chicago and made business cards for individuals and small businesses for a sparse living during the Great Depression. One of the stories that I remember is that he was not above making himself one card to effect a special business advantage. If he wanted to buy an end table, for instance, he would make himself one business card saying, STANLEY'S CHOICE FURNITURE STANLEY JEDLICKA, PROP. With this in his vest pocket he would visit a furniture wholesaler, giving the clerk one of his business cards and look over the furniture stock. At length he would choose an end table, saying that he would see how well the table would go with the customers. Naturally he would be given an excellent price. He would pay in cash. In the Great Depression most people dealt only in cash, not trusting banks and checks and, of course, there were no credit cards. In this period my grandparents who had a tailor shop in Chicago hung a large sign in their shop reading We trust in God. All others pay cash.
But Uncle Stanley could not survive exclusively with his business card business. Whenever possible he supplemented his income with a circus and carnival side show attraction, consisting of a shooting gallery using B-B guns to shoot at an irradicably moving row of various sized, numbered ducks. For 10 cents the customer would be given one shot at the ducks. If a duck were hit it would turn over, a bell would sound, the line would stop and uncle Stanley would direct the customer to the prizes. Hitting the largest duck would be rewarded a package of gum, the prize increasing with the reduction in size of the duck. The maximum prize was as a gold plated pocket watch for hitting a duck of not much over an inch in diameter. The B-B guns did not shoot straight so Uncle Stanley did not often have to give even a package of gum.
As the story was told to me, there was a customer, an ex-military man determined to impress his girl friend, who bought repeated tries until he finally shot down the smallest duck and walked away with the gold-plated watch, an event which had never happened before. Soon afterwards, the man returned, angrily saying that the watch was only a shell without works inside. Said Uncle Stanley, "All of the shots that you tried and missed just proved that you were not a good enough shot. If you are not satisfied with the prize, give it back to me and I shall refund your last 10 cents." Uncle Stanley was not a man with a massive build so I would have imagined that the unhappy customer would have assaulted him and maybe in addition would have destroyed his stand, but apparently the man threw the watch shell at him and walked away. The presence of his girl friend may have tempered any thoughts that the man might have had for violence.
And now here's another story of my more immediate family. When I was 13 years old my family moved to East Palo Alto, a low income area which would, decades later, become a part of Silicon Valley. The area was settled in the 1920s with many chicken ranches, each used to raise chickens that provided fresh meat to markets and restaurants in San Francisco, 30 miles away. The chicken coops consisted of a row of screened coops with an extended shingled roof of about 400 square feet total area. Each ranch had an austere house, initially of about 600 square feet. Our house was built before building codes were in effect. It was built at minimum material cost, similar to the chicken coops. Dad, with help from mom and me, was gradually reworking the house to bring it up to code. Located centrally was a cast iron cooking and baking wood stove which we were still using for both heat and cooking. It had a sheet metal stove pipe leading to a hole through the ceiling sheetrock to some kind of vertical stack in the attic. We were sitting down, eating a meal, when someone noticed smoke coming from the attic through a crack next to the stove pipe. Dad jumped from his chair and ran into the garage to get his brick hammer. Then he got on the stove and broke a hole next to the stove pipe. Immediately a dense stream of smoke poured into the room. He shouted to me to bring in the garden hose and fully open its hose bib. Mom tried to help. On the stove was a bucket of water intended for washing the dishes. She held it up to dad. He grabbed the bucket but immediately dropped it, shouting, "It's boiling hot!" He broke the hole to more than a foot in diameter as I brought the hose into the house. We could see fire in the attic. East Palo Alto got its water from San Francisco's Hetch-Hetchy Aqueduct, which used a massive high pressure water pump to carry the water up to their water storage lake, Crystal Springs Reservoir. If you turned on a garden hose with an open shut-off nozzle on its end, the hose would rise into the air like a snake due to the large quantity of water passing through it. Dad shouted, "All the wood in the attic is on fire!" Starting in the area next to the stove pipe, he completely extinguished the fire in about 5 minutes. He had been standing on the hot stove and the bottoms of his heavy work shoes were beginning to melt; he used the hose water to cool down the stove and extinguish its fire. Next he jumped down from the stove, tore off his work shoes and gave his feet a drenching of water, all the while rubbing the soles of his feet and using some Bohemian profanity learned from his older brothers and sisters who must have picked it up from grandfather Jedlicka.
In an hour we had mopped up the water from around the stove and removed the charred wood from around the stove pipe. Dad said that East Palo Alto had an all-volunteer fire department and the house would have burned to a charred ruin by the time the volunteer firemen would have appeared with a real fire hose. He also noted that our outdoor watering hoses were of 3/4-inch size, which he used for his masonry work -- a smaller sized hose may not have provided enough water. He inspected the stove pipe area and discovered that some wood had been nailed against it to provide a nailing surface for the sheetrock, a no-no. Many such oddities appeared in the house. But we had to excuse these. The house had been improved earlier by a highly successful butcher and his teen-aged son. There would seem to be little in the butcher trade that was applicable to house building or improving.
This year's Christmas card has a cow on it -- there's a small tie-in with my previous comment about the butcher, I suppose, but there's not enough room left to tell some of my cow stories. I'll include some next year.