Apple Pie

I am sorry to say that I don't have as many memories of my Grandma Piekarski as I do Grandma Beck. One memory though that always sticks out with her, was her apple pie.

Grandma Piekarski made the best apple pie that I remember. When she and Grandpa lived in Whitefish Bay, they had a small orchard in their backyard, about a half dozen trees. I think they were all a cooking apple, because I can't remember just eating an apple right off the trees.

Anyway back to the pie. She mostly made the pies in the fall with fresh apples. The smell of the cooking pies would fill the whole house with the most wonderful smell of cooking apples and tasty crust. Her pies were the perfect combination of apples, spices and flaky crust. My most prized memory of her was one fall when I was visiting her, I think I was around 8 years old. Grandpa had picked apples for her and brought them into the kitchen for her. I was looking to watch her make the pies and then she surprised me and said she'd show me how to do it. So we mixed the ingredients for the crusts and divided the dough – one for her pie and one for my very own little pie! After the work of making the dough was done we filled the crusts with her filling and and waited for the goodness to come out of the oven.

Sadly a few years later Grandma and Grandpa moved out of Whitefish Bay to Thiensville, away from her trees, and she quit making those delicious pies.

Grandma's crib

Grandma's Crib

One of the oldest traditions I know of in my family is my Grandma Beck's crib set. She got it from my Grandpa back in 1927. The set started out simple as you can see, then grandpa built a landscape out of sheet metal for one side and then the other side another year. He painted both sides to match the original set. Grandma sewed an appliqued shirt for it, I'm not sure when, but I can't remember the crib not having the shirt.

The crib remained the same the over the years with the exception of a lost or broken figure. During one of my visits in the summer, I think about 1971, we went to downtown Milwaukee to go to the museum and shopping at a five and dime store. I was looking for toys , Grandma was waiting for me like usual, and she found a new shepard, a couple of sheep and a camel.

The crib was always setup up in Grandma's living room for as long as she lived, sometimes she didn't have room to put up the whole crib, but the original building has always been a part of our Christmas.

Recently my cousin has restarted the tradition and set the crib up, just like all of us remembered it. He didn't have the first photo to go by, just the shared memories of it. Making a part of Grandma and Grandpa with us still.

Veteran's Day 2012 -- Steve Francis Phillips

Last year I wrote several blog's about my relatives who have served in the military. I've since found out I missed several. I would like to correct that this year. I'm starting with my cousin's son Steve. I hate to say it but I don't know Steve very well – yet.

Like a lot of us Steve didn't know what he wanted to do once he left high school, he held a couple of jobs, but didn't feel he was going where he wanted to. So he joined the Air Force in November 2010. He graduated from basic training in January of 2011 and entered his technical training or MOS training after that. His specialty is 3P0X1 or Security Forces which included the core basics of law enforcement, security, and air base ground defense. Steve graduated from technical school in April 2011. His first duty station was Dover AFB, Delaware. Here Steve honed his skills he learned in tech school, specializing in commercial vehicle inspection. In October of 2011 Steve learned he was to be deployed to southeast Asia and trained for two weeks and half weeks Eglin AFB, Florida before deployment to Qatar. He came back home in May of 2012 and is again stationed in Delaware.

Steve is an Airman First Class (E-3) and has just passed his two year mark this month, and is extremely proud of what he has accomplished so far in his career and hopes to serve for twenty years.

DUKE

Pets have always been a very important part of my family. I can't remember our house ever being with out a pet.

Duke was the first pet our family had. He was a a German Shepard and a gift from my Dad to Mom. He gave Duke to her when she was expecting my oldest brother.

I never got to met Duke, I only heard stories of him from my parents and my grandparents, the Becks. Mom used to tell us that Duke would jump up and put his paws on her shoulders and look down on her, granted Mom was only 5'1” but still hearing this as a kid was impressive. Grandpa Beck would tell us how he would toss Duke a ham bone and he'd have it gone in minutes. Grandma always said that Duke followed Mom every where and never let her out of his sight.  From what we were told Duke was a gentle giant. Duke showed his gentleness all the time with my brother by letting my brother climb and  ride him. Duke also actually let my big brother teeth on his ears. Other stories of Duke's gentleness included stories of how exceptionally patient Duke was with a neighbor girl who was developmentally delayed.  Mom told us how the girl used to pull Duke's tail and tease him, the type of things that would cause most other dogs to bite. Duke could be also very protective of Mom and Bill. The story of his protectiveness that sticks out most is the one Dad would tell us about,  was the one about the time He took care of Bill for the first time alone.  Mom went to the store for a few things. While Mom was gone, Bill got hungry and needed a bottle, so Dad prepared one for him. Well like a lot of new dad's, he made the milk too hot. So when he tried to give it to Bill, of course he cried --- loudly. This caused Duke to go into action, which consisted of Dad holding Bill while backed in into a corner with Duke keeping guard until my Mom came home.

Unfortunately, like a lot of large dogs, Duke didn't live a long life, but he is still a part of the family through the stories told of him.

MaryAnne Ruth Beck Piekarski

MaryAnne Ruth Beck Piekarski

December 13, 1932 – April 20, 2007

Last year my sister asked why I haven't written about our Mom. I guess there's a few reasons. The two main ones are: Which picture do I use for her and the second she's my Mom, where do you start talking about her?

I guess I'll address the picture reason first. I really couldn't decide on just one picture so – that's the reason for the slide show, I think they tell her story better then I can. These are just a few photographs of her, I hope everyone enjoys them. It was hard to pick even these few; which ones to use which ones to leave out. I picked these because, I think that these photographs really show what she was like. She was out going and very popular, the friends in the slide show were people she talked about often. One of them – Nina, the y were life long friends.

This is the second part. What do you say about your Mom? I mean everybody's mom is special to them, but what makes them stand out? Even though I didn't tell her enough, she was the most influential person in my life. She “kissed my boo-boos”, she yelled at me when I needed it, she was my friend, my Mom. Here's her story. Mom was born during the great depression. Her dad always worked and they had a home, but things were tight. She attended Messmer High School in Milwaukee, where she was extremely popular and met her future husband. When Mom and Dad first married Dad was a salesman, a lot of his salary was commissions, so things were either very very good or just OK. As a family we never went without anything we needed, but Mom had a hard time keeping to a set budget. Early in their marriage Dad had a job opportunity and moved his young family to Ohio, that's the farthest Mom had ever been from her family. One of my brothers was born there. Things weren't what they thought they would be, so the family moved back to Milwaukee. My sister and I were born in Milwaukee and were the final additions to the family. Finally Dad got tired of the selling game and wanted to do his dream job – being a motel/resort owner in northern Wisconsin. So we packed up as a family and move “up north”. The resort business didn't work out for my parents and they ended up in the hotel management business for awhile moved around Wisconsin and Minnesota a few times. The last jobs they had before retirement was managing apartments. It was at their last apartment complex, that Mom discovered she was ill. The illness was pulmonary hypertension (abnormally high blood pressure in the arteries of the lungs. It makes the right side of the heart need to work harder than normal. Symptoms include shortness of breath or light-headedness during activity). During the time Mom was sick, she never complained to us kids or let on just how bad this illness made her feel. Like the pictures I chose, she was always smiling.

My First Rod and Reel

The printed date on the photograph is 1966, but I think I'm only four or five in this picture not six.

I know I was only about five, because I had the chicken pox that year. I was so sick with the chicken pox that even at that young age, I knew I was ill. I also remember it was winter; I was stuck in the house and didn't care. I itched and all I could eat for weeks were bananas. (believe it or not I still like bananas).

One night when Dad came home from work he handed me a wrapped package; I was so excited I ripped it open. This was my “chicken pox gift”. It was my first rod and reel! A zebco, closed face reel with about a four foot rod. Up until then all I used was a bamboo fishing pole. You know the kind – a long pole with a line and bobber, all you could do was tosh it out a few feet.

This was taken the spring of that year. Dad was teaching me how to cast. I had to learn how, because, as soon as I could cast correctly, we were going to go to Silver Moon Trout farm to catch some fish. It didn't take long to learn how to cast and when the weather was warm we when to the trout farm and I caught my first fish with my rod and reel. It was the greatest thing that had happened to me up to this point.

The second picture which was taken several years later, shows me on our trip to Canada. Dad and the boys went out on the lake with a guide and Mom, Sue and I stay behind and fished. There weren't any piers there so Mom took us out to the swimming raft thinking we could catch some pan fish out there. She advised me to cast, but I just dropped my line right there, and I caught the largest walleye of my life there!

February Blizzards

This week, as I was digging out from a February blizzard, this photo took on a new meaning to me. We had over twenty inches of snow in a twenty-four hour period. The third highest total for my area. It was hard enough digging and plowing with modern equipment. I can only imagine how difficult it was with the limited tools they had in February of 1936, the date of the photo.
I really like this photo of my Mom and her brother. It's a cute picture of them. I never thought about it being any more than a photo of two kids playing in a snowbank until I found a newspaper article among my grandma's papers that gave the photograph new context and meaning.
On the front page of the February 10, 1936 edition of the Milwaukee Journal, were several stories of the blizzard that had hit not only Wisconsin, but a good deal of the rest of the country. For Wisconsin many highways and roads, along with the trains were stopped, literally closed by snow drifts for at least a couple of days. There were several stories of hospitality and heroism. One of the heroic stories, was of one man, who walked two miles in the blizzard to a stranded train in order to get milk to a baby who was on the train with it's mother. Hospitality stories told of strangers who were welcomed into homes and taverns, where they were feed and kept safe while waiting out the storm. One man, a school board member of one of the districts took a teacher and her students into his home when it was clear they wouldn't make it to their own homes before the storm hit. 
What hit me were the differences between then and now. Many of the stories of being truly neighborly, I hate to say it, wouldn't happen anymore. I made into town later in the day of our storm and watched people working as individuals and not as neighbors. You know sometimes these really are pictures of the good old days on more than one level.