Jean Bullard

Old Age

Jean Bullard

2

It seems impossible to believe that I just had my 94th birthday. Others in my family died in their seventies, so I assumed that I would also. Much history has been made in the last almost 100 years. I can remember people and events. Saddest thing is that most of my friends have died. My walker allows me to get around on my own, but I have to remember not to go fast. The bookmobile is my favorite activity so I can get a variety of new (to me) books to read. My biggest laugh is when I heard Robert Frost tell a man, “Robert Frost’s house is three miles down the road. His is the third house on the left.” “You are a liar.” “Damn right I am. Got rid of him fast,” he laughed.

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The Journey of a Table

Deborah Boomer

2

What do you picture in your mind when you hear the word “table”? Is it a periodic table? Is it a table of contents? Or do you picture something a little closer to home? What comes to mind for me is the kitchen table where my family ate together from the time I was in the second grade until I graduated high school. Although that was just the timeframe I remember dining there — I left home at the age of 17. The table was a classic 1950’s style, with metal curved legs that traveled up to the trim around the Formica top. The extendable extra leaf made a circular table more oblong to accommodate six people. There were nine people in my immediate family by 1962, which yes, didn’t add up. At breakfast this wasn’t an issue because my siblings all started school at different times. During the school week, there was always a pot of steaming hot oatmeal on the stove which my mom woke up to prepare at dawn. I followed soon after escorted by an aroma of freshly brewed coffee, and the thought of a bathroom which no one was using yet. The memory of my dad sitting at the breakfast table every morning with his two eggs over easy reading the morning paper is a fond one. His 12-hour shifts at the bowling alley meant this was the only time my brothers and sister and I saw him throughout the day. At dinner time, the hectic nature of each of us eating in shifts wasn’t the case. At 6:00 pm every evening, we all sat down to eat dinner together. However, due to the lack of seating, one of us would “get” to sit at the coffee table — which was very appealing to all of my brothers due to the TV and the opportunity to sit on the floor. I rarely volunteered my seat at the table because not only was the floor uncomfortable, it seemed lonely. I had five brothers and one sister, all younger than me. My brother, Kayle, ate more than anyone else. He would sit down to dinner with our family, and then visit his friends under the pretenses of playing chess. In reality, he was accepting second dinners all around town.

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My brothers often got into heated arguments which inevitably created my mom’s rule of no talking at the table. This was enforced with a swift tap of metal spoon on top of your head if anyone violated the regulation. Among the silence was my innovative brother Bill. We were not allowed dessert until we finished our plate, but he hated peas (we all hated peas). On one occasion, Bill’s peas and everything else miraculously disappeared off his plate well before the rest of us. Two Oreos in, my mother went to clear his plate from the table and saw a perfectly round circle of green — the peas he had hidden under his plate. He only got away with this once. How different a dynamic it was sitting at the dining room table with my daughter, Annalee. Now at a wooden farm table I purchased from JC Penney, we sat together each and every night freely talking about each other’s days, lives, dreams and goals. We said grace before each meal and I never cooked peas. Flash forward to this very moment, where I sit in the home of my daughter and her sweet husband’s new home. Even her dining table has a history. Her coveted mid-century modern wooden table was far out of her financial reach until someone dinged a chunk out of the corner at the local West Elm. At a very discounted price, we were tasked the disassembly, transport and reassembly of the very heavy table which barely fit through the door. It warms my heart that her table now serves as the gathering place for family get togethers. As I sit here with my daughter’s dog resting his head on my sneaker, awaiting my son-in-law’s BBQed chicken and grilled vegetables, I reflect on the journey of the family table. To me it is a catalyst of love. It is the heart, the soul of so many homes. If only these tables could also share in the conversation, oh the stories they could tell. I bet they wouldn’t care for peas either.

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New York City and the Bronx

Robert Christian

2

I was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. However, when my father was in a tuberculosis sanitarium in Wheat Ridge, Colorado for over six years, I spent long summers on my uncle’s dairy farm in southern Wisconsin where I learned the meaning of physical labor and developed positive values in life. My Uncle Paul and I loved to go fishing, and some afternoons he would say to six-year-old me, “Bobby, should we go fishing tonight?” I’d quickly respond with a big “Yes” and he’d say “Ok, you dig the worms, clean the barn and then we’ll go.” Those evening fishing trips, traveling in his green Oakland car, with the red and black stripes and long bamboo fishing poles tied to the side of the car, were fun evenings. I would fish with a wormbaited hook on the line of my pole, hoping to catch enough bullheads we would skin and clean for our morning breakfast. Then I was on the campus of Concordia Teachers College in River Forest, Illinois for prep school and college, where everyone was preparing to be a teacher in Lutheran schools. In the spring of 1949, in my senior year at Concordia, all of the seniors gathered in the school chapel, and after prayer, the place where we would be to teach was read for each one of us. Imagine my feelings that I would be going almost 1,000 east to Our Savior Lutheran Church and School in the Bronx, New York to begin my life’s vocation of teaching. To top it off, when I asked my college placement director if there was any special reason why I was being placed in the Bronx, he said, “Well Bob, we’ve been sending graduates out to Our Savior in the Bronx for the last several years, and they all seem to soon leave because they say that they can’t get along with the pastor. I want you to go there and change that.” So, the end of August, 1949 found me on a New York City Central train on my way to New York City. I arrived, explored Our Savior School and Church and quickly spent time with the pastor there, Berthold von Schenk. He was a very creative Christcentered person and a leader in liturgical Christian worship emphasizing the centrality of God’s Word and the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which were to also be central to the life of Our Savior Lutheran Church and School. I was soon head over heels in the life and work of the school and church, including handling the parish Sunday School and youth work while having positive life changing experiences under the leadership of Pastor von Schenk. When going out the Bronx, I was engaged to Arleen Vogel whom I had met at Concordia College, and we were planning to be married at her home church in rural Iowa the summer of 1950. She had been teaching in the two room Lutheran School she had attended as a child, but after our

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wedding in August of 1950, I took her from the farm country of Iowa to the Bronx, New York where we began our life together with our four children for the next 16 years. The Bronx, with a population of over 300,000 is one of the five boroughs of New York City, together with Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island, and all five boroughs are connected by freeways, elevated rails, a great bus system and rapid transit subways. The Bronx itself has Manhattan College, New York University, Fordham University and Hunter College, plus the great Bronx Zoo, outstanding hospitals and medical centers and the New York Yankees, the Bronx Bombers and City Island and Pelham Bay Park in the southeastern section of Long Island Sound.

Pelham Bay Park, photo by Joan Nilon The population of the Bronx is very diverse, Caucasian, Hispanic, African-American and some Asian. Our Savior Lutheran School, where I became Headmaster after teaching there a few years, is located in an Italian neighborhood not far from the lower Bronx with its large Hispanic and AfricanAmerican population. At Our Savior School in the mid-1950’s the pastor and I brought the first African American students into the school, this taking place even before the integration of the New York City Public Schools. When I left Our Savior in 1966 to go to Hong Kong, our Savior School’s population was almost 50% minority, and in the Hong Kong International School which I opened in 1966, there were 35-50 different nationalities. For the first five years of our married life in the Bronx, Arleen and I lived in Parkchester, 12-story buildings constructed and owned by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company for 50,000 residents living in one square mile, quite a bit different from the onefamily residential communities in the nearby neighborhoods. I attended graduate school classes at Columbia University in Manhattan and one of the men seated at my table asked where I lived so he could offer me a ride. He lived in the Bronx and it turned out that he lived in the same building as me. One fall weekend there was a complete 20 plus hour loss of electricity in the northeastern part of the U.S., including all of New York City. And yet, it was reported that that night experienced the lowest crime rate that had taken place over a long time as people rose to help when the need was there.

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