I’m thinking about my grandparents lately. Here’s what I remember the most about my grandfather Alex Kaiser. He could mash potatoes so smoothly with just a metal potato masher and the strength of one arm, you would swear the potatoes were whipped. He used to bet his grandchildren they would never be able to find a lump when he finished mashing them, and he was right. Those potatoes were lump-free, creamy goodness topped with real butter and a dash of salt.
He and my grandmother used to have a party line phone, where they shared a phone line with another family. And get this: The phone company billed them for incoming, local calls, but his work line calls were billed differently. So they had a system worked out where if he needed to call home from work, he would let the phone ring twice and then hang up. My grandmother, or my Nana, as we fondly called her, would then know to call him back. Free call. They were sneaky.
He always used to drive a Buick, the best car in the world, he used to say. Every winter they would leave Wisconsin and drive out to California in a red Buick. My sister and I would wait out in the front yard for them, patiently looking for that red Buick to turn into our driveway. Until that year when a dark blue Pontiac pulled up to the house instead. That was the year that he discovered Buicks were not the only good cars on the road. That Pontiac never gave him one problem, and he loved it so much that he said he would never go back to a Buick again.
As a grandfather, Alex was always concerned about his grandchildren wearing shoes that were made properly and fit well, thanks to a career as a shoe salesman. It must have come as a shock to him when one of his granddaughters — me — had one of the widest foot sizes ever recorded for a child. I remember when he visited us, how he would take me out to shoe store after shoe store, trying to find shoes to properly fit my wide feet. He would hold his chin between his thumb and index finger and shake his head back and forth every time a pair of shoes didn’t fit me. Which was often. Although he’s no longer with us, nothing about my feet has changed.
I would be a decade older before I learned that my grandfather had more than smooth potatoes, cool cars, shoe wisdom, and phone hacks to talk about, but I’ll save that for another post.
No Bull Genealogy 