I Read “Yesteryear” This Week

My sister posted a few weeks ago about our shared obsession with anything adjacent to “Little House on the Prairie.” It was the early 80’s. Michael Landon starred as the frequently bare-chested Charles “Pa” Ingalls in the television drama adapted from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books. I was barely in elementary school, so I paid no attention to Pa Ingall’s six-pack. I paid a lot of attention to Laura’s braided hair and her bonnets. And her numerous sisters. I had long brown braids, just like Laura’s! Our mom sewed us our own bonnets and matching ruffled nightgowns. I had a lot of sisters, just like Laura.

We lived in rural central Pennsylvania when our “Little House” fascination began. Or, rather, we were born into our “Little House” era. Amish farms surrounded our small town. (The town often smelled like manure.) Our family drove past the farms in our station wagon, and I watched Amish kids my age run around barefoot. Amish families travelled past our house in their black, horse-drawn buggies. An Amish family even owned the local bakery / bookstore! (Mom took me to the Amish store and I picked out a book for myself. The owners’ son rang me up at the counter. He had six fingers on each hand. Mom told me that the young man’s parents established a store for him to run because he was unable to work on the family farm. Years later, I saw a photo in my high school biology textbook of a six-fingered hand that resembled the hands of the store owners’ son. The book introduced me to the term “Ellis-van Creveld syndrome,” a “genetic disorder in the Amish community.”)

The town’s volunteer fire chief owned the deli directly across the street from the volunteer fire station. The fire chief answered the fire department’s landline phone while he filled deli orders. The all-volunteer ambulance station sat next to the fire station. My dad volunteered on the ambulance crew because the town was so small that everyone had to volunteer to do something, or else the town wouldn’t have basic emergency services. That’s how small and isolated our town was. When our elderly neighbor suffered a fatal sudden cardiac arrest, my dad was on the ambulance crew that responded. Another time, a local Amish boy fell out of a hay loft and suffered a head injury. Dad had to drive the ambulance that transported him 50 miles to Hershey Medical Center. Medical helicopter evacuations didn’t exist in our community back in the “olden days” of my childhood.

I read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s original “Little House” books, and also that bummer of a memoir about her newlywed life “The First Four Years.” (Spoiler alert: Laura and Almonzo’s infant son dies. Their crop fails at least once, maybe several times. Then, she burns down their first house in a cooking accident.)

Our aunt gifted us a book titled “The Hunky-Dory Dairy” by Anne Lindbergh about an eleven-year-old girl who meets a farm family that is stuck in time in the 1800’s. The girl from the twentieth century shows the girl from the 1800’s her Sony Walkman cassette player. (It was the 80’s, after all.) The girl from the 1800’s teaches the girl from the twentieth century how to make butter and stuff.

So, I’m a sucker for books about rural life in the 1800’s, or about people who romanticize this rural, 1800’s-ish life.

My sister K. taught me how to use a public library this past March. Okay, not really. I worked in my college’s library for four years. When I was fresh out of college, I used the computers at my local library almost every day after work so that I could look for a better-paying job. (I was too cheap or too poor to pay for my own internet access.) Then, I got rich and lazy and I paid for my own internet access and purchased all of the books that I wanted to read. However, K. is a librarian. One of her favorite topics is “how to use a library card to get free stuff.” K. inspired me to “refresh” my library card, because I hadn’t used it for so long that it expired.

I added myself to my local library’s hold list for the novel “Yesteryear,” by Caro Claire Burke. I did this at the beginning of April. At that time, there were at least 50 holds on the county’s 18 physical copies of the book. It seemed to me that it would be a fun story that involved time travel to the 1800’s. I had no idea until yesterday that Anne Hathaway already signed a contract to produce a movie adaptation of this novel. I don’t follow anything on TikTok and the only reason that I know that BookTok exists is because I heard about it on a podcast.

Anyway, my “turn” for one of the 18 county-wide copies of “Yesteryear” came up on Thursday. I read the book on Thursday evening, Friday and Saturday because rained all three days. I returned the book to the library Saturday afternoon so that the next person on the list could read it.

Here’s what I think about “Yesteryear“: It’s a weird book.

The protagonist is a social media influencer by the name of Natalie Heller Mills. She is a parody of Pioneer Woman’s Ree Drummond or else that family with 18 kids. Anyway, she marries into a rich, conservative Christian family and her father-in-law gives her the money to buy a farm in Idaho. She has an Instagram account promoting her large family and their lifestyle as “homesteaders.” She is a “tradwife.”

However, it’s all fake. They buy most of their food at the grocery store, because her husband is actually a terrible farmer. They depend on their immigrant farmworkers and their household staff in order to function. They mistreat “the help.”

Then one morning, Natalie wakes up in hell. Actually, she wakes up in what appears to be the year 1855. Life as a woman bites for her. Modern medical care doesn’t exist in this new universe. The entire family is filthy. Her husband physically assaults her. (Warning: this book does describe the sexual assault of adult women.)

The book alternates between life in this hellish new universe and flashbacks to Natalie’s journey from a high-achieving high school track star and Harvard scholarship student, to her marriage to the son of a wealthy politician, to her success as a grifting social medical influencer.

My husband Jonathan bought me several books for our anniversary last month. He confessed that he “almost” bought me this book, but in the end decided not to because he “wasn’t sure whether I would like it.” (He didn’t know that I had this on my “to be read” list.) On Amazon, the hardcover is currently $19.50 marked down from $30, and the paperback is currently $29.82. (Yes, Amazon is selling the hardcover for LESS than they are selling the paperback.) I assume that the book costs $30 or close to $30 at a real bookstore. I’m glad that I waited for my turn at a library copy.

Part of me feels that the author wrote the book in order to “teach the reader a lesson,” but I’m still not sure what that lesson was supposed to be. Yeah, I already knew that life as a woman was terrible in the 1800’s and that life as a woman can still be bad in the 2000’s. I already knew that most of social media is fake. I already knew that modern medicine is good. I already knew that a lot of “Christian” culture is designed to make women feel badly about themselves. I already knew that life is easier when you’re rich. I already knew that it’s really easy when you have a lot of money to judge the choices of people who don’t have a lot of money.

I feel like a terrible person to admit this, but I laughed reading this book. I feel terrible because several women and children get hurt. However, it’s a dark comedy. I imagine that some readers will choose this book because it is fan fiction about a social media influencer – someone like Pioneer Woman who is already rich – who “gets her comeuppance.”

I posted above a photo that I took of our own house yesterday. Our house was built in the 1890’s and we like historic architecture. We also like having lived in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. I imagine that most of the readers of “Yesteryear” also like living in the year 2026. Otherwise, they wouldn’t choose to read a book about how awful it is to live in the past.

I Rooted for the Luddites

I rooted for the Luddites when the “Planet Money” podcast talked about them. Who wouldn’t sympathize with these angry skilled textile workers – weavers and artisans – who smashed machinery in the early 1800’s? I would be angry too if the invention of power looms rendered my skillset – my ability to earn family-sustaining wages – useless.

I’m the daughter of a man who refused to sign up for EZ Pass for driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike because the technology eliminated the roles of unionized tollbooth workers. My dad insisted on using the staffed tollbooths up until the very end so that he could “stick it to the turnpike commission.” So, I have family precedent for my feelings.

Then, my own employer made it extremely clear to its stakeholders that it had invested a considerable amount of money into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and that it would continue to invest in Artificial Intelligence. Also, I learned that my job workflow and job prospects would change as a result of this investment.

I took the optional (at this time) AI prompt engineering training that my employer offered to those of us in non-technical roles.

Why would I do a thing like that? I’m sure that you, too, have read the stuff on Reddit about how AI steals intellectual property and ruins people’s livelihoods. I write a little bit of fan fiction – well, I used to write fan fiction. I stopped posting it after I read that somebody trains AI bots on the stuff that other people write and post. Whenever I ask ChatGPT to write something for me, it comes back with a bunch of stuff that looks like it was ripped off of someone else’s blog.

Here’s why: I have been out of college for a long time and I don’t want to be obsolete. The summer after I graduated, I got a job at Walmart. Most of our training was on a computer. Our training class had to sign into the computers together. One of the ladies in my class had a great deal of difficulty signing into a computer. I don’t want to be that lady.

One of the first things that I learned during my employer-sponsored AI prompt engineering training was that I had already learned some of the stuff in the training as a young kid.

Every class at Berlin Brothersvalley Elementary School performed in either a winter or spring musical. These weren’t Broadway shows. The lines and the song lyrics were all exposition meant to educate us. One year, our spring show was titled “How the West was Really Won” and the entire thing was a (very sanitized) history lesson about Manifest Destiny.

One or two springs before that, we did a show about Information Technology. The main characters were stuck in a computer. They had to defend themselves from evil creatures called “Glitches.” My class sang the following chorus, “Garbage in, garbage out. There’s no doubt. If you put garbage in, then you’ll get garbage out. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.“

That’s actually the only part of the musical that I remember. However, as I discovered from my AI prompt engineer traning, it was a good thing for me to remember. Because the key point from one of my lessons was the mantra “garbage in, garbage out.”

I don’t want this blog to look like AI slop (garbage). So, I need to understand what AI slop looks like. For instance, I didn’t know how to finish this blog post. I fed what I had already written into ChatGPT. I asked ChatGPT to finish the post in the persona of Jenny. I studied what ChatGPT wrote for me. I didn’t like any of it, so I trashed it all. However, it was a good way for me to study how not to write.

In the end, the Luddites didn’t stop the Industrial Revolution from happening. The Luddites didn’t stop the robber barons from emerging. Some part of me hopes that some of the displaced skilled artisans took what they learned about textile mills and used this knowledge to open their own textile mills. Not that I want them to be the capitalist villains in a Dickens novel. Hopefully they made just enough money to keep their families out of poverty, but not at other people’s expense. That’s probably an unrealistic wish because that’s just not the way that things worked in England in 1811.

I can’t promise you that this blog won’t ever look like AI slop. However, even if it does look like AI slop, it will not be because AI wrote it. This blog will continue to be my own words.

O.J. Simpson and His White Bronco Upstaged this High School Civics Banquet

This photo was taken on June 17, 1994, while the police chased O.J. Simpson in his white Ford Bronco.

The American Legion Auxilliary (it was called the American Legion Ladies Auxillary when I was a kid) chose me to represent my school at Keystone Girls State in 1994. The Berlin chapter usually just sent one girl, but in 1994 they sent two girls. I think that the American Legion (no Ladies in that name) was supposed to send a boy from my high school to Keystone Boys State as well. No boys applied, thus they funded two girls.

Girls State and Boys State are one-week programs held on college campuses in almost every state to teach rising high school seniors about civics and citizenship, American-Legion style. The programs held in Pennsylvania have “Keystone” at the beginning of their names because Pennsylvania is the Keystone State.

At the end of the week, we held “State Elections.” We elected one girl as “Governor” of Keystone Girls State. This lucky girl received a trip to Washington, D.C. to attend Girls Nation along with the girls elected as “Governors” of the other Girls States. Boys State also holds elections. They send delegates to Boys Nation. However, they are set up differently. (Note: I haven’t seen this documentary, but apparently it touches on the differences.)

My parents strongly encouraged me to sign up for anything that would “look good on a college scholarship application.” I wasn’t down with sports or STEM. I really enjoyed my Social Studies and History classes. So, I threw my hat in the ring for this fine opportunity. Two of my younger sisters also attended Keystone Girls State the summers before their own senior years of high school.

Per this Wikipedia page, “In 2020, the New York Post published an article citing Boys Nation and Boys State as summer camps that groom future presidents and governors.”

If a program attracts thousands of kids with enough of an interest in politics for them to give up part of their summer vacations to do politics, then it makes sense to me that some of those kids eventually achieve success in politics.

If you listen to the podcast “The Dollop with Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds,” then check out the first few minutes of “Episode 456- Scott Walker.” Future Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker attended Badger Boys State. (Wisconsin is the Badger State.) Walker then got sent to represent Wisconsin at Boys Nation in Washington, D.C. There, he met Ronald Reagan. The Dollop referred to the program as a “Model UN ripoff.”

I don’t know anything about Model UN (Model United Nations) because my school didn’t offer an option to attend Model UN. I bet that the types of kids who attend Model UN are the same types of kids who attend Girls State and Boys State, though. They most likely have parents who encourage them to sign up for anything that could increase their chances of getting into a good college and / or receive money to fund their attendance at that good college.

We lived in a college dorm for a week at Shippensburg University. When we checked in, we received housing assignments that corresponded with our “city” assignment. We also received an assignment to one of two political parties. Each city had an equal number of citizens from each of these parties. The parties were NOT related to any existing political party in the United States. They just happened to have the same primary colors.

We lived on the same floor and in the same section of that floor with every other citizen of our “city.” The authority figure who lived on our floor as a sort-of Camp Counselor / RA was Mrs. Heeter. So, the name of our “city” was “Heeter City.” The photo at the top of this blog post are the citizens of Heeter City. On the first evening, we gathered for a Heeter City town hall.

The activities during that week were stuff that you would expect from a civics camp run by the American Legion. We had flag raising and flag-lowering ceremonies every day. We had lectures on flag ettiquette. We had “General Assembly” sessions where people gave speeches and held debates. We practiced parliamentary procedure.

The dress code was professional attire. My first office job after college was for a financial services company owned by the chair of that county’s Repubican Party committee. The dress code for that job was the same as the dress code for Keystone Girls State in 1994.

We knew about the dress code ahead of time because the American Legion or the American Legion Ladies Auxilliery sent us a list of what to pack. In addition to the office clothes, they asked us to bring a dress for the end-of-the week banquet. I think that they referred to it as an “Inauguration Ball” for the winners of all of the state elections.

A lot of the girls brought the dresses that they wore to their high school proms that spring. That’s why the photo at the top of this post includes a lot of girls wearing prom dresses. Obviously not everyone had a junior prom dress. The citizens of Heeter City posed for this photo at the banquet / Inauguration Ball. I am standing in the top row with most of the other tall girls, fourth from the left. I am wearing the blue prom dress that my mom sewed for me. A girl who was good at art volunteered to draw our city’s official “sign.” (Nobody voluntold her to draw it.)

We moved into the dorm at Shippensburg University on Sunday, June 12, 1994. On the opposite side of the U.S. on this same day, a woman named Nicole Brown Simpson and a man named Ronald Goldman were murdered at Nicole’s residence. Wikipedia told me that it was evening on the West Coast when this happened. We had already met our fellow citizens of Heeter City and we were probably asleep in our new beds. My new roommate had already had a heated conversation with her boyfriend on the landline phone in our room.

I had never heard the names Nicole Brown Simpson or Ronald Goldman before. Nicole’s former husband was retired football player and movie star O.J. Simpson. I had no idea who O.J. Simpson was, even though I had probably watched the first Naked Gun movie by 1994 and O.J. Simpson was one of the actors in that movie. He had also appeared in an orange juice commercial that I had seen.

Our dorm had a television in the lounge. Early in that week, I watched a teaser for the tabloid show Hard Copy. It called out the double murders of the former wife of a football player-turned-movie star, and also of her male friend. I didn’t watch the actual show because I was busy doing politics with other strivers.

By the middle of the week, both of the political parties at Keystone Girls State held state primaries. These were the elections which decided which candidates from each party would run for the Keystone Girls State general election on Friday. One of the citizens from Heeter City won her party primary to run for State Treasurer, and one of the citizens from Heeter City won her party primary to run for State Governor!

By that point in time, we had already been lectured at General Assembly because one day at the flag raising ceremony, somebody had responded to the American flag with a formal military hand salute. This was not appropriate because we were not veterans or wearing military uniforms. One day they let us wear shorts to General Assembly because of the hot June weather. This relaxation of the dress code was revoked the next day because people started to prop their feet on the seats in front of them. Hopefully a professional dress code would encourage people to sit professionally.

Somebody gave a speech in General Assembly that maintained that “nobody should get a free lunch.” Another citizen of Girls State advised that she was offended because her family qualified for free lunch at her school. The original speech-giver clarified that she only mean it as a colloquialism, and no offense was intended.

My roommate at Heeter City fought with her boyfriend over our room’s phone every night. She insisted to him that she wasn’t talking to men at GIRLS STATE.

We held our general elections on Friday, June 17, 1994.

Our Heeter City citizen who won her primary for State Treasurer also won her general election! She was now the Treasurer of Keystone Girls State! The position didn’t have any actual responsibilities. She got to wear a cool-looking sash for the group photo and the Inauguration Ball. In the above photo, she sits to the left of Mrs. Heeter.

Our Heeter City citizen who won her primary for Governor lost in the general election. In my opinion, this was the only race in Girls State worth “winning.” The winner got to attend Girls Nation in the US Capitol. They might possibly meet President Clinton, since he attended Boys Nation when he was in high school. Such a bummer that she made it all this way, just to lose on the final night. She didn’t even get a cool-looking sash to wear. She is sitting, sash-less, to the right of Mrs. Heeter.

I watched Mrs. Heeter try to cheer her up as the Inauguration Ball emcee announced the general election winners. Losing elections is just a part of politics.

One of the other citizens of Heeter City (not my roommate) announced that she had called her boyfriend in between the photo-taking and dinner. He told her that some famous person that I had never heard of – some football player – was leading the police on a chase down a highway in L.A. This girl’s boyfriend was watching it unfold live on television when she called him.

A bunch of the girls at my table decided to cut out of dinner early and go watch the news coverage of the police chasing O.J. Simpson in his white Ford Bronco.

Very few people stuck around after they finished their dinners. When I returned to the dorm, citizens of the various cities sat around watching the coverage of the Bronco chase.

We all went home on Saturday morning. I may have exchanged a letter or two with one of the other citizens of Heeter City, but that all fell off pretty fast. I lost touch with every person that I met there. My high school classmate who also attended Girls State was assigned to a different city, so we didn’t know any of the same people from this.

O.J. Simpson was charged with two accounts of first degree murder for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. He was acquitted on October 3, 1995. On that day, I was a freshman at St. Vincent College. The school had a six-week long freshman orientation process. The afternoon of October 3 was the freshman class’s mandatory assembly on drug and alcohol use. (Yes, I am aware that this was already more than a month into the semester.) A bunch of the freshmen skipped the drug and alcohol assembly in order to watch the verdict in the murder trial. I attended this assembly. We were in the question-and-answer portion of it. Some kid confused the Dean of Students by asking her a bunch of questions about the results of drug and alcohol usage while operating farm equipment. Then, this other kid raised his hand, stood up, and announced that the jury had just acquitted O.J. Simpson. This guy had worn headphones to the assembly so that he could listen to the verdict on a radio. The Dean of Students announced the verdict over her microphone at the podium. This pretty much ended our drug and alcohol assembly.

I hope that the citizen who got elected as Governor had a good experience at Girls Nation. I am sure that the citizen of Heeter City who didn’t get elected found success doing other things. To my knowledge, none of my fellow citizens from Keystone Girls State have become Presidents. Maybe our time just hasn’t arrived yet.

The Wedding Dress Post

My youngest sister, O., is planning her autumn wedding.

Last month, she invited all of us Gaffron sisters and several of her fiance’s family members to shop for dresses with her. We sisters had a “Girl’s Weekend” which included pool time at a hotel. In fact, another hotel guess commented to me that it looked as if we were having a “Girl’s Weekend.”

O. did say “yes to the dress” that weekend. Almost everyone that loves her will need to wait until this autumn to see the “big reveal” for this dress. So let me tell you about a dress from another autumn wedding.

I present to you “The Dress” that my mother, Shirley, sewed for her wedding to my father in the autumn of 1974. Mom met my dad several weeks before her 16th birthday. Dad gave her roses for her Sweet 16 because his mother told him that it would be a nice thing for him to do. They married several weeks before Mom’s 20th birthday. Dad had just graduated from college and he had just started his first teaching job.

Both of my parents are no longer with us. I can tell you about how young they were and show you photos of how cute they were without getting myself into trouble.

The summer before the wedding, Dad took what little money he had and he went shopping someplace in Westmoreland County near where he grew up. He needed a suit for his new teaching job, and he needed a suit for his wedding. He only had enough money to purchase one of these suits. The salesman at the suit store approached him. Dad introduced himself and explained the purpose of his shopping trip. The salesman said, “What did you say your name is again?” Dad repeated his name. The salesman said, “I’m the owner of this store. My last name is also Gaffron. I’m your dad’s cousin. Tell you what. If you buy one suit, then I’ll throw in a second suit as a wedding gift from my branch of the family.”

At least that was how Dad told the story. I have no idea how much of this is actually true. Any questions would just destroy the “magic.”

Anyway, back to The Dress. Mom sewed it on the same sewing machine that she used to sew all of the clothes that she made for our family. (My sister blogged a little bit here about the “Little House on the Prairie” outfits that Mom made us.) The leftover material from the sleeves ended up in her fabric scrap collection. I used some of these fabric scraps to make accessories for my Barbie when I married Barbie off to Ken. I still have some remaining scraps for an as-yet unknown future project.

Here’s a full length portrait of my mom wearing The Dress. My dad is also in this portrait. He is wearing the suit that his “surprise cousin” allegedly gifted him on behalf of a mystery branch of the Gaffron family.

I took Mom’s dress, her veil, and her wedding album back to my house when we prepared to sell the house in Berlin. My sister O. modeled The Dress (Mom’s dress, that is) and The Veil in front of my Christmas tree last December. It fit her!

My mom’s name was Shirley. O’s middle name is also Shirley. So now we have two brides with Shirley in their names.

Let me tell you about yet another bride named Shirley. This Shirley was my maternal grandmother’s only sister. She passed away before my mom was born. Here is a photo of Shirley on her wedding day, standing with Grandma.

Shirley didn’t have any children of her own. So, I get to be the one to tell you blog readers about her. Here is what I know about this Shirley: my grandma missed her very much. A few years before Grandma passed away at the age of 90, she and I sat down with all of her photo albums. Grandma showed me many photos of her with her sister Shirley.

It is my understanding that this Shirley got married in the early 1950’s. I don’t know anything about her dress or about the dress that my grandma wore in this photo.

Even though my mom made her own wedding dress, I know a tiny bit about wedding dress shopping in the 1970’s. My late mother-in-law, Fran, married my father-in-law, Dennis, in 1974. They actually got married just a few weeks before my own parents got married. My in-laws and my own parents all belonged to the baby boomer generation. (My parents disliked the term “baby boomer.”) Fran told me that so many women shopped for wedding dresses in the 1970’s that the Pittsburgh department stores had dedicated wedding dress sections. Fran found her wedding dress in one such department store. Fran said “Yes to the Dress” because the embroidery included one of her favorite flowers.

In the very late 1970’s or the very early 1980’s, Mom brought me to her own sister’s wedding shower. It was held at somebody’s apartment in Pittsburgh. I ghosted the event (otherwise known as a “French exit” or an “Irish goodbye”) in order to check out the building’s elevator. I was still riding in the elevator when Mom found me. I wasn’t a big fan of weddings back then. But I enjoy them now.

Voluntold; The Story of the Time that My Dad Volunteered My Mom for a Project

This is my second grade soccer photo.

If anybody reading this blog identifies themself in this photo and they object to it, please reach out and I will put a big ‘ol Eat N’ Park Smiley Face or something over your mug. Most of this post is actually going to be about the team banner shown in this photo.

For the first few years after we moved to Berlin, I played AYSO soccer. A lot of my classmates also played AYSO soccer. The team in this photo was just one of many teams of kids my age who went to school in Berlin. Our AYSO teams were all co-ed. I later graduated from high school with many of the kids in this photo. The exceptions were the kids who were my age but were in other grades, and the kid who moved in junior high. (The birthday cut-off for teams for AYSO soccer was slightly different than the birthday cut-off for our school district.)

Berlin’s varsity soccer program started after I left high school. Our town didn’t have any “permanent” soccer facilities when I was a kid. The “soccer fields” that I played on during my short soccer career all became other things. For instance, most of our elementary school soccer games were held on a farmer’s then-fallow cornfield. A few years later, it became a planted cornfield. There was another, smaller “soccer field” in town where the kindergarten kids practiced and played their AYSO soccer games. We also played pick-up soccer with the neighborhood kids on the “kindergarten soccer field.” When I was in high school, the parents of one of those neighborhood kids custom built their Forever Home on the lot that was formerly the “kindergarten soccer field.”

(Disclaimer: I think that one of my childhood soccer fields was a fallow cornfield. I could be wrong about this. Maybe it was a wheatfield? I saw farms from my backyard. Our house was on the very edge of town. We certainly smelled them. My entire eighth grade class was required to take Vocational Agriculture. A lot of my classmates lived on farms and I didn’t. I mis-remember a lot of things, so I could be wrong about the corn.)

My soccer career started in March of second grade, a few months after we moved into “Joe’s House.” I am pretty sure that my soccer career was my dad’s idea.

Now it’s time to talk about something else that was my dad’s idea.

Dad took me to my soccer team’s introductory meeting, held in the school cafeteria. This was where we learned the rules, and voted on a team name. (“Firebolts” won the vote for team name.) This was also the meeting where the coach asked for a volunteer to make the team banner. Our team’s official sponsor was Keidel’s Hardware. Both the team name and the team banner needed to include Keidel’s. Spoiler: my dad volunteered my mom to make the team banner! And she wasn’t there! She was at home with their other two young kids.

I do remember how all of this went down. We came home from the soccer meeting. My dad said to my mom something like, “I volunteered you to make the banner since you like to sew!” My mom wasn’t as excited as my dad was.

Less than two months later, my parents purchased their house in Berlin. My mom repainted the living room while we were at school. My parents moved all of our stuff out of “Joe’s House” and into “Our House.” I celebrated my First Communion at our new Catholic parish the same month that we moved into Chez Gaffron. Mom found out during my First Communion rehearsal that every mom there except for her had planned a family party to celebrate their child’s First Communion. (Mom’s own parents didn’t “do” First Communion parties. Dad’s family were Protestants. Mom didn’t realize that First Communion parties were a thing. She threw one together for me. Our extended family showed up so that they could see my parents’ new house. I got a cake and presents, and it wasn’t even my birthday yet.)

My first soccer game happened a week after we moved and a week or so before my First Communion.

I understand why Mom didn’t realize that when she dropped me off for the warmup before my first soccer game, that she was also supposed to drop off the banner. There was a lot going on in our family. Also, Mom didn’t want to make the banner in the first place.

The coach and the “team mother,” or whatever they called the woman who organized everything, said to me, “Jenny, where is the banner that your mom made?”

I didn’t know. (I think that she was at my younger sister’s soccer game, which was probably held at the exact same time, at the “Kindergarten Soccer Field” that I mentioned above.)

They asked me for my parents’ new phone number. I didn’t know that either. We had only moved a week earlier.

Someone tracked my mom down (probably at my sister’s soccer game) and asked her to bring the banner to my soccer game.

Mom showed up at my soccer game with the banner and explained, “I haven’t finished it yet.”

I don’t think that Mom ever finished the team banner for Keidel’s Firebolts. The top of the banner looks sort of “unpopulated” in our team photo. However, the bottom of the banner has a cool-looking thunderbolt. You just can’t see it because kids are standing in front of it in this photo. So maybe that was her artistic vision for it. Mom was very talented in multiple textile arts, although we never said it like that. We just said, “Mom is good at sewing,” or “Mom is good at needlepoint,” or “Mom is good at crochet,” or “Mom just taught herself how to knit a sweater from watching YouTube videos,” or “Mom owns a lot of yarn.”

Mom also sewed her own wedding dress. I plan to post a photo of it soon. Unlike the soccer banner for Keidel’s Firebolts, Mom decided on her own to make her wedding dress. We still have it and cherish it very much, just as I cherish the memories of my parents during our first spring in Berlin.

Snyder of Berlin and the “Joe’s House” Era

My four sisters and I sold the house where we all grew up, in Berlin, PA, a little over a year ago, after our dad died.

A few months ago, I learned that the company who owned the town’s potato chip factory intended to shutter it. The news was so shocking that my sisters and I texted each other about it. The Chip Plant? Oh, no, not the Chip Plant!

(We all called it the “Chip Plant.”)

Snyder of Berlin potato chips were one of my first introductions to Berlin.

My parents moved us to Somerset County when I was seven years old. My dad had accepted a position teaching Special Education at Somerset Area High School. Berlin is not in the Somerset Area School District. Berlin is in the Berlin Brothersvalley School District. My dad’s brother and the brother’s family lived a few miles outside of Berlin. My dad wanted to live close to my uncle. So, he rented a house a mile or two down the highway from my uncle. My dad knew that it would be an “easy” commute to Somerset because my uncle also worked in Somerset.

My sisters and I called the rental house “Joe’s House.” My parents rented it from a man named Joe. They also rented the house from Joe’s wife (we called her Joe’s Wife) and Joe’s daughter, Rita.

Joe used to live in Joe’s House with his wife and several kids. All of the kids left the nest except Rita. Joe, Joe’s Wife, and Rita moved out of their house and into an apartment on top of their garage. Then Joe rented Joe’s House to my parents.

Joe’s Garage was actually Joe’s Welding Shop. Joe’s Wife worked at Snyder of Berlin. The day after my parents moved us into Joe’s House, Joe’s Wife brought us several bags of Snyder of Berlin potato chips. She introduced us to the potato chip brand and to the role of Snyder of Berlin in our new community.

A few days later, I visited Berlin for the first time. The potato chip factory was a short walk down a residential street from our new school.

Rita rode the school bus with me and my sister K. Rita was a senior in high school. I was in the second grade. K. was in kindergarten. The Berlin Brothersvalley School District at that time educated their entire student population in two buildings connected by an “underground tunnel.” (Just like the US Capitol, except that it was traversed each day by a few hundred kids.) I thought that Rita was cool because she sat with (and horseplayed with) the other high school kids in the back of the bus.

Rita told me that my new bedroom at “Joe’s House” had been her bedroom. You know, before her parents moved her out of her house and rented the house to another family. Rita had to ride the bus each morning with the little girls who now slept in “her” bedroom.

I wonder if we should have all called the house “Rita’s House.”

A few months after my family moved into Joe’s House, we moved out of Joe’s House. My parents found a house to purchase in the town of Berlin. We walked to school. Berlin was small enough that we rode our bikes to every corner of the town. I often rode my bike past the Chip Plant.

Rita graduated from high school. I saw her name proudly written on a paper graduation cap taped to the wall of our shared school cafeteria. I was proud that I, a newcomer and a second grader, recognized a name on that wall. I graduated from that same school ten years later.

I smelled fried potatoes on windy days while I sat in class. We took Economics and did Junior Achievement in our senior year. As our “field trip,” we walked down the street and toured the Snyder of Berlin factory. There were 78 of us in my senior class. We divided ourselves into groups of five to ten each and laughed at the hair nets that we all wore. Some of my classmates waved at their family members working on the assembly line. When my sister K. took Economics / Junior Achievement two years later, a manager from the Snyder plant visited their class several times. He gave her a bunch of Snyder swag.

Every time my family rode past Joe’s House, we explained, “That’s Joe’s House!” Then a few moments later we pointed out the house that my uncle and aunt used to own. Two of my sisters were born after the “Joe’s House” era, so they needed to know about it.

I’m not going to get into the details about why the potato chip factory in Berlin got shuttered. You can Google all that. However, it closed last month.

I assume that Joe’s Wife eventually retired from the Chip Plant. However, a bunch of my former classmates and / or their family members probably didn’t have this opportunity. The Chip Plant’s role in Berlin will be hard to replace.

Mackinac Island – Fresh off First Ferry of the Morning – Labor Day (Lake Huron)

On Labor Day, the Mackinac Bridge Authority in Michigan closes the bridge from 6:30 a.m. – noon. Brave pedestrians walk across the bridge. Jonathan participated the past few years. (A one-way walk, plus all of the extra walking involved for walking from one’s drop-off spot to one’s pick-up spot, ended up being 7 miles for Jonathan.) Last year he crossed the bridge and then crossed back! (I’m so proud of him.)

While Jonathan walked this year, I took the first ferry of the day to Mackinac Island. This is the earliest that I’ve ever been to the island.

Mackinac Island was a sacred spot to the local Native American tribes. It’s now a tourist attraction.

European settlers colonized it. An Astor traded furs here. (Same family as the guy who went down on the Titanic generations later.) The island now hosts two old forts, three cemeteries, many Victorian houses, and the Grand Hotel. (And a Starbucks!)

And horses. Lots and lots of horses. (“HORSE” is pretty much the entire theme of this island.) And bicycles.

Motorized vehicles are banned here except for emergency vehicles. That’s why folks pay the big bucks to come here. Tourists sightsee by bicycle, horse, or walking.

If you’re staying overnight on the island, you either schlep your luggage to your hotel or get it delivered by horse or bicycle. Same with any souvenirs that you buy. Same with the food that you eat. Same with the food that the horses eat. Same with the ingredients used to make the fudge that the tourists buy. (There are a lot of fudge shops on the island.) Same with the alcohol. It’s expensive to consume things and experiences on the island.

My in-laws used to visit as day-trippers every few years. (My husband’s parents used to live in St. Ignace, one of the towns on the mainland where one can park and catch a ferry to the island.) My father-in-law likes to joke around family and friends about the smells of the horse shit mixing with the smells of the fudge.

I’ve never spent the night “on island.” I first came here as a day-tripper 20 years ago this summer. However, this month’s Labor Day trip was my first since before 2020.

I personally find the island stressful when it’s crowded. The island is crowded every day that I ever visited, which are days with nice weather during tourist season. (Funny how that happens!) However, the crowds vary depending on the time of day and the day of the week. The only reason that I was able to take any photos of the “main drag” this year was because I got there as early as I possibly could. I arrived on the same ferry as about a dozen hotel employees. (I am under the impression that they were housekeeping staff who lived on the mainland.)

I wanted to show my blog readers what Mackinac Island looks like in the summer before “all of the rest of us day-tripper tourists” arrive on Labor Day.

So, keep in mind that I took all of these photos within an hour of stepping off of the morning’s first ferry on Labor Day. Don’t expect downtown Mackinac Island to be this empty when you arrive midday for your visit.

Also, the irony is not lost on me that I (as a tourist) witnessed a lot of service and tourism industry employees up bright and early at work on Labor Day.

After I took all of these photos, I booked a rather expensive carriage tour around the island on the first tour of the day. To make a long story short, the carriage ride was in two parts. For the first part, I had a Romanian carriage driver / tour guide. I learned that he was a university student and he was in a program that permitted him to work in the United States for three months each year, and then travel for a fourth month. He is only eligible for this program while he is a student. Next year, he will graduate and he will no longer be eligible for this program. He drove us past the traditional tourist trap staples such as the Grand Hotel and the Grand Hotel’s golf course. Some poor little girl wiped out on her bicycle in front of our carriage while we were at the Grand Hotel. (The roadway there is a steep hill.) She cried. Her parents were there and she got back on her bike. I saw the same little girl walking around on a different part of the island several hours later, so I like to believe that she was fine. It must have been mortifying for her to fall like that in front of a full carriage, though.

Then our Romanian driver / tour guide drove us past the dormitories where many of the service industry employees reside and past the stable where the horses reside.

I learned a lot about horses on both the first and second parts of the carriage tour. I forgot most of it already. I do remember that the Romanian driver / tour guide finds it necessary to rest his horses behind trees and shrubs when he is on the section of roadway that borders the Grand Hotel’s golf course. This is to prevent golf balls from hitting the horses, causing them to bolt. I learned several details about the Romanian guide’s personal life. I learned absolutely nothing about the personal life of the driver / guide that we had for the second part of the tour.

The tour company had a “moderator” who managed our transfer from the first carriage and the first part of the tour, through a building that had a souvenir shop and concession stand, and onto a second carriage for the second part of the tour. I learned that this man lived in St. Ignace. He told us that if he did not go to work on Labor Day, he would otherwise be stuck at home all day due to the traffic backups that result from the closing of the Mackinac Bridge.

After Jonathan walked across the Mackinac Bridge from St. Ignace to Mackinaw City, he took a ferry from the Mackinaw City side to the island. (The two ferry companies offer service from both sides of the bridge.) The ferry that Jonathan rode to the island almost wiped out two small power boats that stopped directly in front of that ferry. Also, a freighter passed in the shipping channel on one side of this whole scene, so the ferry couldn’t swerve in that direction to avoid the power boats. Then Jonathan watched sailboats and other small watercraft leave the island’s marina until I finished my carriage tour. (Jonathan is a boat nerd.)

By then, downtown Mackinac Island had a lot more people out and about. We had lunch at the Pink Pony. We waited almost an hour for our table, but it was okay because we haven’t eaten there since before 2020. Also, we overheard the hostess tell patrons who came in after us that the wait was now one and a half hours. The Pink Pony is one of those places where you have to put your name on a list even to be seated at the bar. Jonathan watched the bartender confiscate bar chairs from “patrons” who stole them from the bar in order to join their friends at a table. (“Fine, I guess we’ll just stand then!” said the now chair-less guests.) A bunch of other patrons wore tee shirts announcing that they completed the bridge walk.

The Pink Pony is the restaurant on the ground floor of the Chippewa Hotel, seen in the background of this photo, on the right side of Main Street.

I shopped for overpriced souvenirs. (The souvenirs arrived on the island by ferry. Then I purchased the souvenirs and took them off of the island by ferry.) We returned to St. Ignace on the ferry. By then I had reached my limit with crowds and the smell of horses.

Jonathan confessed that the ferry rides to and from the island contribute significantly to his enjoyment of these trips. I agree. For several years, we brought our bicycles and pedaled around the island’s perimeter. We toured Fort Mackinac once. One year, I toured the Grand Hotel. (The Grand Hotel charges non-guests $10 per adult and $5 per child to walk up on the porch and enter the hotel in order to keep out the “unwashed masses.”) Other years were more low key. Jonathan likes to look at the boats in the marina. For several summers, we visited the island during the Race to Mackinac. This is an annual sailboat race (in July) from Chicago (sponsored by the Chicago Yacht Club) to the Round Island Lighthouse / Channel at Mackinac Island. So, Jonathan sat on the beach at Windermere Point to watch boats cross the finish line for several hours. (I think that Jonathan watched the race while I toured the Grand.)

I read a lot of beach reads about the island of Nantucket off of the coast of Massachusetts by Elin Hilderbrand. I like to think of Mackinac Island as a sort of “Nantucket of the Midwest.” Except with no automobiles. And probably with more horses.

Postscript: Here are some photos that I took of the Mackinac Island Area (Round Island Light House, Mackinac Bridge at Sunset, etc.) several years ago.

Jennifer Woytek
Jennifer Woytek
Jennifer Woytek
Jennifer Woytek
Jennifer Woytek
Jennifer Woytek

My Great-Grandfather Left His Immigrant Family to Serve in World War I, Become a POW, and Lose the Use of His Arm

I will occasionally blog about stuff that my sisters and I found when we cleaned out our late parents’ house.

For instance, here are two books that we found. They belonged to our paternal great-grandfather, Leonard Robert Gaffron. (My uncle Leonard and my father Robert were both named after him.)

Leonard Gaffron was a veteran of World War I.

The book above says on the cover:

80th

DIVISION

SUMMARY OF OPERATIONS

IN THE

WORLD WAR

PREPARED BY THE

AMERICAN BATTLE MONUMENTS

COMMISSION

The inside page says the same thing, with this added:

United States Government

Printing Office

1944

So, while my grandfather Carl was away serving in World War II in 1944, his own father, Leonard, received a book from the US government about a summary of operations in World War I.

The second book says the following on the cover:

WAR DIARY

of

COMPANY “E”

320TH INFANTRY

Compiled upon the occasion of the Eighth Annual Reunion, commemorating the Tenth Anniversary of the Company’s organization at Camp Lee, Virginia

September Nineteen Seventeen

June Nineteen Nineteen

The inside page says:

DEDICATED to all the men of Company “E”, 320th Infantry [80th Division], who made the supreme sacrifice.

According to family lore, Leonard Gaffron was a tremendous athlete. Before the War, he pitched a no hitter in a local baseball game. During the War, the Germans wounded him in the arm that he used to pitch the no-hitter. The Germans also took him prisoner. The Germans released him, but he lost the use of that arm due to his injury. At some point after the War, he went back to playing baseball- with his other arm. He pitched another no-hitter.

According to my dad, his Grandfather Gaffron earned a living by farming with one arm and two mules. He named one of the mules Kaiser Bill. (This was a reference to Kaiser Willhelm II, the German emperor during World War I.)

Years after World War I, a local newspaper interviewed my great-grandfather about his experience as a POW. My dad’s cousin brought a copy of this article to last year’s family reunion. He put the article up on a big screen so that we could all read it.

The article left out stuff that we Gaffrons had heard in the family lore. For instance, the article downplayed my great-grandfather’s ability to communicate with his German captors. My great-grandfather spoke German fluently. His parents were German immigrants.

My family concluded last fall that the article differed from the family lore because the article writer – or my great-grandfather, or both of them – didn’t want to draw attention to his German immigrant background. Somebody was apparently worried about the optics of his experience as a POW.

I never met Leonard Gaffron because he died before I was born. I have no idea if the Gaffrons who immigrated from Germany were a bunch of jerks. This doesn’t matter. Leonard had to farm and play baseball with one arm after he was captured as a POW in the War. From the family lore, the household struggled between World War I and World War II. The Great Depression happened, everyone struggled, but Leonard had to struggle with one arm.

Leonard’s son Carl went off to serve the U.S. in World War II. Then Carl came home and eventually married into another German immigrant family.

While we consider ourselves Americans now, some used to consider us outsiders. Interesting how a generation or two can affect our viewpoints.

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