Tag Archives: Detroit

My Grandma’s scrapbook

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I have many memories of our family living in Detroit, MI with my maternal grandparents in their basement at first, and then living in our own house down the street later on. This was from 1970-71, a relatively short period of time but one filled with a lot of experiences. I was about three years old. This photo of my grandparents was taken around this time, I believe. grandpa-and-grandma-mccallum.jpg

As anyone knows who has children of their own, it can be hard to get the little ones to take their afternoon naps. All of my own children stopped doing that right about the same age I was in this story. When I was three years old, I didn’t like taking naps any more than my own kids do. I distinctly remember my Grandma telling me, “Steven, if you take a nap this afternoon, I will have a surprise ready for you when you wake up!” So I took my nap.

I wondered what on earth my Grandma would give me. I was really surprised and delighted when she presented me with my very own scrapbook that she had made for me. I still have that scrapbook; it is one of my most treasured possessions.

My Grandma made the scrapbook out of clippings from magazines and little odds and ends that she had collected from her travels and elsewhere. For example, one of the things she particularly liked, and always had a supply of in the house, was a brand of tea bags named Red Rose Tea. It was only available in Canada at that time but that wasn’t a problem for her to get, living just across the river from Windsor. Each box of this special tea came with a little surprise such as a pack of little, colorful cards, about one inch wide and two or three inches tall. Each card featured a picture of an animal with its scientific name at the bottom. On the flip side of each card was a brief description of the animal, its habitat, etc. I loved those cards! Grandma kept them in a collection on her kitchen counter and some of them she included in the scrapbook. I remember sitting on her counter looking through those cards. Later on, Red Rose Tea stopped including the little cards and began to include one little china figurine of an animal in every box. Grandma collected all of those, too, and I loved them just as much as the cards. I kept as many of them as I could for a long time when I was a kid. Nowadays we are able to buy Red Rose Tea here in the States in most grocery stores. It’s been many years since I bought a box and I wonder, do they still include those little ceramic figurines in each box? But I digress.

That scrapbook fascinated me and still does to this day. It is like a snapshot of American life and customs and products from the early seventies. It’s hard to describe how much it means to me because of the memories it evokes.

Unfortunately now almost forty years after it was made, my Grandma’s scrapbook is a little worse for wear. I now have children of my own who aren’t particularly careful about how they handle this book and consequently, some of the pages are ripped out and some of the clippings have been lost or come unglued. For a long time I have thought about how to somehow preserve it (other than locking it away somewhere in a dark, safe place). A few nights ago I decided to take a photograph of each page just to see how it might turn out. You can see them here if you’re interested. My camera doesn’t have the high-powered resolution, and the setup is just my kitchen table, so the photos aren’t as clear and professional-looking as they could be.

grandma-mccallum.jpg I dearly loved my Grandma, who died October 25, 1982, surviving only a week after a severe heart attack. (The photo on the left is the last one taken of her before her death. It shows her with her only great-grandchild at the time, my nephew, Nils.) Her features are a little fuzzy in my mind’s eye, and although her voice was distinctive, I can’t exactly recall it as I used to. But her scrapbook lives on and provides me with an important link to an important time, and a very important person, in my past.

P.S. After writing this I discovered that Red Rose Tea has its own website at http://www.redrosetea.com/ There is a page that talks about those little figurines and there is more information about its history. This is still my favorite black tea in the world to drink.

1970

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The year 1970 is permanently engraved in my memory. Lots of things happened that year that irrevocably changed my family and those things still have an impact on me today.

In July 1970 I had my third birthday.

That same year, my paternal grandfather, Grandpa Oberg, died. I don’t remember him unfortunately, but I have particular memories of his death, such as seeing him in a casket in the dining room of the house belonging to my Uncle Laverne and Aunt Harriett Oberg, my father’s older brother and his wife. People, mostly relatives, were standing around in groups, many of them crying. Then there was the graveyard and the gravesite where he was buried. If my memory is correct, it was a sunny day and my brother, Dan, and I ran around a bit, and I particularly remember looking down into the big black hole into which my grandpa’s casket was to be laid. In my memory, my mother had made us black suits with matching jackets and shorts with a white shirt underneath. (Interestingly, a few years ago when my Uncle Laverne died, I drove out to Nebraska to attend his funeral along with some other family members. My uncle was buried in the same graveyard as my grandpa. The graveyard was definitely familiar to me even after more than 30 years had passed since my Grandpa Oberg’s funeral. My brothers and I decided to look for his grave and I was the first one to find it. That whole, short visit to Gothenburg, Nebraska, was like a series of flashbacks to memories long suppressed.)

In 1970 the church group my family belonged to suffered a huge split over revelations of immorality, or at least, ‘inappropriate conduct,’ of what they then termed the ‘universal leader,’ a man from New York named James Taylor, Jr. (a.k.a. JT Jr.). My maternal grandfather, Stanley McCallum, was involved in uncovering the ‘inappropriate conduct’ and was therefore near the center of the whole controversy. People in this church group (generically known as Exclusive Brethren) split over who believed which side of the story. This affected people all over the world, splitting families, pitting children against parents, husbands against wives, friends against each other. Two of my grandpa’s own sons refused to believe him and actively worked to discredit him and support JT Jr. (and still do to this day). I have no memory of Uncle David and Uncle Garth and I know next to nothing about their children or grandchildren, my cousins, except for one who left that group about eight years ago. I know of situations beyond count where separations were forced by JT Jr. supporters, e.g. children were taken away from their parents by relatives, in some cases, never to be seen again. I know of husbands whose wives and kids stayed with the JT Jr. camp and spent the rest of their lives living alone and never recovering from the pain of separation. My grandpa and grandma never recovered from this, either.

Partly due to this split, my parents decided in 1970 to sell their farm in Nebraska and move in with my maternal grandparents in Detroit. I well remember living in the basement of my grandparents’ home for several months, then moving into a nearby house, where we lived for the next year and a half or so before moving to east central Illinois where I spent most of my growing up years. Lots of dramatic and difficult experiences punctuated that 18 month stay in Detroit but I won’t go into them here. My grandma died in 1982 and my grandpa in 1987. After their death when going through some of their papers I remember coming across my grandma’s diaries in which she documented some of the anguish, loss, and depression they felt as a result of the 1970 split.

For me the events of 1970 became almost legendary, serving as a backdrop to just about everything and everybody I knew. And there were many more splits after that. I no longer think that one side was entirely evil and one was entirely good. I do know, however, that the legacy of this JT Jr. guy is still very prevalent today, especially in Australia and New Zealand where the latest ‘universal leader’ is a Sydney business man named Bruce Hales. These people have received a lot of media scrutiny over their political machinations in that part of the world and elsewhere. It was pretty freaky for me to read about and then see a few videos on Google Video documenting what’s been going on. Fortunately I haven’t had much interaction with these people, although my sister Becky and her husband, Martin, have. Martin has many siblings who are in that group and they have been involved in legal proceedings about custody battles and such between parents and children who are part of this sect and those who aren’t. Both times I traveled to New Zealand, I saw members of this sect (a.k.a. Peebs, Exclusives, The Brethren, PBs, etc.) everywhere, and all of the people I knew there were tragically affected in some way or another. I well remember going to a small town in the north of the South Island called Motueka where there is a meeting of about 200 members, a big population of Peebs in such a small town. As soon as we arrived in town, our arrival was noted by these people and we were watched during our stay. My brother-in-law’s father and I would walk down one side of the main street, and notice some of these people coming toward us on the same side of the street. As soon as they noticed us, they crossed over to the other side of the street so as not to come in contact.

I am very thankful to have not been raised in that group, that my parents raised me and my siblings in a better environment, even though that environment was heavily influenced by, and contained a lot of legacies from, the JT Jr. era such as alcoholism. I’ve glossed over most of the darker elements to the story because I don’t think they need to be gone over yet again and also because I still don’t have a complete understanding of it all. And I don’t really want to anymore.

So…There you have it. 1970 was quite a year.

Sick of being sick

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The flu finally caught up with me and Michele yesterday. Thank goodness the worst part was over after a matter of about seven hours. We’re both still feeling weak and I am bothered by a continuous headache but otherwise, we feel much better. The children all seem to be doing well, also, although caring for them all while we were feeling that sick was a huge challenge. This period of my life reminds me of stories my mother tells of the short (18 months) time when we lived in Detroit and I was only about three or four years old. This was from 1970-71. She said that it just seemed like everything went wrong during that time and we kids were very sick a lot of the time. I don’t remember much of that except for the episode of chicken pox that went through all seven of us, down to me, the youngest. During that time, Detroit experienced race riots, my father nearly lost his eye in a welding accident, and my oldest brother, then only about 11 or 12 years old, was nearly strangled to death by a neighborhood kid while he was delivering newspapers. I can remember seeing the black plumes of smoke from the rioting from the front door of our house.

One incident I vividly recall is coming home from church one day on one of the major highways. Cars were stopped in a traffic jam due to everyone gawking at a bad accident. A car had somehow flipped onto its roof. When we got near enough to see what was going on, the car burst into flames. My dad jumped out of the car and ran over to the burning car to see if anyone was inside. The driver was still inside, unconscious or something, and my dad, with the help of another guy, managed to drag him out. He was badly burned but they saved his life. Meanwhile, I was terrified that my dad would die so as soon as he jumped out of the car, out I jumped, too, dodging cars and running up the embankment toward him. Fortunately one of my older brothers ran after me, grabbed me, and took me back to our car.

Another time, also while we lived in Detroit, I can distinctly remember my mother taking us somewhere when we got caught in a shootout between some crooks and a police squad. Bullets were flying everywhere and I remember my mother yelling, “Hit the floorboards!!!” I remember scrunching down as far as I could into the floor of our station wagon.

I think these kinds of days are like the days that Anne Shirley (of Anne of Green Gables fame) used to call “Jonah Days.” Our house is even more of a mess than usual and I feel even further behind in just about every aspect of my life. Sigh.