Grandma & Grandpa & Everybody Else!

Remembering Grandma Rita & Family

Photos From Trish Wysong 

Remembering Grandma Rita: Grandma Loved To Laugh

Rita & Bob Were Extraordinarily Lucky

By Jeremy Weld

Grandma Rita loved to laugh. She enjoyed it whether the joke was on her or on someone else. She laughed every year through the skits her kids and grandkids made up to help her and Bob celebrate their anniversary which were largely based around silly things she and Grandpa Bob did. She thought they were so funny she sent recordings of them so we could all laugh too. Not only was she quick to laugh, but she was very game and up to a challenge.

One only needs to read her book to see how challenging living in the Foreign Service is. And think of her piling into a car to head north to Alaska with you all camping the whole way. And although we sometimes laugh remembering the giant king salmon she caught -- it is well known in Alaska that the treacherous Klutina River, where she caught it, is one of the hardest rivers in the state to actually bring a salmon to shore on.

She was lucky to have a sharp mind right up to the end of her life. Furthermore, Rita and Bob were extraordinarily lucky to have kids who devoted so many years to helping her and Bob land softly. I have often said that the best we can hope for is to have someone on this side to comfort us as we go and someone waiting on the other to greet us as we arrive. I know Bob is as grateful to Susan, Bobby, John and Mary for the extraordinary effort you have made to make her comfortable and secure in her final years - as are Linda and I.

July 27, 2019
- Jeremy Weld

Remembering Grandma Rita: Love From Julia

From One Great Writer & Cook To Another

Grandma Rita's Letter From Julia Child

Remembering Grandma Rita: On The Open Ocean In A Wheat Chex Sweater

Wearing one of Mom's homemade sweaters while crossing the Atlantic.

 

Living The High Life With Grandma Rita

By Linda Wysong Weld 

Grandma Rita was always quite the lady. When you looked at her in her older years, you could still see it. She had put Ponds Cold Cream on her face every single night when she was younger. I can still remember her standing there in the bathroom, peering in the mirror, and dabbing it here and there.

You never knew. You just might want to look really terrific as you aged.

And, she DID look really terrific. She always dressed so nicely, too. Her clothes when she was in her 90's were very reminiscent of her clothes decades earlier. Tailored, attractive, layered...

But she was also practical.  She was smack between two cultures. She grew up in South Dakota and she lived the "the high life" in the Foreign Service. She chose bits and pieces of both these very different lives.

At heart, she liked making things. She knit sweaters for everybody: Grandpa, me, Grandpa's mom in Indiana... Her sweaters were very distinctive. They were made of little squares -- kind of like Wheat Chex, all piled up on each other. And the arms were always ridiculously long, as if she had made an article of clothing for a gorilla instead of a 12-year old girl.  She chose unique and unexpected colors, too. Like baby blue.

I liked her sweaters. I wore them all the way through my years at Belt Jr. High, and then on to Wheaton High School, even though they were probably wildly unfashionable at the time.

Here's a picture of me and Mom, on an ocean liner (either the Independence or the Constitution) coming back to the United States from Beirut. Mom is in her lovely little tailored outfit, with a French scarf and high heels. I am in one of her wonderful sweaters (see the long, long sleeves all rolled up) and I'm wearing saddle shoes.

If you look really closely, you can see that Mom is carrying a knitting bag, with the knitting needles poking out. You never knew. Perhaps there would suddenly be a random minute or two to work on yet another Wheat Chex sweater to present (all wrapped up quite carelessly in white tissue paper tied with thin little string) to some unsuspecting relative next Christmas!

Christmas With Grandpa Bob

Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire

In 1960, our family came back to the United States from Lebanon. We settled down, for a while, in Downtown Washington, D.C.  We were in a strange part of the city where the desperate slums met high society. A phenomenon that is common enough in many large cities, like Boston, or New York, or Washington.

We lived for awhile in the great Mayflower Hotel, in a suite, with a kitchenette. The suite had a number of rooms, and ornate furniture and desks, with leather trim. There was a concierge at the hotel -- a lot like the concierge in the movie, Pretty Woman, who takes an interest in helping Julia Roberts learn to be high society.

When our dad took Suzy and me downstairs, and asked where the nearest school was -- it was winter -- the concierge clearly tried to dissuade Dad of sending us out into the nearby community. Basically, the nearest schools were in the heart of the D.C. slums. Yet, I had already gone to over half a dozen different schools already in my life, and this was no different. So off we went.

My school had large staircases, and what seemed like thousands and thousands of students. In that whole school, only one other student -- a boy -- was also identifiably "white." (Suzy went to another school.) The food in my school cafeteria was terrible. It was hard to believe it was really"food." It seemed to be a mashup of leftovers. Nobody ate it. Fortunately, as an alternative to a real meal, there were candy machines at the school -- which, to me, seemed amazing. For 5 cents I could buy a Pay Day peanut candy bar for lunch. Which is what I did. Day after day.

The Mayflower Hotel was fancy. Dignitaries who were staying in the hotel lounged around downstairs in a kind of reading room, poring over the Washington Post and New York Times, and smoking cigars and cigarettes.

The Mayflower suite we were in had huge, gilt-framed mirrors in the living room. In those days, it seemed that our parents frequently went out for evening social events, even though they had just arrived. After the small children went to bed I would turn on that exotic, new device -- a black and white television set -- and watch, by myself, forbidden shows like "The Outer Limits." Which, with no built up immunity from watching television, scared me to death. Especially the time the show was about ghosts, billowing out of huge gilt-framed mirrors. Exactly like the many expensive mirrors that the Mayflower had thoughtfully installed on many walls in the suite surrounding me.

Christmas was coming in Washington, D.C. in 1960. And Mom sent Dad and me out into the night streets to drum up whatever we could of holiday cheer.

The Mayflower Hotel is on Connecticut Avenue. We walked northwest of the hotel, several blocks, to Dupont Circle. I remember it was windy and cold, and maybe even raining. Out at the intersections of the streets, people were standing in the cold. They were tending  blazing, charcoal-filled braziers, right on the streets. They were roasting chestnuts. You could buy a little brown paper bag full of hot chestnuts (and they were really very very hot.) Dad bought some, and we burned our mouths, trying to eat them as we were standing there at the stoplights.

Dad said that when he was young, the chestnut trees of America had begun to die off from a terrible fungus. He said these chestnuts we were eating were not American chestnuts, but Chinese chestnuts. The chestnut tree had once blanketed America, with huge trees everywhere -- one in four trees was a chestnut in many parts of the country. By the time Dad had grown up, the chestnuts were almost all dead. And, in our childhoods, Dad would occasionally drive by some shriveling young trees -- American chestnuts -- that were helplessly trying to survive, but that were in the process of dying from the chestnut blight. He said the Chinese chestnuts we had bought tasted quite a bit like American chestnuts.

At Dupont Circle there were news stands, which sold tobacco, magazines, tabloids and newspapers, and gum. One of them also had a small tabletop Christmas tree for sale. Which Dad bought, and triumphantly carried back down the boulevard to the waiting family at the Mayflower Hotel.

Somewhere along the line, he also found a big bag of mixed shelled nuts.

Basically, our Christmas in Washington D.C. was a very urban Christmas. But, urchins that we all were, we hardly fit into the highlife of the Mayflower Hotel. We discovered we could crack the shells of the Christmas nuts by putting them into the windowsill of a small wooden window sash in the little kitchen in the suite. We'd bang the window down on the nuts, again and again, cracking them open, and denting the wood of the window sash.

Not much later, Dad had found a house in a place called Wheaton, on a street called "Elby" Street -- easy to remember because it sounded a lot like the Italian Island of Elba, in Italy. He had bought the house through a kind of huckster salesman, who had his sales office up at the movie theater complex on the main highway. Dad took me to see the Elby Street house right after he bought it that winter, and before we moved in. When we arrived, he couldn't find it, because all the streets looked so similar, and the houses so half-built, and there was no landscaping to speak of. So we had to go find the salesman, at the movie theater, and he showed us where it was.

And then, our lives became suburban.

--Linda Wysong Weld 

Fall of 2018: Gaithersburg Gatherings!

Google-Eyed Gatherings In Gaithersburg

Dahlia and Grandma 

Suzy, Grandma Rita & Bob

Suzy, Grandma Rita and Kyle

Grandma Rita's 2018 Birthday Party

Suzy, John, Grandma Rita, Mary & Bob

July 15, 2018

Looking Back At Grandpa Bob & Grandma Rita's Life On The Internet

What Was Grandpa Bob's "Formal" And "Official"

Persona Like -- In Those Days Before Facebook

And The Internet?
(And a peek at Grandma's too.)

Here's some help from Lori...

 

Photos Of The Larry Neises Family

Larry Neises, Grandma Rita's Brother... And His Large Family

Dad's Day: Grandpa Bob

The early years: Dad at the Gulkana River.
Probably in the 1980's. 

DAD'S DAY ALASKA MEMORIES
GRANDPA & THE GRANDMA RITA BIRD

By Linda

We were planting vegetables yesterday for Dad's day. 

We were outside, and this robin was way up in the top of the spruce trees,

singing away.

Actually -- and this is a little known fact -- many robins are born and raised

in Alaska. So they are "Alaskans." At the end of the summer they go down to

other parts of America. But this is where they come from. 

There are many birds like that -- birds that people think are from where they 

live, but which actually are born in Alaska.

THE GRANDMA RITA BIRD

At any rate, Dad used to love the Alaska robins and how they lived in the tops of the trees and sang away up there. There was also another bird -- don't know what it was -- but its whistle sounded to him like "Grandma Rita! Grandma Rita!"  He used to sing along with it: "Grandma Rita!"  We called it the Grandma Rita Bird.

Thinking of Father's Day, Jeremy was saying that it was really as if Dad was his 

father, too. He remembers the first time he saw Dad and me. We had just moved to Milton Street, and it was the 4th of July. Jeremy arrived on a plane one  evening, and Dad and I went to the airport to pick him up.

Milton Street -- on a rare snowy day.

I remember Jeremy walking across the airport toward Dad and me. And Jeremy remembers it too.  Dad was looking at Jeremy coming toward us, with his arms kind of swinging down, like a gorilla pawing its way across the ground, with the fingers facing backwards. Like he was swimming. And Dad said, "That's how Arnold Palmer walks. His hands don't face his body, but face backwards like that. I didn't know anybody else could walk like that."  Then Dad and I started laughing. I still remember it. And Jeremy still remembers it -- us standing there, laughing. And when he arrived, we told him all about it, and how he clawed his way toward us… And that is how Jeremy and Dad first became such great friends. 

RUDYARD KIPLING

Jeremy was saying that one thing he liked about Dad was they both appreciated things like making fires, being outdoors, and doing all the things we do in Alaska. He was an enthusiastic Alaskan. When Dad was here, he'd whistle and sing, and chat, and recite poetry, and expound on everything. It reminded me of when I was little. My first memory of Dad reading something to me was 

when I was really small -- probably two or three. He read me Rudyard Kipling. I can remember him very slowly, reciting the section about "the great,  grey-green, greasy Limpopo River.' It was a story about  a small elephant in a battle with a crocodile. And Dad loved saying "greasy" didn't he?

Dad would assume comprehension (perhaps) far before it showed up. And he was always correcting my grammar, or explaining word meanings, or whatever.

I never thought this was intrusive or bossy, actually. I just thought, "This is what Dads do." And I still think that. I never worried about jumping in and correcting my own kids -- their use of "it's" and "its" and  so on. Public school can only go so far, can't it? 

DAD IN ALASKA

We had Dad here, speaking French to Michel Flouret and the French people, every summer for years, in August. These friends of ours would come through with over 15 tourists in tow, and they'd all speak French. And Dad would make them soup and bread, like we were a lodge.

We were talking about how Dad treated our house like it was an extension of Boy Scout Camp, or some kind of alternative teaching school for the kids -- and how he would read to them constantly, or they'd hang out and talk, or do things -- all the time, day after day. 

I was thinking -- how much time did Dad actually spend, in our house, cooking and gardening, and picking berries, and taking care of the kids, and teaching them -- and I think it amounted to  over 2 solid years of total contact and activities. Camping, fishing, canoeing, biking, cooking, baking,

reading, singing… Just carrying on.

So, out of the years the kids were in school, Dad was with them for at least 1/6 of that time! In the house. In the bed, wearing his knit stocking cap all night. Making breakfast. Day and night. Non stop. That's pretty neat. Not just "a visit" but total immersion…

Also -- there were all those years of talking with Dad on the phone 2, 3, 4, 6 times a day…

So that was my Dad's Day memories. I know  -- well, we didn't live in Maryland. But, in a crazy way, a lot of the time, Dad wasn't actually "in" Maryland either!

Pretty cool what technology can do. And -- the amount of help he gave us with our work was absolutely invaluable, both in personal contact and in genuine assistance. This wasn't a phony "job" or "distraction." He was actually a full-time employee of our company. Though -- gratefully -- not a paid employee!

Wysong Family Portraits: December, 2016

Baking Cookies All Wrong With Grandma Rita

Memories Of Christmas Past

By Grandma Rita, Christmas 2016

There were 10 of us for Christmas eve here at my apartment.  Lots of good food from Rick and Suzy.  We were glad to have Laura with us.  Also, Suzy brought Kyle.  

They wound up decorating Christmas cookies that Suzy had made a couple of days ago.  

I always remember baking cookies with Johnny Herron and commenting on the fact that his mom made such pretty, fancy ones and I made plain old cookies. 

Johnny was about 3 and he said, "Well, Grandma, can I eat the wrong cookies?" 

Grandma Rita's Memories: Singing In The Choir At Christmas

Grandma & The Good Music Station

December, 2016

I love listening  to the good music station - they are playing a lot of Christmas music. I especially like the renditions of music like the choir music we sang. I loved those l9 years of singing with Dad.  He was the best one in the tenor section.

I remember so well when Johnny Herron was 2 and Jay was standing in the back of the church holding him. 

As we paraded through the church in our gold robes trimmed in red, we went past them.  He was so excited see me and Dad. And when  Patrick was about 2  l/2, he ran  down the aisle when he saw me and Dad standing up in the choir loft about to sing.  He was saying, "I 'm going to get grandma."