Robert Stanger

As a person who lived in Sweden for nine years before immigrating to America with his parents, my father, Christian, like other new arrivals in the U.S, had to shift language gears quite rapidly to acquire an education.

Despite his early unfamiliarity with it, he did acquire a small repertoire of sayings in his new language, some quite prosaic, others more profound.

He had a strong preference for starting his day with a bowl of oatmeal. If his wife (and my mother) would serve cream of wheat in the morning for a change, he was apt to remark, “Oh, it’s wallpaper paste today.”

He also referred to the dry cereal that I preferred as “sawdust.”

He did enjoy a hearty meal and was fortunate that my mother was a good cook. But he was careful not to over indulge. “Moderation is key in all things,” he’d say.

Despite being an immigrant, he did manage to graduate from Erie High School in 1903, although he was 20 years old by this time due to his late school enrollment in his new homeland.

His completion of high school was a feat that not only required prowess in a new language and scholarship, but the daily passage of a gauntlet of sorts from the tiny farm his parents had acquired on the far eastern outskirts of Erie to the school’s site in downtown Erie.

This gauntlet was the tough neighborhood of Erie’s lower East Side, largely populated by immigrants from Eastern Europe, and my father (who went by “Chris”) admitted to having had to carry a club on his person for protection.

I don’t know as he ever did have to use it, but he did speak of once having to brandish it when he was confronted by a gang of young Slavic toughs.

As the father of seven who worked in the business office of Griswold in Erie for 44 years (where was the controller) he was probably speaking from experience when he’d say, “There’s always two sides to a story.”

In the same vein, he might say in response to a rather inept explanation to an occurrence “And if the dog hadn’t stopped to s… it would’ve caught the rabbit.”

The phase that he cited for use in his high school yearbook under his photo says a lot about him in a few words, “On their own merits, modest men are dumb.”

Although he remained bilingual for the rest of his life, the only times I recall my father speaking Swedish was when he would chat with his stepfather, Rudolph, as he cut the latter’s hair during our Sunday visits to the small farm where Rudolph, (who never learned much English) lived a reclusive life during his final years.

(Swedish was never spoken in our home when I was growing up , as my mother, who, however, was half Swedish — and half Norwegian, was born and raised in the U.S. and wasn’t the least bilingual.)

Although English was his second language, he was as proficient in it as a native speaker and his pronunciation was without accent … in contrast with how Swedes, in caricature linguistic portrayals, can’t seem to pronounce the letter “j” as in “By yumping yimmeny.”

During most, (if not all) of my father’s life, “women’s liberation” wasn’t much of a cause. However, both he and I would leave our home for the evening when it was my mother’s turn to host a small group of her friends for an evening of card playing (which included much conversation as well as the serving of refreshments).

As a number of the women in this group happened to be spinsters, my father would occasionally rather crassly refer to the group as the “SOL club” with the acronym standing for “S… Out of Luck.”

Since my older sister, Ruth, would occasionally hold similar gatherings (which rotated among members’ homes) I wonder if they weren’t (or aren’t) some sort of social event unique to Erie.

I do recall my father making a statement which reflected a view rather harsh of the opposite sex and which could have originated in his own experience … although I hope not.

The unfortunate quote I recall was “Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned.” (Hardly a phrase that would garner much credence today.)

As further example of my father’s attitude toward the opposite sex was his remark about the woman I had chosen to share my life with.

“Oh, that’ll never work,” was his rejoinder when I told him that Judith not only taught French, but had dabbled in both playing bridge and acting in plays staged by an amateur theater group in Lorain (where we both lived for a time).

In his defense, he certainly knew that given my tastes, I wasn’t ever likely to play bridge or to act in amateur theater productions.

Since Judith and I have now been married for over 50 years. it does appear that his “that’ll never work” prediction was off the mark.

Perhaps the saddest phrase I associate with my father was “Weep and you’ll weep alone …. laugh and the world laughs with you.”

It is understandable that he might quote such a phrase, as he lost his first wife, May Burke, (with whom he had five children) when she was not yet 40, and of those children, William, a promising son, died at 16 and Marie, a much -loved daughter at 35.

He lost his eldest son, Thomas Burke, when the latter was only 45. He had been ill for years from the tuberculosis he acquired on Guam in the late 1930s where he worked in the medical field as a Navy chief pharmacist’s mate.

He visited Thomas when the latter was at the Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Tucson. During his visit there, he would stroll the hospital ‘s desert grounds for exercise.

“That area out there looks like Mars,” I recall him saying.

As an outdoors lover who enjoyed walks there in the woods and swims off its beaches, Chris would often query “Where would we be without the peninsula?” speaking of the state park, Presque Isle, which arcs out into Lake Erie north of Erie.

But as much as he might have enjoyed bathing, my father had a very inefficient one-arm crawl stroke as result of having suffered a serious injury to his left shoulder early in his working life while employed at an Erie shop that handled steel plating where a plate fell against him, pinning him to a wall.

(One always knew where he was out in the lake as he raised his one efficient arm high as he slowly swam along the beach for some distance. He would then walk back to his starting point.)

In his latter years my father’s vision declined, which was a serious blow to a man who in his early years had garnered so many medals in rifle and pistol competitions, and who could shoot woodcock on the wing when hunting in the woods and fields that surround Erie.

On one of my final visits home before he died I drove him out to the peninsula for what was probably his final swim. His visual impairment was such that he had given up driving.

While we were stopped beneath a traffic light, he looked up and said, “I can see that red light. Maybe I can start driving again.”

But his macular degeneration did not permit this, and his limited vision also severely restricted his reading ability.

The depression that resulted from both his visual and physical decline was a major factor in his demise at 87.

But I know of hardly anyone who had lived a fuller life, and he did it all as an immigrant whose entire life, except for his early years in Sweden, was played out in Erie.

His life was thus a tribute to both what Erie had to offer, and to the abilities and the indomitable perseverance which enabled him to fully exploit this.

I regret to say that no one in his immediate family came close to this, including this writer.

Robert Stanger has lived seasonally for over 40 years along the Allegheny River and has the stories to tell about it.