The Good-Time Charlie

Painting by my uncle, George Palof. I believe the subject is my grandfather, John Palof

My maternal and paternal grandfathers were very different personalities, sometimes in comic contrast to each other. Living in a small German-speaking village in Serbia, my maternal grandfather, during WWI, was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. The soldiers each received an allotment of cigarettes. My grandfather sold his share and sent the money home. The good son. He supported the dreams of his three daughters. The good father. And was kind and generous to his grandchildren. The good grandparent. In this country, as a carpenter, to support his family, he labored long hours even outside in the harshest weather. The good worker. The good provider. Despite these tiring long hours, on election day, he was up early and first in line at the polls. The good citizen. My paternal grandfather wasn’t really a bad man. I struggle to characterize him. What pops into my mind is an old expression from the 1920s. He was a good-time Charlie.

My paternal grandfather, John Palof, like my maternal grandfather, came from the “old country.” In grandpa John’s case, his origin was a small village in what is now Slovakia. Growing up, I experienced him as a remote figure with a heavy accent that made him difficult to understand. Sometime during my childhood, so my dad’s story goes, my grandfather woke up, went to the bathroom, and pissed blood. That was the end of his drinking. With his sobriety, he became very nervous, retreating in the face of us boisterous grandchildren.

When I got older and my father taught me to play pinocle, I experienced by grandfather as a vigorous player who, when he had a trump, would thump the card down hard on the card table. And I knew him as the man who had a vented room in the basement of his small, brick suburban home, a room where he smoked slabs of bacon and homemade sausage. He also made a strong horseradish and would coax the children into smelling it and laugh as their heads jolted back at the pungent scent.

But I mostly knew him from my father’s stories. My father was the eldest child and had the responsibility of getting my grandfather out of bars on payday before he spent his entire check. My grandfather had taught himself to play the fiddle. He like to be where there was music and the company of men. He liked to drink, joke and gamble and buy rounds for the boys.

My father also remembered when his father built a house on Albion Road near Cleveland. As children, my father and his brother George decided that the house needed an accompanying swimming pool, so they dug a deep hole beside it. Then, in their parents’ absence, they played with matches and set the house on fire. My grandfather returned to find the fire fighters putting out the blaze. In anger, he chased my father and his brother around the house, only to fall into the swimming pool hole, emerging even angrier. My father would have a hearty laugh when he recounted that part of the story. After that, my father said, when his parents left them unattended, his dad would put two chairs back-to-back and tie the brothers up.

I didn’t really start to learn about my grandfather firsthand until I went to college and took a course in developmental psychology. I had an assignment to interview representatives of three generations of a family, and I choose my paternal grandfather, his son George, and George’s son, my cousin Andy. I don’t remember what I asked my Uncle George and Andy, but the responses of my grandfather have remained vivid in my mind. First, I should add this disclaimer. My grandfather liked to joke, as I said. For example, once when I was a child, a helicopter flew overhead, and he told me he had built a helicopter out of wood. Unlikely. He also told me that to create a two-car garage, he once climbed on the roof of a one-car garage, sawed the building in half, and then pulled the halves apart and filled in between with new construction. That turned out to be true as it was witnessed by his youngest son who later verified the story for me.

Keeping this joking propensity in mind, dear reader, here are stories that he told me as I sat across his kitchen table from him, doing my school project. I asked him how he became a carpenter, and he said that when he was young a plague stuck his village and killed so many people that he was put to work making coffins. I asked him what his life was like as a child. He said that once he had a swelling in the back of throat. He seemed to be describing tonsillitis. His mother reached into the back of mouth and squeezed the swelling until it burst. He said that the pain was so bad he raced from the house into the woods where he claimed he couldn’t see the trees for the blinding agony, and there he slept for a night before returning home. I asked him why he left his village and came to this country. He said he was trying to avoid the Austro-Hungarian draft. He said he left the village and just began walking in the direction of Germany.

My next recollection of him was when he and my grandmother celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, repeating their vows in the Catholic church that they were originally married in. At the step up to get to the altar, my grandmother tripped. My grandfather caught her and wisecracked, “You’ll get it right next time.” Afterward, we all ate out at a Chinese restaurant. My grandparents had never been to one before. At the end of the meal, not realizing what a fortune cookie was, my grandfather ate his cookie, fortune and all. Later, when he went to the restroom, I wisecracked that he was going to read his fortune.

So this was the grandfather that, as the oldest grandchild, I grew up knowing. But then, in 2010, my cousin Tom Palof, using some genealogical research of another cousin, Steven, produced a compact disc about my grandparents. This nicely done work gave me a different perspective on my grandfather: John Palof, the progenitor, with ancestors branching out behind him and descendants spouting out before him. There was film of the old country with scenic rolling hills and a castle in the background, one that my grandfather recalled seeing in his youth. The background music was classical tracks by Dvořák and Bartók. It made my recollections seem, well, rather irreverent.

But that’s the man I knew. In the story that I like best, he plays the good-time Charlie role.

After his death in 1975, my grandmother continued to live in the small brick house on Lawnwood Avenue in Parma Heights, a place she shared with her divorced son Albert. When we came up to Cleveland for holidays, my wife, Marcia, and I would always stop by. Like her husband, my grandmother had a heavy accent and with broken English was a little difficult to understand at times. But she was a pleasant person, and we wanted to make the effort to find topics to talk about. Seeing it was yuletide, Marcia says, “What was your favorite Christmas?”

Grandma knits her brow in thought, then says, “I had the four boys. What trouble they could be.” She smiled and continued, “A lot of work. Running around. Get in trouble. There was Paulie [my father]…”

“How old was Paul?” Marcia asks.

“Paulie… He was seven. George five. Albert two. Joey one. Four boys. And I was pregnant. John [my grandfather, her husband] has his coat on, going out the door. I say, ‘John, where you going?’ He say, ‘To get a drink at the bar.’ I say, ‘But John, the baby is due today!’ He say, ‘Mary, you’re always complaining’ and he go!”

At this point in her story, Marcia and I are thinking, “Did she misunderstand the question? This is her favorite Christmas?”

“The midwife came,” she goes on, “and I have the baby. Mary, my first girl.” With that revelation, she smiled sweetly, and her old face was infused with joy at the memory of that distant event. Her favorite Christmas.

I am sure that when he found out, my grandfather bought a round of drinks in celebration.

THE END