My Father's Stories

I have been working for several years to collect my father's stories. I have hours of tapes that I have transcribed and have started editing them for readability. I thought you might enjoy reading some of them here...

The first time I saw my official birth certificate it was a bit of a surprise to discover my name listed as Gerd Fredrich Franz Schmitz. My first name as far as I knew had always been Gert. Fortunately that was in an era when a misspelled name on a birth certificate could be overlooked. And it was only one letter.

I think the earliest memories I have are kind of sketchy, more like flashes. I can see myself in a little wicker basket on wheels. It has 4 legs on it and a kind of white finish, with rings around the rim. That was my basket to sleep in. We lived upstairs in an apartment of the house where we later lived downstairs. I was in the bassinette about a foot from the stairs and I remember that I looked down the stairs. Then my mother came and grabbed me because I was jerking my body in the basket and jerked it toward the stairs. If she didn’t pull me out I would have gone down the stairs in that basket. I probably would have gotten killed.

I remember once when I was about three years old, I walked off from our home, toward Trills, which was the next town. I just took off and a friend of ours recognized me when he passed me on the street. He took me by the hand and brought me back to my mother. She was already looking for me.

Another early memory of while we lived still upstairs and we had walls that were kind of slanting down because of the roof line. There was a window about two feet off the floor, but it dropped lower behind the floors I could actually sit on the edge of the floor with my feet down a little more on the window sill. During the German Carnival people would run around in the streets while wearing masks. I was sitting in the window watching them and some older boys saw me sitting up there and said, “We’re going to get you! We’re going to come and get you!” And I was afraid and said, “Mommy! Don’t let them come up here and get me!” I was scared to death they were going to come up and grab me, but they never did. That is engraved on my mind.

Then the next thing I remember is almost drowning in our septic tank. We had an outside septic tank but it was like quicksand. There was straw on top that they took from the chicken and rabbit bedding. There was also the liquid stuff and the bad stuff in there from people. One day mother had me all dressed up in a blue knitted outfit with a matching hat with a ball on top, like skiers wear. I picked that day to try and walk on top of the straw and I went through the straw and into the sewage so all you could see was my hat floating on top. We had a German shepherd by the name of Rolf and he barked and barked and barked. My mother came out to see what was wrong, because she knew I was outside. Rolf looked to that big concrete pit and kept barking. He went wild! Then my mother saw just my hat there sticking out of the straw, and she pulled me out. I remember my mother pulling me out and the dog barking. I must have swallowed some stuff while I was under there because told me much later on that I stank for days when I burped.

There was another blue outfit I remember. A blue Kossack outfit with black trim. She had me all dressed up, washed and combed with knee socks on and nice brown shoes polished and everything. We were supposed to go visit somebody, and she got me ready before her so I went outside. Mr. Rüffert, the one that owned the place (he was also a relative- his wife and my dad’s mother were first cousins) had a long bean stalk, about twelve feet long, that had a big cloth ball on the end, like a Q-tip. He used that to clean out the chimneys and he had laid it alongside the chicken coop. I saw it laying there and had to get my hand on that ball! I went in all that soot, and played with that. I was one sooty mess! I had a knack of getting into things like that, especially when I was all cleaned up. My mother saw me and had a fit. She had to change my clothes and wash my hair and get me all cleaned up again. I don’t know why I played with it. Because it was there I guess. I don’t know where we were supposed to go, but it must have been important because we all got dressed up.

Those are the earliest things I can recall. I also have very clear memories of the years before I went to school, when I was 4 and 5. My favorite playmate was also my uncle. He was the son of my mother’s father and his second wife, Maria. Maria was close to my mother’s age and Helmut was close to my age. At that time Maria worked at Stallenhouse. That was a big farm, really a huge farm, almost like a castle. They had the houses in a square with big doors where you could come in and be protected inside the square. That’s the way they built them way back in the 1700’s and1800’s. Stallenhaus had lots of land and cows and pigs and chickens. Thousands of chickens! My grandmother was in charge of the kitchen there and they had to cook a lot. They had eight or ten farm hands that came in for breakfast and lunch and dinner.

When Helmut got out of school, there was nobody at his house because his and mother were both working. I wasn’t in school yet, so he took me with him to the farm in the afternoons. I had nothing else to do and Helmut and I were together a lot, so he and I walked up the street about half a mile to the farm where she worked and we stayed there on the farm just fooling around until she got off. We had pretty much the run of the farm and we constantly got into trouble.

We loved to play in the barns where they had the straw. We would build passages in the straw and crawl around inside. We must have breathed in dust by the pounds! It was so dark in there. We played in there all the time and we called it buden bauen --- that’s an old run down place where people live.

Stallenhaus had all those chickens and a huge chicken coop where all the chickens laid most of their eggs. But the chickens were also allowed to run loose so they went all over the farm. We didn’t call it “free-range” back then but they definitely were. The chickens loved to go into the barn, and would get way up in the rafters. There were little boxes formed where the four by eights went horizontally and the rafters came down at an angle. It was a perfect nesting place for the chickens so some of them would lay eggs up there. Nobody could go get those eggs but us kids. The grownups wouldn’t climb up there. They didn’t even know about it until we found the. We would climb from rafter to rafter and to get all the eggs out and would throw them all down in the straw. They usually didn’t break when they hit the straw. We had 10, 15 eggs sometimes and had to make sure we didn’t throw them on top of each other. We’d have to make sure we spread them out. Then we climbed down and got a basket and took them to my grandmother. She paid us a penny for each egg we found, which was pretty good! Helmut and I each had a book. One was Helmut’s Egg’s and one was Gert’s Eggs. That’s how we kept up with our earnings.