Grandpa Rogge

Grandpa Rogge

Grandpa and Grandma Rogge lived at 234 east Fifth Street in my hometown, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Grandpa had nearly retired by the time he came into my consciousness. He was thirty-nine when he married and sixty-two when I came along. The Grandpa Rogge that I remember was a tower of strength.

Grandpa was about five feet, ten inches tall and a big man, not fleshy but solid. Broad in the shoulders and with a barrel chest, he was muscular due to fifty years of heavy physical labor. His stance was somewhat "gumbyesque". . .his feet several inches apart giving him a broad base and a sturdy appearance. He had a big head with intelligent wide-set eyes. His hair was full and curly white. He had a kind smile and I never saw him raise his voice or his hand in anger. He neither smoked nor drank. He was a mason and a lifelong member of the German Methodist church.

Otto Helmuth Rogge was the second of six children born to German immigrants Karl August Rogge and his wife, Augusta. Karl was a supervisor at the Rueping Leather Company. It is said that he was a man of exceptionally fine character and a warm friend to all who knew him. Otto did not finish high school but in his early teens went to work with his father at the Rueping tannery. The tannery suffered several reversals and when he was no longer needed there, Grandpa found work with the Boulay Brothers Feed Mill. He worked at Boulay's for fifty-one years as a common laborer. He was well acquainted with the business and over the years, became a trusted employee of the mill.

Though his work for Boulay Brothers was mainly physical, he was a right hand assistant to the employer. Occasionally, he would tell me about his experience during the years of prohibition in the twenties and the early thirties. Apparently, "mob" figures needed grain to make bootleg liqueur and had arranged for the purchase of this commodity from the Boulay Brothers. Mr. Boulay asked Grandpa to meet the trucks at the loading dock at three in the morning to effect the transaction. He was to load the sacks of grain for the buyers. When he was finished, they tipped him with a fifty-dollar bill. These middle of the night meetings continued regularly throughout the prohibition period and nearly doubled Grandpa's income during that time

I remember going with Grandpa to the Boulay Brothers flour and feed store at 18 East 4th Street. This location served as a storefront for the mill, which was located several blocks away on Macy. The store was devoid of trim; it was just a big room. A large window to the street provided light but swirls of dust on the glass clouded my view into the store. Sacks of flour and seed awaiting purchase lay on steel-wheeled hand trucks parked haphazardly in the public space.

A heavy glass door opened into the store. There, the air was hazy and the smell of flour and grain was strong. A layer of dust covered everything. The floor was heavy wooden planking worn smooth from years of shuffling feet. A clerk who wrote up bills of sale staffed the long flat counter. Buyers backed their trucks into the loading area. It was like a garage with the floor elevated at the back end to facilitate loading. A laborer like Grandpa filled the orders and loaded the heavy sacks onto the trucks. Even in his later years, he customarily toted two one-hundred pounds bags at a time, one on each shoulder.

The loading dock opened into an even larger room behind the storefront. It served as a warehouse for piles of hundred-pound cloth sacks filled with various types of grains. There were no windows there and the only illumination came from the occasional small, bare light bulb. The ceiling was high and huge wooden beams supported the upper story. Heavy plank flooring lent support for the mounds of feedbags. This was a dark, dusty, and dirty place. There was no door on the loading dock so the warehouse was frigid in the winter and hot in the summer. The small opening to the loading dock was the only ventilation for the grain room. There were no fans there, yet I never once heard Grandpa grumble about his working conditions and I doubt that he ever missed a day on the job.

Grandpa Rogge loved to bowl. In his early years, he was an excellent bowler and competed in national tournaments. In 1912, he and four friends, William and Otto Zoellner, William Shirey, and Tom Watson bowled in the Twelfth International Bowling Tournament in Chicago, Illinois. He and Dad took me bowling on several occasions. We went to the Alhambra Bowling Lanes on Macy Street. The lanes were located on the second floor, above another business. I wondered what it would be like to live downstairs, under a bowling alley!

Bowling alleys haven't changed much since the late forties with one exception: automatic pinsetters were not in place at the Alhambra then. In their stead, the alley employed lads to work as pin boys and furnished one for each pair of lanes. There, at the far end, he was responsible for returning the ball and manually resetting the pins.

The boy sat on the back wall behind the facade. Only his feet were visible to me through the opening. When a ball rolled into his space, he would jump down from his perch, pick it up, and roll it back down the track to me for a second try. When I rolled the ball at the pins, it would occasionally knock one or two down. Instead of a machine clearing the fallen pins, the pin boy would manually remove them from the lane and the pit, and place them on the rack. If it was the end of the frame, he lowered the rack to replace all ten pins on their spots for the next bowler.

Another of Grandfather's diversions was his garden. He was a farmer at heart but his residence in the middle of Fond du Lac largely frustrated that ambition. However, he did find an outlet for his love of cultivation behind the garage . Due to years of careful agri-business, his garden lay roughly a foot higher than the surrounding lawn there. He followed the same planting ritual every season.

Grandpa composted everything organic and regularly added this material to his garden soil. First, he would turn over the entire plot with a pitchfork. This interred the compost and generally shook things up. Then he massaged and raked the plot to reduce all recalcitrant lumps to powder, and removed any stones. Not until the soil looked like velvet, did we make the trip to Lallier's farm on East Fourth Street.

The Lallier farm was a quaint site. The city was expanding in that area and amid the new home, it looked oddly out of place. The barn was old and ramshackle. The residence wasn't getting any younger, either. It was a large, two-story, dark-grey stucco affair with a big, wrap-around porch. The porch screens were dark and it was impossible to see what the porch held. The surrounding greenery was overgrown and unruly, and the entire location looked like a hermitage. Farm machinery and other orphaned items cluttered the yard. If the house was a hermitage, the Lallier sisters were the hermits. They were a strange looking pair. It was hard to understand them when they talked. They wore brimmed hats and blousy shirts with pants.

A local nursery favorite, the Lalliers had bedding plants for sale each year. Most of the east side residents came to visit each spring to purchase plants for their gardens. Theirs was a rather relaxed operation. One of the sisters had pulled a somewhat derelict and out-of-square hay wagon to the fore, and parked it in the yard. It was loaded with flats of small tomato, pepper, and other vegetable plants. The lawn displayed the geraniums and petunias. The parking arrangement was a catch-as-catch-can affair. The women staffed a cigar box on the end of the hay wagon and wrapped plants to be taken home.

When requested, a sister unceremoniously uprooted the tender young vegetable plants with her dibble and plopped them on a sheet of newsprint. Years of practice made the rolling up of these little plant pouches a smooth and quick operation. Grandpa always purchased tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts. He loved Brussels sprouts. He paid for our purchases and we headed home. The rest of the garden came from his work place in the form of seeds or onion sets.

Once armed with things to plant, he and I laid the wooden board down next to the rows and strung a line to make arrow-straight planting furrows. With the greatest of care, we sowed the seeds and set in the plants. They all appeared to be in extremis by that time. They were devoid of turgor from the rude treatment at the hands of the Lallier sisters. Undaunted, we carefully watered each one from Grandpa's bucket and shortly, the new residents stood up and took note of their surroundings. When finished, Grandpa replaced the planting board on its brackets along the backside of the garage.

Grandpa religiously tended his garden from that day forward. He summarily plucked and disposed of any weed so impertinent as to show itself. Neat rows of green things rewarded his ministrations and his garden was a remarkable sight. Grandpa grew many kinds of produce and we enjoyed each as it came into season. The sweet musk melons, juicy vine-ripe tomatoes, and crunchy carrots were my favorites. There was plenty to eat fresh and lots left for grandma to "put up" too.

Grandpa, Grandma, and I would regularly set out for Chicago to visit aunts and uncles living there. Grandpa's younger brother George had moved to live in that area where he was the accountant for the American Steel Company. He was married and had four children, Ruth, Edna, Mildred and a son, George. Georgie was the repository for good humor and joviality in the family. He was a victim of polio, which left him with badly deformed legs although that did little to slow him down. He lived and worked in Mundelein, Illinois as a typesetter and raised a family of four there. He was very artistic and prior to the depression, he published a magazine entitled "Youth." It was easy to see why grandpa loved to visit the Chicago relatives. A cheerful lot, they knew how to enjoy a good time.

Interestingly, as I reminisce about them, the one common thread that jumps out at me is the unfailing civility of all four of my grandparents. They all lived a simple life with few frills; all worked very hard and experienced frustration and disappointment at times. I spent considerable time with each and I cannot recall a single conflict; not even one! I never heard a voice raised in anger, or a disparaging or thoughtless remark; never saw an impatient moment. It seems remarkable to me that this was so and I feel fortunate to have such loving examples to emulate.

I learned much from the time that I spent with my Grandfather Rogge. He taught me, mostly by example that there is dignity in hard work, how to get my hands dirty, how to meet a challenge head on, how to finish what I start, and to always do my best; no matter what the task. He also taught me how to bait a fishing hook, how to "pick" angleworms, and that ice cream is one of the basic food groups. I loved to spend time with my wonderful Grandpa Rogge as I grew up in my hometown, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.