KEEPSAKES con't. next column KEEPSAKES con't. next column KEEPSAKES con't. p. 8 KEEPSAKES continued KEEPSAKES continued KEEPSAKES con't from FRONT PAGE “I’ll be right up to get it,” I said. Jane served as a substitute grandmother for our younger daughter, Suzanne, during her preteen and teen years, and our family attended church with Jane. “Ask Diane if she’ll give me something of Jane’s to remember her by,” my wife Carol said. Diane gave us a decorative teacup and saucer of Jane’s. We have photos of Jane, but Carol wanted a keepsake, something “real.” David Mitchell, in his novel Black Swan Green, said, “Photos’re better than nothing, but things’re better than photos ’cause the things themselves were part of what was there.” A keepsake is a memento (a reminder of an event or a person) or a “souvenir,” a French word meaning “memory.” Ashleigh Brilliant said, “Keep some souvenirs of your past, or how will you ever prove it wasn’t all a dream?” Carol and I married in 1970. Most of our keepsakes have minimal monetary value but are cherished. Carol kept her 12-inch-tall teddy bear her parents gave her at her birth (1947) in Oakland, Calif. Carol’s father was a U.S. soldier (WWII). Carol’s mother, Betty, met and married him when she lived with her older sister, Rose Magnone, while Rose’s husband, Frank (a WWII sailor) was “out to sea.” Carol’s brown “baby bear” exhibits ragged fur and bandaged paws, but he still wears his “bridge coat,” a “pea coat” that extends to the thighs and is patterned after a European naval officer uniform. Carol’s parents divorced before Carol was two years old. Her mother, originally from near Washington, Penn., moved back “home.” Carol and her bear moved with her. Carol’s father moved on. Carol’s maternal grandfather, “Grandpap” Ben Steele, was 65 when Carol was born. He and Grandma Ella hailed from Zollarsville (near Washington), Penn. Carol spent good childhood times with them. She keeps Grandpap’s windup bear in our kitchen cupboard. “It’s about six inches long,” Carol says. “It was old when I was a kid. One of my earliest memories is of Grandpap putting the bear on his linoleum floor. When it walks, it moves its head from side to side and growls.” Carol saved her grandfather’s sugar bowl and spoon for that bowl. “He had Parkinson’s, and he’d use his left hand to hold his right hand steady as he tried to put sugar in his coffee,” Carol says. “He died in Dec. 1977. He would have turned 96 in April.” Carol has a box of her childhood paper dolls and a sewing box her Aunt Rose Magnone gave her. Rose, one of eight born to Grandpap and Grandma Steele, landed her first job at a 5-and- 10-cent store. From her first paycheck, Rose bought the sewing box for her mother. “When Grandpap died in 1977, Aunt Rose gave me the sewing box,” Carol says. “I kept everything in it just like it was. Among thread spools is my grandmother’s bank book.” Rose passed on at age 91 in 2014. Carol keeps a quilt her grandmother made, and we also have a quilt my mother, Eva, created when she was about 12 years old. It features girls wearing bonnets. Mother called it “The Bonnet Quilt.” We have a chenille bedspread my mother “started housekeeping with.” The idea for chenille bedspreads reportedly came along in the 1890s. “Chenille,” the French word for “caterpillar,” describes fabrics with thick pile (raised yarn “tufts”). Bedspreads, sold along North Georgia roadsides in the 1930s, spawned the tufted carpet industry, revolutionizing carpet manufacturing. Mother’s white bedspread features a 2.5-foot-tall blue basket holding images of pink- and white-colored flowers. In our hallway rests a brown-charcoal colored, 15-inch-tall teddy bear: Lt. Frank Looper’s childhood bear. Lt. Rufus Frank Looper, a handsome, personable, unmarried Greenville County, S.C., law enforcement officer was an only child. His father, who operated a garage on his residential property, advised his son that a Carol's 12 in tall teddy bear from 1947. Mother’s white Chenille bedspread. p.6 The Pinehurst Gazette, Inc. No. 127
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