By Diane Hoemeke

I lived with Grandpa and Grandma Magelli until I was 15. Here are just a few of my favorite memories of Grandpa:

During the Great Depression, there were a lot of Magelli kids but Mine No. 3 was only working one or two days a week, if that. So one summer, Grandpa worked for Mr. Alexander, who owned a farm a couple of miles from Mt. Clare, on the road to Wilsonville, known for the No 4 mine. His pay at the end of harvest? A PIG! We all know what happened to it–sausage, salami, head cheese, lard, and even pickled pig’s feet.

Grandpa had a gentle sense of humor. One time, Aunt Rose took him to Gillespie to get a pair of shoes or was it a pair of slippers? This was right after Tom and I returned from our year in Australia, 1968. We brought him a wallet made of kangaroo skin and left a couple Australian dollars in it. When Grandpa went to pay for the shoes/slippers, the clerk told him it was made from kangaroo skin. No problem for Grandpa, he pulled out his wallet and handed the clerk Australian money.

In the spring, grandpa would cut young willow shoots that grew by the railroad tracks. He’d twist the outer covered and remove the wooden stalk. Then, he’d cut a hole or two in the outer shell and put a small piece of the wood back in for a reed.

One of his favorite challenges to us kids was: “If a man lives to be exactly 60 years old and sleeps exactly 8 hours a day, how many years of his life did he sleep?

In the fall, after the farmers had harvested their corn with combines, we’d go to their fields with our gunny sacks. We’d pick up the ears of corn that weren’t collected with machinery. Then, I’d spend hours shucking corn to be stored in a backyard shed and fed to our chickens.

Sometimes Grandpa would get a ham leg and make prosciutto, hanging it for months on the basement clothesline to cure.

If one of our trees got diseased, Grandpa would cut out the rotted part and white -wash the cavity. And sometimes he white-washed the trunks as preventative measures.

Grandpa never said he was getting old. He just said he’d had “too many Christmases.”