Old pictures - Pop and Miss Chips

(Please excuse me while I recover from an unattended CHKDSK that seems to have eaten my c: drive.)

In this picture, my great-grandfather Rudolph Sprenger, called Pops by everyone in the family, sits in his living room chair with my grandmother's dog Miss Chips doing her best imitation of the RCA dog. Based upon the newspaper headline of the Jersey Journal in his lap - "Hungarian Premier Capitulates", the picture was taken in 1956.

I have a memory of spending the day at "Pop's" house when I was a little girl, sitting in the kitchen while he made me toast. He did it in one of those old toasters with a triangular base with two sides that had doors you opened to lay the toast on, partly upright, until one side was done; you'd then turn it over and brown the other side. I remembered that he had a little white mustache, and a very faint accent, and that he was rolly-polly and very old.

I carried this for many, many years before I actually saw his picture, knew who it was when I saw it - and had a shock when I visited his gravesite when my father died in 1984 and realized that Pop - my dad's grandfather - had died in 1957, when I was barely two and a half. When I think about the circumstances of being left with Pop, it was most likely after my sister was born
in 1956, while were were still living in an apartment on Communipaw Avenue in Jersey City. My grandmother lived with her father at what had been the family home since shortly after 1903 - 10 Claremont Avenue, an asbestos shingle-sided narrow row house on a steep street with a view of the Statue of Liberty (and a little bit of lower Manhattan) to the left as you stood on the front steps.

My grandmother had married young, and her husband, Thomas, had died when my father was only 4, at the height of the Depression. So she and her son moved in with her parents, and Pop and his wife Katherine became the real parents of my father. She had no say in the home, although she was the apple of her father's eye. From what my dad used to say, her mother ruled with an iron will that no one dared cross.

Anna, my grandmother, was a wild one. I'm still trying to ferret out details, but she remarried and divorced once after being widowed, the divorce supposedly because she was cheating on her second husband while he was in the Army during the second World War - or at least that is the story my mother told me. I remember my grandmother as doting on me, with wirey silver black hair (although she wasn't that old - barely fifty), bringing me a hankie of some kind everytime she visited as a sort of token between us. Some of them had edges she had tatted, some of them were printed with cartoon characters or ornate flowers - and some of them are still in my dresser to this day. For whatever reason, she had a big plastic bag of them, from which she never failed to give me one every time I saw her.

I remembered her house in Jersey City had an odd smell - wet linoleum and a bready smell - and a washing machine with a mangle, and an old coal stove that had been converted to gas sometime in the 1920's, oddly next to a modern stove. And this wire hair terrier named Miss Chips who liked to bite people, the first pedigreed dog I remember seeing, utterly my grandmother's dog, and utterly nuts.

"Get away from the dog," both my mother and father and grandmother would say the moment you entered the house. Chips was a biter whenever she felt either playful or angry, two moods that she could go from in seconds. I still remember the feel of her coat, wire-haired but silky at the same time. She reminded me of the old horsehair sofa my grandmother had.

Years later, in her old age, Chips lost most of her eyesight and bit one person too many and my grandmother had to put her down. The legal matters involved apparently were to much for Anna, and her mind snapped. One day my father walked in the door from his overnight shift in the morning as the Jersey City police called - they'd picked her up, naked as a jaybird, trying to get on a bus. After a few days in the hospital, she came to live with us. But she would never be "right" again.

For the rest of her life, until the day she died, she moved in and out of an assortment of mental hospitals and nursing homes, diagnosed as scizophrentic and/or just delusional. No one really could figure her out. And, in those days, no one tried really hard. So from the age of 54, until she died at 82, she lived in a place in her mind alone, divorced from all the hardships that life had done to her, where she never felt safe, but where she retained a quirky sacarsm to the end.

Just so sad.