Quiz #51. Is Your Father Named Stewart?
Can you help solve a 21-year-old mystery? Steve's Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz for May 12, 2020
Is your father named Stewart?
Did you grow up in Groton, Connecticut?
Are you 21 years old?
These are the 3 questions I am throwing out to the internet on a sunny Tuesday, May 12th, in Week 10 of my Stay-at-Home Coronavirus world.
Will I get the answers? I’ll let you know, but first let me explain.
This past Saturday morning, I woke up incredibly early--5:33AM. (With the pandemic, I just can’t sleep late.)
Dishes done, bread in the oven, social media consumed, I found myself awake in a quiet house, everyone else in slumber. I texted my siblings, “Anyone want to talk?” Within minutes, my sisters Ginny and Susan responded. Sure.
It was 101 minutes of magic and memories.
I had not meant to mine the phone call for material--really, I promise I just wanted to talk on a Saturday morning--but I soon found myself taking notes. I simply did not want to forget a thing.
Ginny recounted the SNL skit that had unfolded in her community recently with an evening Zoom Rosary hosted by a family sitting on a couch--with a toddler misbehaving throughout. The family never missed a beat as they moved and prayed from decat to decat. (A word I’d forgotten--but instantly remembered--from my Catholic school days.) One of the online comments, “Best Rosary ever!”
The conversation then turned to projects at home. Ginny had spent the first two months of the quarantine going through thousands upon thousands of slides from Mildred, her mother-in-law. Now, she told us, she was tackling boxes upon boxes of cards, correspondence and artifacts.
Just as I had told Ginny with her slide project, I blurted out my worry, “Promise me you won’t throw anything out!” Ginny reported that she was sorting the stuff into piles for the relevant people (her daughter, her son, us siblings) while also tossing the extras. Who needs seven college graduation programs from 2004? One will do.
I told Ginny about the Doxie scanner which I use for photos--and which I plan on using to preserve my own paper trail of cards, correspondence and artifacts.
And then she told us about a mystery letter which she had already thrown out. It was from 1999. A thank you letter written in the voice of an infant, thanking Ginny and her husband Larry for watching a baby. The letter was stamped from Groton, Connecticut and referenced a father named Stewart. Ginny and Larry had no recollection of the babysitting adventure. No recollection of Stewart. Or Groton. Or the baby. No need to keep the letter, she tossed it. No need to bother.
I practically screamed in horror. How could that NOT bother you? Who was this kid? Why had they watched the baby? Where was Stewart? I asked if the letter had actually been hauled away from her house. She said it had not. It was still in the trash in the kitchen. I begged her to fish it out--and she promised she would after the phone call but only if it were near the top, “I’m not going through scraps of food.” She promised to report back to me if she found the letter.
Ginny and Susan then recounted how our mother had done the same thing with our paper trails when my father retired and they were both sixtysomething. She too had made piles, putting stuff into boxes for each of the four of us. Report cards, art projects, letters. Susan described the boxes, orange crates from Florida that my father received each Christmas as some kind of business present. I instantly remembered the boxes. We’d used them to store my train set. Big and sturdy with a removable top. One or two holes on each side (to let the oranges breath?), green letters and orange images of, well, oranges. All four of us got a box from my mother--and I was sad to report that I was not sure where mine was. I told my sisters I was worried that many of my childhood mementos had been destroyed when a flood hit our home in 2011 after Hurricane Irene. (That’s something I confirmed when I went back through my Irene images from 2011. No sign of the orange box, but the flood hit our basement and garage, soaking anything we had on the floor, wiping out much of my childhood artwork and stamp collection.)
Damage from flooding after Hurricane Irene in 2011 that wiped out many of my childhood mementos.
Susan then talked about the letters she’d sent home when she went to Girl Scout Camp on Long Island. I thought remembered the name, Camp Blue Jay, but Ginny corrected me. It was Camp Blue Bay. (I have a thing for birds. See Quiz #42. Out of Stock.) Susan hated the camp and was horribly homesick. Each day, she’d send a letter home, describing some horrible, made-up accident that she hoped would convince my parents to come get her and take her home. A broken arm. Jelly fish bites. Trips to the hospital. Looking back, she realized that there was a time lag with the letters--they’d take days to get to the house so the cries for instant help would arrive too late. More important, she never realized that if she had broken her arm or been taken to the hospital, surely the camp would have called my parents.
Susan also revealed that at camp she created a nickname for herself, Sport. She said she always wanted people to think that she was athletic so when the camp asked the girls to fill out a questionnaire asking for their names and any nicknames, she added “Sport”--and even used that to sign off her letters back to my mother and father.
Ginny and Susan went to the same camp, but they were in different groups. Susan reported how seeing Ginny from a distance had broken her heart. Ginny reported that she hated going to camp but went for 3 years, never telling our parents. She never got a nickname, but they then revealed that Susan had also been dubbed “Little One” by my Uncle Ed, my father’s older brother. I’d never heard that one.
Susan then told us that she used “Sport” as part of some of her internet passwords. I reported that I have so many passwords and such a faulty memory that I have just leaned into it. Prompted to provide a password, I just punt and click “Forgot password.” The passwords always change and my online identities have two-step verification so I feel protected. When Sara asks me for passwords on any joint account, I can’t provide them--and this confounds her. (I have given her my iPhone password.)
Susan revealed how she used a mash-up of the names of where she’s lived for passwords plus the year she moved there. She recounted how she would intentionally change the number for the year she moved to a location to ward off hackers, using the wrong year in case anyone got hold of her records of where she had lived and when--and how her son Seth had howled when he’d heard this, explaining that he didn’t think hackers would be so curious or creative. I replied that this wasn’t so crazy. I’d done the same thing with some of my passwords, using a combination of my favorite sports teams and a year in their history--but not the right year--of their greatest accomplishments. Susan reported that it had gotten to the point where she could not remember the actual year for when she’d moved to different locations. Was it the mistaken number in the password--or not? Ginny also reported using numbers from addresses in her passwords. I told how Will had urged us to use complete sentences with a number and punctuation thrown in at the end. I told them how my new passwords used a complete sentence, some names and some numbers plus a variation of my favorite phrase, “You were right.”
We talked about old photos. They remembered the photo album that my parents had of their first apartment in Glen Oaks. A black album with black pages. Stickers at the corners for each image. Ginny revealed that she’d found a photo album showing Larry as a baby. Mildred had a white pen which she used to add captions, including dubbing baby Larry as “Boo-Boo McMousemeat.”
We talked about secrets growing up. We all went to Catholic grammar school and Susan did not want to go to Catholic high school so she had tanked the entrance exam. She explained that it was a multiple-choice test and she’d answered every question “A” so the teachers would know she had tanked it. I wanted to know--did our parents know? Susan didn’t know, but I argued they probably did. Ginny, who’d gone to that Catholic high school two years ahead of Sue, reported that she had always been told that Susan had not passed the entrance exam so always felt sorry for Sue. It was only decades later that Ginny found out that Susan had gotten what she wanted.
Susan talked about how a notice from that public school was sent to our house when she started cutting classes. My mother left the notice on the mantle and forced Susan to read it in front of my parents. Unphased, Susan told them there was another new girl at school whose name was “Susan Rhode”--and school officials were always getting them confused.
We talked about Susan getting mono in seventh grade--which I had forgotten about. She was so tired my father had to carry her up the stairs. On the second floor of our house, one bedroom, bathroom and closet were over the garage. In the winter, those rooms were always very cold--so cold, we called the closet “the cold closet.” The bathroom was unusable in the winter. We wondered--why had our parents never put in insulation over the unheated garage?
We talked about watching TV--and how I would take my evening bath during the commercials, filling the bathtub up in advance so I could get washed in time. My favorite show, they reminded me, was “Combat.”
I remembered--and hummed--the opening theme. Susan remembered they had a slow and somber version of that theme song whenever someone died--and someone always did. She hummed it and I remembered it. I had army men from Combat. 5 inches tall. Americans, Germans and Japanese. I’d forgotten, but Ginny said I would cut off the limbs from the German and Japanese soldiers, covering them in red ink or paint. I’d play with them in the stone retaining wall at the back of the house which we’d once flooded with water so the soldiers could be crossing a river. My father was not happy. That segued into a childhood friend of mine who was nicknamed “Kraut.” I explained that it was because his first name was Jerry. Really. (The ‘60s were a dark time.)
Magic and memories. They’ve been one of the blessings of this pandemic. Discovering things you’d forgotten. Things you’d never known. Sharing them and connecting. Laughter. Ginny recently recalled a line from Dr. Seuss, "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened." Reliving these memories keeps them alive. Keeps our parents alive. Keeps us alive. It’s why I love--and am fanatical--about preserving old photos. I want someone to find them in 50 years. I want some distant nephew or niece to look at them and wonder. Who were these people? What was their life like? How are they connected to me?
And all of that brings me back to Stewart, Groton and the mystery baby. Ginny never found the letter. It’s now out with the trash, on its way to a landfill and likely lost to the ages. And yet, there may still be hope.
Does this story somehow ring a bell with anyone who reads this? If your father's name is Stewart, you’re connected to Connecticut and you’re 21 years old, I'd like to hear from you.
What did NOT happen?
A. During the middle of the phone call, I told my sisters I was taking notes. At the end of the call, I told them that I might use some of the notes in a quiz;
B. Susan told me that everything she’d said in the phone call was on the record and I could write about it as I saw fit;
C. Ginny reported that being told by Susan that everything was on the record and all of it could be used was a producer’s dream;
D. Ginny reported that for herself, she wasn’t so sure. She wanted to see what I’d written for the quiz first before it got sent out. You can never be too careful;
E. Sara read this quiz and told me, despite the flood, the orange box from my mother is in the attic. She has a near photographic memory for things--and where they are located in our house.
Want the answer?
Answer #51. Is Your Father Named Stewart?
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Want more?
Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz #52. PTFO.
Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #50. 63.
Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020
Here is an archive of all the quizzes.
The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.
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