Grandma Marguerite

By the time my father, David Frank Wolter, was born in late August of 1923, his mother Marguerite was certainly aware that her life would not be an easy one. Raised in a distinctly feminine household with a younger sister, a dominant if not domineering mother, and a self-effacing father, her adult life would see her surrounded by males. In 1917 she married Anton Ernst “Tony” Wolter, a Gold Bar, Washington grocery store proprietor eight years her senior, and was destined to become the young mother of three active sons. Gene, born in 1918, was followed predictably by Claire in 1921, followed inevitably by David in ’23. My grandfather Tony had been raised in a German Baptist colony in North Dakota and grew fluent in English only after managing to escape what he termed the “hardships” that constituted farming life in such a stark and unforgiving environment. To his dying day he spoke with a hint of a German accent and stayed as far away from manual labor and cold climates as he could reasonably justify. Under Father’s Occupation on David’s birth certificate stands the vaguely pretentious notation Inventor, and indeed, at the time of his youngest son’s birth, Tony might have almost substantiated that grandiose claim. In his spare time, when he wasn’t at work in the Everett, Washington shipyards, he had invented and patented an oil cap that he sold to the Ford Motor Company for ten thousand dollars, an impressive amount of money in those days. This event prompted him to uproot his young family and relocate to what was then the west coast’s epicenter of all things innovative: Southern California.

Children require very little to survive and even thrive, which is a good thing, for natural tendencies and socio-economic circumstances converged to insure that Tony would never manage to make much of himself or realize the promise hinted at by this early financial windfall. To label him a ne’er-do-well would be, at once, unkind and accurate.
Thus it was that my grandmother Marguerite found herself, through no conscious choice or empowered desire of her own, thrust into the position of primary breadwinner for the family. She’d inherited a talent for needlework from her mother Pearl who had surely practiced and perfected various decorative cross stitches as she and her family laboriously made their way west from Springfield, Missouri in a covered wagon. Pearl’s father, Jonas Heltzel, a rather austere-looking man with an imposing beard that hid from the photographer’s lens any semblance of warmth or humor, had spent much of his active duty with the Indiana Cavalry interned in Andersonville, the infamous Civil War prison, which he claimed to have survived thanks to the advantageous size of his German farmer’s hands. As he told his youngest grandson David many years later, he’d receive a ration of cornmeal in one hand and sugar in another, and because of their relatively large size, he made it. Ironically, David would inherit his great-grandfather Jonas’ hand size, which would ultimately prove more of a hindrance than a help as he sought to find surgical gloves to fit over his stout fingers.

I remember hearing much made of my Grandma Marguerite’s prowess as a seamstress. She later metamorphosed into a successful professional tailor with her own rather swank shop, employing a busy bank of seamstresses on Seattle’s upscale Fifth Avenue. It was even rumored that she was one of the first women admitted to the American Tailor’s Union, and she boasted a discrete list of celebrities among her loyal clients. Names like Anne Southern and Frances Farmer were hinted at, but impossible to confirm. As a child I would sometimes visit her shop as my family passed through Seattle in route to or from one of our many military assignments. I have recollections of overstuffed mohair couches in which clients would luxuriate as they waited to be measured or fitted, often served coffee by Bill Graef - the second of Marguerite’s ne’er-do-well husbands. A consummate business woman by necessity if not by nature, my grandmother would deftly run a yellow cloth tape measure down the back and around the middle of a client, as I watched and marveled at her almost magical ability to envision sartorial masterpieces.

But she didn’t start out this way. Rather Marguerite paid her dues, along with her family’s bills, as an apprentice to two Jewish tailors in the Los Angeles area – one Mr. Klein and then Florenz, the proprietor of a pleating and button business. Throughout the Depression years, these men kept her steadily employed and effectively taught her everything she knew.

As I think back on her now, I find myself regretting that I didn’t make more of an effort to get to know my Grandma Marguerite better. Nothing about her encouraged much inquisitiveness on my part, which I now recognize as much more my failing than hers. In my immediate world, populated by “Type A” people, Marguerite was most definitely a “Type C,” if there is such a thing. When I’d visit her periodically as a child, she came across as calm and unflappable, almost to the point of disinterested. Slowly inhaling one of her long Salems, she’d look at me with one eye partially closed in response to the smoke column that lazily rose from her cigarette’s tip, a vague, almost enigmatic smile on her lips that caused me to wonder if she was actually listening to my exuberant chatter. The most animated I ever saw her was in response to a spur-of-the-moment prank I played on her – pretending she’d slammed my fingers in the car door when she shut it. Once she was convinced that no physical harm was done, however, she quickly resumed her emotional inertia, leaving it to my mortified mother to roundly reprimand me for perpetrating such a wicked ruse.

In 1970 my father retired from his military career and went into private practice on Mercer Island, Washington, which finally afforded me a greater opportunity to get to know my grandmother better. Still I didn’t move in that direction until a dream suggested that Grandma Marguerite might have something to offer me. I had a favorite pair of dress slacks that fit perfectly and made me feel particularly good whenever I wore them. One night I dreamt that I had a pair of these pants in every imaginable color. Upon waking, it occurred to me that my grandmother, now a retired tailor and a widow to boot, had both the time and the talent to help me realize that dream. Rather than blatantly request that she offer me her services, I slyly suggested that I’d really like to learn to sew…slacks, in fact! Her phlegmatic response was neither encouraging nor discouraging. “Bring your pants over and we’ll see what we can do.”

Thus began a series of weekly trips to West Seattle where Marguerite did, indeed, oversee my initial forays into the garment industry. Much as I had as a child, I marveled at her ability to look at a piece of clothing and then recreate it without a pattern or even much measuring. She taught me to make a “sham” – the first time I’d heard this word mean anything other than fraud or charlatan – basically a muslin “mock up” of the item to be created, which would then be fitted, formed and refashioned if need be, later to serve as the prototype for my slacks. I drove her to the local fabric store where she helped me select suitable material for my array of trousers – black, maroon, beige and brown to complement the original navy blue pair. Once back at her place, she explained how it was always more efficient to make two of anything, a logic which fit my purposes perfectly. She then proceeded to make one pair of pants while I made the other, patiently instructing me at every step. She allowed me to learn on her ancient-looking, industrial Singer sewing machine, a relic from her Fifth Avenue shop. I was in awe of its ability to unhurriedly sew at a relaxed pace that allowed me to anticipate each hesitant stitch into being and soon enough, my confidence grew along with my wardrobe. As I think back on it now, I realize that Grandma Marguerite was a talented teacher, inherently knowing that the only true way to teach something is to create an environment in which the learner can experiment and experience without undue repercussions. She also introduced me to a handy little tool that readily removed errant stitches and imagined with me how many wayward threads she had cut in her seventy years of sewing.

Each sewing session ended with lunch at her kitchen table, a lunch that I more often than not had to choke down, my stomach turned by the ubiquitous black dog hairs that made their way into everything she prepared. Her beloved black Cocker Spaniel – Beauregard, “Beau” for short, was hands down the most unruly, obnoxious dog I’d ever known. My father was convinced that he was brain-damaged and only found it mildly amusing when I referred to the pedigreed pooch as “Uncle Beau” – so complete was Grandma Marguerite’s love and approbation for her pampered pet. Once when she rose to retrieve something from the counter, Beau took it as his cue to leap up on her chair and slobber all over her lunch before I could chastise him. “Oh that’s alright...” she opined, and then proceeded to tell me that a dog’s mouth is actually far cleaner than a human’s. Yuck.

Marguerite’s lifelong love for animals served as a segue into one of the very few stories she did share about my father’s childhood. She described a favorite incident that never failed to amuse her in the several times she told it to me as her memory began to falter. One day little David decided to give the family’s white angora cat a bath. Forcing it into a soapy sink, he was horrified to see its size shrink under the influence of the suds. In an effort to quickly dry the poor animal and return it to its original condition, David held it over the gas heater, a procedure that seemed to work fine until, in what seemed but a moment, the cat went from damp, to dry, to scorched. Responding to the commotion, mother Marguerite found a whimpering David sprawled on the kitchen floor, still gripping a most disgruntled, brown-singed cat. Seeking to soothe her stricken son, Marguerite consoled, “It’s OK David, her fur will grow back…” Tearfully David stuttered, “W…w…will it grow back before Daddy gets home?”

Sad to say, those few sewing sessions were the only occasions that afforded me any one-on-one, quality time with my grandmother Marguerite. I was a self-absorbed, college-bound teenager, and she was a quietly independent woman who had never seemed to request or require my attention, so I allowed our budding connection to whither without even realizing it. I also never sewed another stitch, thus missing out on both accounts. By the time I slowed down enough to even remember that I had a paternal grandmother, she had already lost her mental faculties, so much so that on one visit to her rest home with Dad, she introduced me to her son, the doctor.

My seventh grade math teacher, Mr. Stokes, suggested something that comes to me now as I reflect on Grandma Marguerite. On one of the many occasions when we predictably got him off-track, he mused about the great loss our country was incurring through the countless casualties in the then raging Vietnam War. He likened each soldier’s skills, knowledge and ability to a card catalog of experiences that necessarily died with the individual. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could will your life’s card catalog to someone so that it could continue on after you?” Marguerite’s card catalogue would have extended far beyond couture. It would have included tutorials on quiet patience and long-suffering perseverance. It might have revealed her recipe for raising rambunctious boys into responsible young men who picked up the slack created by her dreamer of a husband’s inability to test reality. Perhaps it would have explained her live and let live approach to everyone and everything that crossed her path in her eighty-nine years, an approach that was often read, and perhaps even misread, as nonplussed, I fear. It surely would have revealed riches that only she was privy to and I can only guess at so many years later now.