Oma and Daddy

My grandparents, who I knew as Oma and Daddy, raised me. Oma is German for grandma, and I called my grandfather “Daddy” because when I started to talk it is what I shortened Grandaddy to, and it stuck. Even as an adult I called him Daddy, because it was never meant to be “Dad.” That would’ve been weird, as if Daddy weren’t weird enough. Given the very, very small town I was raised in, and the amount of gossip that was spread on our party line, I would imagine there were times our family was the main subject.

Daddy was the Fire Chief at Bethlehem Steel until I was about five. Always ambitious, he did painting and wall-papering on the side, and more after he retired from the steel plant. Later he would say he was an “interior decorator.” Here was this 5'2" bald man, with bow legs and a nose the size of Jimmy Durante’s, big strong hands rough from working “down in the cellar” or “out in the garden,” fingers crooked with arthritis—not the typical image of an interior decorator. But he was very proud of all he did.

One day, as an adult, I was driving home from the city on Seneca Street. There was a terrible accident, a fatality. Seneca Street was backed up for miles. In front of me was a big, black Mercedes, not a car regularly seen in Elma, New York. The license plate frame said, “Buffalo Sabres.” We sat in our cars for awhile, then bored, both the driver of the Mercedes and I got out and started a conversation. Turns out it was Seymour Knox. The Knox family owned the Buffalo Sabres, Marine Midland Bank and had been in partnership in a five-and-dime called Woolworths. (Seymour H. Knox was Woolworth's first cousin). They were the wealthiest, and most talked about family in East Aurora since Elbert Hubbard.

I told Mr. Knox who I was and he recognized my name. When he was a boy, my grandfather would be at the Knox estate almost year-round, painting or wall-papering one of the houses. Mr. Knox said he remembered three things in particular about my grandfather. One, his perfectly bald, shiny head. Two, that his aunt would give my grandfather pieces of broken china, or a petal of a flower, or a tiny snip of fabric, and ask him to match the color. He believed his aunt probably saw it as a game and enjoyed the challenge of seeing how close Frank Slade always got matching paint to the precise color she was looking for. By the time he finished one room she had a new color sample ready for him to repaint the room he had finished six months prior. The last was that my grandfather always shared his lunch with him. And he had given young Seymour his very first taste of an orange. Ironic.

Mr. Knox asked me to remember him to my grandfather. When I finally made it home, Daddy and I sat at the dining room table for hours while he reminisced about the Knoxes and the crazy things he saw take place on their estate.

My grandmother, born Irma Louise Marks, was a pillar of Elma society. Her mother was Alice Irene Allen—and the Allen family was one of the town’s founding families. Henry Allen, an author of several books, traced the family back to the mid-1500s in England. I have a 200-page document outlining the Allen family history through to my generation.

Daddy’s family, the Schiefersteins, came to Elma in 1848 from Hesse-Darmstadt. Sometime between 1900 and 1910, the family name changed from Schieferstein, meaning "slatestone," to Slade. I've been told it had something to do with the name being too long for the railroad payroll registers. The Shiefersteins ran a saw mill along Buffalo Creek, were the proprietors of the general store and worked for the railroad. (I wonder where both Daddy and I got our ambition.) They also founded and built St. John’s Lutheran Church on Woodard Road. The Shieferstein monument remains the tallest and grandest in the cemetary. Many of the stained glass windows that run along the side of the traditional white church, complete with a tall, white steeple, have the names of my ancestors in a pane near the bottom.

Daddy's mother, Minnie, nee Bommer, was the daughter of Adam and Christine Bommer. Adam and Christine came to America on the ship Adler from the port Bremen in 1862. According to the manifest, they were not married, yet their first son, John, was born in 1862 as well. (That's pretty interesting...) They were also from Hesse-Darmstadt, and as of 1870 were settled in Elma, but I have yet to find a connection between the Schiefersteins and Bommers prior to 1888 when Minnie married Frank Slade (my great-grandfather).

Oma and Daddy went to school together, first in a one-room schoolhouse in Elma and then they took the train to East Aurora for high school. I have a composition book of my grandmother’s. She asked her friends and family a series of questions and one of the entries was from my grandfather, Frankie Slade. My guess is they were eleven or twelve at the time, and already smitten with each other. In 1925, my grandfather was twenty, my grandmother eighteen; she went to watch him play baseball; he was pitching and took a direct hit in the stomach by a ball at close range. He had to have his spleen removed. Oma said the doctor didn’t think Daddy was going to live and so, “just threw him back together.” They were married the next day. Everyone said she was crazy since she would be a widow by the end of the week. They were married almost sixty years when she died of cancer. He went on to live another eleven. In fact, he outlived most of my grandmother’s sisters’ husbands. I think Oma always got a kick out of that.