Nature, Nurture, Whatever

Nature or nurture, genetics or care - which is it?

My hobby is genealogy and as a result, I know something about my ancestors. Most lines, excluding the presidents and governors and such were just good solid farming stock. They worked hard, they had no Social Security and they lived a gooood long time. Many lived into their upper nineties. Shown here is Nimrod Harrison, Jr. and his wife Sarah C. Watkins Harrison, my great grandfather and great grandmother. In this photo in 1910, he was 71 and she was 65. He lived on for another ten years and she for twenty. And they were the slackers of the family fading away so young.

Here's their whole family in that shot, my grandfather is here, Peter Kleylein, my grandmother Hallie Harrison Kleylein, my father Leon Kleylein and my uncles Stanford Wheeler Kleylein and Nimrod Harrison Kleylein. Families got big in those days.


On my mother's side, outside of one German line, all of her folks came from Posen, Poland. Here's my grandfather Roman Damos Pawlak and grandmother Wanda Marie Pokornoski Pawlak in 1963 when he was 82 and she was 76. They still worked their dairy farm right up until the end. The man standing behind them is my uncle Edwin Pawlak, I've written about him in this blog before. My point in all this is to discuss how long I'm going to be writing this thing. I'm sure you'll be sick and tired of it if you aren't already.

My company had a kind of 'health day' at work last week. They bring in some healthcare workers to do some simple tests to warn you if you're dying, I guess. And once more I was reminded that I'd better save my money or I'll end up eating catfood because I've outlasted the cash. And, yes, my daughter has kindly told me that she won't allow me to get into the state of eating catfood but I still have this nagging doubt. It nags at me. I got it from my mother, I think.

My mother grew up during the Depression, you know, the other really bad one. And her family was poor enough already, I bet the Depression didn't help any. I can clearly remember her swiping sugar packets if we were ever in a place that had them. I guess folks had to do that if they were going to survive. But my lines DID survive, lousy healthcare, no healthcare, whatever - they had the ability to survive. And part of that, at least, can be attributed to good genes. Good strong, Depression-era-fighting genes.

So, I went to the 'health day' thing with a pretty good notion that things would turn out OK. Part of that good feeling can be attributed to the three or four full-scale, all-day physicals I've had at John Hopkins in Baltimore. In my business, you come to know which hospitals can be really trusted to give you the straight skinny. And when the Chief of Medicine at Johns Hopkins tells you you're good, then head right out and have a big greasy cheeseburger. If you're going to have a physician tell you something about your life, then have an A-student physician from a top-rated hospital do it. You know?

So once again, my blood sugar was fine, pulse 58, BP 120/82. The Nurse asked me if I had any stress in my job. OOOh NOoooo. Apparently if I didn't have the stress, I'd die of low blood pressure. The real killer, of course, is cholesterol. Mine continued it's decline and is now 148.

But that doesn't tell the whole story because my HDL, the 'good' cholesterol, is very high, out of the normal range leaving me with very low LDL (the 'bad' cholesterol). So the Nurse checked my carotid arteries to discover if they were open or not (they were), gave me a box of Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts and sent me on my way to the next spot.

At the next station, they were able to analyze the condition and age of my circulatory system. No, Bones McCoy didn't wave a whirling knob around me but that must be next because this was also non-invasive. So now I know (supposedly) that I have the circulatory system of a man twenty years younger than me. I'm not sure how he's able to get along without it, but nobody grabbed me and told me I had to give it back, so I just kept moving.

They told me my skin is bad. I know my skin is bad. I spent too much time in the sun in Miami and I'm sorry. Every time I see someone at work come in after too much sun exposure, I just want to slap some sense into them. You can't take the damage back. There it is to stare you in the face forever.

And yeah, I go to the gym, but not enough - the job interferes a bit. But gym or no gym, as long as my wife doesn't kill me, I've got a pretty good chance of living forever. Just gotta make the cash last.

Everybody Has a Mother

Today is my mother's 100th. birthday.

She's not still with us, however, she died quite a while ago. She died of complications from a perforated ulcer. Now, of course, we know that ulcers are caused by a virus and not the stress caused by raising two recalcitrant children. But we didn't know that then, so my brother and I figured that we had driven her to an early grave, or at least I did. If not for the stupid ulcer, she might still be alive. Sixty-six years old isn't very old for our family, everybody lives into their nineties. Except my father who died at eighty-nine after smoking and drinking his whole life. Sixty-six, boy, that's only a few years older than I am now! That's a sobering thought, huh?

That's Mom on the right with her younger brother Richard who has on almost as nice a dress as she does. She was born Sophia Eleanor Pawlak on May 1, 1909 on a farm in Silver Lake, Minnesota. These folks weren't well-to-do genteel farmer types, they were Polish farmers in a Polish community. And that community had most of their roots from a couple of small towns in Posen, Poland and they all grouped together and continued their lives in the United States.

So, she grew up working and that's what she did her whole life.

In this photograph, that's Mom on the right with her mother Wanda (Pokornoski) Pawlak, her brother Richard and her sister Delphine. Her youngest brother Edwin hadn't been born yet.


She did jobs like pick strawberries for extra money, but mostly, and for the rest of her life, she was a maid. I look at the photographs of her when she was a child and she's never smiling. In this shot of her at her confirmation, she's very serious with those eastern European eyes looking at us. What was she thinking? Was she making plans? Was she glad to be alive? Or was she already feeling old?

I can't ask her, because I never had the sense to when she was alive.

<sigh>

So, as soon as she was old enough, she got a job as a maid for a well-to-do family in Saint Paul, the von Neida family. At one point, all three older Pawlak children Sophia, Richard and Delphine all worked for the von Neida family. The family began wintering in Miami and that's where my mother met my father and you know how that turned out. Isn't it something how a seemingly small decision becomes a pivot point and everything that happens after that was dependant upon that one turn?

Here's Mom at twenty-one, she's very fashionable with that hair, huh? Remember, in 1930, they were very much in the Depression, I'm REALLY glad she knew enough to get some photographs taken.

But she also knew there wasn't going to be any college for Sophie. There wasn't going to be any 401(k) money to lose, there wasn't going to be any money, no trips to Tahiti, no ball gowns stuffed into the waiting limo. Actually, she never even learned to drive. No car, no reason to drive. Simple reasoning, huh?

But she came into her own, that's for certain! Perhaps I'll write about that tomorrow, you can't stuff a whole life into one post.

So, I'll leave you with a photograph of the four Pawlak childen in 1934. From the left is Edwin, the youngest, Delphine, Sophia and Richard. It might bore you almost to tears to learn that I was named after my Uncle Richard. They were going to name me either Richard or Kenneth. And that was one of those pivot points I spoke about, because Kenneth would never have lost his hair!

What the Hell

Marilyn Monroe is famously quoted as saying, "Ever notice that 'what the hell' is always the right decision?"

I'd like to add that you often reach that decision state when you're tired. Frankly, a lot of the major directional decisions I've made in my life were made when I was tired. I'm tired right now, but I've got this thought in me and it has to come out.

When I interviewed with the company that I still work for, SMS, (now Siemens), I came right off an all-nighter at the computer lab and right into the interview. I knew instantly that this was the company I wanted to work for and canceled all my other interviews as I walked out. Now that I think of it, I guess it's a good thing they hired me. The interview was in January, they hired me and I didn't start until I graduated in August. It did take the pressure off the last couple of semesters. What's more, this is what I looked like when I interviewed and they hired me anyway!

I also made the decision to join the Navy when I was tired. I was going to school full time and working full time so when my friend Bob Deeter suddenly suggested we should just join the Navy, I followed Marilyn Monroe's sage advice (as I always try to do) and said, 'What the hell' and we joined up.

We took the summer off before heading off to camp, I wrote about that in a previous blog entry. I also had the opportunity to drive my mother up to Minnesota to see her family. We went in my mauve Rambler American, the first new car I ever owned. Hey, don't laugh, it was a good car, I gave it to my father when I went in the Navy and he drove it practically the rest of his life. One of the high points of that trip was loading Mom, Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle Edwin in the car and having some clown run a stop sign and hit the car hard enough to spin it all around. Ha ha, what fun. No one was hurt and damage to the car was barely noticeable. Boy, they don't make cars like that anymore.

On the way back to Miami, we visited my cousin Audrey and her husband-to-be Andrew Houlihan. They were living in New Orleans and I distinctly remember deciding that as long as we were in the neighborhood, we would have to swing by and see them. Yeah, it's hard to reconcile how Minnesota and New Orleans were in the same 'neighborhood'. But I'm so glad we did because I got to meet Andrew and I thought immediately that he was so cool and had this dynamite southern accent. My instincts were right because even now, after all these years, he's still cool.

But the summer ended, I went to the beach a few last times to finish working on my tan preparing for the skin cancer that would come later. When we were visiting my Aunt Del and Uncle Mel (that's Uncle Mel to the right) up north with my mother, I happened to cross my legs and the skin on my leg showed. Well, Uncle Mel's eyes bugged out like you see sometimes in old cartoons. He asked, "Are you that dark all over??" He was stunned. This was a man born and raised in Minnesota in the heart of white-leg country. I think it had a profound impact on his whole belief system.

By now, my brother Dave had already moved to the Buffalo, New York area and was preparing for his marriage to the lovely Miss Donna Krueger. So as I prepared to leave to go off to boot camp, it never occurred to me that I was leaving my parents with an empty nest. And while it's true that they were never what you might call 'demonstrative' it may have at least been nice if I had awakened long enough to recognize what was going on around me and acknowledge it somehow. 'It never occurred to me' - a phrase I often use even to this day. But I was excited because I was taking my first jet aircraft trip. Bob and I were off to Chicago and on to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center where I would be introduced to 'culture shock' before they had even invented the word.

Secret Origins

The reference to Secret Origins has a secret origin of it's own. Back in the '60's, there was a comic book dedicated to telling the background stories of super heroes. It explained arcane things like why Green Lantern had a green lantern and what was he doing with that huge ring and other critical stuff. Where is Green Lantern today, when we really need him?

So, what's the secret origin of this blog? Why did I feel compelled to communicate in this manner? I'm willing to bet that your chances of guessing are very low. I started this blog record because of my Uncle Edwin.

Uncle Edwin comes to my mind frequently of late, it may be because I see his photographs as I do my genealogy work.

Edwin Anton Pawlak b.1916 d.1992.

And when people read my family file, that's pretty much all they'll see. Because Uncle Edwin had cerebral palsy and that limited him a bit.

He was born the youngest of four to a resource-poor farming family in central Minnesota and the special needs funding in Silver Lake was. . . limited. It probably didn't help to have the depression fall right when he was 13 either. Circumstances did not provide an easy road for him. The disease affected his speech and motor skills and facial expressions. Schooling was very limited, college was never an option, he was a farmer all his life. He never drove a car, he never rode a bicycle. He never walked a young girl home after a movie. He never won a ribbon in a track meet. He was never in the army or the navy. He never went out drinking with his buddies and he never raised havoc. He lived with his mom and dad on the farm until they died and he milked cows and he cut hay. So that means he never got called into the President's office to be told about his raise and critical new position. But he never got fired from anything, ever.

So, I started this blog to write down where anyone could read it that Uncle Edwin had lived. I don't want him to be forgotten. My kids never met him, so already it's all secondhand information. Photographs. Stories. Well, he was a very smart man trapped in a body he did nothing to deserve and whatever he had, he earned it personally. By the way, that body he was trapped in was immensely strong. You should have seen the way he could throw those cows around. OK, not exactly.

So, be aware, I had an uncle and his name was Edwin. And he was a sweet man brutalized by a condition I can't IMAGINE confronting. My Uncle Edwin was a real man.

Edwin Anton Pawlak b.1916 d.1992