Bleed for Me

I was never what you'd call a 'sickly' child. I didn't have asthma like my older and handsomer brother Dave. Look at him, isn't he cute? But, no, I didn't have hemophilia or any sort of wasting disease like consumption which was really usually just tuberculosis.

Interestingly, my grandfather, Peter Kleylein, did die of tuberculosis, but as far as I know my brother never had consumption. Just asthma... and bad shirts.

So, although I wasn't sickly, I was thin. Of course, in those days, we never used such a politically correct word as 'thin'. In those days, I was 'skinny'. I was a skinny kid and I couldn't put weight on if you held a gun to my head. I could knock back a pint of chocolate ice cream or a whole huge bag of Hershey's Kisses (mmm, Hershey's kisses) at one sitting.

So, for the first two thirds of my life, I could eat as much as I wished - of ANYTHING. When I was working the midnight to eight shift as a Controls Analyst at Eastern Airlines in Miami I brought five sandwiches (homemade bread sandwiches!) with me. I had one at the first break, three for lunch and the last at the last break. Didn't gain an ounce.

The first time I noticed a change was in my mid-forties. I attended a week-long management seminar for SMS and sure enough, they had food out all the time. Doughnuts and bagels and candy and coffee and huge lunches and dinners (oh, my). At the end of the week, I noticed all my pants seemed to have shrunk around the waist.

OMG! It wasn't my pants! It was me! Boy, talk about a sobering moment. Fortunately, having tight pants annoys me, so I got it under control.

I had put weight on while I was in the Navy, but I was working out all the time and it didn't laser-zoom to my waist like this did. Now, I had to think about what I was eating, what a pain.

But this post started out talking about being sickly and other than colds and the flu, some shattered bones in my hand (thanks US Navy) and skin cancer (thanks Miami), I had been keeping myself together.

My brother had many bouts with kidney stones (boy, talk about an affliction!), but no such sickly stuff for me. Until now. Now, my nose has decided to bleed. What the hell?

Apparently, it's very common, as least that's what the doctor told me. I ran to the doc like a frightened puppy because I was sure I was dying of maybe nose cancer. But she pooh-poohed me and smacked me upside of my head (it would have been funny if my nose had started to bleed). "It's common", she said, "you're common." So, it just bleeds a little and then stops.

Usually.

Except for this one time when I was having dinner with my wife and I blew my nose into my handkerchief (remember handkerchiefs?) Handkerchiefs were supposedly invented by Marie Antoinette who was so upset about leaving Austria that she cried all the way to France. She tore pieces of lace off her outfit to wipe away the bitter, bitter tears. What a pisser being sent off to be Queen of France! She was never without a piece of lace after that and started a trend.

So, I blew my nose (it's winter, after all) into Marie's lace underwear and this gusher of bright, arterial blood came out and wouldn't stop for anything. Naturally, just as I was holding my (by now) bright red hankie jammed up my right nostril (it's only my right one that bleeds) the waitress (wait-person) walks up, looks at me sharply and asks 'if everything was all right'.

Over the sopping hankie, I look up at her blandly as if nothing was wrong at all and said, "Oh, yeah, everything's fine!" I was thinking how macho all this blood must make me look.

As she walked away, she was probably thinking, "Hmph, that cokehead must have burned his whole nose out."

In the Navy

When I was nineteen, I joined the Navy.

Yes, the United States Navy. You may recall that as I was growing up, I had always figured that if I was going to go into ANY service it would be the Air Force even though I couldn't fly because my eyes were not perfect. My, that was quite a run-on sentence, wasn't it? Sorry.

It wasn't until years later that I discovered the number of relatives that served in the Navy. It got a little weird. I had a cousin, two uncles and my step-grandfather all in the Navy and no one in any other service. No Marines, no Army, not even the Coast Guard. Oh, wait, my brother was in the Army Reserve, but apparently, he was in the Navy first.

That's quite a toy you've got there, buddy. Don't break it. And comb your hair.

My uncle Tanny was also in the Navy. They called him Tanny because my grandmother, in her infinite wisdom, named him Stanford. My father's youngest brother was named Nimrod, he went by Nim. He was named after his grandfather Nimrod Harrison, Jr. and his great grandfather Nimrod Harrison, Sr. Nimrod Sr.'s father Kinsey Harrison fought in the Revolutionary War. He was a Private in the Maryland Line for those of you familiar with Maryland history.

My father, Leon Kleylein and his brothers Stanford and Nimrod grew up in Maryland, for the most part in Baltimore. They did have to leave town for a while in 1917 and 1918 because their father, Peter had to abide by a rather peculiar law passed during World War I (actually, it was called the World War at that point).

If you had been born in Germany as my grandfather was, during the war you were not allowed to live within a hundred miles of Washington DC. Can you imagine them trying to pass such a law today? The court docket would be so clogged with lawsuits the commerce of the nation would grind to a halt. But not so in 1917. So Peter and the boys, Leon (the tall one) Stanford (the middle one) and Nimrod (the youngest one) packed up and moved to Pittsburgh.

I can't prove it yet, but I believe they made this decision because William J. Kleylein, son of John and Anna Kleylein was living there. William may not have been a close relative of Peter's, but they were both Kleyleins which meant their ancestors had all come from Unterrodach in Germany. The place was loaded with Kleyleins.

When the war ended, since Peter had not blown up the US Capitol Building, they were allowed to go back and live in Baltimore.

While he was in Pittsburgh, Peter still worked as a baker. He was always a baker. I wonder if he enjoyed his work. I can't ask him, he was dead for twenty years before I was born. I wonder what he was like. Did he have driving goals? Was he really intelligent, but never had access to education? Or was he small-minded and belligerent and did he pass those qualities on to me?


I'm glad he had enough sense to get some good professional photographs taken of his boys. I know he had blue eyes from the photographs I have of him and I know he could smile because he has a broad smile making his bread deliveries.


I know this has taken us a long way from the Navy, but we'll get back to all that in due time.

The Sound of a Train in the Distance

Last night, before I went to bed, I heard the sound of a train whistle in the distance. That's not so common nowadays and I know the only active train tracks in the area are miles away, so the sound had carried a long way.

In a fairly direct way, I owe my very existence to trains. My grandfather Peter Kleylein (below) emigrated from Unterrodach in Bavaria and as a young man found himself in Baltimore as a baker. He wasn't a baker when he left Germany, his occupation was listed as 'joiner' which could be anything from a carpenter to a sawmill worker. It would make sense that he would work with wood, since the major occupation in Unterrodach was lumberjacking and floating the trees to sawmills. There's a museum there dedicated to the history of Floessers. The German word (floater) has a kind of frontier mystique about it, like the American cowboy. The occupation 'joiner' may have been selected by the immigration people since there is no American translation for 'floater'.

These guys cut the trees down, dragged them down the mountains, lashed them together and rode the rafts thus created miles down the river to the sawmills and then made their way back home. Some of these rafts were big enough to have cabins on them where the men lived while they floated downstream. Of course there was a river in Unterrodach, the Rodach River (see Number 10 on the map below) that fed the river Main.
But my grandfather decided not to pursue this life and instead joined his brother Johann in Baltimore. However, when Peter arrived, there wasn't too much of a lumberjack operation going on in downtown Baltimore. Peter arrived alone in 1889 to join Johann and without lumberjacking available, he became a baker. He was sixteen.

In all the research I've done on Peter, his occupation never changed. His first documented job in the United States was baker and that's what he was doing when he died of tuberculosis in 1925.

By then he had gone through a lot of hard events in his life which will be fuel for other entries in this communication mechanism. But what has all this baker business got to do with railroad trains and my existence? You see, I try to make these things a big circle and answer the questions that have popped up in the beginning.

The circle has to do with the Baltimore Ravens stadium and why they named Mount Airy, Maryland 'Mount Airy' in the first place.

Back before the Interstate highway system (or highways. . . or even automobiles) the transportation system of choice was railroads. The B&O Railroad (Baltimore and Ohio) had a huge hub right in the middle of Baltimore. The stadium complex there in downtown Baltimore is built on the site of that huge B&O railroad station hub. Interestingly, that was the first railroad station built in the United States. This was 1828.

If you follow the rails west after Ellicott City from Baltimore on the map above, a couple of stops later is Mount Airy named for the cold, clean air carried over it's rather modest summit. It was clean enough to create a better atmosphere for those suffering from the crowding and bad air quality of cities like, say. . . Baltimore. So the Garrett Sanitarium was built in Mount Airy to treat people suffering from such lung diseases as tuberculosis.

So the youngest of eight of Johann Andreas Kleylein and Katherina Shaller took the B&O steam train west to Mount Airy and there met my grandmother Hallie Harrison, the youngest of twelve of Nimrod Harrison Jr. and Sarah Watkins.

The Harrisons and Watkins' had been in Maryland and Virginia since the dawn of time. John Watkins sailed with John Smith for heavens sake. And the Harrisons are part of the Virginia Harrisons that produced two presidents.

The story of how exactly it happened that these two met and became interested in one another is unfortunately not available to me. Yet. Perhaps it can be discovered at some point how a tubercular German immigrant baker who presumably spoke with a heavy foreign accent met and charmed a girl thirteen years younger than him whose family had already been in America for 300 years. I'm sure Nimrod and Sarah were thrilled with the prospect. He was twenty-nine when they married and she was sixteen.

The sound of a train in the distance has always been wistful and romantic. It carries with it the prospect of traveling to new places and meeting new people and having new adventures. As it happens in this case, all of those things were true.

Part of that adventure was the three boys this couple had, the oldest of which was my father Leon (below). What was it like for Peter and Hallie when they were first married and lived in Baltimore? Remember, these were the youngest of both families. I know for quite a while they lived on Barre Street in Baltimore just a few blocks east of the B&O Terminal so it was an easy commute for the sixteen year old Hallie to get back to Mount Airy. Barre Street is still there in a fairly well preserved state because it was trapped between the terminal and the waterfront which was a couple of blocks to the east. Now the terminal is the stadium complex and the waterfront is Inner Harbor. The noise and smoke and dirt from the rail complex is gone, but the results of it's existence are still with us.
I know, because I'm part of it.