Observation

In my last post, I droned on for a while about how much genealogical data can be gleaned (I love that word) from photographs. And while I was thinking about that, certain photos popped into my head, so I thought I'd better document them before they pop right back out again. That happens with astonishing regularity lately. Something (an image, an invention, a lucrative business venture, my first telephone number, etc.) is right there fully formed and then POOF, it's outta there. Perhaps my synapses are all rusted and clogged up, I understand gin is like WD-40 for your brain. I'm experimenting with that now, so I'll report back when I have viable data.

Wrestling myself back on topic, there's a photo down below of my father, Leon Kleylein and his younger brother Stanford Kleylein who I knew as Uncle Tanny. They're standing on the marble steps of a Baltimore rowhouse in 1909. In those days, the condition of your marble steps was a direct indicator of the quality and status of your household. Whole families would be out front every morning scrubbing them down with a scrub brush until they gleamed in the sun.

The first question I have about this photo is, 'What the hell are they wearing?' Your question was probably about the haircuts, but we'll get to that in a minute. Whatever these things are I don't recognize them. They appear to be one-sies made out of either linen or sackcloth with a built-in belt that has one button. ??? I wonder if this was a popular fashion of the day. Is this what Dagwood Bumstead wore when he was a child?

How do you get into the thing, is the whole back open like a hospital gown? If you double click on the image, it will resolve larger for you and you can see Uncle Tanny's kerfloggit seems to be coming apart in the back. That would have been dangerous in Baltimore even a hundred years ago.

And why are my father's sleeves so short? Did he have to wear it for five years? Was it made of canvas, then? If you look carefully, it appears the bottom part of my father's kerfloggit is wet! Was he stamping barefoot in the open sewers of Baltimore? Or perhaps he just finished scrubbing those marble steps. There are no shoes in sight, so I'm hoping is was summer, but you never know.

Perhaps he wasn't wearing shoes because of what they did to his feet. Man, those toes look like they hurt. A lot. But you can see he was applying a lot of pressure on Uncle Tanny to keep him from floating away. Shoes would have anchored him down a little.

The other interesting tidbit was that my father was wearing a gold (?) ring on the middle finger of his left hand. What's up with that? Is he engaged already?

Which brings us to the hair. It looks a bit like something Moe Howard wore but with a cut out in the front. Ahh, this was my clue. During this era, there was a popular cartoon character named Buster Brown, shown here with his dog Tiege, who went on to shill kids shoes (and apparently cigars).

Buster became so popular, parents began dressing their children like him and having their hair cut similarly. So, my guess is that that this kerfloggit is a cheap Buster Brown knockoff and the haircut is an at-home, soup-bowl BB cut.

That still doesn't explain who he's engaged to, however. I wonder if my Mom ever knew.

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.

Old Navy

I must have met my Uncle Tanny as a boy, but I have no memory of him.

Stanford Wheeler Kleylein (that's my Uncle Tanny) lived most of his life in Indiana. He had met and married Harriet Copple and Harriet and her family were from Indiana and you know how that goes.

Here's a photograph of him from November of 1942. I can see from close examination of his rank and rating (the insignia on his sleeve) that he is a Machinist's Mate First Class. That means he could have worked on anything to do with ship propulsion or any other kind of shipboard engines that need looking after by a mechanic.

Here's what the Machinist's Mate rating designation looks like. I guess he could have worked on propellers too. A naval rating is like an occupation, you can glance at anyone's sleeve and instantly tell what their job is and what their rank is. There's no guessing in the Navy.

I don't know why he joined the Navy. It may be because his step-father, Avner Hoffacker Wareheim had been in the Navy. That's probably a pretty good guess. Avner's daughter, Violet also married a Navy man, Raymond Alt. But blind and dumb as I was when I was a kid, all this was lost on me. I was actually surprised to learn all the Navy connections later when I got into the whole genealogy thing.

Here's Avner holding my brother Dave. Look how stiff my brother looks. I think there's something wrong with him (Dave I mean) and Avner's probably trying to wake him up or something. Maybe he's in a coma, although I don't know how anyone could ever tell.

Avner was also a Machinist's Mate, but he was a Chief which is a higher rank than Uncle Tanny. In civilian life, Avner was a plasterer, I guess they didn't have too much call for plasterers on board ship. Or maybe he just wanted to do something different.

When my brother outgrew his little Navy suit, it got passed to me. Boy, there was a long history of that. Here's a photograph of me in the suit with my brother Dave and our cousin Audrey. Isn't she cute?

I guess wearing that suit as a little kid is another example of that foreshadowing thing.

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.