The grandparents I never met

My dad's mother and father died in 1948 and 1949, when he was a teenager. Who were they?

I still think about the grandparents I have never met.

Their names were Elmer Walter Ohman, who everyone called “Al”. His wife was Mabel Therese Anderson. They were both born in the 1890s.

Al was a trim little dude, five six or so, and very natty and handsome, with a permanent ironic expression. The yellowed photographs aren’t very revelatory, really, except fedoras at the beach. Mabel was said to be very jolly and funny, anyone’s favorite neighbor, and, typically for that era, a housewife.

Having ghosts for grandparents struck me as highly unusual as a child, like getting an IOU for a new red bike for Christmas. Like Jacob Marley, they were dead to begin with, and my father still seemed reluctant to discuss them. I could tell that their very early deaths (congestive heart failure, leukemia) affected Dad on every level for the rest of his life.

Jean, Al’s daughter, once said to me, “Dad just sat and smoked”.

“You don’t know how damned bad it is until way later,” he said to me once, commenting on the orphaning of my friend’s son.

In their final years, they lived in Detroit, Marquette, and St. Paul.

In Detroit, Al worked as a steel buyer for Packard Motors, mostly during World War II. He had a great job, considering they were living through the Great Depression. My dad told me that his mother would put out pies on their window sill for unemployed people to eat. I was told that Al made $5,000 per year, which was a very solid figure for the 1930s. They lived in a nice home, not knockout but nice, off Six Mile Road and Gratiot.

I went there three times: when I was a five year old, then about 22, then at 50.

I have zero recollection of seeing the house on 1641 Glenfield at five, but I do remember going to the Detroit Zoo on the same trip, an aquamarine Tonka truck I got, and the huge lollipop—but no memory of that house that I can access.

When I worked at the Detroit Free Press, I bought a six bedroom townhouse in the City of Grosse Pointe, a few blocks from Grosse Pointe High School, immortalized in the movie “Grosse Pointe Blank”, starring John Cusack. I used to play tennis there.

Grosse Pointe was definitely not Six Mile and Gratiot.

Still, by my dad’s description, 1641 Glenfield was in a pleasant neighborhood, he felt safe, joined the Boy Scouts (he never let me forget I never got past Tenderfoot and he was Star), and had lots of friends. There was a nearby movie theater and a small grocery store, a mom and pop place. Maybe my grandfather would go get the Camels that killed him there.

One day, I drove over to Glenfield to see the old homestead.

First, the weather was absolutely horrible in the Michigan sort of way: 37 and raining. Gray. The usual sloppy late winter weather. Maybe I wasn’t in that great of a mood.

When I got out there, I saw a perfectly serviceable home in a neighborhood that had definitely seen better days (the Great Depression, right?). It was a bit shaggy around the edges, but not a catastrophe. They saved that for 2011, the year my Dad died.

I told Dad I went there, and he seemed a little surprised. I told him it wasn’t that bad, and it wasn’t. He said he couldn’t go back anymore. It was too poignant (not his words, but Swedish-Norwegians don’t say “poignant”—he said “empirical” a lot, though).

He might have said the neighborhood was “crapped up,” a phrase he employed periodically.

28 years later, more or less, I made the pilgrimage back. Again, not sure what I was looking for.

This time, I was accompanied by my friend Mike Thompson, who succeeded me later as editorial cartoonist for the Detroit Free Press. I didn’t have a car, so Mike drove me over, prior to our visit to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn.

Mike had instructions for me for this trip to 1641 Glenfield.

“We’re not stopping. I’ll drive by slowly so you can take some video, and then we’re leaving”.

“Why?” I inquired.

“Because the cops will think we’re there to buy drugs”.

We made our way over to Glenfield, and the weather was beautiful, oddly. What I saw as we drove down Glenfield was shocking.

Shocking isn’t even the word for it. Disorienting is better. Like Dresden.

There were magnificent old Richardsonian Revival houses that looked like they had been rotting for forty years, after they had seen close-in hand-to-hand combat. Windows out or shattered, porches sagging, fences sinking, missing doors, all manner of trash on the weedy lawns, resplendent with various graffiti rendered at various artistic skill sets.

On one block near Glenfield, there was an immaculately maintained yard and home, surrounded by dozens of wrecks. Mike said it was probably an 85 year old retired auto worker who still had the resources and the energy to keep the place up. I couldn’t disagree.

Mike told me that it was likely that there was no police or fire service available in that area to conserve funds for neighborhood that hadn’t died. There did seem to be electrical power. Virtually all the homes seemed abandoned, or nearly. Squatters might have been more prevalent than owners or renters.

Mike’s minivan crept toward the house. I recognized it from my 20s, and I had even done a painting of it once and gave it to my dad for Christmas one year. Dad didn’t express sentiment, really, but he was able to feel it.

I held up the flip phone and took the video, moving along at about ten miles per hour. I noticed that there were sheets hanging in the window rather than drapes. I had no time to visualize little Johnny Ohman playing in the yard, shooting his BB gun, or any of the photos of him as a tiny, jug-eared cowboy sitting with his much older sister Jean.

Normally I am good at this sort of visualization, but my mind went blank.

No Al. No Mabel.

I don’t know where the video is now.

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I once was taken to the cemetery in Marquette where Al and Mabel are buried.

My other grandfather Marlowe took me.

He was in his late sixties then, and looked older, in the way that men who didn’t jog, weren’t using SPF 50, smoked Camels, and drank like sunsabitches looked then. Naturally, he also wore a fedora. He wasn’t jovial, but he was amusing—he was also a great letter writer, and always enclosed “a buck for a hamburger",” and he was more than generous with the Orange Crushes from the gas station pop machine rack.

My grandfather took me to lots of cemeteries, come to think of it.

I stood at Al and Mabel’s graves. There were other graves that had the name “Ohman” and “Anderson” around us. It was cloudy. I couldn’t visualize them because I had never met them or saw them.

My dad told me he saw his father in his casket, and that’s the way he visualized him the rest of his life.

To me, my grandparents were only a concept, and I couldn’t ever think of them as anything other than a flat headstone that needed to be mowed.

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Al’s health deteriorated rapidly in his late forties. My dad thought he probably just needed a cardiac bypass. One weekend he completely lost his mind, and my 14 year old father and Mabel drove him to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Jean might have been in the car.

While Mabel was driving, Al tried to jump out of the car—leaving my poor 14 year old Dad to wrestle him back inside.

No. I cannot imagine how traumatizing this was for Dad.

Al was given ECT at Mayo. When Al came home, Dad told me he very tentatively asked his Dad if he was better, and Al said, “Yes, I am”.

My dad did cry telling the story, and I’m close writing this. Real close.

Al’s doctor told him his job was too stressful at Packard, and so he quit. The family then bought a little coffee shop called the Snack Shack in Marquette. It was long since torn down to make way for a bank, so I never saw the Snack Shack.

Mabel, Jean, and Dad all worked at the Snack Shack, and it basically killed Al. When I was fired in 2023, my first, and I mean my first thought was of Al and the Snack Shack. Would I have to work in a Snack Shack equivalent? Would it kill me?

I worried a lot about that.

Anyone who has been in my position knows the feeling: the loss of status, the fear, the financial woes, and knowing that the people who executed the plan had zero interest in whether we would wind up slinging hash or making lattes.

Fortunately, in my case, I found Substack.

All of you kept me from the Snack Shack. Thank you.

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Al died in March, 1948.

I have few of his possessions. I have his Ford Model A wrenches, some of his ancient tools, a bunch of his screws (won’t-bend-ever domestic steel, baby) and a stamp box that has the initials “EWO” engraved on it. Inside is a letter that says, “Al’s letter to Dad 1947” written on the paper.

I cannot bear the thought of reading it, but I saw my Dad cry once when he read it. I think he was describing his new, more challenging life at the Snack Shack.

Mabel then moved to St. Paul to live with Jean. My Dad was a freshman at the University of Minnesota, and working as a janitor at a bank downtown. Mabel had to get a job at the YWCA as a kitchen aide.

Anytime I think I might be fancy, with my Pulitzer Prize, I think about Al at the Snack Shack and Mabel carrying trays at the Y.

Mabel died in September 1949. Al and Mabel were both in their fifties.

Dad eventually went in the Army and to Korea, where he saw horrible stuff I will not describe here for the moment. Jean sold all of Al’s fishing equipment and hunting gear while he was in Korea.

My father never forgave her.

Never.

I did, but I sure would like to see that stuff again.

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Al built a cabin on a place called the Bayou in Scandia, Michigan. I do have some recollection of that, since my Aunt Carol, widow of Mabel’s brother Fred, lived out there. One day when I was a kid, I was looking through some family albums, and saw a schematic sketch of a small house.

Decades later, I realized that this was Al’s house he designed himself.

My Dad said several things to me right before he died.

One was that he had talked to one of his cousins on the phone in the 1980s, and she said, “You laugh like Al.”

Dad said, “Al never laughed.” How sad this was to hear my Dad could not conjure the laughter of his own father.

The other was he said Al told him that “the afterlife was when you think of your missing folks”.

Al, Mabel: I am thinking of you both right now.

I wonder what you were like. Al, were you always taciturn? Mabel, I wonder what you thought was funny? Another thing my Dad said was that they were trilingual.

Al would say something to Mabel in Swedish, and she would answer in Norwegian.

Both my father and Jean both had what I would call an odd lilt in their accents that could only be derived from their parent’s Scandinavian linguistic skills.

I can still hear my father’s laugh. He liked a funny phrase, and my brother is very funny, too, with a great laugh. My brother and I talk most weeks, and I suspect a lot of it is that we remind each other of our folks, more than a bit.

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My Dad has been gone 14 years now, and, wow, do I think about him every day, so he’s enjoying his afterlife.

I hope you find Al’s fishing gear, pal.

I used yours the other day.

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Hey, YBs: Gonna check out some NBA Hoop Action, as I ironically call it with my sons. I’ll catch you all tomorrow, and thank you a million times for your generosity. No Snack Shack! —J.