It All Started When
A Waychoff Married Grandma
Remembrances by C. Jane Egan to honor her Grandmother Waychoff

Andrew Jackson Waychoff married Cemantha Mundell, starting wonderful memories of my Grandmother, long before I had a memory. At regular intervals she had seven wonderful children, five boys and two girls. One of the girls, Nettie E. Waychoff, married "Charlie", who was her childhood sweetheart, I understand. He became my papa, who had the distinguished title of Dr. Charles R. Meek, M.D., listed in the Who's Who as an Obstetrician. Doctors did not deliver their own babies in those days, as I suppose they do not now either. Therefore, Dr. Valloyd Adair was called in to bring me to town, and they named me Cemantha Jane Meek.

Grandma Waychoff was glad that I was her namesake. She gave me her beautiful pearl ring mounted on top of a setting that looked like a pedestal, and also her old fashioned gold watch on a golden chain around her neck. I was the only one in the Waychoff family who had her name and she was quite proud of that.

How I "loved" it when Grandma Waychoff would bring out the "Parcheesi" board, and liked to play with me. She taught me "Old Maid", "Snap", and "Dominoes". We laughed together and talked and had such a good time. You could tell she was proud of me and liked me, and I loved her! She was very kind and gentle and looked refined. Her pretty dress with a high collar fit nicely, and looked most stylish it seemed to me. The sparkling gold chain and watch hung about her neck and lay on the lace and embroidery of her dress. The skirt was long and full, but I could see that her shoes were nice and buckled clear to the top. Grandma and I both had large hands and large feet. I could see that . Grandmas hands were graceful, though, and as white as the pearl she wore on her finger.
Every Sunday we all went to church together, mamma sitting beside me on one side, and Grandma Waychoff on the other side. We were dressed up in our best clothes, "fittin" for Sunday, believe me. My Grandma Meek was there, too. I always felt like she wanted to sit beside me. I was proud to have two Grandmas who loved God and me and the church. I was sure that they did, by the way they sat so dignified and attentive, and told me that they were glad that I was a good girl, not wiggling around like some others do. You see, I was named after my Grandma Meek, also. My middle name was Jane. Because I was the only granddaughter she had, she let me know I was extra special.

We always had a big Sunday dinner after church. Grandma Waychoff set the table in the dining room with a beautiful white linen tablecloth, hand painted dinner plates, sparkling silverware and glasses, and lighted candles. It was very special! I was allowed to sit up at the big table with the grown ups. We held hands around the table, bowed our heads, and thanked God for all our blessings. I thank God for giving me my Grandma and Grandpa Waychoff, and of course, for my brother and my mamma and papa, Aunt Oma and Uncle Frank and my favorite cousins. It was a great day! I remember being very quiet and listening to every body talking at once. It was surely noisy! On the sideboard were stashed all kinds of pies, cakes and cookies. Grandma also kept a dish of pink mints on the inside of the cabinet, that I dreamed about. My! All nice things to eat. A big platter of browned fried chicken, a big casserole with a lid on it full of mashed potatoes, accompanied by a gravy bowl full of brown chicken gravy, a whole pot full of fresh green peas that Grandma said she had cooked in a whole pound of butter, and enough corn on the cob fresh out of the garden for all of us to eat. Big puffy homemade biscuits peeped out of a covered warming basket, followed by homemade strawberry jam and honey. Grandma raised the strawberries and kept boxes of honeybees. I think that she must have worked hard to get everything ready for us, although I never saw her work at all while I was there. Everything seemed to take place. Grandma always had time for me and everything was perfect. The great big linen napkins were extra special, and I liked to dip my fingers in the finger bowl full of water which was passed around the table at the end.

Then we all went to the front porch and enjoyed each other all afternoon. I do not know who did the cleanup. It just happened, I guess.

The porch went all across the front of the house, past the front door that entered the parlor, and swung around the whole length of the side of the house to the side door, which entered the living room. A full sized wooden swing was on one end of the front of the porch. It was padded with a soft cover and soft cushions Grandma had made. On the lattice, behind and beside the swing, blossomed yellow honeysuckle, giving wonderful cool shade and delightful fragrance to the summer air. The honeybees were busy all day long going in and out of the flowers. That was nice! The floor was covered with a tightly woven straw like carpet that felt cool on my bare feet, and I could smell the red roses that climbed on a long trellis clear across the side porch. Grandma had a big bed of pink and white petunias blooming by the side door. That smelled wonderful. She said that they seeded themselves every year, which I have found since is quite unusual. I wish I had saved some of the seed from her petunias.

My cousins were all about the same age. We were full of energy and happy to be together. We ran furiously after each other all afternoon, from the front of the house to the back, and rolled down the bank of grass in front of the house until we were stopped by a cement wall at the bottom, and we did it over and over again. When we got too hot, we would race around the house to the pump at the back of the house and dip our heads in a bucket of cold water.

There was an outhouse out back, where I liked to hide and watch spiders weave their webs, all by myself, and nobody knew where I was. It was fun to look at the toys in the Montgomery Ward catalog. Grandma had put the catalogue there for us to use as toilet paper.

Grandma Waychoff had a wonderful large kitchen with a big pantry. In the pantry was a pump for fresh, cool water, with a metal cup hanging onto a bucket. Everybody drank out of the same cup by dipping it into the bucket. We didn't worry about germs in that day. Sometimes she would take me to her cupboard and ask me if I would like a cookie.

A long table in the kitchen was where everybody came down early for breakfast each morning. It smelled like homemade bread, toast, milk and cereal, fruit and bacon and eggs.

My Grandpa Waychoff would slip down the back stairs with his bare feet. He liked to wiggle his toes in the grass when it was covered wet with early morning dew. This delighted me because I knew Grandpa Waychoff was a college professor.

Grandpa liked to play with me. He would chase me up the back stairs from the dining room, through the long hall past all the bedrooms, down the front stairs into the room off the parlor, through the door into the dining room and chase me up the back way again ! Meanwhile, his feet were making terrible noises as he shouted, "Watch out! I am coming after you !". I was not afraid of him, but ran as fast as I could, because I was delighted that he was playing with me.

Grandpa Waychoff was a scientist, taught astronomy [geology], and was to be found upstairs in his study room. I could tiptoe into his room and find him leaning over his desk, wearing a green visor, studying. He let me go about my business and see everything, bookcases and glass covered shelves full of his treasures, Indian relics, starfish, porcupine fish, dried skins of rattlesnakes, corals, curious shells of all kind of everything imaginable, even a real skeleton standing in the corner of the room. Grandpa had traveled with the National Geographic Society when they excavated Indian mounds down through Ohio. He talked to me a lot as if I were somebody he "liked" and I surely liked him ! He told me how he ate his grapefruit with brown sugar on it. I had never heard of that. I ate it with salt. I found out, too, that he "loved" potato skins.

My mother took my brother and me on the train to Grandmas every summer after school was out. We would stay a month or so. Grandma Waychoff could not hear very well unless we yelled in her ear. Papa would say, when we came back home again, that we were yelling all the time, but we did not know that we did. She had a long ear phone to stick in her ear, but most of the time she forgot to use it.

During the year, we never knew when papa was going to be able to go to Grandmas. You see, he was a medical doctor and had a private practice, which made it difficult for him to leave his patients. After he did emergency duty at the hospital, he would come home about three o'clock in the morning and say, "Nettie, let's go to Waynesburg", and though we had been asleep for five or six hours, she would have us ready to go at a moment's notice. We would pile into the car and away we would go. We were lucky to have a car. Not every family did in those days. The roads were mostly muddy and not graded. It was very easy to slip over into the ditch, especially if it was raining. Also, you had to crank the car to get it to start. It worked well except when we went over big bumps in the road. Mamma would hold me under one arm and Charles under the other to keep us from hitting the roof, which was like a hard board. There were no springs or anything to soften the seats, and they were slippery black leather.

Some of the roads in the Pennsylvania hills and West Virginia would seem to go straight down like they would take off over the fields. Papa said it gave him buck fever, and mamma would say, "Charley, don't go so fast!". That worried me, although I am sure now that he was probably not going even twenty miles an hour, which seemed fast at the time. I do not know how fast horse and buggies went, but that was as fast as the first cars went. The road would then make a sharp V turn and straight up it would go making the car feel like it was gasping its last breath. Papa was always afraid it would either stall going down or stall going up. Well, papa always got us there. I never liked to travel in those days.

Gas stations were far between. If we ran out, a farmer could usually give us a little. Sometimes, Papa left mamma with a revolver and he took off down the road at daylight to try to locate a farmer to pull us out of a ditch. We felt fairly safe because mamma was a good shot. We had some pictures of her, when she was a young woman, holding up several rabbits she had shot. When we got to Grandmas, it was early in the morning, no one had told her that we were coming, but when we came running up the bank to the side door and pounded upon it, she could feel the vibrations through the house, and knew we were there.

She did much the same thing, in a way, when the telephone would ring. She felt the vibrations and would run to the phone box in the dining room, lift the receiver, and say "Hello, Hello", and tell us that nobody was there because she could not hear anything.
I used to like to go onto the parlor when it was cool and quiet and the shades were pulled. Nobody came through that way and I could lie down on the soft rug under the love seat and peep out. Grandma had a nice upright piano in the parlor. Some of my happiest moments I spent there, sitting up on the piano stool and making what I thought sounded like beautiful music. Sometimes Grandma would come with her earphone, stick it inside the piano on the board, and I was happy that she liked my music. How time flies! Seventy years ago my papa started me on my first music lessons.
How I wish my Grandma Waychoff could hear me now! My Grandma Waychoff influenced my life more than she ever knew.