The Stairs Going Up – Part One

The Stairs Going Up – Part One

The front door at 828 opens into what our family called the hall. Not a foyer, the hall was a large entrance room that led straight ahead to the kitchen and left to the living room (called “front” room by Mom and Dad). At right were the Stairs Going Up to the second floor. There were eleven steps to a landing with a left turn, then three more to the small second-floor hall that opened to four bedrooms.

The hall downstairs was also our TV room after 1955, when Dad brought home our first set, a snowy[1] thing with a small circular screen. The dimension of the hall was @ 11’ X 15’, and the staircase became stadium-like seating for television viewing, especially for the younger kids or any late-comers. 

The upper part of the stairs, the landing, and especially the three steps around the corner were a kind of never-land, a place where a child’s not-exactly-overt defiance might occur. When one of us was sent to bed earlier than when we wanted to be, the three steps around the corner became a place to monitor what was happening downstairs, whether it was a conversation or a TV show for “mature audiences.” This lasted until the watcher got bored or became fearful of the wrath of our parents—or someone squealed on the transgressor.

There was almost always something happening on these stairs. Upstairs was a place where Mom put us for any misbehavior, quasi-separated from the family going-ons. For me the stairs was a place to crash toy cars by making them fall off a cliff to the hall floor below. Or a place to align my plastic army figures on the higher ground. I also remember some of my younger sibs sliding down the stairs with a blanket to protect their bottoms.

The stairwell was also a passageway for sound. Once, when one of the younger boys was peeing in the toilet upstairs, Dad was talking with a visitor at the front door. To Dad’s chagrin, the bathroom door was open, so Dad tried covering up the offending sound by raising his voice. After the man left, Dad told the pee-er to close the door while using the bathroom because he could hear it and was embarrassed.

The Stairs Going Up served as a kind of passageway between up and downstairs activities, but for me, those upper steps, also evoke sadder memories, for despite the almost-constant hubbub of our large family, I remember standing on those upper-stairs and feeling loneliness and teen-aged angst. (I'm not being snarky or dismissive here.) This will be covered in Part II.

-- Bob

---

[1] For you slackers, millennials, and pre-cable TV types who have only seen HD digital TV, “snow” showed up on the screen if the antenna wasn’t properly aligned, your set was too far from the station producing the signal, or Mom used the sewing machine or kitchen mixer.

The Underbelly of Our House

From the kitchen at 828, there were three steps going down to a landing and side door. Outside was the driveway, so those three steps served as a much-used portal to our home, but usually only for those of us who lived there.

Mother didn’t necessarily like visitors coming through the side door, for it was lined with the trappings of our everyday lives: the ironing board, a mop, the broom and dust pan we used each evening after supper, and the grease-stained baker’s apron that Dad hung from a nail after work.

The Stairs Going Down, as Mom liked to call them, was a somewhat unsightly area, with its chipped gray steps and dingy painted walls. It was also dirty from the heavy traffic and from us kids stopping to grab whatever seasonal gear we needed before heading outside: a basketball, ball gloves, or the small baskets we used for picking  strawberries and raspberries along the railroad tracks that ran nearby; and, in the winter, black rubber boots and hats and gloves stored in a peach basket. I can readily recall Mother’s strained urgent voice whenever one of us approached the house and it was muddy or snowy outside: “Use the side door,” she’d say, and we would.

Occasionally, Mom would temporarily keep a box of Kotex on the basement shelf, tucked away at the back so my brothers wouldn’t see it. She’d buy the monthly menstrual pads on her weekly trip to the grocery store and put them there while my brothers helped haul the other grocery bags from the car to the kitchen. (Later, when the coast was clear, either my sister Nancy or I would scurry upstairs and put the box at the back of Mother’s bedroom closet, out of sight and hopefully out of the mind of a curious brother.

I also remember how Mother was clever in steering visitors from the side to the front door because that entrance, though not grand, was certainly clean and without clutter. When she’d hear a car pull into our graveled driveway, she’d go to the front porch and draw the guests through the front door. It wasn’t overt or awkward, but more so gracious, as she’d greet and talk to them as they made their way to the front of the house.

It’s funny how we absorb the notions of our parents, that it is good not to show the underbelly of our lives. I remember when my husband, Steve, and I were moving into our current home and I quickly threw a tablecloth on our much-used kitchen table, covering its wear and tear. Before long we had visitors, a neighbor woman with baked goods to welcome us.

My mother had been staying with us at the time, helping as we settled in to our new home. After the neighbor left, she said, “I was glad you had a tablecloth on.”

Some might think these behaviors pretentious, but I don’t. I think of them as putting our best foot forward. I know Mother would agree.

—Linda

A big White House

A Big White House

A big white cube, or nearly so, 24 feet wide by 30 feet deep, two floors plus a full basement. A kitchen, dining room, “hall,” and living “front” room on the first floor. Four bedrooms and a bathroom up. The living space totaled 1440 square feet, a relatively big number but a not-so-big containment vessel for the energies of twelve kids and the ambitions of two parents. Now it seems small for a large family. The house my wife and I live in today (with two sons now moved on) is 1600 square feet. It doesn’t feel particularly small, but I can’t imagine a dozen more bodies living there.

The 828 house seemed large while I was growing up. It was crowded, but didn’t seem so. We all fit somewhere, even if someone else fit right next to you. Most of us found a way to gain a little privacy. My refuge was the top bunk in the little kid’s room, where I couldn’t easily be seen unless someone climbed up to see me. Another place was the basement when no one else was there, or in a closet with the door shut, with no one the wiser.

A 12,240-cubic-foot containment vessel! A haven into which we could retreat. It was a place to recharge ourselves and return to the outer world. Perhaps it was insular, knitting our family so tightly that some of us (me) found it difficult to respond to others in the same way that we regarded our sibs.

There were the “nons,” of course, particularly the non-Catholics and the non-Kerbers. People a shade different from us. Not bad people, just not us. When I was approaching puberty, Mom told me I should find some friends other than the Protestant kids in our neighborhood. I would be meeting girls soon, she said, and I couldn’t date a non-Catholic. (Hah! me, a high school freshman, dating! That’s a good one, Mom. More on that later.)

 That containment vessel leaked, of course. Our physical energies escaped, through a window broken by a thrown metal cap gun or a door through which Mom or Dad chased us when we were fighting, telling us to “take it outside.”

Our non-physical energies must have escaped too, but not always. Looking back I see a pretty tight container, a pressure cooker even. The house may have been made of wood, glass, and shingles, but 828 was made of less tangible things, like the determination of two loving parents to fit into middle class society. It was also made by the mores of the Midwestern USA, the cultural (r)evolution of the 1950s and ‘60s, and the unbending doctrine of the Catholic Church. But these, too, are stories for later.

Like many childhood homes, 828 is the vessel from which I was (we were) launched. And like the space shuttle, I seem to have an unbreakable tether to it, without which I would drift afar and be only a dim satellite of the Earth.

—Bob

Who We Are

No two blades of grass are alike, and neither are the seven billion humans who inhabit the Earth. Because each of us is unique, we all have different tales to tell. There are stories of overcoming obstacles and wrestling with fears, of losing and winning. Of imagining and growing up.

We are Bob Kerber and Linda Kerber Schmitmeyer, two siblings with stories to share. We have a common heritage—Bob is third and Linda fifth among twelve siblings—but we often view things differently, which will be reflected in our individual stories. Yet we believe in the power of storytelling as way to better understand the paths we’ve walked and imagine what is ahead.

What makes any story worth telling  is the uniqueness of the individual. For the two of us, that means being forged, in part, by the following forces:

• Our parents, George and Dorothy (Wuebker) Kerber, come from simple beginnings: George was one of ten children of a railroad worker and an Irish/German Catholic mother. He dropped out of school in the eighth grade, in the early 1930s, to help support his family. Dorothy was the daughter of an itinerant farmer turned factory worker and his German Catholic wife. The oldest of eight children, our mother was deemed smart enough to skip third grade when her family moved from one farm to another. Our parents’ early years were shaped by the Depression, ours by two parents whose hard work, sense of curiosity, and high regard for education propelled us to become who we are.

• Our parents had lower middle-class means yet upper-middle class beliefs and values, ambitions, and attitudes.

• The twelve siblings (ten males and two females, all living) range in age from the mid-50s to the early 70s. There were a dozen live births and a miscarriage in seventeen years and eleven days, a crowding of children that created clusters of sibling dynamics that continue to resonate even today.

• We came of age when ideas on religion, race, culture, gender, and ethnicity were swiftly evolving. We grew to maturity in the years between the aftermath of World War II and the winding down of the ‘70s, a time of widespread change as world colonialism waned, counter culture arose, and people in most societies began questioning once unquestionable things. Our lives spanned the emergence of home TV sets and party-line telephones to  information being transmitted almost instantly and personal computers empowering corporations and individuals alike.

In writing our first blog post, one of many we hope to share, we mulled over the use of the word “unique” because it begs the question: Are we really unique? With the help of a thesaurus, we considered other possibilities: “exceptional,” “distinctive,” “irreplaceable.” We agreed on “unique” but knew the other words would have worked. For everyone of us is all these, especially irreplaceable.

--Bob and Linda