E. Harold Eckert 1910-1968

St. Patrick's Day was my father's birthday. He'd have been 105. He graduated from Waukesha High School, also the alma mater of Judy, Jack, and me. We even had some of the same teachers.

He started at Carroll College but had to drop out after a semester for economic reasons. Carroll was a natural choice because it not only was in Waukesha but where his mother, Ethel Marsh Eckert, was a house mother at one of the women's dorms after Emil, Dad's father, died

He started as letter boy at Waukesha Motor Company. He worked his way up to Traffic Manager where he had memorized the schedules of the trucking and train firms who brought in parts and materials and took out completed engines.

A lefty, he was an excellent bowler. Not quite professional class but consistently in the 500s during his participation in bowling leagues. He enjoyed listening to Packer football and Cub baseball games on the radio. He got me hooked on the Packers but I switched to the Braves and later the Brewers when Milwaukee got its own pro teams. He was "ecumenical" in that he stayed up with both the Cubs and the Milwaukee teams.

In his younger days, he loved ping pong and entered tournaments at the YMCA, starting at the bottom of each tournament and working his way up and usually winning. Being lefty may have helped him but it was his "eye-hand coordination," he always said. I played him when I was in high school, years after he had left ping pong behind. I was pretty good myself but he still could play great defense and wait out my anxiousness to make a score and, in that anxiety, miss. Yes, I won finally but he was always in the game.

He was funny about words. He used them correctly but he pronounced many of them funny. Then I realized his vocabulary depended more on cross-word puzzles than ever hearing the words used. He was excellent at cross-words. I bet he would have done the very hard sudoku puzzles if they had existed when he was alive.

He was also funny with puns. At meal times as we ate together, he frequently played with the words of the conversation. The classic was one day when Judy said we'd been playing outside until the next door neighbor boy messed up what we doing. She said, "We had fun until Dwayne came." Pop immediately threw in, "That's odd. There wasn't a cwoud in the sky." (You may have to read that out loud to get it.)

All his memorabilia from years of working with transport companies and household goods he'd had after Mom died disappeared during his second marriage. One thing did come into my possession, a hand gripped "stapler." Looking sort of like a pliers, it has a mechanism in the "head" that punches a "v" shaped cut and then pushes it back through a slit in the paper. No staples, just paper held together by an ingenious means. I think of Dad every time I use it. Still works great.

There are many memories that come back now, mowing the lawn for his second wife but never for Mom, wanting to wear a hard hat to church in case the roof fell in because he finally got there, picking us up on the corner of College and Waverly on his way home from work at noon or at supper time. I, and sometimes Judy too, would run the block to that corner just to ride with him. And now Ann saying I'm a lot like him. I guess that's not too bad a compliment.

Anita Patricia Freihube Eckert 1909-1965

On November 18, my mom would have been 104 years old.  She died nearly fifty years ago.

I'm sorry I do not have a picture of her to share.

But maybe a few memories will be good enough.

She was one of ten sisters who grew up in Nashotah, WI.  She attended the little two room school house there and graduated from 8th grade.  I have no doubt she'd could have handled the upper grades and college if there had been any real opportunity for further schooling.   Like her older sisters, she worked as a housekeeper out among the mansions on Lake Chenequa.

She met dad out at Moose Lake Beach, two miles north of Nashotah.  Dad said what told him it was love was the time the car had a flat tire and she helped fix it.

There are a lot of things I remember about her.  She was always helping someone, like giving hairdos to our aging relatives.  In 1940, she ordered two blankets from a Sears-Roebuck catalog.  Laundering one a few months later, she hung it out to dry.  When she went to bring it in, it was gone.  Her response?  "Someone else needed it more than we did."

She wasn't as generous toward the one pet we had.  A kitty showed up at our door and was becoming a part of the family.  But it made the mistake of jumping up on the table and eating a piece of baloney we had out for lunch.  It ended up as a barn cat down the road and was never replaced.

She was an at-home mom until Judy and I were both in grade school.  That meant she did a lot of cooking and baking.  And teaching us how to fill the kerosene tank of the stove, dusting the furniture, doing dishes, and ironing our own clothes.  She made the best pork roasts, holiday turkeys, and Christmas cookies.

In typical teenage fashion, we each drifted out from under our parents influence with school, jobs, and friends.  But we did not drift that far from our parents' roof.  We had a home there until we each married, even if we did not happen to be in the house for periods of time because of school (in my case) or Coast Guard (in Jack's case).

Once Ann and I married and went off to school in Texas, Mom sent us ten dollars a month as support.  Just so you gain some perspective on how significant an amount that was, gas cost 28 cents a gallon and Ann's tuition was $98 a semester.

We always were welcome at home during those days.  We seldom got there.  And just when we were getting settled after graduating from college and seminary, Mom's high blood pressure caught up with her and she died of a heart attack.

She never met our kids.  We were in the process of adopting David when she died and he came into our lives just months later.  So they never got to meet her either.  My only hope is that I followed her example and they got a sense of who she was by who I have been.