On August 16th, 1918, Marvin Earl Welfel was born to George and Anna Marie Welfel in Racine, Wisconsin. His father George was born in Germany and had immigrated to the United States as a child. Like many European immigrants, he started working in the brickyard making bricks. His method of stomping down the clay to pack it into rectangles earned him the name “Clay Feet.” At the time Marve was born, though, he was working as a foreman at Bell City Manufacturing, a sheet metal factory that produced threshing machines. Anna stayed home to raise Marve and Mildred (Marve’s sister 4 years his senior).
Through middle school and high school, Marve loved sports. His favorite was baseball. He loved basketball as well, but never made the high school team because he was told he was too short. He also never attended any dances in high school; he says he had no one to take because he couldn’t find any girls his size – they were all taller! After graduating Horlick High School in Racine in June of 1936, he made his way to Crawfordsville, Indiana, where he enrolled as a freshman at Wabash College. To earn his room and board, he worked in the kitchen at the Kappa Sigma fraternity house, washing dishes and serving meals. He had no money to speak of and so couldn’t pay tuition, but the college allowed students to attend on credit, which they would have to pay back at the end of each year.
At the end of his first year, Marve returned to Racine to look for a job in order to pay back his tuition debt, but couldn’t find a job until August! Unfortunately, that meant he wasn’t able to earn enough to go back to Wabash for a second year, and had to stay in Racine to work and pay off his debt.
Marve was working as a mailman at the Case Tractor plant in 1938 when he met Florence Ellen Valentine, his future wife. He heard about her from a friend, and although he had never met her he heard she was about his size, so he asked her to a dance. They dated for several years before getting married in 1942, during which time Marve started an apprenticeship as a tool and die maker at Case’s. He never finished the apprenticeship, because shortly after his marriage in October he enlisted in the service. Like all young men, Marve knew he was likely to get drafted to serve in the war, so he decided to beat the draft to the punch by enlisting in the branch of his choice – the aviation cadets.
After over a year of training, Marve graduated from flight school in January of 1944 and quickly rose through the ranks until he became a First Lieutenant and was certified as an instructor in both twin-engine and instrument flying.. He taught other cadets how to fly in Lubbock, Texas for the duration of World War II. His favorite plane to fly was a twin-engine medium bomber, the B-25 Mitchell.
When he returned home to Racine in January 1946 after the war ended, Marve had planned on continuing to work at Case’s, but the union workers had gone on strike! The strike lasted fourteen months, so Marve had to find other work. He tried to start a tool and die business with two other men, but when that didn’t pan out he went to work in the tool room at Massey Harris in 1950. He continued to work in the tool and die business until his retirement in 1982.
Marve and Florence didn’t waste any time in starting a family after his return from the military. Their first child, Cheryl Mae Welfel was born in 1946, followed by James Roy Welfel (my dad) in 1950, and Tom Welfel in 1956. Tragically, Florence developed cancer, and two years after Tom’s birth she passed away. Marve’s mother helped to take care of the children while he was at work, but things were very hard. In those days, a single man didn’t raise children on his own, and so Marve looked for another wife. By 1960, he had married Karen Hjortness, a daughter of immigrants from Denmark. Karen had also grown up in Racine, and had recently divorced her first husband. She had one child from her first marriage, a son named Gary. In 1961, Marve and Karen had a son of their own, Jon Welfel. Marve worked hard to provide for the seven Welfels (well, six – Gary had his father’s last name) living under one roof on Sheraton Drive, and wasn’t able to spend as much time with his family as he might have liked. But the family never went hungry, even if they had to eat liver and onions every night of the week.
And then, the kids grew up. First Cherie left for college, attending one of the University of Wisconsin campuses. Jim followed soon after, attending the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse. After a year of teaching in Wisconsin, Cherie left to get masters from Purdue University in Indiana. Jim left to find a teaching job in New Jersey. Several years after graduating high school, Tom left as well, to work in a moving business in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. With Gary gone as well, seven became three. Jon, at least, stayed, and was able to visit regularly, but the other children visited at most once a year. “It sucked not seeing them,” Marve said, “but I supported them in whatever they wanted to do, and I knew there weren’t any opportunities here in Racine. But I sure wish they had lived closer.”
For a while, Marve and Karen took joy in having Jon, his wife, and three children close by – at least they could see one set of grandchildren grow up. “About once every two days,” explained Karen, “I would go over by Renee [Jon’s wife] and tell her, ‘I have to see my babies!’” But in time, Jon and Renee split up, and Jon’s two daughters grew up and moved to Colorado. And then there were none.
And then on May 10th of 2009, passing through Racine on my road trip across the country, I found myself in my grandparents’ living room, the only person to be with my grandmother on Mother’s Day.
I’ve told my grandfather’s story here only because I know it better, but my grandmother’s story carries with it the same feeling of working hard to raise a family, and then seeing them slowly leave. Her story, too, has reached a point of mourning and loneliness in her twilight hours. Neither she nor my grandfather is without any flaws, and they both certainly have butted plenty of heads throughout the years. But they are both loving people, even if they love imperfectly.
And yet there they were on Mother’s Day with naught but a few token cards and vases of flowers, a few short calls from some (not all) of their children, and I find myself hastily texting all my cousins, begging them to call Grandma to wish her a happy Mother’s Day (I think only one actually did). I tried to fill the void by cooking my grandparents breakfast, buying a flat of geraniums and planting them on my grandparents’ tiny balcony, and taking them out for an upscale lobster dinner; but it was only one holiday out of the several hundred that my grandparents have celebrated without many of their children or grandchildren in the 30 years since their children moved away.
The point isn’t to draw sympathy for the plight of my grandparents. After all, a few cards and flowers are more than some grandmothers receive, and my grandparents are fortunate to have any children that love them and call, even if their children live far away. They’re also incredibly fortunate to have grown up in a nation where the life expectancy is such that it’s not uncommon for a couple to live to be 90 (my grandfather’s age). Nor is the point to place blame on any of their children for having moved away or not making more of an effort to be in Racine for holidays.
The point is that for the first time I was seeing Grandma and Grandpa as people instead of as grandparents. And I know that “seeing your parents as people for the first time” etc. is something that many, if not all, people go through, and probably earlier than at 25. But it wasn’t until the experiences I’d had over the past year and a half – organizing for Obama, organizing for Stand for Children, and traveling across the country – that I was able to see my grandparents in the light that I saw them at that moment.
I stepped back, away from the frame of viewing them as Grandpa Marve and Grandma Karen (a frame that rigid in its restriction of our ability to understand a person), and viewed them as Marve Welfel and Karen Hjortness, depersonalized and without judgment. I was able to see their occasional ignorant comments (at times even racist comments) for what they were – simply part of their way of thinking that is a product of the time and culture in which they grew up, rather than a moral blemish on their characters. This doesn’t make some of the things they said good or right, but rather unavoidable at this stage in their lives (believe me, I’ve tried at length in the past to shift their views).
Their occasional bickering and judgment was no longer idiotic and frustrating, but just a bump in the road that could be smoothed over by a polite interjection by me. Their judgment of my plans for the future and my outlook on life no longer bothered me. I didn’t take it personally, and I’m finally secure enough in who I am and in what I value that my grandparents’ uneasiness with some of my trajectories no longer provoked a gut reaction of needing to vigorously defend myself.
Because they are my grandparents, they of course still occupy a special place in my heart, but I no longer feel the need to revere them as infinitely wise nor do I become angry and frustrated when they fail to live up to that fantasy. They are just Marve and Karen, children of European immigrants whose parents moved to the United States in search of a better life. Even though Marve is now a grandfather whose progeny span America’s two coasts, he is still that short, shy boy who never asked any girls to a high school dance because they were too tall for him. And for that, I love him in a new and (I believe) more meaningful way.
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