Andy, My First-Cousin-Once-Removed

It seems that as I was growing up Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners were always held either at Grandma Swartz’s or Great-Aunt Mildred’s. That makes sense, since for years they were the matriarchs of our extended family—they were sisters and the last members of that older generation. I loved them both dearly. I was closer to my grandmother, of course, not only because she was Grandma but also because she lived in our town. Great-Aunt Mildred was Grandma’s elder sister, and she lived about forty-five minutes away in Ashland. (I shall refer to her hereafter as “Aunt Mildred,” which is what we called her—and by the way, in our family it’s pronounced “ant”; none of that hoity-toity “ahnt” stuff for us!)

I never knew her husband, Uncle Herschel. He passed away in 1963, two years after I was born.

Uncle Herschel and Aunt Mildred had one son, Andy. “Andy” was his given name, and for a long time I thought he had no middle name. His grave marker, dated 1940–1994, has only the name “Andy” on it.

Aunt Mildred’s House . . .

I loved visiting at Aunt Mildred’s. She was warm and funny and welcoming, and she always related well to children. I could tell she really liked me as a person, as an individual, and that’s a great gift for someone in her sixties to give a child. (Speaking of great gifts, she could be counted on each Christmas to give each child four or five silver dollars—heavy money, real money—sometimes in a little leather pouch with a zipper on it. It was real-life treasure.) Her home was fascinating, so different from ours. First of all, it was on a treelined street in the town of Ashland, Ohio, which was much larger than my hometown of Fredericksburg. To me it was a big city.

258 W. Main St., Ashland, OH in 2022
(Google Maps)

Secondly, her home was—I’m not sure what to call it. An apartment? A duplex? I guess the best way I would characterize it would be to say that it was an apartment with another apartment right up next to it, somewhat like a New York City brownstone. It was the left-hand apartment if you stood on the sidewalk out front. It was solid, made of orange brick in the front and red brick in the back. The front porch, shaded by the aged trees along the sidewalk, was cool and substantial. One time my cousin Peggy and I played a new game on the porch. It was called “Battleship,” and I remember that I couldn’t find Peggy’s ships. Suddenly, I had a profound thought. “You know,” I said, “this game could go on forever.”

“Yeah,” she replied, “but eventually you will run out of spaces and pegs.”

Hm. Peg was older and therefore wiser than I, and I had to concede that her conclusion was profounder than mine.

“Oh yeah.”

If you came through the front door into Aunt Mildred’s home (which we almost never did—more about that later), you were in her living room. A chandelier figures into my memories somehow. Maybe she had one near the entrance? To me part of the fascination of her home was that it was so different from ours, which was boxy and predictable. Aunt Mildred’s home was long and thin, stretching back from her porch through the bright living room to secret recesses and nooks and crannies at the back—and beyond that.

The living room joined without a break to the dining area, where so many memorable meals were held. Maybe that’s where the chandelier was. Off to the right, below shelves full of knick-knacks, was an old pump organ that she would let us play as long as we wanted, until the pumping turned from fun into work. I liked pulling the stops and making the sounds change.

Past the dining room and through a swinging door was her kitchen. Memories of that room are pretty vague—probably because I thought of it mainly as a passageway from food in the front to fun in the back. I think there were a table and chairs in there, and the door that led to the basement stairs was there too. Past the kitchen you entered an odd-shaped, dark little room with low ceilings. I’m not sure if it would have been considered a passageway or if it had some actual purpose, but the bathroom was off to your left, and the stairs leading to the second floor went up from there. I almost never went upstairs—I suppose it was off-limits to us kids—but I remember that little white tiled bathroom on the first floor. Fashionable ambience for bathrooms back then was “cold, clinical, sterile, and white.” On the inside of the bathroom door facing the commode was a caricature of a skinny chicken, nervously sitting on her nest. The caption read, “Don’t just sit there, WORRY!”

The odd-shaped little passageway led to the back door—but off to the left of the back door, tucked in under the stairs, was a little nook that served as office space.

Aunt Mildred’s house started out huge, bright, and spacious in the front and then gradually got smaller and smaller as you went straight back, changing from a fairy-tale mansion to a snug dwelling fit for a hobbit. And I loved it.

. . . and Beyond

Exit the back door and you were in a low-ceilinged car port. The driveway—made of concrete, not gravel—ran along the left side of the house with space for parking at the back, so that’s why we entered from the back when visiting. There used to be a porch swing hung from hooks in the car port. At one family gathering it got overloaded by adults, and it came crashing down, resulting in a huge laugh for everyone—including the swing’s occupants.

Also, at some point there was a hammock strung up in the car port, and we cousins would scream with laughter while wildly pushing each other in it, grasping the sides for dear life as we were flung higher and higher from side to side. I can’t believe no one ever fell out and cracked a skull on the concrete. Did the adults know we were doing this? Were we allowed to be doing this? Who knew? Who cared? The adults were all sitting around talking—talking—way up front in the palatial part of the house. We were back here in a different world.

Aunt Mildred striking a humorous
pose in her backyard garden.

Continuing straight back beyond the car port, you came to a tiny yard where Aunt Mildred gardened. I grew up in a rural town where there was lots of room for gardening. Aunt Mildred had to make the best of a tiny plot of land with an ugly concrete-block wall at the back of it.

But the mystery and fascination of Aunt Mildred’s didn’t stop there. On the other side of the driveway, behind the house next door, there was another, larger garden plot that didn’t belong to Aunt Mildred. And there was a narrow set of cement steps—old cement steps with no railing, just a couple of feet wide, dark and pebbly with age—leading up and out of the back yard to an alley at the top of the wall.

And if you turned left onto the alley, you could sneak into an old abandoned barn, with dangerous holes in the floor and cracks between the wall-slats where sunshine made the dust motes dance. And you could hide in there with your cousin Peggy, who was never at a loss for creating amazing imaginary worlds, and you could play spooky games. We called the neighbor’s garden “The Witch’s Garden,” and I think we called the barn “The Witch’s Castle,” and we would pretend we were captives there trying to escape.

The Basement!

And there’s one more place I haven’t described—the basement.

Aunt Mildred’s basement had multiple rooms. It was dark. It was mysterious. And it held secrets.

It held the appeal of being a Forbidden Place that you could Sneak Around In and Explore. Of course, it wasn’t really forbidden. It just felt that way.

One of the secrets of Aunt Mildred’s basement was a shelf on which were stored toys from Andy’s childhood. There were model cars and a pickup, each one nearly as big as a shoebox. Their doors opened and their front wheels pivoted, and you could run them around on the floor upstairs. They were sturdy and old, and there was nothing like them in our toy box at home.

One time we—Peg and I—explored all through the basement. It was so large! To our surprise we found a second set of wooden steps leading up to a main floor. We peeked under the crack at the base of the door and could see the soles of a set of boots standing on the other side. Those boots certainly didn’t belong to any of the adults we knew.

Suddenly we realized we were outside the kitchen door of the other apartment in her building! We could have opened the door and been in someone else’s house! But those boots convinced us otherwise. What if a man was standing there in silence, waiting for our next move, having already heard us creeping up the stairs? What if we opened the door and there he stood, wearing those big boots and tattered denim overalls and a faded flannel shirt, grim-faced and hollow-eyed, with stooped shoulders? What if he had a hook for one hand? And what if he asked us from a strangely twisted mouth with little flecks of drool at the corners, “What do you kids think you’re doing?”

As quickly and as quietly as we could, we crept back down the stairs and back to Aunt Mildred’s side of the basement. Her side of the basement may have been creepy too, but it was home!

Family Dinners

Well, earlier I was telling you about Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners at Aunt Mildred’s. I’m trying now to recall who all would have been there. From my family, Dad, Mom, Keith, Eric, and me (Joel hadn’t been born yet); Grandma and Grandpa Swartz; Aunt Mildred and Andy; Aunt Mabel (a friend of Mildred’s but not a blood relation); and the Brinkerhoffs—Uncle Russ and Aunt Millie (my mom’s sister), Peggy, and the twins, Jim and John.

Our places at the table were squeezed in—from side to side because of all the people, and in front of us as well, since food took up a good deal of the table’s real estate. Ham. Fried chicken. Turkey. Mashed potatoes, all creamy and buttered. Crescent rolls from a can that you popped open by whacking it on the counter. Jelly, and, be careful, that stuff that looked like jelly but definitely was not jelly—cranberry sauce. Home-grown green beans sautéed in bacon fat. Navy beans, baked beans, lima beans. Peas. Creamed corn. Applesauce. And desserts—German chocolate cake, carrot cake, Texas sheet cake, ice cream, cookies, fruit pies, pumpkin pie, pecan pie.

And there were foods that appeared at every celebration that no child would touch. The aforementioned jellied cranberry sauce was just one example. There was divinity, which was “candy” that looked like globs of hardened spackle infested with nuts. And there was green gelatin with pieces of fruit defying gravity inside. Some sort of pink fluff stuff with marshmallows on top that was called a salad but looked like a dessert and tasted like neither because little chunks of pineapple had mysteriously found their way into it. And another “salad” made from raisins and carrots and mayonnaise. A salad made from raisins and carrots and mayonnaise. This was a combination guaranteed to make any child retch.

And, oh yes, one more food item on the positive side: gherkins. Oh, how I loved gherkins! Cute little tiny sweet pickles on a cut-glass serving dish, warty and green and glistening and, oh, so flavorful! Sometimes they still had a bit of stem attached, but that was fine because it was completely edible too. Beside the gherkins sat a tiny little cup-shaped container—also made of cut glass—that held toothpicks. Not regular old run-of-the-mill toothpicks, no! This was a holiday! Each toothpick was adorned with a little colored plastic tassel on one end—one end for fancy, the other for function. In order to proceed, you would take a toothpick, stab a gherkin, use your fingers to remove the toothpick from the gherkin, and repeat the process as many times as you liked with more gherkins. Then, using the same toothpick, re-stab each gherkin on your plate before biting it off into three or four pieces—snap! snap! snap!—and eating each one separately, even though the entire pickle was small enough to consume in a single bite. This kept the piquant flavor from being too overwhelming—too much of a good thing all at once. And it was just so darn much fun!

Gherkins—tasty. Zingy. Fun. And the only reason the Lord put cucumbers on the earth, in my opinion.

Andy, Herman, and Hanny

Andy, whom I mentioned before, was my mom’s first cousin, and I know he was always a favorite of hers. (Some might rightly say the first cousins rank highest among family members from your peer group. They aren’t as annoying as siblings, and whenever you get together, you’re going to have fun—sometimes participating in activities you and your siblings would never have had the courage to undertake on your own.) I always liked Andy a lot, even though he was of my mom’s generation rather than mine. He was just a nice guy. He was small of stature, had a chesty laugh from constantly smoking cigarettes, wore interesting t-shirts, and was always interested in interesting things—cars, local rock bands, music, travel, photography, camping.

When I was very young, Andy and Aunt Mildred had a chihuahua named Herman, whose eyes bulged like stuffed olives. Like most chihuahuas, he was deeply loved by his owners and deeply reviled by everyone else. Scrappy little yappy, snappy, ill-tempered grouch.

Andy may have had other dogs after Herman was gone, but the one I remember best was Hanny. She was a mutt, medium-sized, brown, black, white, as good-natured and excitable and ready for fun as all the best dogs are. She was named after a local rock band that Andy was managing at the time, which meant her full name was “Hanny Hooker.” Andy had a t-shirt that said “Hanny Hooker” on it and was graced with the image, not of the canine Hanny, but of a woman who, I suspect, was more hooker than she was hanny.

Hanny enlivened each family gathering until Andy banished her outdoors or relegated her to the space under his chair. I remember seeing him and Aunt Mildred drive into the driveway as we watched out the windows. As they got out, someone would announce by means of a warning, “Yep, he brought Hanny!” At first we resented her as an interloper, but later she ingratiated herself to us as part of the family. A hyper, yappy part of the family that slobbered, but a part of the family nonetheless.

Andy and his mom and Hanny would come in the door—stomping off the snow, hugs all around, the dog yapping, and Andy greeting everyone in his own unique way—“Hello, ello, ello,” in a low and rather chesty voice, pulling his chin back into his neck as far as he could. “How’s everybody doin’?”

His Own Person

Andy was his own person, unlike anyone else in our conservative group. He wore dark aviator glasses. He wore his hair long, sometimes in a shag cut. He smoked constantly. For some reason I associate with him a type of ashtray common in the sixties—a shallow metal bowl for the ashes, a piece of metal curved like sine waves for the cigarettes, and a plaid bag-like base that was filled with BBs to give the thing stability. Perhaps he brought such a tray with him.

Ashtrays used to be ubiquitous. When my mom hosted card parties for ladies, she put an ashtray at each table. Some ashtrays were fancy, resting on a pedestal a couple of feet up from the floor. Some were crudely formed, made from clay by a child at school. Ashtrays were easy to make and useful for years. What do kids make with clay in art classes today? I have no idea.

Andy never married. Periodically when the family got together, he would have a male friend who was staying with him join us. His friends were accepted at family gatherings as they came and went.

Andy was a generous guy. For a while he owned an RV, which we dubbed “the Andy Van,” and occasionally we kids could play in it while the adults were inside talking and digesting. Andy even allowed our family to take it on a trip to West Virginia. It made things less stressful on Grandpa and Grandma Skaggs, whom we were visiting, for us to sleep in the RV rather than in their tiny home. Unfortunately, though, that trip was stressful for another reason—our entire family came down with the stomach flu after we got there. We were throwing up all over the place. The bug missed me until we had been there for a couple of days—I remember going up behind one of their little outbuildings all alone and heaving. And when we left—I assume we cut the visit short—the bug was hitting the grandparents too.

The Storm

Andy also purchased a primitive cabin somewhere in the wild woods of Ohio, and we had an overnight family gathering there once—my immediate family, Grandpa and Grandma Swartz, Andy and Aunt Mildred, and the Brinkerhoffs. It was an unexpectedly memorable high point of my childhood.

As we sat in the cabin that afternoon, it began to storm. Andy said he had a place he wanted us to go and see together, following paths through the woods. It may have been a dam relatively nearby—I really can’t remember at this point what the destination was. But we all agreed that we needed to wait till the storm abated before setting out—too dangerous to be going through the woods in that kind of weather.

So we waited. And waited. Apparently we didn’t wait very patiently, because at some point we decided to go ahead and go because the storm was clearly letting up.

Except it wasn’t letting up.

Off we started through the woods, Andy, Dad, my brothers, Uncle Russ, Jim and John, Peggy, and me, in the pouring rain. And, I guess because it was raining, we started to run. We ran and ran down slippery, muddy paths that were turning into creeks as we went. And the lightning kept flashing overhead followed immediately by crashes of thunder.

I remember splashing through water that covered the tops of my shoes and soaked the cuffs of my bellbottom jeans in the midst of wild lightning flashes that made me instinctively duck my head, and thinking, “You know, we could die. . . !”

It was thrilling!

Whatever it was we went to see, we eventually saw it and then began slogging our way back up the paths to the cabin. We arrived safely, completely soaked, absolutely filthy, and giddy for having experienced such an adventure. I don’t think we used this phrase back then, but in describing it now, all I can say is, “It was awesome!”

We dried off and had supper. I don’t think there was a TV, so we probably talked and played euchre until it was time to go to bed. Then seven of us headed out to the camper.

A Night in the Camper

Because the cabin was small and primitive, we had brought Grandma and Grandpa’s camper along so we would have enough sleeping space for everyone. (I think the Andy Van was a thing of the past by this point.) The camper must have slept seven, because Grandma and Grandpa shared it with the five Skaggses—plus our dog, Missy. (Missy was part chihuahua and had bulgy eyes rather like stuffed olives, but she was deeply loved by her owners.) Aunt Mildred and Andy and “the Brinks” slept in the cabin.

I was a kid, so I think I slept pretty well. And I’m sure I was exhausted from all the running. But I don’t think it was a very nice experience for the adults, with all of us squeezed like that into a little humid box that lacked a good cross-breeze. But, as nights always do, that night passed. The first thing that happened early the next morning was that Missy jumped off Keith’s bed and peed. A little dog who has held it all night can produce an amazing amount of liquid. The urine ran freely across the linoleum, which absorbed nothing, and it spread pretty widely throughout the camper.

The next thing that happened was that Grandpa swung his bare feet out of his bunk and onto the floor. I don’t recall exactly what he said, but maybe that’s because the words were unfamiliar to me. Suffice it to say, he was not pleased. I stayed in my upper bunk and remained real, real quiet while the adults cleaned the floor.

After that we all got dressed and went into the cabin, where Aunt Mildred was busily preparing breakfast. But it wasn’t the smell of bacon, sausage, and eggs that wafted our way. No, it was another smell—familiar, yet odd. . . .

There she stood by the stove with a great big iron skillet, frying up hot dogs, sizzling and smoking and split from end to end from the heat, for breakfast. To the kids this was odd but kind of funny. To my mom and grandma, the idea of eating fried hot dogs for breakfast was inconceivable. And nauseating.

Grandma to her sister: “Why, Mildred, what—?”

“Well, I got up this morning and realized we didn’t bring anything for breakfast, but we have plenty of hot dogs, so I just thought—”

“Ohhh.” Grandma’s emotions were always as easy to read on her face as Aunt Bee’s or Edith Bunker’s. “I don’t think I can do that!”

Somehow we made out. Maybe some people missed a meal, I’m not sure. And that’s the last event I recall from that weekend.

Passing Years

And life went on. I grew older, entered the teen years and soon was in college. It made me sad sometimes to see Aunt Mildred aging. Her sight got worse and worse until she was legally blind. She always retained her sense of humor, but she changed from a plump, matronly great-aunt into a rather gaunt old lady with skin hanging loose and a head that jutted forward from her shoulders.

But Andy was always there for her. By this point he was still managing rock bands, but he also got into videography and photography, utilizing lots of expensive equipment, some of which was stored in their previously mysterious basement.

I married at the end of 1983. Siblings and cousins married, babies were born, and responsibilities for big family holiday celebrations now fell to the next generation, my mom and her sister. Hanny Hooker no longer joined us, but Aunt Mildred and Andy still came—until they got too sick to come anymore. Because they were both sick. She was eighty-eight. He was fifty-three.

I was living miles away from Ohio at this point, married for more than ten years and the father of three children, so I do not recall the event, but my family research tells me that Mildred Dale Green Apperson, born on May 27, 1905, passed away on March 2, 1994. I’m not sure I’ve eaten a gherkin since.

Her only child, Andy Dale Apperson, born September 12, 1940, passed away on July 9, 1994. His complete obituary as printed in the newspaper read as follows:

Andy D. Apperson, 53, of 258 W. Main St. died Saturday at his home after a long illness.

He was born Sept. 12, 1940, in Ashland to Herschel C. and Mildred Green Apperson, both now deceased, and lived in Ashland County all his life.

Mr. Apperson worked in rock video production and formerly managed rock bands. He also was a photographer with the Ashland Police Department.

He is survived by his aunt, Leta Swartz, and a cousin, Jan Skaggs, both of Fredericksburg.

There will be no funeral services.

Heyl Funeral Home is handling arrangements.

I stated earlier that Andy was his own person. That was true when it came to his views on religion as well. When I was a child, everyone in the family called himself or herself a Christian of some stripe—everyone but Andy. My mom, who loved him dearly, knew this and was burdened for his soul. She knew he was dying, and she knew she had to talk to him about eternity.

Mom later told me that when she went to see him, he was blind and very, very sick. His immune system had shut down. “Andy,” she said, not without emotion, “I just have to ask you whether you have a relationship with the Lord.”

“No, Janny, I’m sorry,” he replied, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t believe. I just can’t.”

I’m glad he was in his own home when he died, with friends around who cared for him. His life hadn’t always been easy. My mom told me Andy had gotten beaten up on more than one occasion, once even ending up in the hospital. But I was very young, and I couldn’t relate to such statements. It was as though, because I couldn’t imagine a grown-up getting beaten up, it never really happened. But it did. I received the following recently from one of my brothers.

Did I ever tell you about . . . Rick [not his real name], who came to [a family event] and saw Andy filming. Next time I saw Rick he brought Andy up. I told him that he is my mom’s cousin, then Rick went on to proudly tell me how he and his buddies would beat Andy up while they were in college. Rick is a professing Christian. It was my first real eye-opener about how not all people with a Christian world view really have a handle on it like Mom and Dad taught us with Andy. . . . I believe that Rick and his buddies were the ones who put Andy in the hospital.

I never realized, actually until this evening, when rereading Andy’s obituary, that he “was a photographer with the Ashland Police Department.” I never knew that.

“The Single Most Important Figure”

I never knew much about what Andy did for a living. My mom told me she heard him say once, when asked what he did, “I manage my mother’s finances.” I am sure that was true, but I always thought that that was code for “I don’t really have a job; I live off my mom’s money.” That was not the case.

We kids always turned up our noses at the idea, too, that he “managed rock bands.” Yeah, rock bands from Ashland, Ohio—some big names there, you betcha! But I learned something else about Andy when researching his life for this memoir. I learned it from a website called “The Buckeye Beat,” “the online living history of Ohio’s amazing popular musical culture of the years 1950 to 1979 and beyond” (buckeyebeat.com), which says,

Andy Apperson may well be the single most important figure in the Ohio mid 60s rock-n-roll scene. Among Andy’s accomplishments were:

·       Founder and owner of the Hilltop and Prism label

·       Manager of the Music Explosion and the Muffets

·       Associated with the Ohio Express, Measles, and numerous other rock-n-roll bands

The site goes on to call my first-cousin-once-removed Andy Apperson “Ohio’s answer to Brian Epstein.” Brian Epstein managed the Beatles.

An excerpt from an email I received from the editor of Buckeye Beat says,

We here at Buckeye Beat consider him a legend in Ohio music. . . . I got the chance to talk with him a couple times in 1993/4 and barely scratched the surface of what he did in his nearly 20 years of working in the music industry. It’s my understanding that as a teenager in Ashland he wanted to be a musician but that didn’t work out so he started Hilltop records to record the band he knew, the Collegians. He ran Hilltop for a few years, then moved to Dayton where he bought into Prism records from Dayton. After a couple years there he moved back to Ashland where he brought the Music Explosion and Ohio Express (then still known as Sir Timothy and the Royals) to NYC and the rest is history.

Have you ever heard of the Music Explosion? “The Music Explosion was an American garage rock band from Mansfield, Ohio. . . . The quintet is best known for their number two hit, ‘Little Bit O’ Soul,’ that received gold record status by the RIAA” (Wikipedia).

Have you ever heard of the Ohio Express? It was “an American bubblegum pop band formed in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1967.” They had their biggest hit with “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” (“Yummy, yummy, yummy, I’ve got love in my tummy”—remember it?) “The song became an international smash hit, peaking at #4 US, #5 UK, #5 Ireland, #7 Australia and #1 Canada. Two months after its issue it had sold over one million copies, and was granted gold disc status by the R.I.A.A. in June 1968” (Wikipedia).

Before I started writing this memoir, I knew a number of things about my first-cousin-once-removed Andy Apperson. He was an individual. He was an entrepreneur. He was generous. He was a good son. Now I know one more thing. He was humble.

Andy Apperson, early 1940s

Andy Apperson, 1940s

Andy, 1950, 10 years old

First cousins, lifelong friends—Mom (the bobby-soxer!) and Andy, 1950s

Mom and Andy, 1980s (?)

Great-Aunt Mildred and Andy, early 1990s

Copyright 2022 Steven N. Skaggs.

All family photos courtesy of Eric Skaggs. Check out his excellent family history blog “Stories from Skagend.”