Kith & Kin

My younger brother,* Eric, has always had a fascination with audio and video technology. I remember, when he was an RTV major in college, I played piano for a brief radio program he had put together for a class project. It had to contain certain elements, one of which was a musical number. He knew a college guy who played the accordion, and the guy agreed to play for the program. Eric made sure we all knew that this was to be done like live radio, so timings had to be perfect. And we would do it only once while his teacher, in the booth with him, looked on severely—just to screw the stress up one more little notch. (Come to think of it, most teachers looked severe back in the 1980s.) Then Eric gave us directions, and his speech went something like this: One of the first things to ensure a good performance is strict attention to the director. I’ll keep my directions simple…. If I make a slashing motion across my throat, it means “cut the scene short.” If I make a revolving motion wi...

My cousin Peggy is three years older than I am. We have been close ever since we were very small children and she dressed me up in little girl clothes like I was one of her dolls. As far as I know, only one photo exists of me thusly attired, which is one more photo than I wish there were of me thusly attired. I once told my mother that when I grew up, I wanted to marry Peggy. Grandma Swartz, standing nearby, reacted in typical Grandma Swartz style. “Oh, Stevie, you can’t marry your first cousin! Your children will be deformed! They won’t be right!” Mom’s wise reply: “For heaven’s sake, Mom, he’s only five years old! He’s not really going to marry her!” Why our children would be deformed was a mystery to me, but it didn’t really matter in the long run because Peg and I never married each other anyway. Peggy and I got to discussing birthdays once when we were kids, and we came to realize that I was born on September 22, and she was born on December 22. “We were both born on the...

Fredericksburg, Ohio, 2010. It was the mid-1970s. My first cousin Peggy and I were both teens, and we were standing together at the top of The Cliff. The Cliff bordered my grandparents’ property and overlooked a portion of the village of Fredericksburg. Someone once told me it was about 140 feet high, but in my memory it seems much higher than that. It was cluttered with trees of various girths and scrubby weeds and rock outcroppings all the way down, and its base disappeared into the shallow water of Salt Creek. Mom and Dad and the grandparents had one rule about the cliff: Stay Away From It! So, being compliant children (as all children were in the 1970s), we obeyed. Until we got somewhere they couldn’t see us. We kids had a secret hideaway called “the Cliff House.” It was really just a little indentation in the rocky cliffside that you got to by holding on to a small tree as you went over the edge and stepped into the indentation. Its floor was maybe eight feet from the edge...

Weston Wills and Lorena Oretha (aka “Buddy”) Skaggs , my paternal grandparents, lived in Edmond, an unincorporated community southeast of Charleston, West Virginia. Grandpa was a godly man, not without a sense of humor, and he was born on August 29, 1901. In another blog post I referred to my Grandpa Skaggs’s “tough, rangy body battered by years of hard labor in the West Virginia coal mines.” That’s actually a pretty good description. He was tall and thin and bony. He had had a hard life, as many men did in those days, working in the coal mines at a job that risked his life every day. Somewhere along the way he lost his entire pinky finger and part of his index finger on his right hand. He ended up with black lung and cancer (which resulted in the removal of one of his eyes), so the mines really did eventually kill him. Grandpa worked for seven different coal companies between 1928 and 1960. Imagine working a job where you breathe in black carbon powder every day all day long, down...

Mom (Jan Skaggs) looking young, slim, and attractive. Late 1950s? As I go through the photos in this album and reproduce them here, I am so thankful she kept the album and labeled many of the photos with names and dates! Keith, Dad, and me on Dad’s Schwinn, June 1965. I remember riding the bike this way. It was always a treat to go riding with Dad—and a little scary, as I balanced on that bar. And uncomfortable too! We would ride to downtown Fredericksburg, crossing railroad tracks on the way — bumpity bumpity bump, hold on tight! I assume this is the Cleveland Airport, June 1965. No one was hijacking or blowing up planes yet, so security was quite lax. It was fun (and loud!) to watch them take off and land. L to R: Steve, Keith, Dad. My first cousin Jill Skaggs, daughter of Dad’s brother Leo and his wife, Bonnie. What a cutie! Two more first cousins, Eddie and Kathy, son and daughter of Dad’s brother Eddie and his wife, Shirley. I wish I could have known my Skaggs cousins better growi...