Elizabeth Baden, My Grandmother

By Tom Parker

 

What were they like? 

 

As I look at the photographs on this family history site, some of the photographs connect with memories of the actual people and I remember the individuals as vividly as if they were still living.  Some cause me to feel frustrated.  For example, when I see the photographs of Jim Baden, my grandfather, I can’t hear a voice in my memories.  I don’t have any sense of his personality except that which comes through others’ stories.

 

My mother tells me that Granddad was thrilled to have a grandson – he was 66 when I was born.  He took photos of me playing in an old raft converted to a swimming pool behind his house.  Mom told me that, when our family came to spend time at his house (which was often because we lived in the same neighborhood) he would come into the room when she was nursing me and beam with affection.  She said that was a side of him she didn’t see too often, because he tended to be quiet and reserved.  She also said that she was embarrassed to have someone watch her breast-feed her baby, but she didn’t dare object to her father’s presence.

 

Granddad died when I was just over a year old, in the days when there were no home videos, so I’ll never know what his smile looked like, or what his voice sounded like.  Then I imagine my own descendants reading these pages and thinking the same thing about people I knew well.  So I decided to write about my grandmother, to try to give a sense of what she was like as a person.

 

I knew Elizabeth Baden very well from my birth in 1947 until she died in 1972.  She wasn’t someone I just visited occasionally – for most of my life we lived in the same city and saw each other at least every week.  At the end of her life she came to live with my mother, so we even lived in the same house at times.  And today, many years after her death, I can picture her and hear her voice as if it were yesterday.  She was one of the most important people in my life.

 

Probably my earliest memory is of me standing on the corner of Forrester Street and Nichols Avenue, looking down the sidewalk at a chimney.  My mother, pushing the baby carriage that held my newborn brother, was telling me that the chimney was all that was left of the old house where Grandma and Granddad had lived since 1922.  My grandfather had been dead for two years; the house was being torn down to make way for new row houses and apartments.   Grandma would be living in downtown Washington now, at the Kenesaw Apartment House, and soon we would move to McLean, Virginia, to a new house built just for us.

 

I remember well the trip to Grandma’s apartment from McLean.  It was a semi-rural drive in the early 50’s, down Old Dominion Road and over Chain Bridge.  Grandma’s apartment was reached by an elevator framed by an elaborate iron and brass cage, with an actual person as an operator!  They had to line the elevator up with the floor by hand and sometimes it took a couple of tries as the operator’s hand moved a large rotary control.  From the elevator you turned right and shoes would click on the terrazzo floor; we walked past the doors of other apartments, each with a transom overhead, all the way down the hall to Grandma’s door at the end. 

 

One time we were invited to dinner, and Grandma had reserved the Kenesaw’s private dining room since Uncle Tom and his family were in town.  Mom told us to be careful, as Uncle Tom was quite a character and he would probably play some jokes on us, like putting a buzzer on someone’s chair, or putting a squeeze control under the tablecloth which would make a plate move up and down!  She said that in High School Uncle Tom drove a red, white and blue Model T and played in swing bands.  I was named after him.

 

After leaving Grandma’s we would drive home in the dark; I was fascinated by cars and could tell the brand of each car as it approached by the way the headlights looked.  My brother would usually fall asleep in the back seat before we got home.

 

After a couple of years we moved to California.  It was late at night, and our suitcases were lined up inside the door of Grandma’s apartment, in front of the glass display case that held her miniature statues and other souvenirs.  I had my own brand new suitcase, dark green with golden letters that said “Tommy Parker.”  We were going to Union Station, where we would catch a train to Chicago, and then transfer to the Super Chief, which would take us to San Diego, where my father had a new job.

 

Unfortunately, my parents’ marriage was not going well, and after a disastrous year in California we came home.  Mommy had a divorce, and Daddy would stay in San Diego.  At this time Grandma Baden really began to play a big role in my life, because we didn’t have a place to live and we stayed at her apartment while Mom and Grandma looked.  The house in McLean had to be sold; we couldn’t afford it any more. 

 

Living at Grandma’s place downtown was very different from anything I had experienced.  The building was between 16^th Street and Mount Pleasant Street, two busy thoroughfares with streetcar lines.  The sound of the streetcar bells and the noise of the traffic came through the open windows until late at night; it was summer and there was no air conditioning.  I didn’t mind; I thought the sounds were exciting.  From Grandma’s front window you could see the big statue of Francis Asbury on his horse.  From another window you could see the outline of Washington National Cathedral.  At that time only the Great Choir had been built.  Grandma told us that she gave money to help build the Cathedral and that she had seen it rise from its foundations during her lifetime.  The bishop was a man named Angus Dun.  But at our Church they said another name.  Mom told us that Grandma was an Episcopalian, while we were Catholics.  We walked across the street to Mass on Sunday at Sacred Heart, where the pastor was a very old man who had to be helped up the steps to the altar, and someone had to help him hold up the chalice. 

 

Every day at 5:00 PM Grandma liked to read the Evening Star, and she would send me downstairs to the drugstore on the corner, in the basement of the apartment building, with a dime to get her copy.  I had to examine the stack of papers by the counter, to make sure that I got the paper that had the red stripe down the side:  that meant that it was the Final Edition with the day’s latest news.  When I got back upstairs she would let me spread the newspaper out on the floor and read the comic section.

 

Grandma was 73 years old when we came to live with her.  She had raised three children of her own and had also helped looked after quite a few others when relatives came to stay at 4440, her big country house.  But in those days she had help and a lot of room.  Now, in 1956, she had two small children underfoot in much closer quarters.  The apartment, which had been subdivided from a much larger space, didn’t even have a kitchen as such, but only a small room with a hotplate and refrigerator. 

 

Some might remember their grandmother presiding over a large stove, bringing pots of pasta or trays of cookies to the table.  I’m sure Grandma knew her way around a kitchen, but at her country house she didn’t cook – she had a cook.  I don’t remember much about meals were like while we stayed with her, but I remember well the apartment building’s Dining Room, where Grandma had her own special waiter who always attended us – his name was “Star” and he owned his own set of silverware for serving his regulars. 

 

Grandma was like a queen.  Wherever she went, doors were opened for her and voices greeted her with “How do you do, Mrs. Baden?”  She had arthritis and walked stiffly, but she would mount the steps to a streetcar or bus as if she were ascending a carriage.  She had a green and white Buick Roadmaster with the four portholes in the sides of the hood, and parked it out on Mount Pleasant Street, but after a while she decided to stop driving a car and gave it to Uncle Tom. 

 

She insisted on perfect manners and always dressed and carried herself quite formally.  She had a seemingly endless supply of lady friends of the same age, each of whom we had to greet with “How do you do, Mrs. Jones?  Miss McCready?  Mrs. Portmann?”  

 

In the evenings we furnished our own entertainment.  Grandma didn’t have a television at the time.  Grandma taught us to play Canasta, a card game that was wildly popular in the 50’s, and we also played Monopoly.  Grandma was absolutely unbeatable at these games and didn’t believe in politely losing to children.  She also knew many elaborate versions of solitaire, and since she seemed to have a boundless supply of decks of cards, we all learned them too.  When we weren't playing cards I used the many decks to build houses with them.

 

In the fall of 1956 we moved to Alexandria, Virginia and Grandma was able to resume a more sedate lifestyle.  We rented a townhouse at 1411 Woodbine Street, a few blocks from Blessed Sacrament Church and School.  Grandma’s apartment was not far away; almost every Sunday we would take the new blue and white Pontiac down Quaker Lane to Shirley Highway, across Memorial Bridge to Rock Creek Parkway, through the Park and the Zoo with its ford creek crossing to Irving Street and up the steep hill to Mount Pleasant and the Kenesaw. 

 

Grandma was very determined that we would learn proper manners and so we often had Sunday dinner out, usually at a Hot Shoppes where sit-down dining and proper place settings were combined with moderate prices.  I would take her coat – a remarkable fur which actually had little fox heads on it – and hang it up, after holding her chair in the approved manner.  While waiting for our meals we could read Table Talk; I was getting much too old to draw on the paper place mats.

 

And so our family life continued.  Mom would call Grandma every day at 5:30 PM, and often I would be asked to dial her number and would talk to her first.  We remained in close contact until I left for boarding school in 1960, and I saw her frequently when I was home for the summer or for vacations during the school year.

 

Although I don’t remember her having a TV in her first apartment, she became an avid watcher in later years.  When she was with us at our house, she decided what we would watch.  I was a fan of folk music, and later of rock’n’roll, and she liked Lawrence Welk.  We seldom missed Mr. Welk’s show, and Grandma always remarked that the musicians looked so nice and clean-cut.  She was also a baseball fan. 

 

When I went to high school at St. John Vianney Seminary in Richmond, I had studied piano for a few years, so I was made the school organist.  I immediately fell in love with the instrument, especially after Grandma took us to Washington Cathedral where Paul Callaway was the organist of a large instrument that was nothing like the little Hammond at our parish.  When I wanted to take lessons during the summer, she not only encouraged it but offered to pay the cost, and got a recommendation for a teacher at a church downtown near her apartment, Mr. Louis Potter of Calvary Methodist on Columbia Road.  Mr. Potter was involved in the early days of the American Guild of Organists in Washington and is still remembered today.  I would take the bus and trolley from Alexandria to her apartment, where I would often have lunch with her before going over to Calvary for my lesson.  Grandma often made toast with melted cheese.

 

As the 60’s went on, the neighborhood around the Kenesaw deteriorated.  Grandma moved further uptown to a new apartment at Connecticut Avenue and Livingston Streets in a building called The Brittany.  Finally, when she was 85, she had to admit that it was too difficult for her to live on her own any more and moved in with my mother in Alexandria.  By then we had a Cape Cod house on Crestwood Drive, and Grandma took the large bedroom on the first floor.

 

I helped her pack her things and move, a difficult task for anybody.  I couldn’t help but laugh at the variety of antique pharmaceuticals she had collected.  Some bottles still had my grandfather’s name on them.  Of course she didn’t want to throw anything away.  I showed her a bottle that said “Goose Grease” and jokingly asked if she still needed that – she responded, “Oh no, don’t throw that away, that’s my goose grease.” 

 

One remedy that she used as long as I knew her was Dr. Tichenor’s Lotion.  She would put it on her legs to ease her arthritis pain.  She said that Aunt Anne used to get it for her somewhere as it wasn’t generally available.  From the looks of the bottle I wondered if it was some kind of bootleg potion.  When Grandma was over at our house and would use it, my mother’s cat would immediately appear and start purring and rubbing her legs.  To get the cat to leave Grandma alone, we had to put some of the Dr. Tichenor’s on a ball of cloth and let the cat play with it.  The cat would roll around the floor tossing the cloth into the air and acting as if he were drunk.

 

As I was writing this, I decided to Google the name to see if anybody else had written about this strange stuff.  It seems that Dr. Tichenor’s is quite well known; invented as an antiseptic, it is now called a mouthwash but has been used as a remedy for stage fright (no doubt it has a high alcohol content) and supposedly was a favorite skin cleanser for troops in the middle east who were unable to take showers. 

 

Grandma died in 1972 after being in declining health for a long time.  She had a condition where her bone marrow was no longer able to produce red cells, and she had to be taken to the hospital for transfusions.  This became increasingly painful for her as her frailty increased.  Her doctor, a kind woman name Patience DesPrez, worked with the family to spare Grandma the experience of ending her days in a hospital, and our adopted "Aunt" Anne MacNeill, a registered nurse came to stay with us to help care for her.  She died in the front bedroom of 1709 Crestwood Drive just after her 89th birthday.  She was buried in the family plot at Cedar Hill Cemetery after services at her beloved St. Margaret's Episcopal Church on Connecticut Avenue in Washington.