A few years ago I did a search on my dad’s name and found an old auction for V-Mail (“Greetings from Britain”) from Private Ralph Schirf. I hadn’t known about the auction, long since over, in time to bid. Here are the clues that it’s from my dad:
Ralph Schirf is a unique name. Schirf is rare, and we’re all related. Ralph Schirf is one of a kind.
He was from the Altoona, Pennsylvania, area.
He served as a private in the Army Air Forces during WWII in England (artillery, I believe, although he didn’t talk about it). He was honorably discharged as a corporal.
That’s his block printing.
His beloved sister Marjorie married a Way (Ellis G. in the obituary of one of their children).
He once signed a birthday card to me “Father Ralph.” It’s not a stretch to imagine him signing “Brother Ralph” to his sister.
I would love if the buyer found this post and offered to sell me Dad’s V-Mail, but in lieu of the physical pieces I’ll have to be content with small digital photos.
The long viewBrother RalphSent from Brother Ralph to his sister in Juanita, AltoonaCloseup of the address and date
USPS PDF about the history and process of sending V-Mail.
My dad:
Dad in the Army Air Forces, year unknown. He served in Hawaii before WWII, was honorably discharged, and re-enlisted after Pearl Harbor. His youngest sister, Marietta, also served.
And his grave in Bellwood, Pennsylvania, outside Altoona:
Dad’s marker at Logan Valley Cemetery in Antis Township/Bellwood
Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish imaginings from memories. I’m glad of this. It pleases me that I don’t know whether a strongly felt recollection is only a blip of the brain that never happened.
In a variation of a recurring dream, I’d traveled so far up Route 20 that I’d found where it ended in one or more trails leading into the woods. Down one trail lay the home of family friends. It was so remote that we had rarely visited them. Whenever we left, knowing that we would not return for a long time, the place had seemed to disappear into the woods and out of sight, like a sylvan Brigadoon. To go there with my parents had been a rare treat; to return there as an adult would be a thrill.
As I stood at the head of the path, I could recall how marvelous this place had made me feel, with its unreal quiet and timeless, mythical serenity. I wondered why we had not come here more often, although I knew that you can visit such a place only on its terms.
I couldn’t remember any details, but I could sense them just beyond my comprehension and reach. I was happy that I was about to arrive, but I knew that I never would.
When I woke up, I realized there was no such place and never had been. But my memories of it are powerful, and I long to experience those feelings again.
I must have seen “The Bewitchin’ Pool” on The Twilight Zone at an impressionable age because to me it’s one of the most memorable episodes of the series, despite its flaws. Imagine — emerging from an ordinary suburban swimming pool into a bucolic world similar to but better than your own. The pool was my first experience with a portal to another dimension, place, or time, a concept notably brought to TV screens by Harlan Ellison in his Star Trek script, “City on the Edge of Forever” and repeated to lesser effect in numerous episodes of the franchise. In “Contagion,” Picard discovers the “masters of air and darkness” indeed.
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are, of course, quintessential stories of such portals. Life may not be better down the rabbit hole or on the other side of the mirror, but the rules seem to be different, the unexpected becomes the norm, and life is truly a game. As a child of imagination, Alice is confused by but accepting of the contradictions and anomalies she finds. Why explore another dimension if it’s going to be just like yours?
Death opens one of these portals. “Break on Through (to the Other Side)” seems to be a call to action, suggesting we try the portal that’s beyond the valley of the shadow of death.
Strangely, all of this brings me to some architectural, structural, or location oddities that have evoked a feeling of the other side in me. Even though portals probably don’t exist, I sense that these places can fire the imagination’s ability to discover one.
The first I can recall only vaguely — curtains, perhaps beaded, through which you passed from one dim room into another at my aunt’s house. As a very small child, I half-expected something wondrous on the other side of the curtain, a different type of place, a monster, a marvel of some kind. Instead, I always found the same darkened room with the same old-fashioned furniture, but that didn’t mean the other dimension wasn’t lurking in the dim light, always just beyond my physical or mental reach.
Later, after she was widowed, her older sister moved into a first-floor apartment in a large converted house near the old bridge over the train tracks in Bellwood. Of interest to my immediate family was that it was the same apartment my maternal grandfather had lived in toward the end of his life (he died when I was two as the last of my grandparents).
What fascinated me was something entirely different. My aunt’s bedroom and living room were on one side of the public hallway leading to the stairs, while her kitchen was up and across the hall, next to the building’s main door. In the morning, we’d get up, put on robes or dress (not me), leave the living room, lock the door behind us, walk across and up the hall, unlock the quaint kitchen (probably old-fashioned even for those days), and have our breakfast in the light streaming in from the window. Afterward, we’d reverse our route, this time locking the kitchen and unlocking the living room, where the heavy drapes were drawn and the light didn’t penetrate. With the indescribably lonely sound of train whistles during the night, the gloom of the living quarters (folks of my parent’s generation or at least acquaintance seemed determined to keep the light out), and the strangeness of living on two sides of a public hallway, I felt like I had landed temporarily in a very different world. Eventually the building was condemned and torn down, and more than 30 years have passed since I listened to the forlorn train whistles in the night.
The first aunt, with the beaded curtains, moved to the second floor of a house in Altoona. I didn’t spend much time there and stayed overnight only a few times. To get to her part of the house, you walked up a steep, straight, narrow staircase. The steps were so deep that sometimes I misjudged them and tripped up the stairs. The apartment itself was small and overcrowded, with stuff piled everywhere — a trait our branch of the Schirf family shares. Entering the vintage kitchen was like stepping back in time, accented by some of my aunt’s additions. One was a table fan from perhaps the 1940s with only a few widely spaced wires covering the blades, the kind of awful, easily remedied design that makes me wonder what the manufacturer was thinking. I avoided that fan because I would be the most likely to fall into it and lose some fingers if not a hand.
This place had two wonderful features. The first was a door in a wall. There was something odd about it that I can’t quite remember. The door may have had steps leading to it, or it may not have been flush with the floor. Perhaps the stairs up began immediately on the other side, which I would not have had the opportunity to see anywhere else. I wish I could remember more, but I never went up the stairs or saw the attic they led to. All I knew about it is what my aunt told me — it was hot and occasionally visited or occupied by bats.
The other feature was a second bedroom off my aunt’s bedroom. To get to this room, you had to step down into a different house, a house with a different look, smell, and feel. My aunt’s visitors, like her younger sister, slept in it, and she stored sewing machines and similar paraphernalia in it. I stayed in it once or twice. It had its disadvantages; for example, if you had to visit the bathroom in the wee hours, you had to avoid tripping on the step (who would remember in the middle of the night to step up or down to pass from room to room?), and you had to make an effort to get by my aunt’s bed on the outgoing and return trips without tripping over her or waking her up. But there was something about the room I loved — it was dark and close, although there were sheer white curtains over the window near the door. It was separate. On one side of the door was my aunt and her downstairs neighbor. On the other side, I was alone in this room, with access only to it and to my aunt’s house. It felt like a different world, one that wasn’t quite in sync with her ordinary world next door. Even the street out the window wore an odd aura from this angle compared to the same street as seen from my aunt’s window. It was like being in a different place at a slightly different time — the same, but not the same.
As she aged, we worried about my aunt because of the steep stairs and the likelihood that someday she would misstep and fall down them. Ironically, when she did fall and break her hip, it was not on her stairs but on a step off the sidewalk at her next-door neighbor’s house. None of us would have foreseen that. At some point, both houses were slated to be torn down, and she moved into the first-floor apartment of a newer house with no interesting features except perhaps the cellar, which, like the attic before, I didn’t see.
The Pepperland
All this brings me to a building in Hyde Park that I’ve seen hundreds of times, perhaps, but never noticed or thought much about. Located at 57th Street and Lake Park Avenue, it’s secured now as a vacant building. I hope this doesn’t mean it’s doomed to be torn down. It’s Gothic and gloomy, and even more forbidding and creepy now with metal plates securing the exterior doors and first-floor windows.
One day in passing I noticed for the first time how close the second-story tower room is to the rail overpass, which set me to thinking about how strange it would be to look out over the tracks and to see the trees rooted in the ground at that level, the clouds and rooftops cut off by the lines of the tracks or platforms, and a world floating above a world — all a hand’s breadth away. While they lay sleeping, Metra carried home tired office workers and exuberant revelers and freight trains on the far track moved untold tons of goods from hither to yon — all elevated, at second-story eye level, yards away. Did the people in that room feel as well as hear the power of the freight trains as well as the breezier flight of the more frequent Metra trains? Did anyone who lived there see, hear, feel, and ride trains in their dreams? Did they feel the closeness of their connection to distant places?
Age and experience weaken the imagination, and portals to another dimension don’t open to me and share their secrets as often or as readily as they once did. That’s why I’m so happy that this strange building has, and why I hope it remains here at least a little longer. Today’s architects, “starchitects,” designers, and builders, with their unfailing eye for the contemporary, cold, colorless, and soulless, not only no longer have the keys to the portal; they’re no longer aware of its existence in their utilitarian, ambitious, glory-driven brains.
Update: The building is called the Pepperland, and it’s back to being an apartment building, or the “Frisbee Frat.”
Update 2: Other views of the Pepperland from Metra:
One day I noticed that my mother’s hair was straight and that she had bangs. With her hair so different, she didn’t look like my mom.
“When was the last time you had your hair cut?” I asked, sounding more insensitive than I intended. “Or done?”
“Years ago,” she said ruefully.
I realized that I was supposed to understand more than she said, and that is how I learned that she was ill. She did not even feel like having her hair taken care of or that she should spend time or money on it.
“Let’s go across the street,” I said, getting up to look for my dad.
“That place [salon] is long gone,” my mother reminded me.
When had so much changed? I kept looking for my dad so we would both know that we had to take her to a salon in town on Saturday. She would not have let her hair go unless the situation were really bad, and if she wasn’t in denial, I was. Had my dad not noticed, or had he simply not told me?
Next, I was outside looking at the trailer with someone and trying to explain the scene of devastation around it, as the woods and everything else had been razed for development. I could find nothing that was familiar.
“The trailer was sold to that woman,” I said, pointing to a second trailer to the southeast, parked too close to ours. I wondered at the proximity.
I was trying to explain what had been there before when our trailer pulled out. “Where is he going?” I asked rhetorically. I was thinking, “How can he drive with all that stuff in there?” as I pictured everything on the shelves crashing, and then pictured it not crashing by magic. I didn’t question how the trailer itself had become self-motored.
My dad returned five or ten minutes later, although somehow I missed him backing the trailer into the spot. “Where did you go?” I asked him. “Park Ridge,” he said. “On I55.” He could not have gone so far and returned in five or ten minutes, and I remained mystified by his journey, whether he’d completed it, and how it came to be in Illinois.
I had been looking at two gouged trenches behind the trailer, one deep, gray, and ugly like a scar, the other shallow and dark brown like a garden furrow. I tried to explain to my companion that one or the other — I couldn’t be sure which — marked the spot where our lilacs had grown, the lilacs that in reality had just started to flower when my dad moved away in 1987. The devastation and strangeness around me were depressing, but the sight of that scarred earth where so much greenery had thrived was killing me.
My indecision over which trench prevented my companion from knowing how upset I was. Or so I thought.
Virgil and I were at a carnival and volunteered for an act. We were placed inside a structure like a water tower. It was strange because we did nothing, and no one could see us.
Suddenly there was a light and a mechanical voice calling, “Clear!” When the excitement was over, Virgil had disappeared, and the panel to the outside wouldn’t open. I understood that something was about to happen in the tower that was dangerous or life threatening. I saw a woman at some controls and knew her to be a robot. I asked her what was going to happen.
“The chamber is about to be flooded with [unrecognizable chemical-sounding name beginning with a ‘t’],” she said.
I asked if it were harmful, and she answered, “It will burn your lungs and sting your eyes, but it will not kill you. Do not breathe it.”
“How long will it last?”
“Several minutes.”
“But I cannot not breathe for several minutes.”
She shrugged subtly and left as she had entered — mysteriously.
I banged the door with my fists, but this only hurt my hands and made little noise, and there was no answer. I took off a walking show and slammed it against the door repeatedly. It made a little more noise, but no one came, and although I had a sickening sense that the robot woman had lied about the gas, I realized that all I could do was to see what happened.
I don’t remember the gas, except that I took her advice and breathed as little in as possible. It burned and stung a little, but not remarkably.
The robot woman returned finally and this time let me out. I had a flash of insight that I had been punished for being too slow to grasp the meaning of the “Clear!” warning and how to act upon it.
It also flashed on me that the robot woman hated me, so I asked her point blank. As she fiddled with the controls, she said, “I liked you well enough at first.”
I continued to look at her questioningly.
“The more you talked and the more you worried, the less I liked you,” she said both coldly and passionately. I tried to recall the conversation and what had turned her to hatred, but couldn’t remember meeting her. I senses that she hated my emotions and my honesty about them.
I got out and saw her talking to her robot brother. I couldn’t hear their words, but I could hear in my mind the one important thought that I needed to act on. “She seems to be all right; wait until next week’s newspaper comes out with the photo of her with Clark Kent.” But I was not Lois Lane, and I knew of no such sexually incriminating photo. I knew, however, that they could produce one if they wished, and that the public would accept a fake as real even knowing the ease with which it can be done. I didn’t know what to do.
I noticed that when I breathed hard (with the emotional excitement), a fog came out of my mouth and enveloped people and things in its path in what seemed to be a harmless cloud. I experimented to make sure that it was really my actions and not coincidence. I confirmed that I was the cause.
I had a creepy sensation that the robot siblings were watching my every move and would be able to hear my every word if I spoke. At the same time, I was certain that they did not know that I had “overheard” them and that I was producing the odd fogs and clouds. To test this, I followed the robot man discreetly and enveloped his head and sometimes his followers in a cloud. I sensed his conviction that this was his own doing.
Satisfied with my tests, I sought help about the newspaper threat from — Virgil? Clark Kent? (I didn’t know him.) Someone else? I don’t know; I thought I talked to someone, although I’m not sure how I evaded the knowing eyes and ears of the robot siblings (perhaps the clouds I produced hid us?). I do not know if the fabricated photo was published. Most important to me, I do not know why they hated me and my honest emotions so.
Before we knew quite what was happening and could stop him, my elderly father had climbed up onto a chair to get something out of a kitchen cabinet. The chair tipped over, but all that fell was a clear glass or stein, decorated with predominantly blue winter scenes and three dimensional snow like some of glass ornaments at the Christkindlmarket. We had never seen it before, but miraculously it seemed to be intact. Where was Dad?
I noticed then that the stein had broken into three unevenly sized pieces whose edges were polished instead of having the cloudy look of broken glass edges. I was nearly hysterical because I was afraid for Dad and somehow knew that he was part of the glass. We could restore him if only we knew how.
I appealed to Virgil, but couldn’t tell if he understood me. I went outside into the snowy night to find help, perhaps from the skies or wind or trees.
I was in the old back yard at home and looked up to see a very thin, sprawling tree crown to my right. When I traced its origins against the bright sky downwards, the pencil-thin trunk actually started to my left behind the neighbor’s trailer — the crown was that high. Perched on this wispy, overhanging crown were two large birds I identified as little blue herons. They seemed to be harassing a smaller bird, but when they all flew off with the larger seemingly in pursuit of the smaller, I realized it was likely to be their offspring.
Between the yard and the woods, the lilac bushes had been replaced by a mesh fence, 8–10 feet in height, with white blankets thrown over the black mesh (for privacy?) I looked underneath or through somehow and found a sleeping bag or blankets on the ground, along with some other things that made it appear to be a homeless person’s camp. I must have gotten through the fence somehow because I walked on the bag/blankets, which seemed to be the only way to ascertain that no one was there. I left but turned around and saw something very small moving under the blanket. I wondered what it could be; later when half a wake I thought it must have been an animal. But I still doubted it.
Now some clothes, including an old wool coat of mine, were hung over the fence on the yard side. Like a child I began to fuss that the coat might be stolen and did my dad know that someone was living beyond the screen? I couldn’t tell if anyone around or who I was fussing to. I continued. I said that my dad was [hesitation] 88 years old and shouldn’t have to put up with uncertainty and fear, and then I remembered that he had died. I remembered my mother, who was 80-some years old, but the fact that I couldn’t remember her age reminded me that she had died at age 64, years ago.
Although I had felt that there had been someone there to whom I’d been speaking, I knew now that I was always utterly alone. I felt the weight and despair of a bleak reality keeping me alive enough to suffer. I looked over the mesh fence hoping to see the tops of the group of trees that filtered just enough sunlight to dapple their comforting shade. Instead, there was the painfully clear sunlight of a high alien sky — and a row of housetop peaks. The woods were gone, and so was my home, the only place that had ever touched my heart.
