[My grandfather, George Hotchko. Photo is from the early 1970’s. Credit: Daniel Egan.]

Oh, I dunno, Paddy. Sometimes those stories keep me up at night. They make me uncomfortable.

~~Spoken to me by my grandfather, George Hotchko. When I was a little boy. 1950’s.

Part 1-Meeting my grandfather…

Yes, the title. Of course I’m the ‘boy’ mentioned. And I’m Paddy. That’s what my grandpa Hotchko always called me. Maybe he really meant ‘Patty’ but I don’t think so. It’s just the way he talked. His voice, if I’m remembering this with any accuracy, was a dusty baritone. It was never rough from talking because he was a quiet man. Very quiet. Thinking back on my many hours spent with him, from earliest boyhood to his final days, I always found him to be a man of silence. Solitude even. I’ve written a fair amount about many members of my family, but never about George Hotchko. So, let me tell you a few stories about him…

My grandpa was born in 1890 in Throop, PA, a small mining town northeast of Scranton. As a young boy he worked as a slate picker at one or more of the collieries in NE PA. His job was to stand beside a conveyor belt that carried raw coal up to the breaker and pull out the chunks of slate that contaminated the coal. (I’m not an expert on early 20th century coal mining practices so my terminology will be faulty.) It was not particularly dangerous work but by today’s standards, the company was seriously violating child-labor laws. He came home each night dirty with coal dust, but he came home safe…and alive.

I know very little about the jobs that he held during his early life. At one point he operated the Merry-go-Round in a small park at Lake Winola, PA. The majority of his life, he farmed and ran a boarding house at Lake Winola, with his wife, Mary (nee Korman). It is during his life at this house where all my memories of him were made.

[My maternal grandparents, George & Mary Hotchko pose in the yard beside the Lake Winola boarding house they owned. Photo is from the 1950s and very likely taken by my father or one of my older brothers.]

There is one story about him that I cannot 100% verify. It may be just family lore but when I was not yet a teenager, someone in my family told me the following account:

George (it’s very strange to keep referring to him by his given name. He’s always Grandpa to me. But I’ll be using George when necessary) and a few of his boyhood friends decided to go swimming on a hot day. This would likely have been around the turn of the century, (ca 1902). In and around Throop were many swimming holes. They were large pits left from the mining and most were filled with water. Inviting indeed to a 12-year-old boy and his pals. But in those places, the water can mask unseen hazards. Like large rocks.

The story I was told was that on that day, one of George’s friends dove into the water from a ledge. He didn’t see the submerged rock. He was killed…in front of his friends, in front of my grandfather. I wanted to know more but I was told that it probably wasn’t a good idea to ask him anything. He carried that memory his entire life. I can’t make that statement with certainty, I can only assume it because that’s how I would have carried a dark memory like that.

Part 2–Trying to get stories out of him…

During the 1950s, on warm summer days, the Egan family would cram ourselves into our deep deep blue 1949 Cadillac. You remember, the model that had a hidden gas tank. To access said tank, you had to push the quarter size reflector (part of the tail lights) button. The whole light fixture would pop open and there was where you gassed that bad boy up. It must have taken thirty gallons, but hey, gas was a whopping $ 0.29 a gallon.

But I digress.

My father always drove. It was 65.1 miles from our home in Owego, NY, and it seemed to take far too many hours to get to their house on the lake. In reality, it was about an hour and a half. But, it wasn’t just visiting grandparents that excited me and my brothers. It was their dock at the lake. We would spend hours swimming in the cool waters. That is what awaited us in the next few hours. We approached the lake from the Tunkhannock road. The road split. We would swing to the left and drive along the lakeside properties with the unnecessarily large powerboats with the Johnson 65 HP motors. We passed the Rodham house, where, later, Hilary Clinton’s brother would live. A small dirt lane came in from the left and we made a sharp J-turn. Through a small forest of pines and then the boardinghouse appears on the left. My grandfather’s garden and orchard is to our right. Sometimes he would be tending to his grafted apple trees, other times he stood at the end of his rows of potato hills. It was a folk belief that to ensure a good crop of spuds, the one who planted the eyes was required to pee on the last hill planted. My grandpa believed in this practice, but, sadly, we never caught him in the act. Perhaps it had to be done under cover of darkness. If he wasn’t in his garden, he was usually sitting on a kitchen chair, leaning against the wall of the house, and puffing on his omnipresent pipe. He fiddled with his pipe a lot. I watched with intense curiosity as he took his lighter and begin the ritual of packing the brown leaves. He had an odd lighter that was the size and shape of a shotgun shell. He’d pinch it from both ends and a flame would appear. Somehow he angled it into the bowl and he would start puffing. I don”t recall many times when went about without his pipe.

We had arrived! Our very long car would then make a hard left and continue down a short crescent driveway. My grandma would usually be standing in the doorway of the first floor apartment where they lived. The back doors to the Caddy were open before my father put on the emergency brake. The boys would jump out to run into to greet grandma before heading out to find and corner my grandpa. If he was in the chair, we had him where we wanted him. We sat in a semi-circle on the grass like the followers of Buddha, waiting for words of wisdom…or stories. We begged for stories. We wanted, craved his stories. And he would puff away and tell us a few. I wonder who loved these moments more, me and my brothers, or grandpa.

My older brother, Chris would often head up a short hill beyond the garden and explore an old abandoned railroad path. The broken shale would sometimes present a fossil which Chris would proudly show to everyone. My grandma would look at it and shake her head.

Now me, Dan and maybe Denny, sitting on the ground in the warm afternoon and listened. The lake water tugged at us, but we sat and listened nevertheless.

“Grandpa, tell us a ghost story,” I pleaded. It was often me that went for the ghost story.

“Ooh, Paddy,” he would say, trying to beg off. “Sometimes they keep me awake at night.”

He usually gave in if we persisted. But, I can recall only one story in his repertoire. And he told it something like this:

“I was walking home one evening from a long day at work. As I strolled along the street, I noticed a fellow sitting on a stone wall, a wall that surrounded a cemetery. I was approaching, soon to pass by him when he jumped down from the wall and asked me for a plug (chewing tobacco). I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my pouch and broke off a plug. Thanks, George, he said. I walked on. About a block away, it hit me that I knew the man, not well, just acquainted. And guess what, Paddy. The man had died a month earlier.”

It was a simple story, brief and to the point. Little in the way of suspense or shock scares. But, it sent chills down my young spine anyway. I wanted to know where the cemetery was. I wanted to know who his friend was and how he died. Grandpa would finish the story with how he would speed up his steps, not look back (never look back in this situation!). He told me the story, always in the same way, for years.

I loved whatever tales he had to tell. And no detail in his manner of speaking was lost on me. I watched his hands as he moved the pipe about, his hesitation at certain points to keep us on edge. I looked into his aged eyes and I do believe I saw the motion of the years. I was a part of his life, in the present and in his youth. I hope I paid enough attention so that those moments would stay with me. To this day, I wonder if the 25% of his DNA plays a part in my love of stories. Will my grandchildren sit by me and ask about my life?

Part 3–Was he really deaf?

My grandparents usually occupied one floor and rented the other two. It was a nice income. Lake Winola was, and still is, a popular summering spot. Rented cottages were abundant. We were in the kitchen of the boarding house. I would ask grandpa something.

“You have to speak up,” my mother would say. “He’s kind of deaf.”

But, over the years, I found out that there were places on the property that he was not so deaf. And those places were often where my grandmother wasn’t. Not that they didn’t love each other, they did. But, my grandfather was a quiet man who sought out quiet places. His orchard. Between the rows of his potato hills. Sitting in his chair, against the house…where he could just sit and think. It’s what old men do.

What did he think about in the hours before we descended on him, violating his quiet personal space and demanded his stories. But I know he didn’t mind the intrusion. Grandfathers never mind those kinds of visits.

In the end, I have a pretty good idea what he sat and remembered. I think he was recalling a young friend who died in a small pond a half century earlier.

Some things you never forget.

Me? I will never forget my grandpa Hotchko.