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Here are pictures of the two items that dad passed on to me. One is
the old stove. Dad (Ralph) had it cleaned and repainted and then had
it in the garage with a sheet over it in Hermann for quite a while. He
told me that while he was cleaning it he pulled the straw from a broom
that grandma used to clean it out of a crack in the stove where it had
gotten stuck. He and Mom (Gerry) then sat down and cried for a while.
( Since Mom was an orphan she always looked at grandma in a special
way. I remember her always calling her “Mom”. It was not until many
years later that I began to appreciate what a special relationship that
was for Mom. ) I remember Dad would go out and take the sheet off of
it every now and then and look at it for a while
When I was a kid he and I would go hunting and then come back to
grandma’s and sit in front of that stove. You had to keep rotating so
that the front would not burn and the backside could get warm. I used
to sit and put my feet on the stove until my soles would start to smell.
Dad would smack my legs and tell me to get my feet off. The stove. I
was amazed by the black coal bucket….and the dust that it left all over.
The stove now sits in my study. I had a special base built for it and
had even looked into having it hooked up but the cost was
prohibitive, we would have to build a fire wall etc. The office has a
large Mission rocker and a roll top desk so the stove looks right at
home.
