Mom's Dad was born in 1902. He missed WWI-- was in training camp when it ended.
He grew up in Brecksville, Ohio. It was an idyllic farming community at the time, now it's a bedroom community with a lot of lawyers and stock brokers from Cleveland.
A couple of things to add:
Contagion was a big thing. He remembered "black typhoid" and tuberculosis. In one instance, the sheriff carted a whole family off to a pest house and set the family's house on fire.
Just about anything you caught back then was deadly. He got appendicitis the summer he was 12. They gave him mercury, thinking it was a simple blockage. When that didn't work, the doctor operated on him on the dining room table. The appendix burst in the doc's hand. He spent the summer balled up over a pillow in a hammock in the yard.
Dad's Dad was conscripted for WWI and spent most of the war being shuttled up to the front and promptly sent back. His head was too big for a gas mask. The Germans finally put him on furlough towards the end of the war. He got home just in time to find his mother dead. We're not sure if she starved or caught the Spanish Flu. Both were fairly common at that point. We also don't know why it was him and not his father that found her. They were all living together; it must have been a bad scene there in Marburg in 1918.
Grandpa lived through the panic after the war. His best friend, a butcher he met in Cincinnati, used to tell a story about getting $20 American sent to him from the States. He took the best coach on the best train to Hamburg and got the best room in the best hotel. He had the most expensive meal at the most expensive restaurant, had the best whore, and ordered a box of the best cigars-- he came home with over $10 American in his pocket.
Grandpa's older brother told a painter from Austria to STFU. One thing led to another and Unc had to go hide in the Black Forest for 10 years. Grandpa saw what was going on and left for the States. We all know how that turned out.
Grandpa mailed bacon fat back to Germany for years to the kin that stayed in Marburg. It took the onset of WWII to stop it. Bacon fat was embargoed as a strategic material.
I used to know a woman that grew up outside Dayton. Her father used to collaborate with the Wrights and Curtiss on engines. She saw the first flights at Dayton and eventually got to go up.
