Reinhard Stehle By Sue Luxa, April 10, 2007
Reinhard Stehle > Nancy J. (Nan) Stehle Saik > Matthew J. (Max) Saik > Sue Saik Luxa
His photograph, sepia-toned and frayed, resides in my room of memories. He is handsome with a snow-white beard, a hat perched properly on top of his head with rimless glasses that looked into the present, but saw the past. His three-piece suit is buttoned, and I imagine a watch fob dangling from his pants' waist. Strangely, there appears to be a cast on his left hand. Was it a farming accident? Had he fallen unexpectedly? Why had he allowed the photographer to take his picture with his casted hand so prominently displayed? As in most old pictures, he never smiles, and I wonder what stories he could tell me.
He was my father's favorite grandparent, Reinhard Stehle, a good German whose ancestors had plied their trade as shoemakers in the Black Forest. What convinced him to decide to immigrate to America? Was there a depression? Was it a sense of adventure? Was it his unwillingness to serve in the German military? Had a relative ventured overseas and beckoned and beguiled him with America's possibilities?
My father told stories about the old house in Marietta, Ohio, that he would visit in the summers. He told of jumping off the hayloft into softness below, holding his grandfather's hand as they trekked down Harmer Hill to town. I imagine Dad with his shank of unruly hair, huge brown eyes and suspendered pants looking up adoringly at a man who must have seemed bigger than life.
The story is told that he fell through a trapdoor in the hayloft and was injured.
Today, he probably would have survived. It must have been undiagnosed internal injuries that led to his death. He lingered for several days before he died. It must have been sad news to a little boy who had loved and played with him so long ago.
As a child I returned to the very same house a generation later. My maiden Aunt Ginnie lived in the house now with its musty, mildewed odor; it's large front room. To a child, it seemed dark with its shades partially drawn against the sun's rays. It was where adults talked endlessly about family and farm. It was a house that had an attic up the stairs, a dreamscape of old letters, picturesque stamps, funny-looking clothes ... a child's delight.
It was an ancestral home, a log cabin in its beginnings with the trappings of civilization slowly added, with a trellised front porch and rocking chairs, flowers blooming in the yard and the view of the Muskingum River flowing down and over the hill. It had been home to my ancestors, some of whom I had never met, but I knew for sure it was my beginning, as surely as the river flowed below.
