The installation of hot and cold running water, electricity, and the telephone, and the transition from the horse and buggy to the automobile must have had a revolutionary impact upon my farming grandparents and my mother’s generation. That kind of transformation in lifestyle did not occur in my generation (although it did for a lot of rural residents here in the South). However, there’s more to it than that. Today, we can run to the store to buy what we want ready-made. In my grandparents’ day, you had to grow your food, preserve it, and then prepare meals from scratch. Bread had to be baked every day or so. You couldn’t preserve it after you made it. There were no detergents—only homemade lye soap. Things we take for granted, like glue, pencils, paper and aspirin, weren’t readily available in those days. Chickens didn’t lay eggs as often as they do today. Seeds didn’t produce the way they do today. In 1900, you bought cloth and yarn at the store, but a lot of clothes were homemade.
    I have the impression that when I was growing up, there was more enthusiasm for science and technology than there is today. Operating a household without running water or electricity will do that for you. Complement that with no refrigeration, no telephone, and horse-based travel and you have a hand-to-mouth struggle for existence. In the 19^th century, you would have had to depend upon the postman or what you heard at church to find out about what was going on in the world. It isn’t hard to see why people in the good old days were enthusiastic about science, which brought them better new days. The Saturday Evening Post and the Saturday Review of Literature must have arrived in the mail for Saturday-night perusal.
   The 20^th century opened with a steam-powered world in which the horse was still the principal means of local transportation. Only city streets were paved. Communication was by telegraph and telephone. Elegant houses were heated with steam radiators or convection furnaces, while many rural homes still relied on coal stoves, supplemented by fireplaces. Some urban houses probably had gas grates and gas hot water heaters. Beige stucco. Rubber runners. Electric fans. Gas lights, electric lights. Pen and ink. Fountain pens. Pencils. Adding machines. Comptometers. Slide rules ("slipsticks"). Mechanical calculators. Typewriters. Wax-cylinder dictaphones. Gregg shorthand. Wall mounted telephone. Oak desks. Ceiling fans. Phonographs. Photographs.
    Scrub boards and copper wash tubs. Copper washing machines. Stove-heated irons. Rural spring house, urban ice-house and iceman.
 

    My father, Francis Seitz, was born in Rock Island, Illinois (on the Mississippi River) in 1902, when Henry was 50 years old. He was the youngest of Henry Seitz' second batch of 7 children. Henry's first wife, Lydia, died in the 1880's, after bearing 7 other children, who were Francis' half-brothers and half-sisters. (John, Ira, Marion, and Melvin were among them.) Dad was the youngest of his brood. His mother, Susanna (North) Seitz, left Henry and her children in 1905 and spent much of the remainder of her life apart living apart from her choleric husband. Francis was reared by 3 of his 6 older sisters: Addie, Ava, and Chris. The other three, Myrtle, Bertha and , were grown and gone by the time Francis appeared. Ava would have been 13 and Addie 14 or 15 when Francis' mother left him and fled home to her parents' house in Cleveland. Susanna North was an only child living in Cleveland and exposed to music (viz., operas), art, and literature by her doting parents. Susanna was plagued with high blood pressure from the time she entered her early thirties in the early 1900's. She was overweight and this probably contributed to her infirmity. Her untreated hypertension eventually led to a series of strokes which reduced her to a vegetable by the 1940's.
    Francis Seitz was a city mouse. He was born the year before the first airplane took wing at Kitty Hawk. Travel within the city in which he lived—Rock Islamd, Chicago, Cleveland—was by stop-and-start, bell-clanging electric street car, with their cylindrically rounded front and rear, and the big headlight in front. The suburbs were reached by electric commuter cars and by steam-locomotive commuter trains. Electricity and indoor plumbing would have been ubiquitous in the cities during his childhood, as were elevators, electric street lights, and steel-framed multi-story buildings. (Dad told a story about a night when he and a couple of other kids tied a streetcar to a utility pole. Then they waited with bated breath to see what would happen. The street car started up, snapped the rope as though it were a piece of twine, and went on its way, oblivious to the mayhem which the boys had planned.) Telephones were commonplace in 1910 to 1920, as were telegrams, teletypes, and ticker tapes for long distance service. (My grandparents had the old vertical-pole type telephone. When you picked up the cylindrical receiver, the operator said, "What number please?" and you gave her the number you wanted to call. Their phone number was "Willoughby 43".) The daily newspaper with its wire services—Associated Press and United Press International—and with its newsboys shouting "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!" at times of great pith and moment, was the source of timely public news. Steam rollers, steam and gasoline-powered cranes, U-hooded motor cars and trucks, and belt-driven factories were part and parcel of the fabric of city life. Red brick houses baking in the sun on tree-lined, brick-paved streets are what I remember of Midwestern cities in the 30's (and therefore, in the 20's, since nothing new was built after 1929). In the summers, they were cooled by oscillating or overhead GE electric fans, and in the winters, they were heated by clanking steam radiators. Most people had ice boxes, buying ice each day from the ice man's truck or wagon. (Kids would run up to the ice-wagon, grab chips of ice, and suck on them. The ice-man carried the blocks of ice into your house with a large pair of tongs and put it in your ice-box.) Only the well-to-do could afford GE monitor-top refrigerators. Upscale apartment buildings had two-way intercoms between the foyer and each apartment. The inner door leading to the apartments had a loud-buzzing electric lock that could be operated from inside the apartments. Mail boxes for all the apartments were located in the publicly-accessible foyer, along with the doorbell buttons for all the apartments. The red-brick apartment houses were constructed of wood. The plastered walls were painted in a dirty, light-brown beige and carpeted with a thin, hard carpet runner or a thin, ribbed, black rubber runner. Milk-glass globes inhabited by bare-filament light bulbs lit the hallways. These brick bake-ovens soaked up the heat on summer days until they were stiflingly hot by bedtime. Then they would cool off somewhat during the night and heat up slowly again during the day. (How well I remember sleeping at the window on a hot summer night, straining to catch every whiff of breeze that might wander by. We would try to pull down the upper window sash so that the hot would escape but the upper window casement would always be painted shut and wouldn't budge. Or the metallic smell of rain on the screen when it started to rain. We were much closer to the elements, and far more at the mercy of its sounds and disturbances, than we are today. Who could forget the whine of a mosquito in the dark as one were drifting off to sleep, and then jumping up, turning on the light, and trying to squash the little vampire so that one could sleep undisturbed? Who could forget waking up cold or in a thunderstorm and closing the windows in the middle of the night?)

Funeral Address:
    Francis Seitz—my Dad—was born in 1902 of a very brilliant father and what may have been an equally intelligent mother. Dad’s father, Henry, was a stonemason at a time whn stonemasonry was a skilled and lucrative trade. Dad has said that his father, Henry Seitz may have been the brightest person the family has ever produce. Henry was a self-educated 19^th century socialist and social reformer during the era of child labor, sweatshops, and bone-bruising monopolies. He and his eldest son, John, were passing out copies of the "Daily Worker" in 1908, 9 years before the Bolshevik Revolution. (Uncle John once loaned me a copy of a book written by Nikolai Lenin, writen during the 1920’s when Lenin was the Premier of the U.S.S.R.)
    Henry’s other distinguishing features were his volcanic temper and his absolute, uncompromising honesty. He was a man of great integrity.
    Dad’s mother, Susannah North, was a very bright and culturally oriented woman. She became Henry Seitz’ second wife in 1888, when she was 23 and he was 36. His first wife, Lydia, had died a year earlier while giving birth to Henry and Lydia’s fifth child, Myrtle. Myrtle, for whom Lydia gave her life, married a man by the name of Merkle who became a multi-millionaire florist in Florida. They had a Willoughby outlet located on Second Street just off Erie (Main) Street.
    Rumor has it that Susannah Seitz was a disaster at managing money and liked to sleep in bed until noon. Of course, she would have inherited five children when she and Henry married in 1888, including one-year-old Myrtle. Then the following year (1889), Aunt Addie was born, followed by four more surviving children, the last of whom was Dad. It wouldn’t have been easy to feed and clothe those 10 waifs on a stonemason’s wages even if she had been a superb manager of money.
    One of Susannah’s family legends was that her cousin, Jude Gish, was the father of the silent movie stars, Lillian and Dorothy Gish. (I saw a TV special honoring Dorothy Gish only a few years ago.) Her other family legend was that her great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather was the illegitimate son of Lord North of England—the Lord North of Revolutionary War fame. She gave Dad the middle name "North" to maintain that family lineage.
    Susannah and her children were desperately poor. By the time Henry and Susannah married in 1888, power stone saws had made Henry Seitz a victim of technological unemployment. He fell back to laying bricks, travelling from state to state looking for work. Dad’s oldest sister, Addie, was forced to drop out of school at the age of 10 and scrub floors to help feed her family. It was a terrible waste of a fine mind. Aunt Addie used to say that they weren’t brought up; they were dragged up. Addie, and the rest of her family, had a lifelong respect for and love of learning, especially history and archeology, and an appetite for opera, plays, and other cultural opportunities.
    In 1905, Dad’s mother and Dad’s father separated. Between Henry’s vitriolic temper and Susannah’s profligacy and indolence, they were an odd couple. Three-year-old Dad and and his 6-yer-old sister, Chris, were left in the care of 16-year-old Addie, 11-year-old Ava, and Henry Seitz. Later, Susannah returned, but the two of them died in separate households.
    In 1916, when Dad was 14, he and his father rented a room in Willoughby from my Sheffield grandparents. Then at school, they sat Dad directly behind this beautiful girl with the long chestnut curls, Elva Mae Sheffield. Dad fell in love at first sight. A few days later, he and Elva’s 13-year-old younger brother, Ray, encountered Elva and her sister, Florence, carrying home heavy bags of groceries. Dad gallantly took off his cap on this freezingly cold day, and he and Ray carried home the bags of groceries. The girls were most impressed. Dad’s mother and sisters had taught him well. A few months later, he and mother held hands while they were sleigh-riding. But two years later, Dad was moved to Chicago for a year, until he dropped out of high school and came back to Cleveland for a job at a bank. By now, he was 17, and Mother had graduated from high school. She had lost interest in him by now. Dad hung around like a stage-door-Johnny when she would come home from dates. She considered Dad a pest.
    One Sunday, Dad’s sisters talked him into dating a little French girl, and he didn’t show up. Suddenly, Mother was jealous and began to take Dad seriously. Dad found a position as Chief Clerk in Akron Office of the B&O Railroad. He was moving up in the world. What followed was, like Orpheus and Eurydice, Dante and Beatrice, Heloise and Abelard, one of the world’s greatest romances. They married in 1927, and I was born in 1929—the year of the Great Crash. Dad adored Mother. He was very romantic. He called her "Mavis" and honored her on every birthday, anniversary, and other special event. Twice, Mother thought that other women had designs on Dad, but Dad had eyes only for Mother. In the meantime, Dad’s sister, Christina, had become a Ziegfield Follies dancer in New York. She was approached about a screen test and was on her way to Hollywood when Uncle Mac Macintyre proposed to her. Uncle Mac was "old-money" rich. His sister owned one of the white-fenced country estates along Ohio 91 near Gates Mills Boulevard. Later, Uncle Mac would go on to become a vice-president of Sohio.