UNCLE OTTO AND AUNT MATTIE (Biographical)

How to begin?  Mattie, my mother’s blood aunt, lived in a town about 50 miles from us, and we would get together on various occasions like Thanksgiving or Easter at our place or theirs. Her husband, Uncle Otto Hartelt, was actually my mother’s uncle by marriage so they were really my great aunt and great uncle, but I called them just Aunt Mattie and Uncle Otto.

Aunt Mattie, who spoke with a slight German accent,* was, well, OK, but, if truth be known, she had sort of a mean streak.  One thing that impressed me about Aunt Mattie was her preparations years and years before she died, actually decades.  Every nick knack, painting, piece of China, everything, had a little tag stuck to the bottom saying who was to get what when she died.  I used to visit her maybe a couple times a year until her death after Uncle Otto died.  She lived into her 90s, but was immobilized in a wheel chair for the last several.  One of her sisters was a painter, and I took a fancy to one of her paintings, but Aunt Mattie had already promised it so I was out of luck.  The painting was so dark you could barely make out what it was of, and it suggested to me that she might be depressed or something.  But I used to see her at Christmas time when I was very small and she seemed happy enough from my memories.  This great aunt used to play Santa at our house on Christmas Eve.  I really believed in Santa then, but once I asked Santa why he was wearing women's shoes.

Aunt Mattie got in trouble with one of her sisters (I'll call her sister A) when she wrote one of her sisters (I'll call her sister B) criticizing sister A.  Then she put the critical letter in the wrong envelope and mailed it to  sister A.  OUCH!  DON’T DO THIS!  Decades later, the criticized sister A died and my mother took Aunt Mattie with her to the funeral, but Uncle Victor, the husband of the deceased sister A, met them at the door and wouldn’t let Aunt Mattie enter, even after all those years.  People of German extraction weren’t very forgiving.

Uncle Otto was always a jolly person, not like Santa Klaus because he was clean shaven and bald, but like Santa in temperament.  He owned a small filling station, and he had the key to my heart by bringing me cigar boxes of candy bars.  Not the little things like you get at Halloween, but whole bars.  I’m talking the latter part of the 1930s and early part of the 1940s here.  It is fair to say he was my favorite uncle because of his jolliness and generosity, and I had quite a few great uncles and one regular blood uncle (my mother's brother).  Whenever we got together at our house, it was obligatory that I play the piano.**  So I would stumble my way through a piece or two and Uncle Otto would always say something encouraging and complimentary.  He always had a joke about Roosevelt or his wife Eleanor.

They were like the following.  Roosevelt was on a plane with some of his cabinet members when he said, “I think I’ll throw a hundred dollar bill out the window and make somebody happy.”

One of the trusted department heads said, “Why don’t you throw 10 ten-dollar bills out the window and make 10 people happy?”

Whereupon a grizzled Republican in the seat in front of the president turned around and said, “Why don’t you throw yourself out the window and make everybody happy.!”

Or one about Eleanor, who was, well, not a pretty woman.  Eleanor was not feeling good so she went to the doctor, and he asked her what was the matter.  She said, “Well I don’t know.  I just don’t feel good.  To tell the truth I feel so bad that I don’t know whether I am coming or going.”

So the doctor said, “Go behind that partition over there and take off all your clothes,” which she did.  He then asked to get down on her hands and knees and crawl to the far corner of the room, which she did.  Then he asked her to crawl back.  When she got back to the doctor, he said, “Neither do I.”

My parents were Republicans, but I asked my mother why Uncle Otto was so mean to the Roosevelts, and she said she didn’t know, but the funny thing was that she really thought Uncle Otto was actually a (gasp) Democrat!

* For more on my German relatives see: http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2013/11/what-nationality-are-we-anyway-biography.html
** For more on my piano playing career see: http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2009/11/my-career-as-pianist.html