Volume 1: Pop with his mother Gertie on the left, Albert on the right.
Volume 2: Pop with friends (human and canine) on the top, Albert on the bottom.
One of my grandfathers had the nickname “Slim”; the other, although never called “Fatty” or “Chubby,” would never have been given the nickname “Slim”—except perhaps as a joke, in the same way that the bald member of The Three Stooges was called “Curly.” My second grandfather was not morbidly obese by any means—he was too active and hard-working to entropy into that state—but the family calling him “barrel-chested” was, perhaps, a bit of a euphemism.
Both of my grandfathers were over six feet tall. They were both blue collar, salt of the earth types. They were both born in the rurals near the beginning of the 20th century. The first-mentioned one, “Slim,” was born in DeWitt, Carroll County, Missouri in 1907, five years after the second-mentioned, who was born on “the Felt place” near Carlotta, California (which, if you don’t want to do the math yourself, occurred in 1902).
The first had six children, three of each sex; The second also had three sons, but only two daughters.
The legal name of the first-mentioned one (“Slim”) was Albert Lee Benjamin Kollenborn; the other was named Theodore Roosevelt Shannon (some of his brothers were, like him, named after Presidents); relatives who were older than Theodore Roosevelt called him “Teddy,” while everyone else called him “Pop.” I will refer to them from this point forward as Albert and Pop.
As to how they differed: Albert married in 1930, at the age of 23; Pop married at 29 the following year. Pop lived his whole life in the upper two-thirds of California, almost all of it in the upper third (Trinity, Humboldt, and Mendocino counties). Albert lived in seven States throughout his life. Besides the “AMOK” States of Arkansas, Missouri (where he was born), Oklahoma, and Kansas, he resided in Idaho, California, and Oregon. Pop was a logger and rancher. Albert worked on the railroad (all the live-long day) until his wife demanded that he get a job where he would be home more often. Henceforth, until the day he retired, he worked as a mechanic.
Both died in California at the age of 77: Pop in 1979, Albert in 1984.
Albert’s third child and first daughter is my mother. Pop’s third child and second son is my father.
As to my other three grandparents, Albert’s wife Alice Green Kollenborn outlived him by 21 years according to the calendar and 17 years in age, dying at 94 in 2005. My strongest memories of Grandma Alice are her red curly hair, infectious laugh, and her standby sayings of “Oh, golly!” as she gleefully chuckled at some semi-shocking thing I said, and “Land o’ Goshen!” on hearing something unexpected. I also picture her cooking bacon and eggs on the stove. Surely she cooked other things, but that’s what I always recall her preparing.
When we visited Albert and Alice when they lived in Oregon in the 1960s, two groups of visitors would ensconce themselves in different areas of the house: the men in the living room, on the sofas, and the women on chairs in the kitchen. I tried to stay with the menfolk, but would quickly bore of their conversation, because it was always about automobiles: who bought which car or “pickup,” what its specifications were, and so on. The women, on the other hand, talked about people and what had happened for them or to them, what they had said and done. I found the conversations of the women far more interesting. I never was wild about cars. So it was the men in the living room, and the women and me—probably inhibiting the range of their conversation, now that I think of it—in the kitchen.
Pop was married to Esther Nelson Shannon for 23 years; Esther bore all five of Pop’s children. They had divorced and Pop had remarried by the time I came along. In fact, Pop married his second wife, Dollie Kohl Shannon, the same year (1956) that my parents got married (which was the first and only matrimonial experience for both of them—they will be celebrating their 66th wedding anniversary this September (2022)).
We did visit Esther in Fort Bragg (as she was still my dad’s mother, although no longer married to Theodore Roosevelt). We also often visited Pop and Dollie at their ranch in Trinity County, near Zenia.
My main memory of my paternal grandmother Esther was that she had a piano in her house (and at one time had played in a dance band); that she volunteered with Head Start; and that she normally had a dignified bearing and was somewhat reserved in speech (very different from Pop, who was loud and garrulous). The only time I remember Esther losing her cool was when I was at her house once and, after examining some photos hanging on the wall, asked her, “Who’s this Japanese guy?”
She came in from the kitchen, saw the picture I was pointing at, and blurted out, “Japanese guy?!? Don’t you recognize your own father?!?”
I had not, because (a) I had not known him at the age he was in the picture (it was a photo from his high school days); (b) he had longer and fuller hair than I’d ever seen on him (he’s had a crew cut my entire life); (c) he was dressed in a suit (I don’t know if I had ever seen him in a suit up until then).
I can’t really explain why I thought he looked Japanese, but the fact that World War 2 and Pearl Harbor were not that far in the past at the time may have had a bearing on grandma Esther’s rather violent reaction to my query. My dad is mostly Irish and Portuguese, with some Native American and other (European) odds and ends thrown in for good, bad, or indifferent measure. He’s never looked Japanese to me in the flesh, but his Indian blood does “come out” in his appearance the older he gets.
What I recall most about Dollie, Pop’s second wife (he was married to both wives for 23 years, the first ending in divorce and the second ending in his death), was her giant kitchen in the (literal) ranch house, and the fact that it seemed she spent almost all of her time in it. She was a great cook, especially of cinnamon rolls. I have been on a lifelong quest to find cinnamon rolls that are as good as hers, and have only once found a specimen that matched, but did not exceed, hers—in either quality or size.
As Pop and Dollie were together from the time of my birth, I always viewed Dollie more as my paternal grandmother, even though we called Esther “grandma Esther” and she was the actual blood relative.
So how did these people become my grandparents? Fort Bragg, California, was the common denominator/meeting point for my parents; they attended high school there. Although they are three-and-a-half years apart in age, they had mutual friends that introduced them. The Shannons had moved between Humboldt, Trinity, and Mendocino Counties in the Golden State, and the Kollenborns had already waved goodbye to Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho when they came to California (only Albert had lived in Oklahoma, and Oregon would be a later stopping point).
Who would have thought that a boy born in Humboldt County, California in 1934 would meet a girl who would be born four years later in Benton County, Arkansas in Mendocino County, California in the 1950s? Nobody could have predicted it. But miracles like that occur all the time. It’s likely your parents’ story has some similarities that way.