A DOORWAY TO THE PAST IN CINCINNATI - by Bud Collins

Cincinatti - Nobody is at home at 3321 Fischer St. Nor a few blocks away, at 1722 Hewitt St. maybe it's just as well. Did I expect my mother, the college girl, to answer the door?

Would the grandmother I never knew be in the kitchen making the wonderful potato salad that she passed on the my mother, the aroma and taste that died with her, then my sister? Might the unknown grandfather be in his study, poring over legal briefs, or drinking good Cincinnati-brewed German beer with cronies from the old country, fellow immigrants from Poland by way of France?

These are nutty thoughts I have, prowling through a prenatal past that cannot be recaptured but only looked at like a flat, old photo barren of human life.

"This is one of the places your people resided," says a kind friend, a Cincinnatian named Tom Price. "I looked them up in old city directories." He has stopped the car on Fischer Street, which was called Spokane when my mother and her three sisters lived there with my grandparents. Early in the century.

"I was born in the Ohio River," my mother would tell me when I was very young. She would make me laugh with the line that dialect comedians of her day would use in this then-very-German city: "Vas you ever in Zinzinnati?" She recalled unbelievably delicious peach nectar sodas - what were they? - at a bygone drugstore soda fountain, and hot poppyseed crescent rolls for breakfast from a neighborhood bakery.

She said she'd been a Cincinnati Reds fan, chuckling, "when I was a little boy. First professional team. Did you know that my boy?" But I understood that was just a throwaway line to humor me and my love for baseball. She was a good sport who played catch with me if nobody else was available, and took me to watch the Cleveland Indians when the price was right: those long-vanished bargain matinees called Ladies Days.

If she told me what part of town she lived in, I've forgotten. But this is it, elderly and quiet, called East Walnut Hills. Predominantly black for some time, Price tells me. It's not far from the hedged-in Cincinnati Tennis Club, one of the country's first, 1880. Neat two-story frame homes are the rule with front porches edged by shallow lawns. Lots of shade trees. Nice-sized back yards. Good place to raise kids. My mother loved Cincinnati, her girlhood here, before she departed to teach school elsewhere in Ohio.

Amazing in her good humor, despite her contentious marriage, she had luminous blue eyes and a good story about my birth. "The doctor was out playing that fool golf when I went into labor. He didn't get to the hospital in time, and you were delivered by a nurse, a nun, doing a great job while he was in the rough. The nun beat him, 1-up."

As I pause at the front steps of 3321 Fischer, now owned by a Miss Brooks, a man named Ron, working on his car at the curb, says, "She's on vacation. Gone to Las Vegas on vacation." Had I wanted to go inside and look around? Would melodies from my Aunt Blanche's piano mysteriously spring at me out of an unused corner of what had been a music room? She had a good reputation as a musician, studied in Paris, played the giant organ at towered St. Sulpice on the Left Bank. I would have liked to hear her play. This is what I'm thinking, but I can't go in.

Aluminum siding covers aging walls, but a lovely, original stained glass window remains. I thank Ron for the information and we move away from 1908 and on to 1914, over on Hewitt Street.

By then, my grandfather, Eugene - "Pa," his daughters called him - was 63, a succesful lawyer (nobody's perfect) who had left a farming village in Normandy as a young man, traveling by lowest class on some kind of boat to the New World. Like so many others - he around 1870. Many years ago, I found the shrinking village, called Chennebrun, about 120 inhabitants, amid forests and plowed fields. There I located the record of his birth, but nothing else. No known relatives.

In Cincinnati, he learned English, married a daughter of Irish immigrants, worked his way through a law school, taught his daughters French and told them his father had fled Poland for political reasons. I have a memory of a since-lost photo album in which he looked bald and amiable, with ample girth, and was draped with a white mustache of the sort favored by walruses.

I missed Grampa without having ever encountered him. Gramma, too. Envious was I of lucky friends who had doting grandparents. I wanted some, and tracked them as best I could, now to this white house with green trim shielded from Hewitt Street by pines of long standing. Is there a soft echo within of Pa saying something loving in French to his grils - my mother, Anna, Blanche Eugenia?

Not likely, but......

They were gone before I appeared. Probably I could find out when Grampa and Gramma died, a little more about them in the library of one of the Cincinnati papers, by meticulously going through years of microfilm. Maybe I will if I ever go back.

But looking at their houses from the outside seems enough, somehow comforting knowing that my mother had occupied these places so happily.

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