A Story of Family, Music, and… Truck Farming?
At long last! The interview with my grandfather has been completed. During this interview, I go in-depth with my grandfather and start from the present and work my way into his past until eventually talking about his great-grandparents. Throughout the interview, you can see how his life was shaped by different family and economic factors along with how our German culture is represented in his daily life. I enjoyed talking with him, and most of the contents of this interview contain cultural values that defines our family.
MG: Max Geiger (me) … GF: George Fattman (my grandfather)
The Interview with George
MG: Well, I’ve been doing a lot of research on our family history, and throughout this course, we are supposed to research our family ancestry and basically tell an entire story of our family’s immigration and where they immigrated from and how they came to America. All the steps I took until I’m at the point I’m at right now, which is really cool to think and talk about. I’m about to talk to you for the interview and find out everything needed to know to write stuff about and make one big website, or journal for my project. I chose Laura, my mom, her side of the family over my dad because I think there’s more history to talk about here. I talk to you far more than my dad’s side and am more comfortable asking questions. You and grandma sent me ancestry reports, which I used 100% of; it helped me so much.
GF: Of course, it’s okay. I don’t have a great family history, but I think I told you that regarding my two great-grand parents… I don’t know their background too well, but I know other backgrounds.
MG: Really what I want to get from you is basically a run-down of the different factors in your life. Okay, so I could start with this is going back in time and start from the present and work as far back as… I mean, I possibly can, within the next 20–30 minutes… So, one characteristic of our family that I noticed is that we’re big on music. Would you agree?
GF: Very much so yes. We are very big on it and always have been.
MG: So, I want to ask you about your favorite instrument to play. Would it be the organ?
GF: Yeah, because that’s what I spent the most time on. Also, piano was basic to everything. I still play piano. I played it for your grandma on Sunday after church.
MG: Oh that’s cool.
Yeah, also so I’ve always admired in your house, you had the organ and the piano in that one room — it just kind of pulled the room together by having the two large instruments in there.
GF:Mhm.. yes.
MG:I was going to ask when you were a child, though, did you play instruments?
GF: So, yeah, I, I don’t know that my parents had much opportunity in music. My dad could sing, and my mother sort of picked up piano, she seemed to play things that had a lot of black keys, I heard the flats, stuff like that. When I was pretty young, she had it in mind that I should take piano lessons, maybe when I was six. And so my dad heard about a place in Freeport, which was a small town nearby where the people had a big old upright piano and I think my dad bought it for 25. Borrowed a truck from somebody and went up this hill and I still remember it. Then they had to bring it up this little rise, after the sidewalk in the street but then lifted it up from there into the back of this truck and it was extremely heavy.
MG:But it was worth it once the piano was inside.
GF:Of course…
My dad built the house, it wasn’t real big. And so, the piano, I think they put the piano in the dining room because everyone was always in the living room, and my mother arranged for me to take piano lessons from Mrs. Celesti.
MG:Tell me about her
GF: She really helped me, I must say. I started when I was six and I remember my first lesson, I thought I will never ever be able to do this, so, yeah, I… Because I used to say I couldn’t understand the relationship between the printed notes and the keys on the piano but after a week, it started to click. I was also trying to teach myself the basics. Then the other thing, it was my mother’s determination that I should learn the piano. And we lived in the country — pretty isolated, and not many other people had the opportunity to play. My dad had spent a lot of time at work so it was a hard time getting me to practice but still, it was an opportunity. I think the people who built a house next door to us out there in the country, or the man, the man of the house had what he called a mellophone
MG: A mellophone?
GF: I was a sixth grade and he said to my family, my mother probably, that maybe George would like to learn this. So, he gave it to us. I remember when we went into the music store and bought a new mouthpiece for it. I had this guy who was a sixth grade music teacher, and he gave me lessons when I got it. He also got me to play in the marching band. I said the mellophone never has a melody, but it teaches you; it’s good especially if you’re learning to March. It teaches you to be part of an ensemble, but you won’t find it in an orchestra and you probably would confuse the sound with a French horn.
MG: So, did your parents encourage you to play much?
GF: My mother especially encouraged me a lot in music. I remember when I was a senior in high school, I played a solo during whatever the Move Up Day assembly was or something like that toward the end of the year.
MG: Interesting. How was playing during school as a kid?
GF: Yeah, it’s strangely enough. I won something called the Arion Award for the top student musician and there are other people who were better musicians and maybe they were better, better students, I think, ’cause I wasn’t great at either, but I won the award and, yeah, that’s a reason.
MG: So yeah, that’s very interesting about that. I never heard of the mellophone before, but…that’s pretty cool. Also, very fascinating you said about your parents, how they encourage you to play. Mine did as well which is why I played the sax in middle school and made that Christmas CD.
GF: Oh, I love that CD.
MG: Thank you. Yeah, I included that in the project explaining how I did it and sent it to the grandparents?
The next thing I want to talk about is your church ’cause you’re pretty involved with your church, correct?
GF: Yes. It’s just First Lutheran Church in Johnstown.
MG: Okay, and you typically go every Sunday.
GF: Oh yeah, when we’re in town, we go to church and I…one of my retirement goals is to practice the organ there more. I’ve been playing the organ at that church since 1958.
MG: Do you want to play more pieces there then for the… for services?
GF: I play several times a year for services, and once a month I play the piano for a Saturday night service that’s done in a social hall with a piano. That reminds me also…
When I was a teenager, when we were growing up, there were four of us in a group, I was the oldest of four.
MG: Was it a band?
GF: So, we played the accordion and sometimes I played a horn. Also, when we would have practices, I would play the piano.
I was in college; when I was a junior, I took organ lessons, and a friend of mine was an outstanding musician and for the prom or whatever the big dance was he wanted to dance with his girlfriend and he was a pianist in a band, so but he went to dance with his girlfriend during one piece I think was Canadian sunset or something like that, and I played the piece so that he could go dance with her.
MG: That’s great, what a good friend. But going back to church, do you remember that time you took me up inside the organ at the church?
GF: Oh yeah, I do.
MG: I included that in this project as well, talking about that, and how that was pretty cool to go up in.
Wasn’t that organ faulty at one point. How is it doing now?
GF: We had a really strange thing happen this summer. There was a white mold formed in a room near the organ, and there were some leaks through the massive exterior wall to church, and about four months ago, I noticed that there was a short in the loudest instrument called organ tuba mirabilis and so I told that to the technician. He finally got there and he discovered there was white mold in that organ chamber and it affected all the little leather-like gaskets that control how the air comes in. They were not working right, because the white mold affected the leather, but for the most part, that organ has run really well, we restored it so that it should not need much work for 40 years, but we’re having the people come in now and we’re hoping the insurers will cover everything… The rest of the organ works perfectly.
MG: So you’ve played it there recently?
GF: I played for the church about 10 days ago, and yeah, it, it plays really well.
MG: Yeah, I can’t imagine because when I was researching stuff about organs, I came across an article about it, it included your name in it, actually, about the organ at your church and how a while ago, there was someone had to come and repair it. It reminded me of that time we climbed inside.
GF: Yeah, it’s a remarkable combination.
When my dad was a kid, he pumped organ in the old days at the church services… It was like pumping water in an old fashion well which takes a lot of muscle and persistence.
MG: Sounds exhausting. I wouldn’t last.
Now I want to move along a little, just a little into that of your most recent job that you had, you taught journalism?
GF: Yeah, I was an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Pittsburgh. I love working with young people. Even though it didn’t pay very much money, it was sort of prestigious. I like that I was somebody who’s not actually on a faculty but did something in town that makes my knowledge more valuable. I did that for 23 years, just one course a year… I loved working with students.
MG: Cool! So, I remember I did a project like this with you back in high school, and I ask you similar questions, but mostly it was more about your childhood growing up. Can you just briefly for a few minutes, just explain your time with the Tribune Democrat, because I know you were very influenced with that.
GF: Well, out of college in June of 1958, I started as a night side report at The Tribune Democrat. The Tribune Democrat was a combination joint of two newspapers, one published in the morning and one in the evening, so when it became one they just published all day until the ’77 flood. We were putting out the morning newspaper. That was in 1958, I started there, I left to go to active duty in the army for six months, came back, and then I left again to go to Columbia University to get my Master’s in Journalism. Shortly after I was a reporter, maybe a year after I was a reporter, I became the night telegraph editor, which meant you were reading all of the news coming in from the state to country in the world, and I selected stories and helped lay out front page and then eventually I was working with the editorial writer. We had an operating budget of 2 and a quarter million dollars, which was a lot for that time. In 1977, the month before the flood, we started a Sunday edition we had to six days a week, we added Sunday and… and it added a lot of the value of the newspaper.
MG: Yeah, yeah, this totally rings a bell with me from when you told me this before. Since I’m on the topic of work, going back to, I guess, your childhood, did you ever have any part-time job when you were a teen or anything? What was work like for you, when you were a kid?
GF: My first real job was, I was 16, between my year or year of high school, I was a summer employee at the Valley Daily News in Tarentum, a small newspaper place that later was in a merger and part of the net.
I filled in for someone, so of course, I couldn’t do everything that person did, but it was a great experience introducing me to actual newspaper journalism.
MG: Cool. Did you do anything to make money before that though?
GF: So, prior to that, once somewhere, we did our own newspaper; I’m unsure if I ever told you that. I think I did. We published it on gel. We would get a cookie tray and just heat something up in the oven which became gel and we would do the newspaper with purple ink and then lay the master onto the gel. It would capture that ink and we would put typing paper on it, and then it would fold into a five and a half by eight newspaper, a little tabloid.
MG: Interesting.
GF: So that was, I was like 13 years old, and I really, really wanted to be a journalist. I also wanted to be a disc jockey. I think every kid does though.
MG: Sweet, so moving on to education, you said you went to Juniata College and so then you went to Columbia correct?
GF: Yeah, after I worked a couple of years and after I was done with active duty.
MG: What years were Columbia and what years were Juniata
GF: I was in the class of 58 at Juniata, so I entered in the Fall of 54. I came out and started working. Went to active duty in November of 60, out in 61, married, worked back at the newspaper, and in 63, went to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Yeah, it was an eight-month course. Very short.
I kept going back to the Tribune Democrat.
MG: And then after Columbia, there was no more like schooling correct?
GF: No, no more formal education, nope.
MG: Okay… all very interesting.
So also in this project I was talking about stuff that we keep around our house back in Peachtree City and stuff you keep around your house that is unique to our family. One thing I noticed — one thing I chose to talk about is that, do you know that old radio we have in our house at the top of the stairs?
GF: Yeah, yeah.
MG: I talked about that a little.
GF: We had a radio like that in our house is growing up. I would always listen to the Lone Ranger on it.
MG: I see. Cool, okay, and yeah that’s a pretty cool thing to learn and talk about and how it’s unique to our family. Also, tell me about the clocks around your house, especially the big grandfather clock in the front.
GF: Yeah, it’s actually called grandmother. Because it’s slightly smaller.
MG: And then what’s the one in the living room?
GF: It used to be on the organ, but that’s just a wooden mantle clock.
And then in the kitchen is a clock that was made by a man in York.
MG: Okay, cool, and then you have one more clock in the basement? Isn’t it a cuckoo clock?
GF: Yeah, Steve was in the Black Forest, he brought back that clock and we mounted it.
MG: Yeah, so the point I’m trying to make is just that each of these clocks are not just your basic clock, they’re wooden and kind of are significant and they’re very unique.
GF: Yeah, that’s right, they all have family ties. And when people stay here, it drives them crazy, we have to shut them all off.
MG: Oh, I know. They get loud.
GF: Yeah and they go off at one time or very close together driving everyone crazy. I ignore it but other people here can’t.
MG: Any more antiques around the house worth mentioning?
GF: I have Anne’s dad’s ring that he gave me that I wear all the time; it was a Christmas present from grandma. I just wear for dress. It’s like a sort of becoming an antique.
MG: Yeah, cool.
GF: So that… and we have, we have very little from my family because my family really didn’t have much to pass on. There was a small cupboard, it used to be at the top of the steps of my parents’ house, and it kept a few books in it, and it’s next to the computer now. It’s been painted I don’t know how many times, so it’s as much pain as it is wood, I think so, yeah. I have some of my dad’s tools, which I think you and Nick got into a couple times.
MG: (Laughing) Yeah…
GF: Yeah, so my dad was an auto mechanic and I know a few of his tools were pretty old… you should put in for them sometime.
MG: Another thing that I never actually talked to you about before but tell me a little about your beer can collection down in the basement.
GF: (Laughing) Oh, that. Steve (George’s son), for some reason, decided to collect beer cans and so wherever we went to we would take them home… We were traveling in the Rockies and we stopped by the road and have a sandwich and we’d want to get down into the gully, you know. And, I’d take him to these bars in the city of Johnstown; the ethnic neighborhood, and we would be going past all the people drinking at the bar back to the beer refrigerator, and he’d pick us out something that we didn’t have yet.
Ironically the other day, we’re talking about maybe we should get rid of some of these cans but we have a neighbor who also collects beer cans, and we asked his mother if he might want any of these, and she took pictures of all them on her cell phone and sent them to him to look… and he picked out like six that he wanted that he didn’t have.
MG: Oh wow. So what exactly is on the beer cans?
GF: (Walking down to the basement) I’m gonna walk down to tell you very quickly.
Yeah, Iron City is one of them which is a Pittsburgh brewing company, and they would feature the Steelers on them. Let me see here, just gave me a second. So a lot of the usual ones, like Budweiser and that sort of thing, but there are some unusual ones. Let’s see, Texas Pride, Old English 800, Sierra which has horses on it in the Sierra mountains, Busch, Bonzo’s Beer, Schmidt’s Octoberfest, Utica Club… I’m trying to see if there’s anything really unusual. A couple foreign ones.
MG: Yeah, so… yeah, I know that my dad has one of a collection himself that I think my mom might have made him throw away at some point.
GF: Yeah, we almost threw these away. I cleaned them all up, dusted them, and put everything back. There’s a lot that are Pittsburgh-oriented like Duquesne Brewing Company which they called their beer Duke Beer.
MG: Do you know roughly how many are on that wall?
GF: Yeah, there’s about 180
MG: Oh wow, that’s a lot
GF: Oh, Big Barrel and KB Lager. These are all Australian beers. I don’t know how we got those.
Oh yeah, oh yes. The Super Super Super Steelers 1979 from Iron City beer as a group picture of all the Steelers wrapped around the can.
MG: That’s very cool. Yeah, my dad has at least one of those with all the Steelers on it.
GF: Yep, you have to be a big fan.
MG: Well thank you for going down there and telling me about all that.
GF: Sure
MG: So I’m going to take a little transition here, to now. Your father whose name was Ernest, correct?
GF: Yeah, right, right. It’s also my first name.
MG: Is it really?…
GF: Yes, but I’m named for my dad and my maternal grandfather.
MG: Interesting, I did not know that I always thought that your first name was George since everyone referred to you as that. Okay, so where was Ernest born?
GF: He was born in Washington, Pennsylvania.
MG: Washington… Okay tell me a little about his life.
GF: Yeah, they had a farm and they discovered natural gas on the farm, so that gave them some income besides farming.
MG: So, when he was growing up, he farmed a lot then?
GF: Yes, I think they call them in both cases, my mother and my dad’s farms, were called truck farms, truck like a truck as you drive. Yeah, they raised vegetables and fruit for market, and we have a cow and a horse and a couple of chickens. The eggs, they would market those too.
MG: Yeah, so what about Ernest’s work or a job as he went into adulthood, what did he do?
GF: Well, the idea was for the farm boys was to get off the farm and there was a steel mill about four or five miles away, Allegheny Ludlum. Their specialty was stainless steel, which is used for cutlery. And he went there to work, he was an unskilled labor. The work shifts 8–4, 4–12, and 12–8; every week was different. Which was a horrible life.
MG: Yeah, I bet.
GF: Not so much that the work was hard, but they… you never got a decent sleep.
MG: I read in your ancestry report how he was constantly working.
GF: Yeah and he kept being exempt from the draft during World War II because there were more children… you could be exempt from the draft if you had a child in the name of, say, “Well you have to have two and had two or three or four.” We had four people, so I never had to go into the military but he also didn’t make that much money and so on, the side, he became a driver for a supplies and lumber supply company, and he also worked on cars. He built another garage in the back of the house, and we work at cars… and so sometimes he just worked around the clock.
Then when they would have strikes, during a time of a lot of steel strikes, he would try to find some kind of work to do. I remember he rebuilt barn roofs and things like that. He was a hard worker.
MG: Yeah it for sure sounds like it.
GF: He was also smart. I found his old report guards, and he scored well. He only went up to eighth grade, but he had Latin for example.
MG: Now that you mentioned that I forgot to bring up that one-room schoolhouse you wrote an email to me about. So briefly can you tell me about the school you sent me a picture of when you were young?
GF: So yeah, it was Fawn township, and it had three one-room school houses.
I think my mother went to that school also and at that time the school went up to the eighth grade but she had only had 7 years of schooling.
MG: Did your dad to go to something similar for not all?
GF: Yeah, he would have if he was in that school district, he grew up several miles away, they moved from Washington County, they moved around a lot but eventually ended up in Butler County. Just, yeah, a couple of miles away, they met, I don’t know how they met exactly, they met probably through their relatives because they would all go to the grange. Either the grange for rural people or church or something like that, and they would be dating somebody else’s brother or sister, that kind of thing. So that kind of a relationship among some people who live in that area.
MG: So did your parents go to church often too?
GF: My mother’s father was a Sunday school superintendent at a small church called Center Methodist Church, it’s right near where my one-room school was. But my dad’s family were all Lutheran, and I went to a Lutheran church in Freeport, and so when they were married, they went to the Lutheran Church, and we went all the time.
MG: Gotcha. But so you don’t know exactly how they met?
GF: Well, not exactly, but as I said, there were like three or four families in which the young people were all about the same. We’d go to things like the grange or to church or something like that and meet one another and then they would eventually date, and it was, I don’t know precisely how they met, I’m sorry, but it was something like that. Through church or grange activities.
MG: Okay, the next thing I wanted to talk about… so you were saying your father built a house?
GF: So, yeah, I think in 1940 he did most of the work; I’m sure he had help.
My maternal grandfather gave him a lot hat was on the corner of the farm, the family farm, and he built the house and we grew up there, and then twice he added on to it. I remember helping build the addition. I love carpentry, I love that kind of work.
MG: Cool, okay, and then your dad’s dad, so your grandfather, was named Louis?
GF: Yeah, my father’s father was Louis yeah.
MG: Okay, can you tell me just really anything you can recall that you know about his life?
GF: Well, he was a farmer of course. Had 11 kids who all grew up on the farm and he was, I think, also from Washington Pennsylvania, I know my, my paternal grandmother also from there, and they had this small farm, a truck farm as I said, but they discovered natural gas on it, so they always had gas for themselves and I think they could sell some of it and they produced an additional income. My paternal grandfather almost always had a new car, he loved having a new car.
MG: That’s awesome.
GF: Yeah, and in a way we thought of these people as poor, but in a way they weren’t so poor because you have all those kids and the farm, but everybody kinda helped out.
MG: So, what kind of a food or are we talking about here when talking about farming?
GF: Well, as I said, it was a, I call it, you could look up the dictionary. I finally did, it’s called truck farm. I guess you use a wagon or eventually a truck to take this stuff into market, but they would eat eggs of course, but they would grow vegetables and pro-trees and they make cider with the apples and whatever they had. Whatever they had, they would take it in and sell it to the stores or sell door-to-door.
Both families did that.
MG: So after Louis, then came your great-grandfather. What was his name?
GF:
Well, that was Koedel and then Anthony was on the maternal side. They met on a boat coming from England.
MG: Oh cool, so this was the transition from Europe to America.
GF: Yeah, and the one was an orphan, and the other one was illegitimate.
So they didn’t know their background, they didn’t know their families… it just ends there and they just so happened to meet on a ship bringing immigrants to America.
MG: Interesting
GF: Yeah, and Koedel was from Germany, but the ship must have stopped in England or at some port near there. Yeah, but I don’t know much about it.
MG: Oh yeah, but that’s a biggie right there — that you know that because that’s where it really began.
GF: Well, yeah, because we just can’t go back any further on that side, and frankly, we don’t go back much further on my dad’s side. That was all pretty much in Washington Pennsylvania. Our ancestors came over mid-1800s; my paternal grandmother Laura, she was Scotch-Irish, her parents came in, I think they were sort of in the early a 20th century they weren’t real early immigrants, but there was a wave of Northern Europeans around the 1920s I think. It was the first way but it was kind of a later wave. I think that’s where she came from, so she was probably first generation, well all my grandparents, I think, were first-generation Americans.
MG: So I’m assuming that in Germany or family mostly farmed.
GF: I believe so. My uncle Leonard really tried hard to trace ancestry into Germany, and didn’t do well, at all. I think he found one person relating to Koedel.
MG: Awesome! That’s all very interesting and I love learning about how it pertains to your life.
I just wanted to work all the way back, and go over basically what you told me about which is all very interesting and how it pertains to our family. Everything that we talked about most likely reflects our culture from life in Germany, and the ancestry reports that you and grandma gave me help a ton. Thanks so much for taking the time to tell me about how our ancestors developed their lives after coming to America.
