Robert Holman remembers:
Alfred Walter Whitman
His name was Alfred Walter Whitman but to me, he was Gramp. He was a short fellow, bald-headed and had a jolly personality. He would come to our house a lot down on the Cape because he liked to fish and he liked it down on the Cape. When I was small, I got to know a good bit.
One time he had some trouble with his blood. I know he had heart problems, but the doctor told him to eat raw hamburger meat. I think that is where I learned to eat raw hamburger meat because he always gave me a little pinch of it, and I got to where I liked it pretty well myself.
I can remember going up to his house when he wasmarried to his second wife, Emma. He had a little workshop out back that was just a small building.
One time, he reroofed it. The bees had gotten up into the very top of the roof. So that he would not disturb the bees, he built a little house with holes in it to set on top of the roof. He set the house up there, shingled the whole roof all around, the bees buzzing around him. He said they never did bother him. They just went in and out of their nest while he shingled the roof and then he patched around that little house up on topand left the bees to continue to have their next up there.
I remember that he loved flowers and his backyard was not all lawn. He had little trails or pathways through the flowers. He had a grape arbor where you could sit under the arbor and the grapes would hang down inside. You could pick grapes there and sit there where it was cool.
In his kitchen, he sat in the corner where the end of the table was. He had a rocking chair and pendulum clock in the kitchen. That clock would tick-tock all the time. He also had a little cavalry and that thing would sing like mad.
He had a dog, which I think was a cocker spaniel, whose name was Manny. Aside from the dog’s name being Manny everybody in the family called my mothe Mannie. My mother told me one time Aunt Alice was up in Abington and she met a woman on the street who knew the whole family and she happened to tell aunt Alice, “Oh, wasn’t it terrible about Manny dying.” Poor Aunt Alice got all upset and said, “Well, people in my family die and no one lets me know about it.” Come to find out, the woman was talking about Manny the dog and Aunt alice thought that she was talking about my mother. That got her all shook up. It was a joke in the family for a long time.
I don’t know what my grandfather did for a living, because he was retired when I got big enough to really know him. I believe that he was a painter and wallpaper-hanger I know he worked in a shoe shop as a maintenance man because that is where he lost his thumb. He said he was working on a machine and he got his thumb cut off. He grabbed ahold of his wrist and held his wrist up. He walked down the long line of machines holding his hand up and blood dripping of his elbow. The women sewing shoes on the sewing machine would look up and see his hand all bloody and they were just falling out as he went by them.
One thing that he told me was that he and another man wired the house of John L. Sullivan, a world champion prize fighter, for electricity. Back in those days people were just beginning to get electricity in their houses. Y mother told me that my grandfather and my dad built one of the first raios in Abington. It was what they called a “cat-whisker” radio.
When my brother Bert was small, he had a fire truck which would really pump water, a little truck that you push on the floor. My grandfather would take toilet paper, fluff it all up and light it on fire in the toilet and Grandpa would shout “fire” and Bert would make the truck pump water to put it out.
( I have researched census records and Alfred spent his first marriage actually in Whitman living in an apartment at 83 Washington, now Whitman. After his daughter Laura married Til Balentine, she lived at 845 Washing St, Abington. Her father, Alfred and sisters, joined her living in a rented home next to her at 847 Washington Street. After his wife passed and he remarried Emily and they owned a home at 17 Wall St, Rockland. It is likely that this is the address where the gardens in the letter existed. There is a home which stands at this address but I cant be sure without research if it is the same home. There is a back yard that would have enough space for a garden.)