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Some comments about an extraordinary woman
A BEAR CALLED CHARLIE: A MEMOIR is unique in that it presents family history through the imaginative perspective of a "rescued" teddy bear. Charlie, abandoned during World War II and for the next fifty years confined to a cardboard box in an attic, is at last released when he is purchased at auction by my mother. On the way to his new home, propped on the seat of her car, Charlie breaks his long silence and begins to talk. His new mistress almost wrecks the car.
This clever approach to point of view was the handiwork of a woman in her late eighties and early nineties, my mother, Isabel Crane Goldberg. A Renaissance woman, the great-granddaughter of pioneer settlers who left Scotland in search of religious freedom, early on my mother demonstrated the same fierce determination that had guided her ancestors to America. It is also present in the gentle but also hard-nosed character of her much beloved Charlie.
My mother's Scottish forebears in the New World - a couple with eleven children - headed west from the Carolinas, books and musical instruments in tow. Finally, at the turn of the 19th century, they settled in the hills of Southern Indiana's Owen County, near what would later become Bloomington. When not serving as a circuit rider for the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church), mother's great grandfather carved out a living as a farmer and orchardist. His children soon displayed gifts as educators, musicians, artists and writers, thus forming the rich artistic and intellectual world in which mother would grow up.
Walking two miles to the one-room schoolhouse where she taught, Isabel's own mother had an insatiable appetite for music - opera in particular - for literature, and for writing.
Today, her original poetry compares favorably with that of James Whitcomb Riley. Her brother, Donald Rice, a dentist, served as principal flutist for the St. Louis Symphony. Her great-aunt was not only a talented painter, she was the principal harpist, and her husband first clarinetist of the same symphony. Her great uncle, Walter Coffey, was an accomplished artist and art instructor. Examples of his work can be seen on this website.
Along with other accomplished family musicians, the MacDonalds, Coffeys, Rices and Cranes combined, remarkably, to create an opera company in Spencer, Indiana, the tiny county seat. Performing in English, German and Italian, the company was a huge hit in a rural community starved for culture.
Isabel's father, John Freulinghausen Crane, ran a combination grocery and general store, while maintaining the family's orchard and gardens. As a small child growing up in the community, I was stopped numerous times by the elders in the town, all of them wanting to be certain I knew my grandparents saved them from starvation or freezing to death during the cold winters, by forgiving monies owed to purchase food or coal during the Great Depression. And then, to a person, the same people would smile, shake their heads fondly, and say "Freal was quite a storyteller!"
Graduating at the top of her class from High School during the height of the Great Depression; war looming on the horizon; the sudden death of her beloved father while the family was enjoying a rare day of fun and festivities - all combined to make Isabel's plans to study literature and writing in the nearby university, financially impossible. She needed immediately to find work.
It was while working as a secretary that she met the man whom she would marry, my father. There was only one significant obstacle: he was Jewish, she Protestant, at a time when intermarriage was all but forbidden. But the enlightened attitude of my mother's family is best illustrated by her mother's reaction to the news: "Oh, Isabel, how wonderful! You know the Jews are God's chosen people!"
It was in this home filled with love, religious tolerance and concern for one's fellow man, that my younger sister and I were raised. My father, surely the world's greatest storyteller; my mother, early on determined that we would be exposed to the magic of books, art and music. Nanny, our maternal grandmother, added opera training for me in this familial mix, along with poetry and classical literature from the moment I could toddle. My paternal grandmother, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa in Mathematics from DePauw University when she was only 19, filled my head with the magic of science, and introduced me to what soon would become a lifelong passion of mine - photography.
And always, in this mélange of culture and intellectual challenges, also ran another constant: a deep love for animals of all kinds.
By the time I was probably no more than six, I was convinced my maternal grandmother was the reincarnation of St. Francis of Assisi! How could it not be so, I thought, as I stood silently beside her in our yard, watched as she opened her hands and, with a perfectly imitated bird call, invited the birds to alight and feed from her hands.
This was the magical world in which we lived.
Little wonder, then, that my mother studied every spare moment throughout her long and extraordinarily productive life, honing her already considerable artistic skills and winning awards, both for her paintings and weavings. She kept copious notes, ideas for a host of stories; composed pop tunes as well as the campaign theme song for Eisenhower's presidential campaign. Both she and my father had an eye for fine craftsmanship, frequently attending auctions, searching for unrecognized little treasures.
And, somewhere along the line, she began to collect - and be given - a host of stuffed animals, which soon filled one bedroom to overflowing. Perhaps this slightly whimsical bent amidst so much refinement explains my mother being free enough in imaginative terms, in her eighties and nineties, to discover the idea of telling family history as seen through the golden eyes of a very special antique teddy bear.
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