Remembering Bruce

Lately I’ve been thinking about my only brother, Bruce.  He would have been 57 this week, had he not died of alcohol-related heart failure thirteen years ago.

Bruce and our sister and I grew up in a typical middle-class home of the 1950s and 1960s.  But Bruce was especially gifted in many ways.  He was big and strong from the time he was very young—75 pounds of brawn by the time he started first grade!  The first college football scout to notice him said to my father, when Bruce was just five, “If your boy plays football, I’d love to see that kid when he’s eighteen.”

And Bruce was athletic.  As he grew older, he excelled in every sport he tried—baseball, basketball, track and field…  But when it came time to choose one sport, it was football.  By his senior year in high school, he was a star.

Bruce was also very smart.  And good-looking.  And he lived in a stable Christian home, where college was a ‘given’ and the money was there to make it happen.  But he fell in with a wild crowd, where drinking and smoking and drugs were the norm, and he was the leader of the pack.  Bruce was also what would have been called “high strung”—and I think he inherited the tendency towards depression that runs in the males of our family.  And like many before him, substance abuse was his form of self-medicating.  At least, that’s what my sister and I theorized in long, late-night conversations, years later, on the topic of “what on earth happened to Bruce?”

So he grew up, married, had two daughters…  He somehow finished college (with honors), but drifted from job to job.  His marriage fell apart.  He tried to raise his two daughters, but their grandparents did most of the heavy lifting, while Bruce drifted along in a fog…  But as the years went by, the fog was much preferable to the loud, obnoxious, domineering, hot-tempered person he was when he was sober.  All of us spent less and less time with him.  Towards the end, I felt his hatred enough that I often felt unsafe, and looked over my shoulder when I walked from my garage to my back door.  (Later, after his death, more than one relative told me that my fears for my life were not unfounded.)

So the week of his funeral, we cried.  Not because we would miss him—but because our hearts broke for his wasted potential…  for the two daughters he had failed in many ways…  for what he could have been.

And the years went by—his grave unmarked and his life mostly unmourned.  Thinking about him, remembering him, was painful... 

But lately, I’ve begun to remember the boy I grew up with.  I recall the little guy who had a bit of a temper even then…  If any of us aggravated him to the point of retaliation, he would use the worst bad word he knew—he would call the offender (get ready for it) a “poo poo pie.”

I remember the little brother who, big and strong as he was, was never a bully—but rather, always stood up for the weak.  One time when he was about twelve, he was sent to the principal’s office for fighting, and our dad was called.  It turned out that one of the other boys in his class had a mother who regularly had “nervous breakdowns” and spent time in the local mental hospital.  The other boys were making fun of the kid on the playground, and Bruce stepped in to make sure that didn’t happen any more.

When he was in eighth grade, I came home after school one day and Bruce was in bed—his face beaten to a pulp, almost unrecognizable.  It turned out some gangbanger-wannabes were hassling a girl at his school.  He faced them down and told them to leave her alone.  A few moments later they jumped him from behind and knocked him down and out…  But I don’t think he ever had regrets for standing up for the helpless, no matter what the cost.

I remember the outstanding scholar he was.  Schoolwork was nearly effortless for him.  (I’m pretty sure he had a photographic memory like our father did, and like one of his daughters.)  His seventh grade math teacher put it well, in a parent-teacher conference:  “It really bugs me that I have to give Bruce A’s, when I know perfectly well that he does his homework leaned up against a locker five minutes before class!”

Everyone remembers the outstanding athlete he was.  The week he died, we got a note from Neal Ormond, who announced the West Aurora football games on the radio during the years Bruce played (three years of varsity).  Twenty-five years later, Mr. Ormond still remembered his pleasure in announcing Bruce’s plays on the field. 

I was away at college all three years that Bruce played varsity football, and I’d never seen him play.  So for his last game, the great crosstown rivalry of East Aurora vs. West Aurora in the fall of 1975, I flew home in a small chartered plane to see him play—and it was worth it.  West Aurora had lost every single game of Bruce’s senior year, in spite of his heroic efforts every Friday night.  But that night, Bruce ran the only touchdown of the game into the end zone—and then scored the extra points.  West Aurora won, 8 to 3. 

Bruce never played college football—he was too troubled by then, and burned out, and he became a father not long after high school.  But oh, the memories!…  Our dad kept a scrapbook of it all.

So now I choose to remember not the rude, abrasive, menacing alcoholic of the later years—but the boy I grew up with.  The person he could have been.  The person God meant for him to be.  I think it’s time I had a grave marker made for my little brother—he deserves that.  Bruce, I hope you found peace.  I think I finally have.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

One year later - a postscript:

I recently purchased this marble grave marker for my brother.  When the weather improves here in Illinois, I'll go out to the cemetery and see about having it mounted on a cement base.  It's a step in the right direction.

Another postscript, this one from spring 2017:

Anna Peterson Genoways - Love Found Late

I recently wrote about my great aunt Therese.  Her oldest sister was Anna Peterson Genoways (1887-1928).  She was a schoolteacher, like me; and she married later in life, like I did.  I call this story "Love Found Late."  

Anna was the oldest of eight children, born to Swedish immigrants who farmed on the plains of Nebraska near the Platte River.  Her childhood and youth were happy, as far as I can tell.  She traveled to Sweden in 1905 with her mother and younger sister Therese.  Anna was a typical oldest child—mature and responsible—and she, like two or three of her sisters, became a schoolteacher.      

Her life was first marred by tragedy in 1917.  Her father Charles, by all accounts a wonderful man, died of cancer in a hospital in Chicago.  Not long after, her dear brother Ted, an engineering student at the University of Nebraska, died in an army camp during WWI—like so many others, not in combat, but in the Great Influenza Epidemic.  

Anna was now needed to help run the family farm.  By the 1920 census, she is 32 years old and is no longer listed as a schoolteacher as she was in 1910; now she is a “farm manager” with a mother and three younger sisters to support.

But her life took a happy turn in 1925, when she married Edwin Genoways at age 37.  They took a year-long honeymoon, traveling all over the west in their brand-new Model T.  They even drove it to the top of Pike’s Peak!  Their daughter-in-law told me that Edwin said years later that at times they had to drive it up the mountain in reverse, and at other times they had to push it—but they made it.  A number of photos have survived, including this one of the happy couple standing in front of their car:

Back home in Nebraska, Edwin and Anna soon had a joyful event—the birth of their son Charles in 1927.  This was followed a year later by the birth of another son, Bruce. 

But their time together was now running out…  Two weeks after the birth of Bruce, Anna died at age 40.  My father remembers his little cousin Charles tearfully asking for his mother, being too young to realize that she lay dying.

Edwin was now a grieving widower with two young sons.  This picture of the three of them sitting outdoors, Edwin holding little Bruce, always tugs at my heartstrings:

Edwin managed to raise both boys on his own—and they both turned out well.  But he never remarried…  Anna, the wife he loved for so brief and happy a time, was evidently never replaced in his heart.

Another Step in the Right Direction

Last year at about this time I wrote one of my most personal blog posts ever - about my late brother, Bruce.  Here is a link to that post, with a postscript added at the end...  It's another step in the right direction.

Remembering Bruce

Getting in Touch With My Inner Swede

Recently I wrote about “lutefisk,” and that got me thinking about my Swedish roots. 

Last year I had my DNA tested and it came out 53% Scandinavian.  But growing up a Wallin in the Midwest, it felt like much more.  Looking at my hair, my friends agree; while they are going gray in their middle age, I faded to platinum blonde.  My family tree shows more like 62.5% Swede—five great-grandparents out of eight emigrated from Sweden.  My four grandparents’ surnames are Wallin, Peterson, Anderson, and Erickson.  (The Erickson branch was from northern Germany.)  You’ll find no offensive “-sen” endings on these last names—that would mean Norwegian, and Grandma Wallin had no use for Norwegians. 

I’ve inherited a few things from The Old Country, but not many.  My great-grandparents all came as young adults, with very little but the clothes on their backs.  Only one of the five Swedes who came, my great-grandmother Emelia Fryksdal Peterson, ever saw the old country again, when she went back to Sweden with two of her daughters in 1920, shortly after Great Grandpa died.  A postcard survives from that trip, showing the town where they stayed (Sandviken):

 My Grandma Sara Peterson Wallin said in the 1940 census record that her mother tongue was Swedish, and I believe it.  She had quite a few Swedish books in her possession, and even in her old age, she could open one and read out of it without much effort.  My father remembers as a very young child that the rule was this:  If his grandparents spoke to him in Swedish, he was to answer in Swedish, and if they spoke to him in English, he should answer in English.

My Grandpa Sture Wallin was next-to-youngest of seven Wallin children, the others (in order of age) being Isador, Inez, Iranus, Ithel, Aurora, and Leonard.  My father said that my great-grandpa Frederick Wallin was a bit of a Swedish history buff, which accounts for his children’s names.  Sten Sture, for instance, was a Swedish statesman who “beat up on the Danes,” which would have put him in high favor with Great Grandpa.   

In my childhood and youth, the Wallins gathered at Grandma Sara and Grandpa Sture’s house on Christmas Eve.  Besides the traditional Christmas lutefisk and the delicious butter cookies which we called “Swedish Spritz,” there were Swedish meatballs and rice pudding with a raisin in it.  It was said that whoever ended up with the raisin would have good luck in the coming year. 

Things were a little less Swedish the rest of the year—but compared to my middle-class Midwestern friends, this was still far more ethnicity than most of them were exposed to! 

In my younger days, I colored my hair brown.  But as I have gotten older and given up that expensive and high-maintenance habit, I have gotten in touch again with my Inner Swede.  I think my father and grandparents would be pleased about that...  As Grandpa Wallin said to my brother one time many years ago, “Remember, Bruce, you are a Swede.  And nobody can outthink a Swede, nobody can outwork a Swede, and nobody can outfight a Swede.”


Postscript: Recent ancestry DNA "ethnicity estimate updates" now have me as 84% Scandinavian. I'm not surprised!