Intro: The Strelhke Saga
A Mad Dash to the Truth
Nellene's story was discovered and preserved by her granddaughter Sally in 1962. Sally described this in writing better than I could, so I'll let her explain.
But before I do, just let me explain. Sally put three dashes———after ‘Remember When’ in the title. Papa says that's just how they did it in the ’60s when they weren’t fond of ellipses, maybe—or it could be a personal attachment on the part of Nellene to —s. After all, we do learn in Sally's note that her beloved Ganna “had her own particular ideas about grammar, punctuation, and spelling (note her spelling of ‘Strelhke’).”
Now the —s I can quite understand, as I, N-Strokes, have myself had quite florid affairs and infatuations with them—that, therefore, I can believe runs—or, one might say, dashes—in the family.
The misspelling of ‘Strehkle’, on the other hand, I find harder to relate to—I confess I've been something of a fascist when it comes to the pronunciation and spelling of our last name Strekhle (as a former president of my father's company—haplessly attempting its pronunciation in front of a gathering of employee families only to meet the eager correction of a 7 odd year old me—can attest).
I suspected that perhaps Nellene intended to rib her husband for imposing on her such a difficult surname, and suggested as much to Papa.
But Papa, being an established Detective in these genealogical mysteries—earning him the beloved family NickNames ‘Gen Master Papa San’, ‘Sherlock Chromosomes’, and ‘The Treekeeper’—had a rather more interesting theory: perhaps Nellene's misspelling of Streklhe was nothing short of subversive rhetorical antagonism directed at... the patriarchy! Subterfuge, in other words. ‘Trolling’, to borrow a term from the lexicon of the internet.
His rationale I found quite compelling—throughout her memoir, and on the title page, Nellene wrote her name as Nellene White.
“Ah I get it,” I replied to the Gen Master—“so she’s using her maiden name, right?”
Papa San chuckled a knowing but world-weary chuckle at my naïveté. “N-Strokes, you don't know the half of it. That's not Nellie's maiden name, son. That's Nellie's mother's maiden name.
My jaw dropped to the floor (though admittedly it may have just been tired from jacking—as I'm sure, dear reader, you can appreciate from this introduction it must sometimes get). “But that would be as if Mom were to use the name—not Johnson, not her née name—but the name Callely.”
The Master Papa San nodded, seeing the lesson had been imparted and apparently indifferent to the slack in my rather jacked jaw.
How, I wondered, could she do such a thing to her beloved Daddy, George Andrews, to whom she had dedicated her writings? But my jaw permitted no more jacking at that point so I kept it to myself.
It later occurred to me that her father was not a Strelhke and probably did not care about his surname, which, like my own mother's née name Johnson, was rather anodyne and inoffensive and unlikely to be butchered and still less likely to be twisted into some offensive perversion which your friends torment you with (or so you imagine)—but so N—Strokes digresses (though of course has absolutely no emotional energy around the phenomena he speculates on, the imagining of which has nothing to do with his own NickName).
We are definitely descended now
Finally—and quite improbably given my history—it occurred to me just how successful had Nellie's subterfuge been. How much ink have I spilt, and how much thought had I—among her most descended Streklhe patriarchs—devoted to understanding the surnamic mysteries embedded in the metadata of this document.
I am sure you will have several questions. I certainly have, but I fear they will forever remain unanswered:
Intellectual agility or patriarchal fragility?
Puzzling tranquility or delicate sensibility?
Linguistic versatility or psychological instability?
Moral flexibility or ideological futility?
Social adaptability or economic volatility?
What were we talking about again—senility? Oh, Remember When——— —and what Sally had to do with its utility, mobility, and—dare I say—motility———
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TYPIST'S NOTES
On Saturday, April 28, 1962, my mother and I sorted all the accumulated trunks, boxes, and other miscellaneous articles stored in the basement. In my father's “memory trunk” I found two typewritten copies of this manuscript--the original and one carbon.
Recognizing it immediately as a family treasure, I knew both my brother and I should like to save it. Because only the original was in good condition and so that each of us could have a good, complete copy, I retyped it in my office after work hours on an IBM Executive typewriter. I gave the first carbon of my typed version to my mother and the second and third carbons to my brother and kept the original for myself. Everything I had found pertaining to this document, as well as the original and carbon, I passed on to my brother, first inserting the aged original in acetate sheets.
In addition, I had two sets of the drawings, which were only in the original copy and not in the carbon, run off on the Copease machine at my office. One set I kept, and the other I gave to my mother, all cut and pasted in the right places on the right pages (most of the original illustrations were drawn directly on the typewritten pages).
At the end of this document I have inserted several pages numbered 14, followed by two unnumbered pages, and 15, followed by three unnumbered pages. These pages, in the same box as the original manuscript, were in longhand. They were numbered as follows: 14, 2nd of 14, 3rd of 14, 15, 2nd of 15, 3rd of 15, ord, 4. Since the content of these pages is different from the others, I believe Ganna (Nellene White Strehlke) would eventually have included them, and so I included them here—with a simplified page numbering system.
In retyping this manuscript, I did not do any editing of any sort, even though, as you will shortly see, Ganna had her own particular ideas about grammar, punctuation, and spelling (note her spelling of “Strelhke”). I did include the pencil and pen notations, which had been written by someone sometime in the past. At the bottom of pages 32 and 36 on the carbon, there were these respective pencil notations: "33--picture” and "37--picture." Although neither copy actually included pages 33 and 37, I kept the numbering system the same. Because of our respective typewriters, the margins and length of the pages are slightly different. Nevertheless, I kept as closely to her style as I could; the total number of pages of the whole story (including, of course, the ending mentioned above) and the total number of pages for each individual date’s reminiscences are the same.
I am sure you will have several questions. I certainly have, but I fear they will forever remain unanswered:
Does the story end on page 46, or was the ending lost, or was it not written?
Who did the original typing?
Who drew the illustrations? (Perhaps my father did, as I do seem to recognize his style in some of the drawings, particularly that on page 5.)
Sally Faith Strehlke
240-29 Forest Drive
Douglaston 62, Long Island, New York
May, 1962
Nellie's mother and the three sisters
Read it straight from the Treekeeper: “What happened to Florence?” asked Cousin Carolyn
According to the Treekeeper, Nellene was one of three children born to her mother, Hortense Florence White, and George Andrews—himself surely (in part, at the very least) the namesake of Nellie's son and my great-grandfather, progenitor of The—‘correctly’ spelled—Strehlke Saga. It sounds like they were born in Kansas (Concordia) but moved to the then new and now still small town of Montrose, Colorado in the 1880s.
The three children were all girls (another thing, beyond the easy née name, which Nellie has in common with Shelley): Winifred Florence (1874), Nellene Mable (1876), and Florence Helen (1880). Hortense apparently died at age 37 in 1890, when Nellie would have been 14 and her sister Florence just 10. It sounds like their dad, George, brought them back to Concordia to be raised by Hortense's sister, Aunt Matie. I don't have a lot more detail about Hortense, though the Treekeeper surely has other nuggets buried somewhere. Everything I've heard about the degenerate outlaw and notorious Strehlke in-law George Andrews suggests it was probably a wise move on his part to retain a woman's touch in the young girls' lives.
But what of the sisters? Winifred is referred to lovingly (and often humorously) in Nellene's memoirs as well as in The Strehlke Saga. My favorite anecdote, founda at the end of Remember When———, involves Nellene's son George:
Do you remember the afternoon company came we were all sitting on the porch——Our son George and Sister Winnie had gone fishing, taking one of the boats to the upper part of the Lake. After a few hours we started watching for their return. Could not see them at first thru so many trees on the bank of the Lake. Then we noticed the boat hardly moved and George was working so hard, he was just laying down on his oars. George thought his Auntie Winnie weighed so much, he could not get any place, he kept telling her to sit more on one side, then more on the other, till Sister felt so bad because she weighed so much. Then you noticed what the trouble was. You yelled to George, "to pull in the anchor and he wouldn't have to work so hard." George had thrown the anchor in the water to hold the boat, when they were fishing. Then forgot to pull it in. The anchor was an iron wheel from some mine machinery and was pulling, pretty hard on all the weeds in the Lakes. Sister was so happy to find out it wasn't her. George was so fussed, to think he hadent [sic] thought of the anchor and so dead tired working so hard. Didint [sic] like it because we laughed so hard. Even now, he does not care for this story.
But Florence does not, to my knowledge, get a mention in her sister's memoir. She is mentioned briefly, however, in George's The Strehlke Saga (1961), where she is relegated to the below appendix passage to which I should rather defer to the Treekeeper on the matter of interpretation. But if I were to try my clumsy hand I'd say he was under the impression that Florence worked in a brothel (in California?) and that a dear 'Gannadaddy' opted not to come to her aid after she was severely burned in a fire there because he was worried the trip could hurt his reputation in business.
IV. Second Marriage of George W. Andrews
- She was generally considered a "battle-ax"
- Dad's family hostile to her—Dad doesn't even know the woman's name.
- Ganna and Winifred held the woman responsible for Florence's going wrong when she was young.
- Florence, upon encouragement from her stepmother, began dating an undesirable man. For many years thereafter she worked in "seamy" places.
- At one point the place she worked in caught fire, and she was severely burned. Gannadaddy claimed "they" burned it purposely to "get" Florence (for some mysterious reason). He did not come to her aid because of fear of what her reputation might do to a young man's struggling business in those "straight-laced" days. But Auntie Winnie flew to the rescue and nursed her sister for many months, eventually back to health.
The Treekeeper seems to believe Gannadaddy refers to the author's father (this being the name the author's children, George and Sally, had for his father). But I'm then unsure why he would use 'Dad' earlier on in the passage and elsewhere in the memoir, as he does. Other candidates would be his own grandfathers, George Andrews and Julius Strehlke, but it's hard to imagine either being regarded a young man in the context, so maybe it was Lewis (Nellene's husband) after all—perhaps this passage was uniquely addressed to his children. Perhaps a dig at his father clothed in sensitivity? ‘Your dear Ganadaddy, bless his heart, simply couldn't be moved to help his sister-in-law after she nearly burned to death. Of course, you understand that he was an enterprising man with a reputation at stake and could never have gone, don't you? \s’
So as I was saying, I will leave the interpretations and speculations and approbations and misunderestimations to those more qualified. For now I'll quote the Treekeeper's brief rejoinder and rehabilitation of his great and my great great grandfather (funny how great they get the further we descend, isn't it?), which you can find also in the sketch here: