ERNIE MEYER'S TRIBUTE TO HIS FATHER
Meyer, Ernest L.
Ernie Meyer's Tribute to His Father [By ERNEST L. MEYER] AFTER 55 years of active newspaper work, capped by a well-earned 8-year rest, my father died last Monday in Wisconsin, just a week before...
...I never asked, but what I hope is that, whatever the quest...
...For I remembered all too well the tempcstuo'.is-ness of his middle years...
...Particularly because I knew that mother didn't believe in the existence of cherubs with wings and a harp...
...Ernie Meyer's Tribute to His Father [By ERNEST L. MEYER] AFTER 55 years of active newspaper work, capped by a well-earned 8-year rest, my father died last Monday in Wisconsin, just a week before his 84th birthday...
...It was a fat china cherub with wings and a harp which I had always thought, very privately, atrocious...
...Those were the lean days for father, with leaner ones to come...
...Father was editor of a struggling Anarchist German language weekly called Der Kicker, dedicated to all those concepts of liberty and justice which animate, often too feebly, a few journals even in our own time...
...Thus, hope is a redwood tree, with many rings of antiquity...
...How quaint that "radical" demand seems in our time...
...father con-trived to keep Der Kicker kicking for many precarious months...
...The radicals of Chicago 40 years ago used to gather at Weissenrieder's Summer Garden at long wooden tables under the elms, and mother, while listening to impassioned debates, would knit woolen stockings for us children...
...Her consistency was ruined by the diabolic artistry of Dresden...
...Before the meeting broke up, mother would pass around a stocking, and the nickels and dimes contributed by the faithful meant that the printer of Der Kicker could be staved off for another week...
...For what1 I never asked father, and I do not know, but maybe for the same things wc are looking for today: peace, security, some little hope for humanity...
...But Der Kicker ricw more and more feeble, and 1 recall how mother aided in keeping the enterprise alive...
...And Martin Drescher died, and then mother died, and the last German language daily In Milwaukee folded up, and father, after a half century of labor, with a book in his hand, sat wifeless and jobless in the parlor and looked long and often out of the window...
...The cause and the scramble for a livelihood carried father to many ports and many papers as far west as Denver Mother was continually packing and unpacking, and sad in my recollection is the memory of mother weeping over the wrecKagc of one of her heirlooms brought from Germany which failed to survive one of our hundred movings...
...It is hard to believe that in my father's day it was met with lockouts, troops and bullets...
...My first vivid recollection of father dates from my eighth year...
...By some magic unknown to me...
...Father was a radical writer in Chicago in the grim days of strikes and municipal corruption and police bludgeoning.--Father and his fellow conspirators were agitating for—of all things—the eight-hour day...
...His associate was Martin Dresch-er, a revolutionary poet, stork-legged and potbellied, and fine things came from his pen...
...I shall be able to retain, as father retained until his death last Monday, tne gift of combat without the surrender of serenity...
...During my annual trips home of recent years I marveled not so much at his longevity as at the sweetness and humor which survived in him after eight strenuous decades...
...That, at any age, is a rare achievement, and one which I saluted in humility and admiration...
...We were jammed in a little flat, on Chicago's North Side, the five in our family, and we lived among an entrancing journalistic jumble of newspaper cuttings, paste, shears, and "dummies...
...Those days faded, and Chicago yielded to Denver, and Denver to Dubuque, and Dubuque to Appleton, and Appleton to Milwaukee, and mother kept on packing and unpacking the family possessions...
Vol. 10 • April 1940 • No. 16
