C.M. Russell

Doris and C.M. Russell strike a whimsical pose

My Grandfather, C.M. Russell, was a newspaper reporter. He worked the Menomonie beat for the Eau Claire Leader, a mid-sized newspaper in a mid-sized Wisconsin town.

He was a small-town Wisconsin boy, growing up near Brackett, WI. World War I took him to Germany. A pursuit of a journalism degree took him to Montana, but his heart was always in Wisconsin.

When I would visit my grandparents, I could usually find my Grandfather outside, puttering in his beautiful garden in his pith helmet.  Or he would be inside, playing a game of solitaire, in parallel with my grandmother. I don’t know why they didn’t play double solitaire, but it was always two separate games, side by side.

I was born in 1958, about the same time as he would have retired at the age of 65. So, I never knew him as a reporter, just a lover of a good story.

He would tell me about learning to ride a bicycle down the wooded hills near Brackett – with no brakes to stop him. I’d learn about some of the crime scenes and accidents he would report on for the paper. I especially recall his admiration for a reporter friend of his who wrote a review of a concert pianist in the style of a sports report, complete with references to “an end-run around that arpeggio”.

If he sometimes repeated his stories too often, my brother and sisters and I didn’t mind. His tales were always told with such laughter and enthusiasm that we found entertainment in them again and again. And the repetition just helped us remember the stories long after the telling.

He loved to laugh. I first heard Spike Jones, Jack Benny and Fred Allen from my grandfather’s thick 78rpm records. His eyes would squeeze to a merry squint when a good joke would be told. He’d laugh and then sigh, catching his breath, waiting for another chance to amuse.

His lapses of memory seemed to come on slowly, so we didn’t notice, at first. In those days (the 1970’s), we just called it forgetfulness, senility, or even old age.  Occasionally forgetting things just seemed like a natural part of life.

My grandmother had a stroke in the mid-1970’s, and had to spend most of her time in a care facility. When my grandfather was on his own in his house, we started seeing a digression of his mental abilities.

But, for a time, it was sort of whimsical. He would call our house and say, “I can’t find my cigars” (he LOVED cigars and pipes), “I think those ladies from church have come in and taken them.”   Moments later, he would call, “I found the cigars. The ladies hid them in my dresser drawer!”

On one visit to our house, he and I were looking out the window at the lake, when he said, “This is a nice hotel, but when are you going to let me check out?”

To me, as a kid, this was funny. It was also so near to his sense of humor that I really couldn’t see much difference. It just seemed whimsical and quirky, much like my grandpa.

But, the phone calls started coming more often: “Those ladies from church have hidden my cigars, again!” I would talk him through places to look, “Check behind the sugar bowl in the pantry”, or “Look on the bookshelf near the front door”, I would instruct. He would set the phone down and I could hear him rummaging through the house, coming back to the phone when the prize was found. “Never mind,” he would say, “I found them. Now, I’m going to put them in a spot those ladies will never guess”, as he hung up, just perpetuating the cycle. I was always left hanging on to the receiver, stunned and bemused.

The dangerous part came when we discovered he had started wandering. A surprised Menomonie resident awoke in the very early morning to find C.M. in his bedroom, a good 2 miles from grandpa’s home. Evidently, C.M. was trying to find his old neighborhood and had wandered in an unlocked door. Through the amazing charity of that surprised man, my grandpa was brought safely home again. But, it was a signal of the new phase of his disease.

To protect him and others, we had to place him in a nursing home. It was not a place for him to thrive. He died in August of 1982, at the age of 89.

He may be gone, but the stories he told us – over and over again – live on.

Steve Russell

Steve wearing #328

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