How Granddad Got His Lamp (Epilogue)

Epilogue  (World English Dictionary: a short postscript to any literary work, such
as a brief description of the fates of the characters in a novel)

Well this ain’t no novel. 
It’s the truth!

So our story has mostly ended.Young Waldemar and Mary are married and return to Schloss Grubhof, where they proceed in rather quick order to begin a family of three daughters. Names available upon request. 

I don’t know if the Fortsons from Athens traveled much to Austria, but the Hodgson side knows a good offer when they hear one.  Since this story started being shared over the past six weeks, several of my older cousins have come forth saying they spent European holidays as guests of the Schmidtmanns in Austria’s Alps. My immediate family never did. 

One uncle, John, oldest son of Mr. Ned and Miss Mary, took his young wife to Europe on vacation in the winter of 1938. Politics, they were a changin’ at the
time. John was a highly trained pilot in the Army Air Corps. Upon learning of his presence at Schloss Grubhof, the Gestapo was sent to pay him a visit.

Waldemar and Mary insisted the Hodgsons depart immediately and the young couple were given the use of the estate’s sleigh, driver and team of horses to rush off to Switzerland and avoid a diplomatic detonation. Does this sound a bit too dramatic and romantic to be true? Of course, but what about the rest of this whole tale? Considering what we know as factual so far, this escape only makes sense to me.

And there were visits in the other direction of course, too. The sisters  Schmidtmann, daughters of Waldemar and Mary, last visited Athens in the early 1960s. They were guests of my family and were taken to the old home on Milledge, now a sorority house, to see the parlor where their parents were married. The youngest daughter had traveled from Argentina where she and her husband, a reputed Nazi officer of some renown, had resettled after the war.  Hmmmmm……

And the Empire State Chemical Company? 

It fared OK for another generation, but the upheaval of two world wars scattered the family around the globe, and eventually there was not the bench strength to make it go much past 1950.  The Great Depression was probably the biggest blow; when farmers begged for fertilizer and could not pay. 

I’m proud to say the ledgers of the day show generous write-offs to neighbors and strangers alike. I was raised thinking the real culprit to the family enterprise was President Roosevelt and his New Deal. Part of that legislation was a policy of paying farmers subsidies NOT to grow cotton. It kept the prices up. But try selling fertilizer in that business environment. 

Mr. Ned labored for years to keep the business alive, but in the end it failed.  In any case, the huge factory is gone now but just last summer I walked the giant concrete slap that was part of its foundation out on the Winterville Road near Ben Epps Field.

Or maybe the business failed due to the family not really believing in their product. Between the fertilizer factory and the airport is a huge granite quarry today. That land had once been an experimental farm for testing the company fertilizer. Unbeknownst to my family of fertilizer purveyors, the reason their test crops grew so poorly was the huge granite deposits just below ground.  A fortune was made when the property was sold. But that money went to another family; the ones who found the granite. 

And that’s another story.