February 27, 2004 - From 1939 until 1944 my mother’s parents lived with us in the big house on Williams Street. Granddad had lost his job as Director of a CCC camp in Rushville when the program wound down and he leased a Texaco gas station in Monticello. Dad had taken a job with Hamburg Distributing in Champaign. Mother had an appointment as Piatt County’s first Home Extension Advisor. Grandmother Heath ran the household and me.

The house was full of music. Granddad Heath was a country music fan. We never missed a broadcast of the National Barn Dance on WLS. My father had played his way through college and then went to Detroit to try his hand playing nights on the speakeasy circuit while holding down a day job in the accounting department of S.S. Kresge. Mother had been a classical violinist playing in local orchestras.

Grandmother, the Methodist Minister’s daughter from Findlay, Ohio had always had a secret ambition that she carefully kept from her father. As a teenager she had been courted by a local blade, one Tell Taylor. Taylor went off to New York to pursue a career as a tunesmith and Grandmother longed to follow him to the excitement of show business. When she married the Illinois farm boy instead one of the prize possessions she brought west to Illinois was her piano and her collection of sheet music.

Whether it was grandmother playing and singing in her strong soprano; granddad strumming and singing in a nasal twang; dad practicing fingering exercises or jazz riffs on clarinet, or mother making her violin soar, music was an introduction to the family’s activities and the coda to their completion.

Sunday afternoon was family time. We would gather in the living room, light a fire in the fireplace, and pop corn over the coals. More often than not the conversation would soon turn to politics and a debate between my Republican father and my Democrat Grandfather. When the arguments grew more heated than my Grandmother’s comfort would stand she would get up from her rocker, fetch me by the hand and sit me on the piano bench next to her. Rummaging through her sheet music she would find the one song appropriate to the occasion, a piece from the second act of the 1905 operetta The Gingerbread Man. She started softly and then her voice rose in volume until in the last refrain it drowned the argument:

• Old Rameses dead Three Thousand Years
• The things he hasn’t had to see
• Should wipe away your tears.
• But if he were alive today,
• I know he’d say just so.
• They tell the same old lies we told
• Three Thousand Years ago.

And, ladies and gentlemen, nothing has changed.