[1] This and subsequent footnotes have been added by me, Bruce Crawford Duvall (b. 1943), Edwin’s nephew, son of Edwin’s eldest sister, Frieda Josephine Pund (1910-2006), who married my father Bruce Claxton Duvall in 1935, after which she was known as ‘Jo’ Duvall.

 

[2] Edwin Gordon Pund is my ‘Uncle Eddie’, with whom I stayed in Seattle for four months in 2014.  He is my mother’s kid brother, born 12 years after her, in September, 1922.  He is now 93 and legally blind but more fit than an old Stradivarius, with two rock-hard biceps that he loved to invite people to touch on our recent auto trips around the Northwest, any unsuspecting stranger with whom he struck up a conversation.  (He was proud of his good health, partly achieved by exercising even still in his nineties.)  He did not end up a ‘doctor’ or a ‘chemist’, as he expected at 15 he might.  The Army and Air Force taught him aeronautics toward the end of WWII and he studied it further at Drexel Institute in Philly, but then, being the ‘baby’ of the family and feeling lost for some reason, he didn’t know what to do with himself.  His mother suggested he get a teaching certificate from Montclair State in New Jersey.  Seeing he was still lost after getting his Bachelor’s and certificate, she suggested he go to Faith Theological Seminary for a theological degree, which he did.  He met Joyce Simmons there and married her, then pastored a church in Arkansas, where I last spent time with him in 1955 when I was 12: but he found pastoring not to his taste either.  (“American churches today are a one-man show,” he complained recently several times, meaning that the helpless and passive – and barely believing – ‘congregation’ expects the preacher to do everything.)  After that he taught high school science and band, but was thrown out of every high school after just a year because, he said, he always refused on diehard principle to join the teacher’s union.  Joyce passed away about 1962, leaving him with four little kids, 8 to 2, whom he hauled all over the western states, moving annually.  Retired for the last 20 years or more, and even though legally blind, he spends his days weeding their big vegetable and fruit garden with his daughter Marilyn and preparing for the true calling he finally has found in his later years, teaching his weekly Saturday morning Greek Bible class.  For this, though blind and 93 today in the fall of 2015, he draws upon his scholarly knowledge of Biblical Greek (for which he was given an honorary doctorate) and from his astonishingly astute recall of hundreds – probably thousands – of Bible verses which are always precisely pertinent to the topic under discussion.  He is an expert on the dozens of translations and mis-translations of ancient Greek Biblical manuscripts, and also is proficient in the very complex discipline of ancient Biblical manuscripts, meaning which are authentic and which not.

 

He told me, still sharp at 91, “Oh! The Trinitarians [whom he considers ‘polytheistic’] use I John 1:7-8 [First John chapter one, verses seven and eight] to ‘prove’ that Jesus was God.  But Erasmus did not find those verses in the Greek manuscripts he had available, and so he included only a small portion of those two verses in his first two translations of the New Testament from Greek, and his translations were some of the first from Greek – after the Dark Ages ended, and the Renaissance was beginning.  But in his third translation he included them, but only because the (incorrectly Trinitarian) Roman church had called him on the [red and papal] carpet and demanded they be included, and he had said, ‘Fine, if someone can produce a Greek manuscript that contains them, then I’ll include them, but the Greek manuscripts that I possessed did not include them’; and some monk in Ireland produced such a manuscript for him; and so, in his third edition of his translation, Erasmus included those two verses fully, as in the Irish monk’s Greek manuscript; but that monk’s document was a forgery!  Jesus was the Messiah and he therefore talked constantly about his ‘father in Heaven’.  Which means he was NOT GOD, he was a new kind of man, the ‘firstborn’ of many to follow, including us, as Paul says in Romans 8:29...” etc., etc.  All of this with his 91-year-old brain and memory and with his sight so impaired (by genetically inherited Macular Degeneration) he can only read a print-out of a web page or Bible page on a backlit flat screen of a reading machine that is bigger than two microwaves, a viewing machine that enlarges each tiny letter of Scripture to the size of a Big Mac.

 

His name, ‘Edwin Gordon’, was given him by his father (my maternal grandfather), Louis Luer Pund, Sr. (born ca 1885), who named him after Louis’ best friend, Eddie’s godfather, Edwin Gordon Stork; whom Evelyn (my sister, b. 1939) and our South Jersey Pund (and Titzck) cousins, Gini and Nancy (Gladys’ daughters), should remember as ‘Dr. Stork’.

 

The Storks were not blood relations, but remembering a little about them adds to an understanding of the kind of people from whom my mother and her Pund, Heppe, Myers and Kirchner forebears descended.  And that is the subject of this Post: what kind of people the writer Duvall came from on his mother’s side [note from editors: so we can comprehend him better and maybe even sympathize, maybe even put up with him and his crazy writing if it seems desirable – and/or unavoidable.]

 

Louis Luer Pund (my grandfather) and Dr. Stork knew each other at least since they were students at Philadelphia’s Central High School, the student body of which was hand-picked from the highest academic ranks of all other Philadelphia public schools.  Dr. Stork and ‘Aunt’ Grace and their daughter Phyllis were like family through the years.  Eddie tells the story that whenever he was sick and especially when he had scarlet fever at age 10 (and everybody feared he would die or be left cardio-damaged for life), Dr. (Edwin Gordon) Stork, Eddie’s namesake and godfather, would come all the way over from his pediatrician’s office in Philly’s Roxborough neighborhood, crossing the Ben Franklin Bridge from Pennsy to South Jersey to see his best friend’s little boy, and always would refuse payment whenever Eddie’s mother (my grandmother, born 1886, died about 1956) offered to pay him: “Now, Frieda, you know perfectly well I would never accept payment from you!!”  The Storks were muckety-muck Episcopalians and their daughter Phyllis, later valedictorian of her Women’s College class at Penn (Univ. of Pennsylvania), eventually married the son of the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps.  When I failed to get into medical school at the University of Pennsylvania on the first round, my father (Bruce Claxton Duvall, 1905-1986) persuaded Phyllis and another Collingswood friend of the family who was a Penn valedictorian from the Wharton (Business) School to write extra last-minute letters of recommendation for me.  He took the glowing letters from these stellar Penn alumni in hand, drove across the Ben Franklin bridge to West Philly and Penn, and schmoozed with the admissions dean of the Medical School on several occasions, until finally I was accepted on the second round, in August 1964, just a few weeks before classes began.

 

In some ways I remember Dr. Stork better than I remember my grandparents.  My father would drive us across the Ben Franklin Bridge (during the 40s and 50s), head out the East River Drive along the Schuylkill River until the Drive petered out, then climb up Ridge Ave., which went curving upward and to the left quite steeply from the narrowed Schuylkill, then park the big steel-heavy Buick very carefully on the sharp incline.  We would climb the many steep and railinged stone steps way up to a Pennsylvania fieldstone (not brick) big three-story Philadelphia row house way above our heads.  Inside the front door on the right was Dr. Stork’s mysterious office, with shiny steel and black leather doctor’s chair and all kinds of strange instruments and diplomas, including an M.D. from Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia.  Then you climbed another flight in the darkness, up to the left, to the second story, where they lived, to the better lit living room in the back of the house.  The rest of the house in front I never saw.  Aunt Grace would always wear fine shining rose-colored silk dresses with lace, and she walked elegantly with a cane.

 

When Dr. Stork died, Aunt Grace and Phyllis, maybe because I was the only M.D. in the family, gave me his mystery-laden shiny steel and worn black leather doctor’s chair, his big black doctor’s bag with stethoscope and everything-rusted-else, and his entire medical school and reference library, all of which by then were so outdated as to be useless for anything but antiques.   

 

[3] In March of 1937 Uncle Eddie was 14, a 9^th grader in Collingswood Jr. High, living at 241 Cattell Ave. in West Collingswood, New Jersey, with parents and older brother Louis Luer Pund, Jr. (b. 1912, d. 2007) and sister Gladys (b. ca 1916, d. 2000).  My mother, Jo (Josephine, b. 1910, d. 2006), eldest of the four Pund children, had moved out of her parents’ home two years before, after marrying my father in 1935.  Eddie and his four kids (my first cousins, presently in their 50s) still tell the story told them by his brother, our Uncle Lou, that at age 9 Lou went to his mother and said, “I want a little brother!”  His mother, Frieda (who had produced three kids in six years – Jo, Lou Jr., and Gladys – then gone six more with nothing to show for it), said, “Well let’s get down on our knees right now and ask the Lord to give you a little brother!”  Frieda and 9-year-old Lou got down on the floor on their knees, and before you know it, whammy, there was Eddie!  So that, when the brothers argued and fought in later years Eddie would always say to older brother Lou, “I never asked to be born!  It’s your own fault that I’m here!”  And so that, now, 94 years after that prayer, whenever anyone doubts the power of praying to God for a specific thing, Eddie always tells this tale.  He not only made it into the world, thanks to a very specific prayer in 1921, he is indeed the only one left in this world from his generation, the only one of my many aunts and uncles (18 or 20 on both sides combined, counting second – and third – husbands and wives) still alive.  And boy, is he alive.

 

 Lou Jr. and Eddie (ten-year age difference)

 

 

(It’s easy to see, just from this one little story, exactly how the tiny little unmentionable subject of sex never got discussed explicitly as we were growing up.)

 

[4] Those who are familiar with things I have said over the years about my mother’s Pund, Heppe, Myers and Kirchner ancestors, all Philadelphia Germans, will find that Eddie’s autobiography confirms not just many, but really, all, of those things.  I could never remember who told me things, but I remembered those things, partly because like Eddie, at fourteen I did a family tree, and to do it I had to talk to everyone then alive on both sides, Duvall and Pund.  But I must admit that just like everyone else I doubted my own memory the older I got.  Now there’s no doubt.  Obviously young Eddie’s parents, my grandparents, Louis and Frieda, provided him with the data for his school assignment.  The first Bruce Crawford Duvall ‘legend’ now made accurate history by this paper of his is the line I have used over and over in writing and in conversations with friends and family, for years, “On my mother’s side, as far as anyone can remember, everyone had a German last name.  They were all Philadelphia Germans, all the way up the tree, every branch.”  I would make this claim unable to remember where I had gotten the information and unable to prove it was true, except by showing the enormous family tree in black lead pencil on folded construction paper, which of course only showed all of the German names, not the birthplaces or dates.  But usually I could not show the tree, because for many years it was lost in an attic.  And recently, though it had been ‘found’ again, it remained obstinately aloof and noncontributing, inside a National Geographic Atlas of the World in a locked room in a heavily locked house in a traditional village in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, where I was living comfortably and happily until a barbarian horde calling themselves the ‘Knights Templar’ drug cartel, took over the village super-disgusting-violently between 2011 and 2013 – and that helps explain why my uncle took me in (like a 71-year-old homeless orphan).  Other related claims of mine over the years regarding ancestry, likewise now shown by Uncle Eddie’s accurate autobiography to be true, will be dealt with in subsequent footnotes.  (In June of 2015 I returned to Mexico, stayed for a few months, got the tree, and am now helping my daughter Anna with her 3-year-old daughter in New York City, having brought the tree with me, in case anyone wants to see it.)

[5] Clearly both Eddie’s parents, Lou and Frieda, contributed data to this school paper; but Eddie wrote it, for neither of his parents would have committed its junior-high errors in English usage.  Uncle Eddie recently told me the real truth, that he really did NOT like school, despite what the paper says (for his teacher’s eyes) in a later paragraph.  For one thing he could not see the relevance to his life of most high school course subjects.  For another, he was constantly distracted by girls, and especially by the fact that they seemed so little interested in him.  He admits that he was a ‘sinful’ problem-child at this age, given to frequent lying, and in frequent trouble with parents; and that his much older sister, Jo (my mother, who died in 2006), whom he has always remembered fondly and who is still remembered by many for her kind and loving disposition, would always find some big-sis way to bail him out of his difficulties with their parents.  (As he put it most recently, Saturday morning, August 2, 2014, to the ten adults in the Greek Bible class he teaches in his living room, “I was an evil boy at 12 years old that lied all the time.”)

[6] The present sentence seems to be saying that some, many, or most of young Eddie’s great-grandparents, i.e., Kirchner, Heppe, Pund and Myers, came to the New World about 1800.  It is not clear at first exactly who....  But, after reading it 29 hundred times, I believe he is quoting his parents and that they were intending to say that it was their knowledge, or understanding, that all of their eight grandparents (four for Frieda and four for Lou Sr.) had arrived in America from German-speaking areas of Europe around 1800, just 25 years after the Declaration of Independence.  Remember that both Eddie’s parents were born about 1885-86, were extremely sharp, and probably remembered their grandparents like most people do, or at least recalled stories about them, and knew perfectly well whether they had come from the old country or not, just as most Americans today would know if their grandparents had come from the old country or not.

 

“Philadelphia by the 1770s [the decade when the American Revolution began] had grown to at least 30,000 persons in the central city,” says the Encyclopedia Britannica in its article, Philadelphia: “and it was the third most important business centre in the British Empire, overshadowed only by Liverpool and London.”

 

The colony of Pennsylvania had been founded only a hundred years before, in the 1680s, by a wealthy and influential English Quaker, William Penn, who laid out the streets of its first town, Philadelphia, and welcomed to his new colony not just his fellow Quakers (who were being persecuted in England by Anglicans and other groups, and even were being kicked out of Puritan and puritanical New England) but people of ALL faiths, especially other oft-persecuted groups, including German Protestant ‘pietists’ like Mennonites (including their offshoot, the Amish), the German ‘Moravians’ (a German Protestant denomination), and conservative (pietist and Calvinist) German ‘Evangelical’ Lutherans.  Pennsylvania was also one of the first colonies to welcome Jews and Catholics.  In fact an 1899 high school class photo we have of Frieda with her Philadelphia 11^th grade girls shows a true melting pot including Afro-Americans and girls with Hispanic, Jewish, Irish, German, Polish and other names (on the back of the original photo).  (And on another ancient picture of Frieda with sisters and neighbor girls sitting on the front steps of a typical-looking Philadelphia row house, Frieda has handwritten ‘the Jewish girl I loved’ with an arrow pointing to this Jewish girlfriend.)

 

 Frieda Myers’ 1899 Philadelphia 11^th grade class  (front row 3^rd from left)

(age 13 or 14! since she was born in 1886;

but this is explained maybe by her 1^st grade class photo

where she looks little more than 3 or 4, at the most 5)

(i.e., she probably was precocious and started early and/or skipped a grade or two)

 

 

Frieda Myers’ 1889 Philadelphia 1^st grade class (a motley crew)

 

 Frieda Myers age 10 with Jewish friend (the handwriting at bottom is Frieda’s)

(‘Aunt May’ was one of Frieda’s two sisters)

 

The potentially tedious (to some) discussion of Protestant sects which follows in this issue of The Chockawhoppin Post results from the fact that just about everyone on my mother’s side is still today very conservatively religious, and nearly everyone appears to have been so for generations, a fact which implies that many or all of Eddie’s ‘great-grandparents’ (my eight great-great grandparents on my mother’s side) might have come from various of these extremely conservative Protestant denominations and may have come to Philadelphia from continental Europe “about 1800” at least partly to seek refuge from persecution.

 

“The Pennsylvania Germans, many of whom had been persecuted in their native land,” says the Britannica in an article entitled Pennsylvania Germans, “...were attracted to Pennsylvania by the liberal and tolerant principles of William Penn's government.  Their immigration began with the Mennonite Francis Daniel Pastorius, who in 1683 led a group of German Quakers to Philadelphia, where they founded Germantown, the pioneer German settlement.  The early German settlers were for the most part Mennonites, Amish, Dunkers (German Baptists), Schwenckfelders, and Moravians....  After 1727 the immigrants were mostly members of the larger Lutheran and Reformed churches [‘Reformed’ meaning not German Lutheran but German ‘Calvinist’]....  By the time of the American Revolution [1776] they numbered about 100,000, more than a third of Pennsylvania's population.”

 

Please note the statement that: “After 1727 the [German] immigrants [to Pennsylvania] were mostly... Lutheran and Reformed...” (the latter meaning strict German Calvinist).  This fact implies that John A. Kirchner and perhaps other great-grandparents of Eddie and my mother, Josephine, were quite likely to have been German Calvinists (something I have been suspecting and harping on for a long time), whether they worshipped within the Lutheran denomination or outside it.  This conclusion is fostered as well by the perpetually strict conservative Bible-based bent of the family as we all have known it, generation by generation.  And the inference is suggested and supported as well by yet another piece of data, a thick conservative and Bible-based Baptist marriage handbook which my niece Donna DeGroodt Hickman (my sister Evelyn’s second daughter) now possesses and pulled out to my amazement a few years ago at her dining room table in Northfield, N.J., when we were all sitting there after a family reunion spaghetti and meatball dinner, the antique book having been given her by Donna’s ‘Grandmom’, my mother Josephine, who had received it from her mother, Frieda.  The book was originally given to Frieda’s mother (born Josephine Kirchner) and her new husband, Harry Myers, when they were married on “Monday the 14^th day of August 1876,” by “William Cathcart,” the minister (probably Baptist) that married them.  This we know from the church-issued marriage certificate which was built into the front of that marriage handbook.

 

 

sketchy family tree showing ownership path of ancestral marriage handbook

 

 

 

original church-issued marriage certificate built into same Myers-Kirchner marriage handbook

(which is now a family heirloom)

note the loud quotation of Scripture, with exact chapter and verse cited, and the word ‘gospel’

and the stress on (non-Democratic?) old-fashioned un-women’s-libby ‘wifely submission’

 

 

 

title page (and superimposed publication page) of the same marriage handbook (published 1846)

 

Jews, Catholics and others may feel ramrodded or gumswuckled by the present hootenanny on a hickey about Protestant sects; but just be super-patient please and try to understand that for years I have been trying to comprehend the USA’s (or at least a major and clamorous part of the USA population’s) undying and often unconscious devotion to strict old-fashioned conservative Protestant Christian principles.  I have been trying diligently to see how my own family has fit into the hyperpolarized political dynamic now current: they are, in fact, almost always on the side of the extreme religious (‘Evangelical’) right.  And please try to understand that despite some minor differences, many conservative American Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians (denominations originating mostly from England, Scotland and Ireland) as well as many very conservative Protestants from Switzerland and southwest (and Rhineland) Germany always were and still are today ALL pretty CALVINIST IN THEOLOGY, and in their ideas of church government, i.e., essentially the same in their deepest understanding of scripture, doctrine, faith and practice.  (And Calvin, by the way, for you Roman Catholic theology nerds, just so you can relate to him maybe a little bit as a human being like you and me (in some ways), was born and raised in the Roman church in France, was declared a Roman cleric there as a 12-year-old child, was tonsured (given the monkish haircut) at 12, and eventually was theologically in most ways essentially Platonistic-Plotinian Augustinian, i.e., influenced by late-Roman-empire Roman Catholic St. Augustine, not by medieval Aristotelian super-Roman-Catholic St. Thomas Aquinus.  And Calvin’s goal from day one was not to break up the church, but just to get some basic PIETY back into the crazily impious late-medieval and early-Renaissance Roman church he had grown up in.  Everybody should be able to relate to that, especially if you know the crazy cockamamie impious things the Roman church was responsible for in those days.)  (If you don’t know about those things, read the opening chapter of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization Vol. 6: The Reformation [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957], which explains in gory detail why so many good Roman Catholics starting in the 1300s were so thoroughly disgusted with their own Roman church.) 

 

The ‘American Baptist’ marriage handbook was then passed on (mother-to-daughter) to my grandmother, Frieda Josephine Myers, by her mother (who I’m sure you remember! had been born a Kirchner) perhaps on the day of Frieda’s marriage, somewhere around 1908, when she married Louis Luer Pund Sr., my grandfather; or maybe she inherited it later.  Still later my mother received it, and much later my mother gave it to her granddaughter Donna due to Donna’s telling her Grandmom about her ‘love of old books’, as Donna recently explained to me.

 

This all suggests that probably Mr. ‘John A. Kirchner’, Uncle Eddie’s and my mother’s ‘great-grandfather’ (their mother Frieda’s mother’s father), who came over ‘about 1800’, 25 years after the American Revolution (and died the day after climbing to Billy Penn’s hat), came as a conservative German Calvinist and then quickly moved ‘up’ (or ‘over’) socially to a conservative English-speaking quasi-Calvinist church, the Baptist.  “Most scholars agree...,” says the digital Encyclopedia Britannica in its article, ‘Baptist’, “...that Baptists, as an English-speaking denomination, originated within 17th-century Puritanism as an offshoot of Congregationalism.”  (The ‘Puritans’ and ‘Congregationalists’ were strict Calvinists.  This puts the Baptists right in the Calvinist tradition from the start, though some Baptists today would quibble with Calvin and/or Calvinism over certain things, mainly ‘baptism’.)

 

Here’s how that (not-so-tortured) reasoning would go, that John A. Kirchner was of a particularly conservative German Protestant background, i.e., essentially Calvinist:

 

If you consider that John A. Kirchner ‘spoke seven languages fluently’ (as stated later in the ‘autobiography’) and came to Philly as ‘a German’, ‘from Alsace Lorraine’ (as also stated later), and that his daughter was soon the one to whom her Baptist or Baptist-sympathetic minister gave the Baptist handbook (published by the American Baptist Publication Society in 1846) on her wedding day (as the handbook plainly states on its title page: “MARRIED LIFE.  A WEDDING GIFT.  by Joseph Belcher, D.D.”), then it is not at all far-fetched to surmise that John A. Kirchner, father of this bride, came to America as a German Calvinist or quasi-Calvinist, but changed denominations in Philly, as a young adult (changed from German Calvinist to some variety of American Calvinist, most likely Baptist).  In fact, the conclusion is virtually compelled.  (The bride probably would have been married not in her husband’s church, if his were different, but in her own parents’ church, which was apparently Baptist or Baptist-sympathetic.)

 

Perhaps European culture nerds will want to argue that Alsace Lorraine, a tiny part of Europe, is part of France, not Germany, and that most people there must speak French, therefore, not German; and that the French for centuries were almost 100% Catholic.  But in fact, Alsace has been fought over by France and Germany for centuries and has a split personality.  At times, therefore, it has been part of Catholic France, and at other times it has been part of half-Protestant Germany or has remained semi-independent.  (And the encyclopedia says that even today 75% of Alsatians speak a kind of German dialect called ‘Alsatian’.)

 

“Protestantism made important gains in Alsace during the Reformation,” says Britannica (in its article, Alsace), “and Strasbourg, where the [‘protestant’] reformer Martin Bucer was especially prominent, became the centre of Alsatian Protestantism.  That city's Protestant influence was countered, however, by the resolute Roman Catholicism of the Habsburgs [the royal rulers], who tried to eradicate heresy in upper Alsace.”

 

Here we see the beginning of the persecution of the ‘heretic’(!) Protestants – around the mid-1500s – and the encyclopedia goes on to explain that French (Catholic) influence over Alsace grew and grew, up until the French Revolution (1789), when zealot French revolutionary rationalists robbed or destroyed many French churches, Catholic or whatever; none of which could have been much fun for a conservative Evangelical Protestant.  We know in fact that throughout those centuries (1550-1800) French Protestants, called Huguenots (most of them strict Calvinists) were literally massacred or intimidated into exile by French Catholics, in an effort to keep France as close to 100% Roman Catholic as possible.   By 1800 some of the Kirchners in Alsace (and maybe other of Eddie’s ‘great-grandparents’) most likely were fed up with this miasma and chose to come to William Penn’s ‘City of Brotherly Love’, Philadelphia, where religious toleration was practiced quite successfully.  And furthermore, and to be fair: many ardently conservative Protestants, and especially diehard Calvinists (and quasi-Calvinists) tend to NEED an extra degree of ‘toleration’, because historically they tend to be a little obstinate, or maybe even in-your-face, about their faith and therefore tend to provoke persecution of themselves at times, unfortunately.

 

Strasbourg’s original Roman Catholic church ‘reformer’ or ‘protestant’ clergyman, Bucer, by the way, for you Calvin history buffs (especially me), became a model and older mentor to the young Calvin during the years when he fled and sought refuge in Strasbourg, Alsace, from the persecution of reform-minded ‘protestants’ that was happening at the Sorbonne in Paris (the University of Paris): where Calvin had studied (age 12-20 roughly) and helped author an inflammatory Protestant/Lutheran paper that was then mass-produced and posted by someone on walls all over Paris, throwing his safety into jeopardy.  Once self-exiled for safety’s sake in Alsace, Calvin learned from Bucer in Strasbourg how to mediate and wend a calmer middle path among Protestant and Catholic emotional extremes of the kinds shown at times by both the protesting ‘protestants’ (like Luther and Zwingli), and the Roman church; and too, from Bucer in Strasbourg, Calvin learned how to put (and hold) together in a country not his own (not France) a congregation of French Protestant (‘Huguenot’) self-exiles mixed with Alsatian locals, a knowledge he used to magnificent effect a few years later, when he pasted together the Protestant theocratic city-state of Geneva in the early to mid-1500s in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, a country likewise not his own, from a mix of local (Swiss-French-speaking) Protestants and a throng of persecuted refugees who had fled his country of France.  From Bucer’s time (ca 1520-1530) on, Strasbourg and the rest of Alsace were a center of ‘German’ Calvinism (many Alsatians, as mentioned, still speak a kind of German today, even though Alsace has been part of France for a long time).  French culture dominates Alsace today in many ways, since it has been part of France for so long; yet, when my sister and I toured Europe in 1998 looking for our ancestral roots, we stayed in a medieval wine town in Alsace, in a hotel where a lively group from Germany had rented most of the rooms and were spending the evening in the French-Alsatian hotel’s restaurant, singing rousing German drinking songs to an accordion in strident pure High German as a kind of futile but sincerely offended protest against the Francification of Alsace, still sadly a part of France, which they considered, Hitler- and Nazi-style, to be STILL REALLY GERMAN NOT FRENCH IN ALL TRUE REALITY, if you know what I mean.

 

(No wonder John A. Kirchner ‘spoke seven languages fluently’!  French, German, Alsatian and English would have been certain starters.)

 

But despite Calvin’s oft-seen political finesse and his knack at getting along moderately in many things, his ‘Calvinist’ spiritual descendents of all denominations and countries through subsequent centuries have tended to be ardently strict, meaning anything but lukewarm in their religious politics and political religiosity; until the 20^th century, of course, when many of them ‘fell’ smack dab and loudly into ‘liberal’ and ‘modernist’ thinking, including most of the Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians in America – but – ahem – not the Methodists, Baptists or Presbyterians in our family.

 

I’m trying to say that: John A. had to be pretty evangelical to marry off his daughter in a church which shouted scripture verses even on its marriage certificates, a church which found it essential to clarify on a very formal certificate that the man doing the marrying was not just any common church ‘minister’ signing a formal marriage certificate, but a ‘minister OF THE GOSPEL’, meaning the GOOD NEWS of Jesus’ salvation for sinners; just in case that, by so shouting, some careless reader of the certificate a hundred years thence might yet be evangelized, i.e., reminded of why he or she was created, and then, once reminded, might be brought to salvation.  Most church marriage certificates of that day probably would have just said, “Minister sign HERE.”  But not the marriage certificate in John A.’s church, you see.

   

[7] Josephine lived to 96, Lou Jr. to 95, Gladys to 84, just to name three longevous ones I’ve known; and Eddie, their kid brother, is by now 93, and still as rambunctious as a twelve-year-old.

[8] I should have asked Uncle if he remembered what the word ‘confection’ had meant to him back in 1937 when he wrote this autobiography.  ‘Confection’, a word little used in the USA any more in 2015, used to mean, according to the unabridged dictionary, ‘mixture, delicacy (a mix of fruits, nuts and sweets), sweetmeat, preserve, or candy’, and sometimes it even meant pharmaceutical mixtures.  A store which sold such mixes made by confectioners was called a ‘confectionery’, and often sold also ice cream, cakes, pastries and candied fruits.  All of which might help explain Eddie’s and my mother’s love of sweets, and her habit of baking sweet, lightly anise flavored, molded-and-design-engraved German Springerle cookies every Christmas (which she pronounced with a kind of German accent as ‘shpringerly’).

 

the white ones are end-product Springerle cookies, the darker things are the woodcut cookie design molds

(Germans are known for woodcut arts and handicrafts)

(Springerle cookies are from Swabia, i.e.: to get to nearby Swabia from Alsace

you walk a few miles, cross the Rhine and walk to the other side of the Black Forest and you’re there)

(all above info from Time-Life German recipe book given me by Jeanne Niederlitz in Mexico, thanks Jeanne)

An article in Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia throws more light on my grandfather-Pund’s two families of origin, the Punds, who were ‘confectioners’, and the Heppes, who were ‘all’ musicians, musical instrument manufacturers, and also confectioners.  Encarta’s article on “New Jersey” happens to mention a middle class of German immigrants during the 1840s and 1850s: “The middle classes [of New Jersey] were largely made up of storekeepers, clerks, and skilled artisans.  Many of the latter [the ‘artisans’] were German immigrants, who earned decent wages as piano and instrument makers, furniture carvers, brewers, and confectioners.”  I think we can assume the same demographic applied to Philadelphia, right next door to New Jersey.  If so, we can assume that the Punds and Heppes were mostly middle-class, unless occasionally someone became unusually wealthy, and that the Myers and Kirchners, on the other hand, were from a higher social bracket, ‘upper class’ and ‘nobility’, as Eddie’s autobiography states right at this point.  I’d also like to add that if the German-immigrant ‘artisans’ of New Jersey and Pennsylvania ‘earned decent wages as piano and instrument makers, furniture carvers, brewers, and confectioners,” as Encarta states, then my grandfather came from people knowledgeable in three out of four of those categories.  His parents’ families made musical instruments and confections, and he himself hand-crafted furniture, I can attest, because I own a very fine hand-carved walnut desk, an elegant walnut trash basket, and a stately clothes tree, also probably walnut, all of which he carved and put together by hand.  He populated the secretary-style desk with little wooden drawers made of the wooden boxes which had housed the Cuban cigars he smoked all the time.  The fact that no one in his family was a ‘brewer’, the fourth category of common German-immigrant middle-class artisan, adds weight to my claim that my mother’s people were mostly very conservative Protestants.  Like my grandparents, their parents and grandparents very likely did not approve of drinking, for drinking has always been a strict-Calvinist no-no; since it, like many other vices, creates a faux or unreal, unnatural personality, when the only real relationship possible or desirable between man and God, in a Calvinist world, is a sincere and real and natural one.
.

[9] Heppe Piano Company in Philadelphia, defunct long since.

[10] ‘Myers’ = ‘Meyers’.  The German word ‘Meyer’ means ‘overseer of the estate’.  ‘Kirchner’ could have meant ‘one who raises cherries’, or perhaps ‘cherry wine vintner’ (Kirsch = cherry).  But a more likely meaning would be churchman (Kirche = church), church builder, or church keeper.  It’s interesting that both names, Myers and Kirchner, imply something to do with stewardship, i.e., taking good care of what the Lord gave you to take care of.

[11] Atop the very high tower of Philadelphia’s City Hall stands an enormous statue of the city and state’s founder, William Penn, and he is wearing a late-17^th-century Quaker hat and suit.  And it used to be – and still may be – possible to climb steps to the brim of that hat, just as you can climb to the Statue of Liberty’s crown.

[12] John A Kirchner, who climbed to Billy Penn’s hat the day before he died, would have died around the end of the American Civil War, apparently, assuming he emigrated at about age 20 around the year 1800, and knowing as we do that he died at age 84.  (However, if he came over ‘around 1800’ as a little boy, he would have died in the 1870s or 1880s.)  In any case, fanatical self-sacrificing overachiever drive like his (which probably finished him off when he climbed to Billy Penn’s Hat ‘counting the steps’) still propels the family.  ‘Easy does it’ does not.  Max Weber, the German sociologist who wrote the classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism would have called it ‘Calvinist work-ethic asceticism’.  (In fact, Weber knew what he was talking about in that famous scientific paper because his parents resembled mine, in that his father was a more relaxed fun-loving Protestant, a Lutheran from near Berlin, whereas his mother was a strict pietistic German Calvinist from the Rhine valley, like John A. Kirchner’s people [as I propose], and like my mother and her parents and sibs [as I know from experience!].)

[13]  Uncle Eddie tells me that his father (my grandfather, Louis Luer Pund, Sr.) went to college at, and graduated from, the University of Pennsylvania.  Either during those years or after them, or both, says Eddie, his father taught at the high school from which he had graduated, Philly’s Central High, and after that, at South Philly High, in what was Philadelphia’s Italian neighborhood in those days (and still is today, I believe, judging from Rocky Balboa movies).  At South Philly he taught mechanical drawing.

[14] This is consistent with the ‘myth’ that we have all carried with us for years that Eddie’s ‘Daddy’ (my grandfather, Louis Luer Pund) designed ‘the first non-horse-drawn fire engine in Philadelphia’, the exact verbal designation of his achievement which stayed in my memory all my life but which none of us could verify, once almost everybody was gone and we suddenly found ourselves ever more interested in these subjects, to our frustration.  With this sentence the ‘myth’ has become reality, for it came straight to 14-year-old Eddie from his father, ‘Daddy’ himself, or maybe from his mother, who never would have distorted a dot on a jot of Biblical or any other kind of Truth.  I used to think this meant he had designed a steam-driven fire engine, but Eddie has clarified that it was an internal combustion engine.  In fact, Eddie and Marilyn, when they were in Philadelphia a few years back, tried to track down the company in which Louis Luer Pund designed that engine. 

 

Psychological detectives among you may protest, “Hey, dood, you just said Eddie had a penchant for lying, back then.”  True, Sherlock, but::: I see no evidence that he has done any stretching in this school paper, except when he starts talking about his wonderful attitude toward school.

[15]  John Wanamaker (1838-1922) was a shining light of Philadelphia culture in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  He eventually became Postmaster General of the USA (and thus a member of U.S. President Benjamin Harrison’s cabinet); but originally he rose to fame as a department store magnate in Philly.  He bought an old multi-story entertainment palace which had a massive pipe organ and turned the place into THE department store in Philadelphia, THE classy place to buy anything.  I bought my shiny black upright Yamaha piano there on the 8^th floor around 1968 and became friends with the kid who sold it to me who was a piano major at Curtis Music School and who gave periodic concerts during store hours on the Wanamaker organ.  The fact that Wanamaker’s Dept. Store was far more than a department store, is the thing to understand about the store and about the man as well.  The businessman John Wanamaker (1838-1922) was clever in a way that had even spiritual, cultural and family impact in my life and many other people’s lives.  Wanamaker’s Dept. Store was right next to the same ‘Billy Penn’, i.e. the Philadelphia City Hall (with the very big statue of William Penn atop its very high tower), mentioned in young Eddie’s previous sentence; but it was far more than a huge city store.  Philadelphians went there for two other big reasons: to listen to dynamite booming pipe organ concerts several times a day; and to meet a cherished someone at the big bronze ‘Eagle’ sculpture in the middle of the first floor by the Market Street entrance.  “Meet me at the Eagle,” people would say, not even having to mention where the eagle WAS, because everyone in the Delaware Valley knew.  But you could combine all of these experiences and more.  You could meet someone you cherished, say a family member or a girlfriend, at the eagle, and stay to hear a concert as you stood there among the lingerie, looking at the two- or three-story-high pipes, wondering if they’d rattle themselves off the music-making wall; and then you could go together up to the 6^th or 7^th floor and dine in the snazzy Wanamaker’s cafeteria.  A first class date (in those days).

[16] Here I suspect Uncle Eddie was advised by his mother NOT to mention HOW his ‘Daddy’ knew John Wanamaker ‘intimately’.  Someone in the family once told me that Eddie’s ‘Daddy’, my grandfather, ‘was in John Wanamaker’s Sunday School Class’.  (The fact that discovering this paper has confirmed so many other detailed memories of mine, suggests that this very detailed memory of mine is probably accurate as well.)  Once you hear the words ‘Sunday School’, Eddie’s choice of the word ‘intimately’ seems to make a lot more sense.  In a youth or young adult Sunday School class you would talk aloud with many others listening, about the most important and intimate thing, your walk with God.  But what does ‘John Wanamaker’s Sunday School class’ mean exactly?  It might mean that they were both adult men in an adult class with someone else as teacher; but since ‘Daddy’ (my grandfather), born ca 1885, was a youth or young man at this point, ca 1900-1910 (trucks with combustion engines had just been created in 1896 in Germany), age 15 or 25 roughly, and Wanamaker was 60 or 70, it’s much more likely that it was as I have always understood and imagined, that ‘Daddy’ was in the Sunday School Class which John Wanamaker taught: for that’s what the phrase ‘so-and-so’s Sunday School class’ would usually mean, more than anything else.

 

But, you say, so perceptively: What American business magnate would be caught dead teaching Sunday School??!!  (Would Donald Trump teach Sunday School?)  Yet, in 1900-1910 it would have been far more likely than today; and besides, Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia article, “John Wanamaker,” says that from 1870 to 1883 Wanamaker was ‘president of the Philadelphia YMCA’, the ‘Young Men’s Christian Association’, a youth-focused church organization which in those days was much more religious and church-based than it is today.  An Encarta article, ‘Young Men’s Christian Association’ explains that from the date of its founding in 1844 until the 1960s the YMCA “...attempted to combat idleness among young workers by means of Bible studies and prayer meetings,” in addition to physical activities like overnight camping (which the YMCA made popular) and all kinds of gymnasium exercise.  Volleyball and basketball were both invented in YMCA gyms, says Encarta.

 

My only question is ‘John Wanamaker’s Sunday School class’ in which church?  We don’t know, but some genealogic zealot could dig up a biography of Wanamaker and find out, and some day I just may do that.  (Or, could he have taught Sunday School at the Y?)

 

(behind Gladys' famous azaleas:)
Lou and Frieda & all 4 offspring with mates & kids

nobody missing or killed in a head-on with a drunk driver*

a classic 1950s photo

(*Weidner and Lou Sr. lost their lives together thusly in 1955 on the Ben Franklin Bridge)

 

[17] See The Chockawhoppin Post, Vol. 2010 No. 4, December 6, 2010, section 8, entitled “Remembering Mom and Dad (to see if any of this was their fault),” for a detailed telling of how the Punds, meaning my mother and her 3 sibs, Eddie, Gladys, Lou Jr., and their parents, Lou Sr. (‘Daddy’ in the autobiography above) and Frieda, toured the USA several various summers in a boxy 1920s sedan with big running boards.  (Anyone who cannot find this Post in their digital storage bin is welcome to request it and the Post will send it Post-haste.)  At Uncle Eddie’s home in Seattle, where I visited May 1 to September 1, 2014, he told me that they would drive the sedan out the Lincoln Highway, US 30, to Chicago, beyond which there were ‘no paved roads’, not even US 30, meaning that the so-called Lincoln ‘Highway’ (US 30) and all other roads and ‘highways’ beyond Chicago were nothing but mud when it rained.  They would tour the west on dirt and mud ‘highways’ even to the Canadian Rockies, drive dirt and mud ‘highways’ all the way to the Pacific, go south on dirt and mud highways through California to the Grand Canyon, Zion and Bryce, and then head back to Chicago getting their last end-of-summer kicks on the famous old dirt-and-mud Route (US) 66, much of which has since been buried or sidelined by an interstate.  It’s no wonder that everyone descended from Lou and Frieda in my generation (except my sister, Evelyn) ended up living in the West.  The following paragraph will help to explain this further.

 

Basically everyone just mentioned has told me stories about these massive summer-long family camping adventure trips ‘out west’ during the 1920s and ’30s, which were even ‘pioneering’ in their own way.  Eddie is the most recent to tell those stories, and before that my mother was the usual one; or occasionally Uncle Lou; but I also remember that when my kids, Lenno and Anna, were about 8 and 7, or 10 and 9, on one annual August trip from Denver to New Jersey we three hooked up with Aunt Gladys and took her out to eat at an Italian Diner in Gloucester, near Collingswood; and in that leatherette booth, with her shiny white hair she told the three of us many loud and laughing energetic tales I had heard before from others, but which may have been new to the kids, about how the Pund family had gotten stuck in ‘gumbo mud’ whenever it rained and had been forced to dig the car out of the mud (unless they wanted to stay in the mud forever like dinosaurs) (and Eddie recently added that a farmer would come by and pull them out with a tractor and/or a team of horses); and had hiked up a part of glacier-covered Mt. Rainier in Washington state and then slid back down the ice and snow on their butts, dressed in ‘tin pants’ (pants with metal seats) rented from the National Park; or had camped in tents and cooked in Yellowstone, where they had to raise all food into the air, hanging it from branches; and when bears came (for in Yellowstone bears always have come, even to this day), had banged with tin ladles on tin pans to scare the bears away; and how they had packed a whole household of personal items into the attic for the summer and rented out their furnished home to Philadelphians who wanted to get away to the ‘Garden State’ from the sticky city summer heat of Philly; since ‘Mother’, Frieda, worked only at home, as a ‘housewife’ and homemaker, and ‘Daddy’ was a school teacher and had the whole summer free.

 

(My mother always spoke of [and to] her parents very respectfully as ‘Mother and Daddy’, and her kid brother Eddie still does the same.)

 

And how ‘Daddy’, a mechanical engineer, knew how to repair cars.  So that I always understood this to mean that he (my grandfather) repaired the two-seat (front seat and back) boxy sedan whenever it broke down on those legendary pioneering trips; but Eddie just recently corrected me emphatically saying ‘THE CAR NEVER BROKE DOWN’ because ‘Daddy’ had ‘put it together so well to start with’.  (“He used to take apart anything, including whole cars, lay the parts carefully on a sheet, clean and repair and lubricate any parts in need, and put back everything where it belonged, running better than ever.”)  (And Eddie himself still does such things, even blind.)  And everyone has always told the story that luggage was stored outside the car on the big running boards, while the bedding, during the daytime, was layered on the back seat to raise all four children up for easier seeing out the windows.  But Eddie has corrected this too.  He ‘NEVER SAT’.  He only STOOD UP on the floor in the back, especially on the 1927 trip when he was only 5, my mother was 17, and Lou Jr. and Gladys were 15 and 11.

 

Then there was the story of meeting other cars from New Jersey.  Since historically it was just the very beginning of this very adventurous kind of Teddy Roosevelt family western auto travel, if you ever did meet another 1920s or 30s car with a New Jersey license plate ‘out west’, it was a rare and special thing, and so you stopped driving and everyone jumped out and embraced the people of the other car and shared survival tales and info.  (As I’ve been known to do in a remote part of Mexico upon meeting another gringo, even as recently as 2011.)

 

And to this has just been added Eddie’s story that his father, my ‘Bampa’ (I was unable to say ‘Grandpa’ when I first learned to talk) would grab a handle and turn it to get the car engine going!  There was no ‘ignition’ inside the car, and no key.  Everything was still mechanical.

 

And, finally, “How did all of this get started?” I asked Uncle one day in Seattle.  “My mother [Frieda] read National Geographic,” he said, “and one day she said to Daddy, showing him pictures and maps, ‘Lou, why can’t we do this, why can’t we travel out west?  If you’re teaching school, we have the whole summer free’, and she began to think about how it might be done.  And that’s how they came up with the idea of renting out their house for the summer, to help pay for the trip.”  Since they camped in tents and prepared their own food, and would have had to buy groceries and clothes anyway if they’d stayed at home, their only real potential trip costs would have been gasoline, oil and automobile wear and tear.  Not even the public campgrounds cost money in those days.  National Parks and their campgrounds were free to everyone in the beginning, a fact that still aggravates Uncle and requires – given his age, sacred early memories, and conservative politico-religious bent – that he protest any such public park charge, during these modern days of what he calls ‘government evil and corruption’, by boycotting any public facility that demands an entrance fee from the very public whom it is supposed to be serving, a public who already has paid hefty taxes to create and maintain it.  (He compromises with ‘corruption and evil’ in certain instances, however, for example by purchasing a permanent lifetime pass to all National Parks, a handy and inexpensive way to avoid all of the Satan-begotten individual park fees.)

[18]  M.B.R. = initials of the teacher at Collingswood (New.Jersey) Junior High who graded the paper in 1937.

 

Bibliography/sources were two digital encyclopedias for personal computer; and the King James Bible:

 

Encyclopedia Britannica 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite articles: “Philadelphia,” “Pennsylvania Germans,” “Alsace,” “Lorraine,” “Alsace-Lorraine,” “Max Weber (1864-1920),” and “Baptist.”

 

Microsoft Encarta Premium 2006 articles: “John Wanamaker,” “Young Men’s Christian Association,” and “New Jersey.”

 

Bible verses at end of newsletter: (as plea) Exodus 33:13 and (as thanks) Psalm 36:7-9.

 

 

 

 high 1939 Philly fashion for elegant church ladies (Frieda and Jo)

attending a spiffy higher-degree Sacred Theology graduation

 

 

on the reverse of this elegant Whistler’s-Mother-type old lady’s ancient photo

are three designations in what may be two or three different hands:

(1) ‘Grandmother Kirchner’

(2) ‘(Mamma’s Mother)’

and (3) ‘Gladys Pund’s great grandmother’

all of which when combined and contemplated allow us to understand

that this is Marie Kirchner (her married name) as in the family tree diagram above

who emigrated from Germany to Philadelphia “about 1800”

(maybe she and John A. came over together – maybe they met on the boat – maybe they were already married

and that’s why nobody ever wrote down her maiden name on photos or family trees – maybe, maybe.....)

(or maybe they were cousins and her maiden name WAS Kirchner – cousins used to marry more than they do today)

(maybe they were cousins in love and their families in Alsace would not let them marry

so they ran away to the New World together and married here!!!)

(maybe they NEVER MARRIED

and presented themselves to the American authorities as already having married in Europe!!!!!!!!!!)

(just kidding)

(maybe – .... – never mind)

 

pious Chinese worship their ancestors via sacrifices

pious Calvinists commune with God and his saints

 

(i.e., other church members including family and ancestors)

 

 

(aren’t they terrific?)

‘Frieda and Louie’

Uncle Eddie’s (and my mother’s) parents in their early fifties (1937)

within a month of their fourteen-year-old Eddie’s writing the above autobiography

(aren’t they dazzling?)

 

 

 Now therefore, I pray thee, if I have found grace in thy sight, shew me now thy way, that I may know thee, that I may find grace in thy sight: and consider that this nation is thy people.

Exodus 33:13

How excellent is thy lovingkindness, O God! therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of thy wings.  They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house; and thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures.  For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light.
Psalm 36:7-9

[end of newsletter]