Munichburg Online!

Hey, folks, I’m way behind the game here, but I wanted to tell you about a new blog! It’s called “Munichburg Memories,” and I’m sure it will appeal to all you folks who are interested in Jefferson City and German American history.

The blog is sponsored by the Old Munichburg Association, and it’s written by my dad, who’s a retired professor from the University of Missouri and is a professional geographer. One of his longstanding interests is the historical geography of Missouri, and this blog is one way he can share some of the wealth of information he’s got stored in his noggin.

The tone of the posts varies a bit (Dad’s new at “blogging”!), but I think that’s just fine. Some of them are heartwarming and nostalgic, some of them reflect his career as an educator.

My favorites are the ones that tell his quirky growing-up stories, like the post about Herr Goldammer’s glass eyeball, and the ones that illustrate the past by describing particular episodes in precise and personal detail (like the post about how my grandpa’s barbershop was integrated). The humorous ones kind of remind me of Jean Shepherd’s Christmas Story.

(By the way, I’m one of the administrators for the blog, which is one reason my posts here at the Op Op have been kind of thin lately; I’m just busy, with a lot of fun stuff!)

I really hope you’ll bookmark Munichburg Memories and visit it often, because it’s full of interesting nuggets about Jefferson City’s Southside and the German immigrant experience. And, it’s just fun!

Memorial Days

It’s the bookend to Labor Day, and it’s one of the few holidays that don’t involve any specific or mandatory activities. For sure, it’s great to have a day off, and, since it’s the last Monday in May, it serves as the symbolic beginning of summer.

And we remember people who aren’t with us anymore.




Although it apparently started as a day to memorialize the fallen soldiers of both sides of the Civil War, starting in the early 1900s it became a day to decorate the graves of all relatives and loved ones. (Some people even remember this little fact.)

If your focus is purely on military participants, then I guess you must see Memorial Day as a sort of bookend to Veteran’s Day, the latter honoring living veterans, and the former honoring the deceased ones.

Personally, I’ve always viewed it as a day to decorate the graves of one’s relatives, pure and simple, sort of like the Bon festivals in Japan, where families reunite to clean the graves of their ancestors and celebrate their memories. Or, closer to home, the Mexican Día de los Muertos, which is kind of the same thing.




And although I value the sacrifices made by the members of the military as much as anyone else, I have to question how appropriate it is to honor their memories via air shows of fighter jets and parades of tanks and other weapons. Didn’t they give their lives so that we wouldn’t have to even see such dreadful vehicles and instruments of death? Isn’t war hell? I’m not sure it’s a good idea to make war look “cool.”

Anyway, Memorial Day in my family is a time for decorating the graves of relatives—women, men, and even children, whether or not they ever experienced a war directly or indirectly. (I know that the experiences of many soldiers are far beyond what some of us can imagine—but then I think we should recognize the hard work and sacrifices made at the home front, via Civil Defense activities, Red Cross service, rations, scrap-metal drives, deprivations, Victory Gardens, and worry.)




In fact, my parents were recently commenting on how, in both of their families, it was “Decoration Day,” and not particularly associated with the military. Mom described how her family would walk the ten blocks to Woodland Cemetery (they didn’t own a car). Her dad would wheel their push lawnmower, upon which sat a bushel basket holding hand trimmers and other gardening implements, while her mom would carry coffee cans with flowers in water, which would decorate the graves.

Yes, before there were cheap, multicolored fake flowers for sticking out on the graves, people would collect real, beautiful flowers out of their yards, drive or walk them to the cemeteries in galvanized buckets and tin cans of water, and arrange them at the graves, sticking them into position with wire and adding ribbons ad libitum.




One of the first things I wrote about when I started this blog was how moving it is to live in the home of your ancestors, and inherit flowers and trees that were planted by grandparents, great aunts, great-grandparents. For instance, we have a mock orange bush that grows near our back porch steps—I’m pretty sure the same exact shrub appears in a photo of my dad’s family, taken in the backyard around 1941.

And so it happens that Memorial Day, for me, becomes a sort of exercise in phenology, where the flowers for decorating graves on Memorial Day have become, over the years, the same customary types: peonies, mock orange, roses—because that’s what’s always blooming at the end of May. You say “peonies,” and I think “tombstones.”




Memorial Day wasn’t the only time for this activity, of course—there are many other good occasions for decorating graves, such as Christmas, when juniper boughs and red ribbons were de rigueur—but Memorial Day is the time of year to decorate with peonies and mock orange boughs.

And so here they are, these long-lived plants, blooming their little heads off in the backyard, telling me which holiday it is, reminding me of my ancestors, whether or not they, or their loved ones, had fought in the battles of history.

Johnny Iris

All our flowers have stories. I told you about our peonies last year. Well, now I’m going to tell you about the iris, which are blooming right now.

I really love it that the plants in our yard have histories, just like people do, and their stories intertwine with the stories of humans, the unfurling of history, the changing times.

I grew up overhearing but unfortunately not perfectly memorizing a lot of these stories. To get my facts straight, I recently asked my folks to reiterate the details about the irises in our yard. What I got was a discussion between the two of them as they tried to settle on which iris, and which stories, and who got what from whom.

The stories are already becoming fragmented and fuzzy. But here is what they told me about some of the various heirloom irises that came with our yard.

First, we have a small fleet of tall, light-blue irises in the flower bed over our retaining wall—near the peonies I told you about last year. There are also some of these next to the pillar rose (another million-year-old plant, with which we do battle every year). Right now, they are just starting to send up their tall inflorescences.

No joke, they are tall—the leaves grow to about 30 inches long, and the flower stalks reach 4 feet high.

Here’s what they’ll look like when they bloom.




These iris, my dad explained, had come from the old Bartlett house the next block down Elm Street, just as the peonies had.

Like the peonies, they had been rescued from the old yard before that house, at 318 W. Elm, had been razed. You know gardeners—they can’t let a perfectly good plant get mowed over.

And as I mentioned earlier, the Bartletts are connected to the Mauses, so who knows. Maybe these iris originally came from the old Union Hotel, at what is now the Jefferson Landing State Historic Site.

The other heirloom irises I’m talking about—our “Johnny Irises”— are more of a mystery. It seemed my folks couldn’t quite agree on their provenance.

To complicate matters, we’ve moved them from where Grandma Schroeder had had them during her long tenure in this house. Their “original” location (well, from my perspective) was in the side yard, by the driveway, behind where the old gazebo had once been (my family called it a “lusthaus”—and it stood on the spot where my paternal grandparents were married). (Long story.) We moved them from this location when we put up our privacy fence.




Grandma had also put some of these iris in her official iris bed along the foundation of the next-door house, which she rented out (the house is gone now, though the medley of iris remains).

These particular heirloom irises are early bloomers, solid, dark purple, and relatively short. The leaves only get about a foot high (and max out at about 20 inches), and the flower stalks average about 15 to 17 inches high, with about 20 inches the limit.




The flowers are relatively small, compared to larger, newer varieties, but they are solid dark purple, and plenty per stalk.




I wish I knew what variety they are, but I suspect they might actually be Iris germanica, a natural hybrid that is an old-fashioned standard. (But does that type come in a solid dark purple? Are any iris experts reading this?)




At any rate, they are cheery early bloomers, hardy and profuse, and apparently incredibly old. My dad says that according to his memory, his mom got them from their close neighbors, the Renners—my mom’s parents or grandparents. Somehow (I think because Grandma Schroeder said it!), the story has gotten passed down that they had come from Johnny Renner. Presumably, my mom’s dad. “From along the railroad.”

However, it might have been mom’s grandpa, who was also named John and lived at the same house. If Grandma Schroeder said she got them from “Johnny Renner,” it could have been from either the father or the son. . . . Though I’m not sure my great-grandfather ever went by “Johnny.”

Here’s a picture of my great-grandfather John Christian Renner and my grandfather John Pollock Renner.




Now, while they were talking, my parents also pointed out to me that this swapping of iris rhizomes was probably not something done by the men of the family, but by the women. Hmmm.

Sue and I are still calling them our “Johnny iris.” Maybe I persist in this because iris are my favorite flower, and I want to associate my maternal grandfather with something elegant and beautiful, when I know he carried a lot of pain deep inside him.

. . . There’s another story, too. My mom explains that her family, there at 218 W. Elm, had had a bunch of iris along their back picket fence. These, she said, were bluish purple and not dark; she referred to them as “purple flags.” This color difference throws doubt on the idea that these are the same as our “Johnny iris.”

Anyway, those iris had a story, too. My mom told me that her grandpa, John C. Renner, had brought them home from work one day.

During the end of the 1800s and the first three decades of the 1900s, he worked with the Missouri Pacific Railroad. He had been a line foreman down at Cole Junction, west of town. One day, while he was working, he had seen a yard that had lovely iris. He told their owners, a couple of ladies, that he admired their iris. The women were flattered and shared with him starts of those flowers. And that’s where they came from—John Christian brought them home. So they, too, are a sort of “Johnny iris.”

Here’s a picture of my great-grandfather John C. Renner, working on the railroad. He looks like a nice enough guy, huh? Wouldn’t you share some iris rhizomes with him?




Back then, people relied greatly on their neighbors and friends for new irises and other perennials. It must have been fun to swap starts. They did stuff like that for fun, instead of surfing the Internet. Mom told me they had beautiful white Siberian irises along their sidewalk to the back of the property, and that they also had some early yellow iris that had come from her mom’s mom, Grandma Wilmesherr (who was another inveterate green-thumb type).

Mom also explained that there was a Mrs. Cowley here in Jeff City somewhere, who was a bona fide iris fancier, who had the biggest and best iris garden around. She was the one who got my Grandma Renner fired up about iris, and she undoubtedly shared rhizomes with her.

Here’s a picture of my Grandma and Grandpa Renner, upon their golden wedding anniversary:




And then, of course, good neighbors share plant starts with each other, too. It’s quite possible that my Grandma Schroeder got her stories mixed up and thought that her dark early-bloomers were the ones my Great-Grandpa Renner had carried home from the railroad that day, even though they apparently are not.




So you can see that the provenance of the iris in our yard is no longer ascertainable; the iris traders of the past, men and women, and John C. and John P., are gone, and so are the details of their stories. Still, though, the iris live on, occasionally relocated, but always appreciated, every spring.

Whenever I see hardy, heirloom irises blooming in older neighborhoods, I think of these stories and realize that each clump must have a similar history.

A line foreman in dungarees, doffing his hat politely and telling some ladies that their irises sure are pretty. Two neighbor ladies chat in the backyard and offer each other starts of their favorites. A young couple brings shovels and wheelbarrow to an in-law’s house to rescue plants before the house is town down. A Mrs. So-and-So’s fancy iris garden inspires a modest, Depression-weary housewife. A mother gives her daughter the latest yellow variety.

And they all have bloomed, every year.