NOLA - sorta

Dee remembers her Uncle Paul, and the interesting people he met. Dee & Jim talk about surviving Hurricane Milton, and how their anniversary plans to New Orleans were gone with the wind.

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Transcript

JIM (voice-over): As our regular listeners will know, we at Making Our Way strive to make our podcast a family-friendly show, an enjoyable, stress-free experience. We prefer to Make Our Way in the safe lane, so we steer clear of hot button topics and focus our attention instead on innocuous things such as politics, religion, and social concerns - you know, those things on which we all agree.

That being said, let me offer this disclaimer: We begin this episode talking about family histories, and from the outset let me say I had know idea the discussion would lead us to talking about the Nazis. You know, THOSE guys. Now, I don’t know how familiar you are with 20th century history, but these Nazis - and some might accuse me here of courting controversy, of being unduly provocative just for ratings, but I’m going to say it anyway: These Nazis? The more I learn about them, the less I like ‘em. No apologies, that’s just how I feel.

[Music]

JIM: So Dee, what are you making now?

DEE: I’m working on a stocking, a Christmas stocking for Benji. Benji is my mom’s Yorkie mix.

JIM: And he’s a fabulous dog.

DEE: He’s wonderful.

JIM: And that’s the one that kind of inspired you to take a look at a teacup Yorkie.

DEE: Yes.

JIM: Pip.

DEE: Mm-Hmm.

JIM: You’ve made Christmas stockings for our pets. So tell us about the one you made for Brigus, which is, it’s fabulous.

DEE: Yeah, I’m very proud of Brigus’s stocking. I decided to make Snoopy’s dog house. I decorated it just like in the movie. So it has lights on it and Snoopy is asleep on top of it.

JIM: It’s wonderful. So then when we added Pip, you added…?

DEE: Well, I kept with the theme and I added Snoopy’s best friend, which is Woodstock. And I made a white stocking. And at the top of the opening, I made Woodstock’s nest with Woodstock, and I put little lights all around that one.

JIM: It’s amazing. So Benji’s - what’s that theme?

DEE: Benji looks like Benji. It’s got his colors and his different identifying characteristics.

JIM: And Benji’s coming for a visit, isn’t he?

DEE: Yes.

JIM: And who is Benji bringing with him?

DEE: My sister and my two nieces and my mom.

JIM: And they’re coming down for Christmas. We should let our listeners know Ruby, your mom, she was our guest on episode two of our podcast way, way, way back a year ago. And she was talking about her time working as a nurse with her husband who was a doctor north of the Arctic Circle during the wintertime, and bringing care up there. A great episode if you want to find it, it’s called “North, Past Alaska.” And then Matea was also our guest for a podcast. She did two of them called “Rocks and Ages” because she’s a geologist, and those are episodes nine and ten if you want to find those. Now, Sylvana, who’s coming down, is currently an instructional assistant, right?

DEE: Yes.

JIM: And what - and she’s getting her degree in what?

DEE: Early childhood education.

JIM: So we’ll have another teacher in the family.

DEE: Yes.

JIM: There’s another one of your relatives I want to talk about, and that’s your dad’s sister, Verne, your Aunt Verne. She’s not with us anymore, but you remember the first time I met her?

DEE: Yes, I do.

JIM: Where were we?

DEE: We were at the Tampa Airport. Well, they were going on a cruise. I didn’t know at the time we were just going to be walking her from her hotel to the shuttle bus to take her to her cruise. We met her at the entrance to her hotel.

JIM: And I said, "Hello, nice to meet you."

DEE: Yes.

JIM: And then we’re walking with her all the way through the Tampa Airport, down the escalator, down to where the cruise line has a bus waiting for all the passengers. And so the second thing I said to her was, "Well, it was nice to meet you." The whole time she was talking the entire time. And then we went out to visit her in Vancouver, which was great. It was at a restaurant called Umberto’s, which was managed by a friend of hers named Frank. And this was a converted house. I don’t think the restaurant’s there anymore. And we were sitting in a room that happened to have an upright piano in it. It was like a living room for a house. Then she - your Aunt Verne - talks to Frank and has us do what?

DEE: Basically sing for our dinner.

JIM: Sing for our dinner. So we don’t have any music with us, but we decided to sing… 

DEE: “Can’t help loving that man.”

JIM: “Can’t help loving that man.” I go over to the piano and I’m thinking, "Okay, maybe the key of C is going to work.” So I give you the introduction. You sing through it. And we get nice applause from the people who are there in the restaurant. And then Frank came out and he sang, like an aria, didn’t he?

DEE: Yes. I think he did Nessun Dorma.

JIM: Did he do Nessun Dorma?

DEE: I think so.

JIM: Okay. So that’s your Aunt Verne. But when you’re growing up, I mean, she had been married a few times, but growing up, you remember one of her husbands in particular, your uncle…

DEE: Paul, my uncle Paul.

JIM: And what’s his story?

DEE: My Uncle Paul was German. He always had a very strong accent, but he moved to Canada. I don’t know when he emigrated to Canada. He was my uncle from the time I was born until I was, I was in university. He was a musician and that’s pretty much what I knew is my uncle Paul played the violin, and they would visit from time to time. And then on one of the visits, my brother and my dad got a lot of information from my uncle about his past. And it was at that time that we learned my uncle had met some famous people in history.

JIM: Well, he lived in Berlin. He was born in 1925, and during that period, until 1933, he was a neighbor to…

DEE: Einstein.

JIM: Albert Einstein. That’s right. And this is after Einstein had done his very famous work in Switzerland. And then he went back to take a position in Berlin, and he was there until 1933. He was on a visit to the United States when Hitler had come to power. And so he decided to stay in the United States. So your uncle would have known him when your uncle was up to about 7 or 8 years old. That would have been it.

DEE: Yeah, he was a neighbor. That’s, that’s all I know about that.

JIM: Any chance your uncle invented the phrase, “Way to go Einstein”?

DEE: No, I don’t…

JIM: Like he would come - Einstein would step out, slip on some ice, “Way to go Einstein!”

DEE: That’s something you would do.

JIM: That’s something I would do. That’s something I would imagine. So I tried to find out some things about him. And his name is Paul Hoephner. That’s H-O-E-P-H-N-E-R. And I found in British Columbia, there is an artist there. She plays guitar, but she also does wood burning on - ornate wood burning, and she’ll do it with a guitar. She’ll do burn in some sort of an image into the body of the guitar. Her name is Eileen Harder. On her YouTube page, she mentions that she had learned music from a German violinist named Paul Hoephner. And she said he spoke with a thick German accent and she was afraid of him because she thought he was a Nazi. And so I found her on Facebook, and she hasn’t posted in a couple of years, but I put a question on her and saying, “Could you tell me more about this music teacher, Paul Hoephner, because it could be someone we’re related to.” And I haven’t heard back from her since then. But I know that he also played some kind of American songbook things.

DEE: Yeah, I was only familiar with him playing old American songbook popular tunes. I mean, I was so young, so I didn’t really - and they lived on the other side of the country, I didn’t really get a whole lot of exposure.

JIM: But the stories you’ve told, he’s playing in, like, jazz clubs and places…

DEE: Right.

JIM: …that are frequented by Igor Stravinsky.

DEE: Yeah…

JIM: So he would have met Igor Stravinsky.

DEE: …yeah. When he was in Germany, he used to play jazz. He loved jazz. I remember him talking about jazz. And, yeah, Stravinsky would come into the clubs where he would be playing.

JIM: And so coming from Germany, the, uh - this person again who posted on YouTube mentioned that her teacher had been first violin with the Berlin Philharmonic. And so maybe he had this classical thing. When I talked to your brother, Darryl, he was talking about him as a classical musician.

DEE: Yeah, I remember when my aunt gave me a CD or something of my uncle playing, and I remember thinking - because I had always had this idea who was a classical violinist, but everything was like American songbook. So I mean, I would guess he probably did a variety of stuff.

JIM: And so when you knew him, German accent?

DEE: Oh, my goodness, yes.

JIM: Do you know his relationship with the Nazi Party?

DEE: One of the things my brother and my father found out during this discussion was that my uncle had to give a command performance for Hitler.

JIM: Okay.

DEE: He was in - he was a part of the military, I guess he was a musician in the military. He was the age where he was…

JIM: Conscripted?

DEE: …conscripted into the military. And he did tell my father and my brother, he said, at the time, he said, had he known what Hitler was doing, he would have acted. He would have done something to stop him in some way. But, as a lot of people at that time, we didn’t know the atrocities, everything that had been going on.

JIM: So he wasn’t aware of that. Not really a Nazi Party member. In fact, the Nazis took their house, didn’t they?

DEE: Yes. Years later, my uncle was contacted by the government of Germany saying that he’s owed money or there’s this home that belongs to him that was taken from him. My uncle refused to go back to Germany. So my aunt went over and there was some kind of compensation returned.

JIM: Some reparations?

DEE: Yeah, yeah, it was used - apparently the house was used as a military office or something. I don’t know.

JIM: Let’s move now from your Uncle Paul to Uncle Miltie. That’s a reference most people won’t get. Early days of television, Milton Berle. So we’re going to talk about Hurricane Milton, because last episode I left our listeners with the idea that Milton was about to strike, which it was. So now let’s do kind of an update on how we did with the storm. How did we do with the storm?

DEE: We did very well. We were one of the few places that had electricity. We’d never lost electricity. The lights blinked a couple of times during the hurricane, but they stayed on. We had a couple of dripping places in our dining room and in our bedroom. But other than that - and it was just some debris on our lawn from some trees, but we did well.

JIM: Yeah, well, we get this when rain is coming at us horizontally, it just gets underneath the shingles. However, the cage, the pool cage, the screening for our pool cage ended up in Jason and Sarah’s backyard. Now, I do want to thank the neighbors that helped us out. Jason, who lives next door. Darrel, who lives next door the other way. Greg, who lives across the street. Javier, that lives a couple houses - on the other side of Jason, we’ve got Scott that lives straight across the street here. I mean, Scott had an impact driver, which we needed to put the plywood into the masonry. And so I went over and asked if I could borrow it. Next thing I know, he’s brought it with him. He’s up on our roof putting some of these boards in.

DEE: Yeah.

JIM: It’s just the way this neighborhood was when things were coming through. We didn’t lose power. I did have a generator that I had bought a year or two ago in - waiting for a storm, but we really haven’t lost power since, I think, 2004.

DEE: Yeah, when we had those four back to back.

JIM: When four hurricanes came through, starting with Charlie. But I did get the generator started. It turned out we didn’t need it. And then we tried to get it to one of your former students. The wedding that you went to in the summer up in New Hampshire was Cheyenne. She and her husband, her new husband, were staying with her mom, right?

DEE: Yes.

JIM: Who would never lose power, but she lost power.

DEE: Yeah, they were closer to the coast. Their street was completely flooded. The water didn’t make it into their house, but Cheyenne took video and she was past her knees in water standing out in her street. They lost electricity. They had it gone for, I think, 4 days or something. So we were trying to figure out a way to get our generator to them, but the National Guard had come by and said, “You can’t leave. Nobody can come in.” And they just wanted to make sure they had what they needed. So, yeah, it was pretty bad.

JIM: Your school is still out today. Tomorrow, teachers go back, staff goes back, prepares the school for the students to arrive on Wednesday. So that was our experience with Hurricane Milton. It was the worst storm I’ve ever been through.

[laughs] Our neighbor - we’re in a rather conservative area. So our neighbor - down the street, is Angelo, great guy, and he’s known to be the neighborhood liberal. We kind of keep a low profile, but Angelo is sometimes out just calling across the street to Allen, and they have arguments across the street about everything. So a few of the people have flagpoles. Angelo has a flagpole. And so our neighbor said some of the boys were going to prank him, and what were they going to do?

DEE: They were going to take a Trump flag right before the hurricane hit and run it up his flagpole.

JIM: Well, see, first of all, we have neighbors who have Trump flags.

DEE: Yeah, yeah.

JIM: This is what we’re dealing with. But then once she told us that, you didn’t say it, but what were you thinking?

DEE: I was thinking, “I wish they had because the hurricane would have shredded it.”

JIM: It would have.

DEE: The joke would have been on them.

JIM: It would have shredded that thing. But, during the hurricane time, those differences disappear. Everyone is helping each other out. When do we get back to normal? When I see Angelo and Allen yelling at each other across the street again, I know, “Okay, things are back to normal.”

Jan - I should mention Jan and Rob’s house. We cleared off their patio - their back patio - of all the furniture, put it in the living room, and the neighbor took pictures for them to say, “This is how your house looks.” It looked fine. It was some lawn debris. But the neighborhood lost power, so we went over there after the storm and assessed everything. There were large branches down that were all over the front yard, on top of the house, and they had fallen all around their car, but the car had not had a scratch. Nothing touched it. And so the only thing that we had to do for them was to clean up their lawn and put their patio back together.

DEE: Yeah, they also lost water.

JIM: Yeah, they lost the water there to the Safety Harbor system. So, that will just take some cleanup to figure that out. But the house was secure and no damage there. A lot more fortunate than many of our neighbors. A lot of people lost a lot, and we’re still in recovery mode. Dee & I recovered within a day. The neighborhood - uh, give it about a week or so in this local community, but for the rest, it’s going to take months, or some may just pack it in and move elsewhere. I don’t know.

So that was the hurricane, which interrupted, again, our anniversary. So Saturday, no, Thursday, last Thursday was our anniversary.

DEE: Yeah.

JIM: And we had planned a trip to…?

DEE: New Orleans.

JIM: We love this town, New Orleans. Who was it? - Tennessee Williams, I think? - said there were three cities in America, New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans, and every other place was just Cleveland.

DEE: This came up because of the summer when two of our attempts to have a summer vacation were foiled for various reasons. And I said, “Why don’t we plan a trip to New Orleans for anniversary?”

JIM: So that didn’t work out, but we have a New Orleans theme to recover this. Okay?

DEE: Yes.

JIM: The first attempt was to go to one of our favorite restaurants here in town, Mise en Place, French cuisine, down by the University of Tampa. So we go online, make a reservation, we show up, the place is all sandbagged up. They use a service to do their reservation. So the service didn’t know they were closed. So there we are downtown without, you know, all dressed up with no place to go. We went to this other great restaurant, Timpano’s, and we had a wonderful meal there. What else could we do, New Orleans or French-like? We went to a bakery, Bakery X, which is up by The Groves. They have beignets. So we got ourselves…

DEE: Beignets.

JIM: …a dozen beignets. And I got a croissant. And that is...

DEE: And they’re mini beignets. They’re not like the full-size beignets.

JIM: They’re not like Cafe du Monde beignets.

DEE: No. They’re small little bite-size.

JIM: So we had that. And that was another French thing. Here’s another French thing that we did that doesn’t sound like it’s...or New Orleans thing that we did that doesn’t sound like it’s a New Orleans thing. Yesterday, we went to the Magic Kingdom. Yes, we did ride the train, finally. But then we went to the Haunted Mansion. Now, do you know why that’s a New Orleans theme?

DEE: No.

JIM: Here at Disney World, Magic Kingdom, the Haunted Mansion is part of Liberty Square. But the original Haunted Mansion, out in Disneyland, was part of New Orleans Square. So there is our New Orleans connection. So we were able to patch together some sort of a New Orleans visit here in Florida for our anniversary.

I’ve got a quick story about - well, we’ll see how quick it is. I’ve got a quick story about Haunted Mansion. When I worked in Orlando, we took a group to the Magic Kingdom, a group of young people, and we went to - one of the rides was the Haunted Mansion, and there’s this tiny person. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to go ride. And someone said, “Oh, why don’t you go with Mr. Cheyne? It’ll be fine.” And she was okay with that. So we walked through the opening parts, you know, and then we get to where we’re getting into the Doom buggy. And sit down, and then the speaker in the Doom buggy says, “Don’t touch the bar. I will lower it for you.” And when that bar lowers, she starts crying. I mean, just wailing. Not just loud for me or the people next. It’s like the whole section of the ride must be hearing, “Whah! Whah! Whah! Whah!” It won’t stop. “Whah!” So I tried to distract her with, “Oh, this is fine. This is fun. This is a fun ride. Oh, look over here.” That doesn’t do it. I tried to ask her other things. “Oh, is your brother and sister with you?” She won’t say a thing to me. She’s just crying. Then I try to ask her things like, does she have any pets? What does she want for Christmas? Anything to get her to stop crying. She would keep crying, keep crying. And then, as sometimes happens, the ride stops. “Good. This is going to last even longer.” She cries through the stop. She cries through the entire ride. And then finally, as we get to the end of the ride, and the bar comes back up, she stops crying. So we get out, and all of the group that was with us, you know, have to rush up to her, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” And she’s wiping her eyes and stuff like that. And then she says - and I’m not making this up - then she says, “Can we go again?”

[Music]

JIM: Now, the last thing we have to do our New Orleans re-creation here at home: Dee, you have a great recipe that we’re going to enjoy tonight, for what?

DEE: Gumbo.

JIM: What kind of gumbo?

DEE: A vegetarian chicken gumbo.

JIM: Okay, so now, I remember Wynton Marsalis, the musician, once saying - he’s from New Orleans, you met his father…

DEE: Yeah.

JIM: Ellis Marsalis, you had your picture taken with hm.

DEE: Mm-Hmm.

JIM: I remember Wynton saying, “To be a gumbo, it has to have roux. You can make a great soup. It can be a killing soup, but it’s not gumbo unless it’s got roux. If you want gumbo, you have to have roux.” So what is roux?

DEE: Roux is a type of - you use a fat, some sort of fat. It can be butter, oil. You mix it with flour. I use vegetable oil and I mix it with flour and get like a paste. Then you gradually add in liquid, usually, like, some sort of broth, and I use a vegetable broth.

JIM: Okay, do you cook it at all? Or what do you do?

DEE: Yeah, you put it in a pot, in a saucepan, cook it, and you can’t take your eyes off it. So I always get a stool and I sit down in front of the stove, and I’m there for a good 40, 45 minutes, because you have to stir it like every 15 to 20 seconds so it doesn’t burn, because if the roux burns, you’ve got to throw it out. It’s no good.

JIM: How do you know when it’s good? How do you know when it’s done?

DEE: It turns a nice deep caramel color, or like it can be like a peanut butter, and I like getting it as dark as I can get it.

JIM: Okay, so that’s the roux that makes it a gumbo. So you’ve got that in the pot, and then do you just add everything else in the pot?

DEE: Yeah, then you add in like your vegetables. As soon as you start putting in your chicken, my vegetarian chicken, and also I use vegetarian sausage, and I use Beyond Meat Italian sausage pieces in there, and you put in your vegetables, it’ll start bubbling up. You cook it for like three hours or so, and you have all kinds of spices and things.

JIM: This I know about Cajun Creole cuisine. They have something called the Holy Trinity…

DEE: Yes.

JIM: …which is onions, bell peppers, and celery.

DEE: Celery.

JIM: Does that go in your gumbo?

DEE: Yes.

JIM: Good for you. And you add some other things in.

DEE: Yeah, well this recipe is based on Mrs. Mooney’s Secret Gumbo. I use three different kinds of peppers and some type of tomato, and just let it simmer for like about three hours or so.

JIM: And you make it with rice?

DEE: Yeah, I use a plain white rice…

JIM: Plain white rice.

DEE: …to cut into the spiciness.

JIM: Cut into that, and then that will freeze, and as it - when you reheat it, it just blends together so well.

DEE: Mm-Hmm.

JIM: Oh, it’s such a great flavor. So that is our gumbo. So we’ve had our beignets, we’ve had croissant, we’ve been on the Haunted Mansion ride. So that was kind of our New Orleans. That’s okay, we’ll get back there again someday.

[Music ends]

JIM: When you find the transcript for this show, you go on to cheynemusic.com/podcast. You can find transcripts. And in those transcripts, I’m going to put in the recipe for Auntie Dee’s…

DEE: Vegetarian gumbo.

JIM: …Vegetarian Gumbo with vegetarian chicken and vegetable broth.

DEE: I have to give credit to Half Baked Harvest that posted Mrs. Mooney’s Secret Gumbo, and I just do my own twist on it.

[Music]

JIM: So there we are, and we will be back next week with another episode while Jan and Rob come back in town. And we’re going to post a little bit more. We have more to say about public education.

DEE: We’re going to be talking politics.

JIM: We have an election coming up, and we want to bring out the facts as we know them, and what influences our thinking in such things. Because we have everything from the presidential ticket to the local mosquito controller. And a lot of initiatives on the ballot here in Florida, and we want to kind of take those apart and see how do we get good information for the decisions we’re going to make on that. That will be at a future episode, and we will catch you next time here at Making Our Way.

[Music ends]