211208 Sentinel, Grandpa's Story

My grandpa was a wonderful man.

How grandpa turned out so well is amazing considering how he was raised.

Grandpa had a rough start and a worse upbringing. He was born John Charaneski on January 4, 1892 in New York city. His mother was named Anna. Anna wrapped her infant child John and put him in a basket on the steps of a convent run by the Sisters of Charity located at 175 East 64th street, New York city.

When he was about 8 years old he was put on an orphan train headed west to Saint Louis where he was to meet his new parents, the Rohlmanns. This is a later picture of my grandpa standing behind his adoptive brother Frank.

The Rohlmann family had a farm in Saint Joseph, Missouri where they took John. The first thing they did was change his name to William and then told him that he was not a member of the family, but merely a playmate for their son Frank.

Grandpa stayed with the Rohlmann family for several years until he was old enough to strike out on his own. He left Saint Joseph and went to Saint Louis. There he found a love for baseball. Around 1915 he became a professional baseball player for the old Saint Louis Browns baseball team. I have a team picture of him in my office here.

He is the man on the far left. He said he was not a very good catcher, but was a good hitter. Professional baseball players were not paid much at all in those days. Grandpa couldn’t make enough to support himself in the manner he wanted, so he left the team and became a traveling salesman. He made a lot of trips as far south as Louisville, Kentucky and as far as Detroit, Michigan up north. I think his first love may have been a woman in Detroit, because he continued to write to her through the years and after grandma died, he made trips up there in the summertime. This was grandpa on a visit to Detroit in 1957.

The prohibition began in 1921 and ran through 1933. The great depression started in 1929 and by the early thirties there was no legal work to be had, so grandpa and his friend Whitey ran bootleg whiskey in Saint Louis. On long forays they used Whitey’s car, for short runs they used a baby buggy with the whiskey under the blankets with a baby on top of the whiskey. Grandpa had grandma and 3 kids to support, so money was tight. They were living across the street from Walnut Park and one Christmas grandpa walked into the park and picked up some branches from the trees there and brought them back to their rented flat and he nailed them into a beautiful little nativity barn with a piece of wood for a floor. It was a beautiful piece of work. That nativity was under our Christmas tree for decades. I still carry a picture of it in my head. When mom and dad came out to California it was left in the care of my oldest sister. She never used it and it disappeared somewhere along the way. I asked everyone in the family, but no one admitted knowing what happened to it.

One time when he was older he told me that us kids had too much for Christmas. When he was a boy, “All he got for Christmas was an orange and a handful of nuts.” Grandpa always gave us kids presents for Christmas. Many of them he made himself. He was an excellent woodworker and he made little log houses that were sturdy enough to stand on and could take a lot of rough treatment. He also made little stools about 4 hitches high for the kids to sit on while watching TV. Those stools kept the kids up off the cold floors in the winter. Grandpa was in many ways more of a father to me than my own father was and for that I will always remember him. He will always be in my thoughts and prayers.