Thanksgiving: a time to remember grandparents

      Thanksgiving Story About My Relatives and Grandparents

                                                By Joann Petrovitch

     Mr. Hans E. Solum was my mother's father and lived in Marcus Hook, PA.  He was originally from Wisconsin and was from a Swedish and Norwegian background.

     He raised four children: three boys, Oliver, Eddie, and David and my mother Pauline.  He used to take them for a ride in a little red wagon like they still have today.  Every now and then one child would fall off the back and he would stop and pick them up.

     He met his wife, Mae, in Ocean City Maryland selling crabs at a crab stand.  Mrs. Solum was a good seamstress and hat maker, made all her dresses, and made and decorated hats for John Wannamakers.

     Mr. Solum worked at the American Viscoe in Marcus Hook, PA; he often called it the silk mill.

He loved children and was asked to be Santa Claus one year at, I believe, Wannamakers. Hans had a straight nose like Santa, blue eyes, and a happy face, his natural expression.  He refused the job because he said he could never give all those little children the presents he promised them because he couldn't afford it.

     One Saturday as I was driving down Faulk Road with my mother, she told me that her father would go into a wooden barn like structure in Boothwyn that we had passed on the left side of the road.  That was the place where he shoed horses.  Then we continued on down Faulk Road, a country road not far from here, sometimes singing "Over the River and through the Wood."   The same familiar Thanksgiving song many people enjoy at this time of year, just a week away.

     My uncle Eddie and Aunt Ruth lived farther down Faulk road and my mom, her mother and father the Solums often stopped and visited them.  We did this even when I was a school girl.  My two cousins, Eddie and Jane, also lived at the Early American style home their father, Uncle Ed,  built years ago.  The adults have long passed on, but Jane and Eddie are still living.  Jane lives in Maryland with her husband, Terry Innenmanne a former state trooper of Delaware.  Eddie lives in Delaware with his wife Susan.

     One memory my brother, Dale, mentioned at his last visit here to see me at Plush Mills was that Mr. Solum could bend a ten penny horseshoe nail between his index finger and thumb.  He was a strong Swedish man, my mother's father my grandfather.