Touchstones: Robert Lewis Brobst

One might think that an eighteen-year age difference would preclude any kind of real relationship—or friendship—between a brother and sister. At least in my case, this is not so. Love between my older brother Bob and I has embraced a series of events—or touchstones—where we have been there for each other in perhaps an even more durable way than siblings who are close in age might ever be.

It was the spring of 1954, and two very important events were supposed to happen almost simultaneously—my birth and Bob’s high school graduation. I won the race and arrived the end of April. Of course, I don’t remember this event, but I’ve heard the stories about how my dad was so happy to have another baby girl that he took me from my mother’s arms and rushed into the house to rock me while my brother Bob and sister Sue helped Mom into the house from the car.

Having been an older brother twice before—Sue was seventeen and Don was nine—Bob knew that babies spent an awful lot of time crying. With graduation ceremonies only three weeks away, he was worried.

“Mom, what if she cries during graduation?” Bob asked. “I’ll be so embarrassed.

"We’ll take care of it when the time comes,” our mother assured him.

But his concern was unfounded. Almost as if I knew the importance of staying quiet for him, I slept through the entire ceremony, well, like a baby.

After his graduation, Bob left home for awhile to attend training camp with the Washington Senators, a baseball farm team. I continued to sleep and grow and do all those things babies are wont to do. By the time he returned I was sitting up and starting to pay attention to the world around me. Bob must have spent a lot of time with me and made a huge impact on my life because my first recorded words that had meaning were. “Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob.”

Never was an older brother more proud than mine.

As a toddler, I spent time with my big brother and must have begun to believe he was mine—mine, mine, mine—like most two-year-olds believe of everything they see. If Bob went on a date with his girlfriend, then he owed me a date, too. Photographs of me sleeping on the living room floor prove that I would attempt to wait up for him for the promised trip to the A&W Root Beer stand once he got home. But gosh, anything after eight was just too late for a little girl like me to stay awake. Soon he learned to take me on my date before he left on another. This satisfied the little girl who adored her big brother.

I was four when Bob got married, but not to be outdone by the bride, I had a brand new blue satin dress made for the wedding. After all, my part was nearly as important as hers. I was the flower girl, and if I didn’t proceed down the aisle, dropping petals onto the white runner—and tossing a few toward the seats of close family—then the organist would never be able to play “Here Comes the Bride.”

The next year, Bob made me an aunt for the second time. (Sue's daughter, Connie, beat Bob's son, Tony, by two days.) I spent some of my own childhood with these two, trying to be a good aunt to babies who were closer in age to me than my own siblings, but Bob moved around a lot for the next several years and family gatherings—holidays, summer picnics, an occasional Sunday dinner, and relatives visiting from out of town—seemed to be the core of most memories.

As time passed, I became a teenager, old enough to babysit for Bob’s three boys for an entire summer, then in high school my summers became filled with marching band practice. Bob’s house was at the end of the practice field, and I often stopped in to say hello. Soon I was a high school graduate myself, with Bob and his family attending the ceremony. His youngest was six so I didn’t have to worry about the crying like Bob did with me. The events of our lives had come full-circle, and now I had at last caught up with the moment where he had been when we first started.

The next few years flew by with me off at college then into a teaching career, but visits home always included a few hours with my big brother. Out next touchstone moment was one of sadness, when in 1980, our dad unexpectedly passed away, and somehow the title “Head of the Family” was passed on to Bob. At the age of 44 he was now the one Mom, Sue, Don, and I looked to for comfort and wisdom. He became more than a brother—now he was like a dad as well. And that was a title he wore when at my own wedding he “gave the bride away.”

Since then, he’s been there through our adoption of five sons—willing to provide insight learned through the raising of three of his own—the death of our sister Sue, an illness of his own, his bright optimism continuing to guide the way for his baby sister as she faces the future that may someday come without him.

Yes, our life has been one of touchstones—birth, graduation, marriage, and death—but never once has the eighteen-year age gap made a difference. There’s something special that happens between brothers and sisters—a bond that doesn’t seem to match the one sisters have together. Maybe brothers and sisters are closer because there was never a need for rivalry. Maybe because they didn’t share clothing, rooms, or even crushes. Maybe because older brothers are a little protective. Whatever the reasons, brothers and sisters have a special love for one another—a love that can span the barrier of time, both in ages and across the years.

Those little touchstone moments—the quintessential parts—provide the safe places that make up the journey of family togetherness, and the basis of love that will last beyond life and into memories of generations though the ages.

October 2009
Lu Ann Brobst Staheli

All My Dead Relatives

It’s my theory that every family has one—a historian—a self-appointed someone who is the collector of family history, stories, trivia, and pictures. I’m that person in my generation of the family.

I remember sitting for hours in my mother’s bedroom, looking through photos albums she had painstakingly put together through all the years of my life. My parents owned a Camera Shop and did photo-finishing back in the day before digital, so you can imagine how many photos we collected over my lifetime. As I would browse through the pictures, Mother would tell me the stories.

I knew all about her baby sister, Ethel Louise who was stillborn; how Grandpa Heffner and his brother, Herb, and sister, Ethel, were left in the Soldier’s and Sailors Orphanage when they were kids and how Grandpa ran away and joined the circus; she told me about Grandma Heffner working in the marshmallow factory in Indianapolis until the doctor said she needed fresh country air and they moved to Hancock’s Chapel where Herb and Ethel were living with the Charley Wolfe family.

I knew stories about the Brobst family, too, because Daddy had lived a half block away from Mother once both families moved to Alexandria, where I grew up. Grandpa Brobst used to be in charge of lighting the gas lamps downtown every evening so he knew how walk on stilts; I heard about how he and Grandma had just come home married one day after being witnesses for a couple of their friends; and about the staring contest Daddy once had with Mother’s cousin Roberta that ended with the payment of a kiss.

Not all those stories are told in pictures, but they were all told while I looked at the pictures, and I remembered them. Many of them well enough that I wrote a book about them—Leona and Me, Helen Marie—an early draft of which I gave to members of my family for Christmas the year after Mother died.

One of the oddities about our family photos are all the pictures those albums contain of my dead relatives. No, you might night have understood me—when I say dead, I mean dead. . . in their caskets. I never considered it an oddity while I was growing up, but I have photos of dead baby Ethel Louise, grandmas and grandpas, and even a few greats, all decked out in their final repose, the walls behind their open coffins filled with flowers. Sometimes the shots are of them alone. Others have various once-living relatives posed beside them in a final family portrait.

Okay, I’ll admit, when I was growing up I never saw this as odd. It was quite normal to me. I’d actually posed in some of those photos. I’d even taken them with my own camera as an adult. It wasn’t until I got married and my husband saw my dead relatives that I found out it was strange.
“Why on earth did your family take pictures of dead people?” he asked me the first time he saw them.

“Doesn’t your family?” I asked.

Apparently not! He thinks it’s gruesome. I think it’s my final memory—a memory I guess he’d rather not have of anyone, not even my beloved dead ancestors. Well, I guess that’s okay with me, but I just took a trip down memory lane, taking one more look at all those dead relatives in yet another album my Mother spent hours putting together, and I found a treasure there. Photos of myself and my parents, poetry my mother had written to commemorate each person upon their death, and clippings from the newspaper and memorial services about those people I loved from so long ago. I found it comforting.

My only concern has been who among my family will care in the future about these people who have always been so important to me. My sons are all adopted, and they are—well—SONS! By the time they might decide perhaps they do care, I could be long dead and gone, and the stories dead with me.

I don’t want these stories to die! Maybe that’s why I’ve been sharing photos with my living relatives the past few weeks via the internet. It’s probably why I wrote the novel in the first place. And maybe even these blogs allow me to record a little history for the posterity of my brothers and sister, nieces and nephews. That way they, too, can know of our history. They can see the photos of our dead ancestors—I’ll save you the trauma of actually seeing the photos of the dead relatives, opting instead to post photos of when they were living.

And I hope all this storytelling will entice someone among my living relatives to become the next keeper, the family historian who will allow our family to live on into the next generation and beyond.