In Memory of Mildred Rapp

In Memorium Mildred Rapp

2024 was a year of ups and downs for me, professionally and personally.

In July, I decided to leave a job at a college I’d worked at for ten years. Throughout the year, I have struggled with my mental and physical health.

When things were beginning to look grim, professionally and personally, opportunities began opening up, many of which had been closed off due to my previous employment situation. Others came after reaching out to the right folks for the umpteenth time.

And, it was during these ups and downs, these so-called trials and tribulations, that I remembered that old woman, long since dead and buried, who lived as our fragile family’s matriarch.

Her name was Mildred Rapp (née Ackerman), who we all knew as Midge, or, more respectfully, Grandma Midge.

Grandma Midge was not my grandmother, but, rather my father’s grandmother. She was, technically speaking, my great-grandmother, who lived a long, full life, one with its trials and tribulations, ups and downs.

Grandma Midge was a strong-willed and opinionated old woman, who enjoyed watching reruns of old gameshows on television, while working on her crosswords, reading the occasional newspaper, or chatting with her grandkids, my uncle and father, or her great-grandkids. She also loved to play cards. Her favorites included Bridge and Skipbo, and she cheated whenever she got the chance—something few people called her on in her old age.

My Grandma Midge saw one helluva life between the year she was born (1917) and the year she died (2008). While she has since gone home to see her husband, Carl, and young daughter, Annie, she can still be felt in my life today, even when I don’t realize it.

I’d never really understood the implications of this old woman’s life and what it meant. I’d always taken for granted having a great grandparent in my life, someone who dispensed weird wisdom, always paid using cash and coin, and never cried in front of anyone.

What I didn’t know was that few kids of my generation grew up with this reality. Most knew their grandparents, yes, but few, if any, knew their great-grandparents. I’d been lucky enough to know Grandma Midge’s husband, Carl, before he passed. Sadly, he had a stroke years before, making it hard to communicate with him outside the usual gestures and offerings of milkshakes. I’d also been lucky to know Grandma Midge, who came to live in southern Colorado, where we all lived at the time, back in the late 1990s.

When I was reintroduced to Grandma Midge, I didn’t think much of her. She was kinda funny looking with her ghost-white hair, her big glasses, and her stooped back. She wasn’t very friendly either, and she had expected kids to be seen and not heard—and, occasionally, not seen and not heard.

This toughness faded with time, and the person she was became more apparent.

Grandma Midge was born in Utah, a newly minted state at the time. Her family, which included eleven (11) brothers and sisters, was chasing what may have been the sugar beet rush out in Utah, hoping to make a quick buck and a comfortable life for themselves. (The DeseretNews ran an article on the prominence of sugar beets in the state back in the late 1890s and early twentieth century.)

When Grandma Midge was born in 1917, she and her family lived in a house of modest means, without the amenities we’d usually associate with modern housing, such as electricity, running water, and gas. I remember Grandma Midge telling me about how things were when she was younger, and she always talked about how things had come so far in her lifetime.

Her father, for various reasons, moved the family back to Illinois, and she spent the remainder of her adult life there. Grandma Midge graduated high school, having studied bookkeeping, which she did until after the Second World War. Grandma Midge worked for the Soviet government during the war, serving as a beancounter for the Soviets ordering much-needed American supplies and materials. She even claimed to know two words in Russian—yes and no.

During the war, her husband, Carl, served on the West Coast. They wrote letters to one another, and she shared these letters with me, the only great-grandkid who wanted to hear her story—or so she complained.

After the war, things got a bit murky for grandma’s memories. She didn’t talk about them much. Certain details slipped her mind, she didn’t care for them, or they were filled with memories of her little adopted daughter, who died at a young age.

When I began working through these memories years ago, I sorted out the events this woman lived through and survived. She saw the Soviets turn into the big boogeyman, she watched NASA put men on the moon, and she saw the country change in terms of population, and development, and fall into a new paradigm, where the U.S. wasn’t the dominant economic giant it had been. She watched the Motor City, and others like it, rot, from within. She saw new racial and gender revolutions unfold, and she watched the world change, ever so quickly, before her eyes. She lived through the greatest peace in human history, and she saw the greatest expansion of wealth and development worldwide, often from the comfort of her home and recliner.

By the time Grandma Midge passed, she had grown accustomed to a life unknown to her family when she was born in 1917. She lived in a well-heated home, with working gas, electricity, and water. She owned a flatscreen color television, and she watched her favorite musicals, such as The Sound of Music, and the animated hit, Shrek, on DVDs she bought at some box store. The Internet was hitting its stride, and the world was promising to head into another age of change and madness.

The world Grandma Midge left behind was a different place than the one she entered in 1917. It is this kind of storytelling, with its explorations of world and American history and politics, that To Err Is Human will provide readers regularly.

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