Today’s post is by Steve Grooms

One morning around 1955, George Grooms—my father—woke up with a smile. He had been dreaming. In this dream my dad was walking the sidewalks of our town when he noticed a distinctive dog sitting on the curb. The dog was some kind of hound, a bloodhound or basset. It had a long, pendulous nose and droopy ears. The most memorable thing was the dog’s expression. The dog seemed utterly grief-struck.

In the dream this melancholy dog looked at my father and spoke one short sentence.

“Cheer up,” said the dog.

Cheer up?   What a bizarre comment! The saddest dog in the universe had just told my dad to cheer up!

Dad rushed to his office without talking to anyone. He began sketching the melancholy dog before his memory of the dream faded.

My father was a genius at imagining unique toy animals and then figuring out how certain shapes of fabric could be sewn together to form a three-dimensional stuffed toy.

Designing stuffed toy animals is one of the most obscure jobs in the world. My dad was once considered one of the two or three best designers in the world.

This dog resisted the design process. The body was easy, but all the prototypes Dad created looked jolly or cute. None had the tragic look of the dream dog’s face. Dad knew that the problem lay with the eyes. No matter what eyes he put on this dog, it looked idiotically cheerful.

Then Dad did something totally original. He fashioned eyelids that could be sewn in place to give his stuffed dog a sad expression. This was a radical innovation in the 1950s.

At that time stuffed toys were generic objects meant to be given to undiscerning infants. Stuffed toys were designed to be inexpensive. But my dad was an artist, and the artist in him knew this dog had to have a distinctive face for it to connect with people.

Those eyelids were the first of many innovations he would develop to create stuffed toys with vivid expressions. My dad’s company sold these stuffed toys under the name “personality pets” to highlight the way they differed from cheap, generic stuffed toys.

There was never an issue of what this dog would be called. Cheer Up appealed to children and adults, becoming the first of my dad’s designs to be famous. Cheer Up came in several forms (sitting, lying prone, lounging on his back) and several sizes.

Several years ago I was invited to attend a special meeting of the Ames Historical Society. The society was premiering a film that celebrated my father’s company.

Collegiate Manufacturing had been a significant employer in Ames for over 40 years.

The day before the film was shown I was invited to the home of a man who had a wonderful collection of stuffed toys from Collegiate Manufacturing. It was emotional for me to wander his basement gazing at hundreds of stuffed toys designed by my dad.

Monkeys, dogs, tigers, giraffes, horses, skunks, turtles and other critters stared at me from Don’s display shelves. I grew up knowing these toys but had not seen any of them for nearly 60 years. While I recognized many, I was most moved by Don’s collection of Cheer-up dogs. He had about three dozen Cheer Ups.

Don repeatedly urged me to take some toys as a gift. I was touched by his generosity, but I turned him down. I had no right to anything he had collected.

A day later we had the historical society meeting. When the meeting was over, I rushed to my car to start the long drive to my Saint Paul home. Don ran to catch up with me, shoving a box in my hands. “Don’t refuse me again,” he said. “I could tell by your eyes which ones meant the most to you.” The box held three Cheer Up dogs in the three poses that had been most popular.

My father died in 1999, and I heard that Don died a few years ago. Yet both live on in memory and in the friendly form of the little Cheer Up that sits on my bedroom dresser.

Most mementos honor the memory of a special person. My Cheer Up celebrates the memory of two men with good hearts.

Do you have a memento that helps you remember someone special?

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota 

I have been doing ancestor research on an on-line genealogical service preparatory to our May trip to Europe. We are travelling to Bremen, where my maternal grandparents were born, and then to Scotland, where husband’s mother’s family originated. I realize that the details of much of this research are purely conjectural , as following one thread may take you to Robert the Bruce, while another, equally possible thread just peters out into oblivion. You can never be sure if you have the right ancestor.

What has been most interesting is finding out where they generally were and  when they immigrated to the US, since that can fuel the imagination as to what their lives may have been like if you have some knowledge of the history of their times. Husband’s  family were solidly Scots-Irish Presbyterians, some of whom immigrated from Scotland to Northern Ireland in County Tryone and County Antrim very early, and then left there for the Colonies in 1690.  Others stayed in Northern Ireland as coal miners until 1870, when they went back to Scotland to work in the coal mines around Glasgow.  Husband’s great great grandfather Carson died in a mine cave-in in 1878. The Scottish Mine Disaster website was quite helpful identifying the very pit in which he died. We hope to visit the are on our trip. We don’t know if his body was ever recovered. His children immigrated to Ohio and West Virginia and worked in coal mines and steel mills. Some things don’t change that easily.

Family names have been fun to find. My father’s Friesland family has first names like Weert, Okke, and Freerk. The  Scots have names like Alexander, Robert, James, Margaret, Andrew, and Jennie. My mother’s Bremen family, all solidly Saxon, has common German names like Wilhelm, Herman, Christian, Metta, Greta, Johan, Anna, Sophie, and Otto.  My favorite family last name is Hellwinkel.

We aren’t travelling to Stuttgart to see where husband’s German family comes from (they raised sheep, so I guess you could call them German shepherds), but it was in that family tree I found another favorite name-that of poor Walburga Merkle. Oh, how fun it wold be to see her, to know if her name was considered beautiful or odd, to know what her life was like.

Husband said that, perhaps, in five hundred years people will be excited to find they are related to us. I don’t know about that, but doing this research really impressed me with the randomness of our very existence and how strange nature or chance or divine influence has led each of us to be who we are.

Your future relatives are listening, 500 years hence.  Why should they be excited to learn that they are linked to you?  

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

Some time ago I submitted a post about a large piece of carved Chinese jade in my possession that my maternal great grandfather hauled from Hamburg, Germany to New York to Minnesota in 1914. I thought it was an incense burner, and couldn’t figure out why it was so important that the family brought it with them when they immigrated to the United States.

My son did a little research this fall and discovered that it isn’t exclusively an incense burner. It is called a Scholar’s Mountain, Scholar’s Rock, or Spirit Stone (Gongshi), and it was used to encourage wisdom and deep thoughts as it was gazed upon. The holes, some natural and some that were carved in it, are for calligraphy or paint brush handles, and the round basin is either for incense or for water for rinsing the brushes. Who’d have thought?

Most were naturally occurring rocks carved and perforated by water, sometimes embellished with carvings, sometimes placed in gardens as points for contemplation or else brought inside. They were chosen on how well they emulated the natural world of landscape, especally mountains and elevations.  Ours is 10 inches by 7 inches. It is carved with a stag, a bat, a bear, two ravens, and a honey comb or coral shape. Now that I know this, the shape and design and purpose make sense. I wonder what scholars or deep thinkers might have used this for inspiration.

I used to worry what would happen to this after I am no longer here, and now that son has taken an interest and we know what it is, I think it will continue on its journey with him.  He is a scholar and a deep thinker, after all.

Describe a sight or an object that encourages you to think deep thoughts.

Header image – “The Boy Who Cried Wolf“, by Francis Barlow

Today’s post comes from Barbara in Robbindsale.

I’ve just come from a semi-annual Care Conference with two of the people in charge of my mom’s care at her assisted living residence. This is sort of like parent-teacher conferences, except in reverse – YOU are learning about your PARENT. You find out which medications are working and which aren’t, what other services might be needed, and any concerns on our part or theirs are addressed. You are given a written update, and may have to sign permission slips which will be appropriately filed. “Are we all on the same page?” is one underlying question, and “Do either of us know anything the other doesn’t know that would be helpful?”

The concern I voiced was “What would it take for my mom to get an assisted walk every day?” We resolved that to the best of our ability. Then they had one for me – a new behavior my mom has done just once so far:  testing the system. She apparently called out to one of the cleaning people for help, telling them she had fallen and needed a nurse or caregiver. When the caregiver showed up several minutes later, they learned that she had indeed not fallen, but just wanted to see how long it would be before someone would come to help her.

Oh, boy. We’re going to “watch and wait”, see if this happens again. What is behind it – some sort of desire for attention? If it does happen again, she and I will have a little talk about:  if you create false emergencies, then when you really DO have an emergency maybe no one would believe you… She is still lucid enough to understand that she shouldn’t be doing this.

All in all, I am pleased with where she is – she loves the physical space, the resident dog and cats, and she now has pretty good relationships with the staff. There is just this one little glitch.

Have you ever “cried wolf”, or known someone else who did?