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Presenting A Series of Columns Drawn From Prof. Greb's Actual Radio Broadcasts |
 This column is taken from a broadcast over KSJO in San Jose, CA in 1956 |
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Aunt Louise!  This is Lick Observatory high atop Mt. Hamilton in San Jose, CA, The Professor might never have seen if not for Aunt Louise. |
Relatively Speaking
Seeing Our Great Land Can Be Easy, with Auntie's Help
By GORDON GREB
of TheColumnists.com
A funny thing happened
to me the other day when I went to my mailbox. I got a
letter from Aunt Louise, who lives in the East.
She wrote: Coming to California. Expect
to stay a few weeks and visit the children. Excited about the
trip and want to see everything.
With the arrival of this letter, we had a minor crisis in the
house. Wife Darlene had to get out the dust mop and the swish
broom. Clean …clean…clean…upstairs… downstairs…front
and back. And all the time the place looked pretty good to me
as it was.
“Now look,” I said to my wife. “If you
keep this up, you’ll be exhausted by the time Aunt Louise
arrives. Slow down, take it easy. She isn’t going to look
in every nook and corner for dust and cobwebs.”
Still there’s no stopping a woman who is on a cleaning binge.
All you can do is let them exhaust themselves and try to keep
out of the way. Of course, it means you have to cancel your golf
game, put down your newspaper to carry out the ashes from the
fireplace and baby-sit for sonny while mother goes shopping at
the store for something special. That’s just the way it
is.
But Aunt Louise, bless her heart, isn’t
all the trouble you thought she’d be. She really is a blessing
in disguise and you don’t realize it until the dear soul
has kissed the kids goodbye, stuffed a 50-cent piece into the
Piggy Bank, and said, “Come see us in St. Louis sometime.
Don’t forget.”
You sit down on the chair when you come back from the SP railroad
station in San Jose and look at your wife, saying with relief:
“Whew! Am I glad that’s over with.” And
then you start to laugh, no matter how tired you are.
“Say, wasn’t that fun driving up to Lick Observatory
to see what the astronomers are doing,” you say. “Do
you realize we never would have gone there except Aunt Louise
wanted to see it?
“Funny thing, too, that I never before realized that San
Jose was the first ‘pueblo’ or town in California.”
Aunt Louise pointed that out from the little folder she got from
the Chamber of Commerce.
Then junior comes in and says, “Daddy, when can we go
see the animals at the Alum Rock Park again? I liked them.”
That makes you realize it had been months since you had taken
junior to the zoo. Time had just slipped by. Thanks to Aunt Louise,
you made a tour of the park and saw all of its strange animals.
Then you say to your wife, “Gosh, Aunt Louise forgot
her Chamber of Commerce
booklet. Here it is, right under the chair.” You start
thumbing through the folder and start reading aloud some of the
paragraphs.
San Jose calls itself a ‘City of Firsts.’ It was the
first capital of the state; site of the first English-speaking
school; seat of the first legislature; and terminus of the first
stagecoach line in California.
“Gee, do we live there?” asks junior.
“We sure do,” I reply and continue reading aloud
from the brochure:
Santa Clara County is one of the fastest growing places in California.
Nearly 3,000 people are moving here every month and all kinds
of new industries have picked this area for new plant sites,
like Lockheed, General Motors, and General Electric.
Then your wife says, “I certainly enjoyed visiting all
the old missions. Why, I never knew we had so many and all of
them close to home. Mission San Jose…Mission Santa Clara…Mission
San Juan Bautista. We’ll have to go again.”
Then you thumb through the Chamber of Commerce bulletin and read
more about your hometown and all of the interesting places right
in your own backyard. Lots of
places you’ve never seen before.
“Why," you say to yourself, "if it hadn’t
been for Aunt Louise, we never would
have gone to see the Egyptian Museum, visited the Winchester
Mystery House, or
looked at the historic old silver mine down at Almaden.”
Then as you look at the calendar, you realize it’s time
to confirm your trip to New York. As you talk to the travel agent
on the phone and he arranges your sightseeing itinerary for the
big city, you begin to wonder what you’re doing.
He suggests visiting New York City’s famous planetarium
to look at all the stars. Also the city’s first school and
the high rise headquarters of General Motors and General Electric.
And oh, yes, some of the old historical churches and-----
His voice seems to drift away as you ask yourself the question,
“Why am I traveling all the way across the continent
to visit these places when there are plenty here we still haven’t
seen?”
But you never finish the thought because the man is talking about
the bill for your trip and the arrangements to have it paid.
Later you hear yourself telling your wife to write Uncle Albert,
“Tell him we’re coming this summer, that you want
to see the sights, and would he please meet us at Grand Central
Station.”
©2012 by Gordon Greb. This column first posted July 2, 2012.
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